In the 1830s, Austen
Henry Layard, an impecunious young man learning to become a
solicitor in his uncle's London office was finding it difficult to keep his mind on dry
legal texts. He was restless and longed to travel, above all to see the lands described
in The Thousand and One Nights, which had stimulated his imagination since he
was a boy. In 1839 he set out to travel overland to Ceylon, but got no further than the
mounds the the ancient cities of Nineveh and Calah (Nimrud). There he spent most
of the next ten years excavating the remains of a civilization that belonged to a period
far older than that of the caliphs.
Most important perhaps
were the thousands of tablets, inscribed with cuneiform
characters, which he uncovered in the library of King Assurbanipal at Nineveh and
which, more than anything else, have enabled scholars to build up our present
knowledge of the Assyrian and Babylonian world. Hormuzd Rassam, Layard's former
assistant who from 1852 carried on the excavations at Nineveh, found among those
tablets a version of the Flood older than the biblical narrative, the beginning of which
runs as follows:
Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch
it within
and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark
shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A
window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the
ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.
And, behold, I even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh. . . . But with
thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark. . . .
To judge from this
account in Genesis, Noah's ark was a floating home planned with
much thought and large enough to receive a numerous clan, its livestock and the
necessary provisions, rather than a complete zoological collection. Had such ships
really existed in prehistoric times? And what lay behind this diluvial legend? The
excavations at Nineveh allowed a corner of the curtain to be lifted for the first time
and helped to clear up some of the mystery in which the Flood was wrapped. Some
of the tablets, which were sent to the British Museum, contained extracts from the
earliest known great epic poem of humanity, the story of the tyrant, hero and demi-
god Gilgamesh, and narrated episodes of a catastrophic deluge in much more detail
than is given in Genesis.
Many years were needed
for the deciphering of the cuneiform script. It was George
Smith of the British Museum who in 1872 unravelled the Gilgamesh epic—with
growing wonder, for the correspondence with Genesis was amazing. But the texts
were not complete, and Smith himself went out to Nineveh in 1873 and again in 1874
to seek the missing portions in the ruins of the King's library. He was successful, but
died on his way home in 1876 at the early age of 36. With the deciphering of the
Gilgamesh epic the world learned, to the confusion of some and the joy of others, of
the existence of a story of the Creation earlier than that of the Bible and bearing a
striking resemblance to the account in Genesis. The Hebrew authors of the Old
Testament had apparently dipped into a source of legends common to both texts.
Noah's counterpart
in the epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim, advised by the god Ea
also builds a ship which he covers with pitch inside and out; and,
'all I possessed I laded aboard her . . . into the ship I embarked all my kindred
and family . . .
cattle and beasts of the field. . . .' For six days and nights hurricane, deluge and tempest
swept the land; when the seventh day came, ' assuaged was the deluge, so did I look on the
day ... all human back to its clay was returned, and fen was level with roof-tree . . . into the
distance gazed, to the furthest bounds of the ocean, land was upreared at twelve points, and
the Ark on the Mountain of Nisir grounded.'
Then Utnapishtim releases
one after the other a dove, a swallow and a raven. The
raven discovers that the waters have abated, and finds food to eat. Utnapishtim
leaves the Ark and makes a sacrifice to the gods.
The epic of Gilgamesh,
which dates from the Sumerians, was taken up and copied
by the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites and the other nations of the Near East,
who completed it and touched it up. Most of it refers to the multi-millenary struggle
between the people of northern and southern Mesopotamia. In the course of the
centuries the legends centred upon kings; gods and heroes were woven in. Then, at
a time which the most recent research places in the second millennium before
Christ, the legend of the Flood was incorporated in the epic of Gilgamesh: it had been
known five thousand years ago to the river people of the lower Euphrates.
Now Genesis specifies
that Abraham, progenitor of the Hebrew people, was born at
Ur, a Sumerian town situated on the lower Euphrates, and it seems reasonable to
infer that it was he who introduced the legend of the Flood into the future Promised
Land. Later, when the Hebrews began to write the history of their nation, they
included with other traditions of foreign provenance this one relating to a disastrous
flood, quite inconceivable in a dry country such as Palestine. It meant something
entirely different in an area as subject to inundation as the Euphrates valley.
Almost all peoples
living close to the banks of large rivers have flood legends. The
Edda of Scandinavia, the Vedas of India, the myths of Persia and China, of the
Eskimos and Polynesians, all tell of deluges which drowned mankind; lesser risings
of the water figure in the myths of the Incas, the Mayas and the Aborigines of
Australia. As Alexander von Humboldt reported, the Indians of the Orinoco spoke of
legendary ancestors who ' at the time of the great waters' were said to have reached
mountain peaks in their canoes. The natives of Fiji—much as in the epic of
Gilgasmesh or in the Old Testament—attribute the mythological flood to divine
punishment. On the other hand nations which have virtually no contact with the
water, such as the inhabitants of Central Asia or the Berbers of Africa, have no
knowledge of this sort of legend.
