Ill - In Search of Noah

The deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was decisively facilitated by the chance discovery, during Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1799, of the Rosetta Stone - a stone tablet from 196 B.C. (now on display in the British Museum, Fig. 14) on which a royal Ptolemaic proclamation was inscribed in three languages:

• Egyptian hieroglyphics

• a later Egyptian cursive script called Demotic

• Greek
   

Figure 14
 

It was the Greek part that served as a key to unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt’s language and writing.

No ‘Rosetta Stone’, a single decisive master discovery of a tablet, had occurred in the ancient Near East; there, the process of discovery was long and tedious. But there too, other forms of multilingual inscriptions moved decipherment along; above all, progress was made when it was realized that the Bible - the Hebrew Bible - was a key for unlocking those enigmatic writings. By the time decipherment was attained, not only several languages but several ancient empires - one of them most astounding - came to light.

Fascinated by the tales (magnified as centuries passed) of Alexander the Great and his conquests, European travelers ventured to faraway Persepolis (Greek for ‘City of the Persians’), where remains of palaces, gateways, processional stairways, and other monuments were still standing (Fig. 15). Visible engraved lines (that turned out to be inscriptions) were assumed at first to be some form of decorative design.

A 1686 visitor (Engelbert Kampfer) to the ruins of this Persian royal site described the marking as "cuneates" (‘Wedge-Shaped’ - Fig. 16); the designation, ‘Cuneiform’ has stuck ever since to what has in time been recognized as a lingual script.

Cuneiform script variations on some monuments gave rise to the idea that, as had been the case in Egypt, royal Persian proclamations in an empire that encompassed many diverse peoples could also be multilingual.

Disparate reports by travelers increasingly focused attention on some of the multilingual Persian inscriptions; the most important and complex of them was discovered at a site in what is now northern Iran. It was in 1835 that traveling in remote Near Eastern areas that were once dominated by Persian kings, the Briton Henry Rawlinson came across a carving upon forbidding rocks at a place called Behistun.

The name meant ‘Place of gods’, and the huge carving commemorating a royal victory was dominated by a god hovering within the ubiquitous Winged Disc (Fig. 17).

Figure 15
 

The depiction was accompanied by long inscriptions that (once deciphered by Rawlinson and others) turned out to be a trilingual record by the Persian king Darius I, a predecessor, by a century and a half, of Darius III who fought Alexander.

Figure 16

Figure 17

 

In time it was realized that one of the Behistun languages, dubbed Old Persian, resembled Sanskrit, the ‘Indo-European’ mother language; it was a finding that opened the way to the decipherment of Old Persian.

Taking it from there, the identity and meaning of the other two languages followed. One was later identified as Elamite, whose use in antiquity was limited to the southern parts of what is now Iran. The third matched the writings found in Babylonia; classified as ‘Semitic’, it belonged to a group that also included Assyrian and Canaanite whose mother tongue is called ‘Akkadian’.

What was common to all three Behistun languages was the use of the same cuneiform script, in which each sign expresses a whole syllable and not just a single letter.

Here, in one monument, was an example of the Confusion of Languages... Hebrew, the language of the Bible, belonged to the group of ‘Semitic’ languages that stemmed from ‘Akkadian’.

The fact that Hebrew, uniquely, has remained a spoken, read, and written language throughout the ages was the unlocking key there - so much so that early scholarly studies of Babylonian and Assyrian (two ‘Akkadian’ languages) provided word lists that gave their similar Hebrew meanings, and compared cuneiform sign lists to their equivalents in traditional Hebrew script (Fig. 18 - from Assyrian Grammar by the Rev. A. H. Sayce, 1875).

Figure 18

Word of intriguing ruins in the great plain between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers (hence Mesopotamia, ‘Land Between the Rivers’) has been brought back to Europe by varied 17th- and 18th-century travelers.

Then, suggestions that such ruins represented Babylon and Nineveh of biblical fame (and wrath) stirred up a more active interest.

The realization that 19th century A.D. people were able to read inscriptions of people from a time before Greece and Persia, inscriptions from the time of the Bible, shifted interest geographically to the Lands of the Bible and chronologically to much earlier centuries.

In some of those ruins, inscriptions in cuneiform script were found on flat tablets - tablets that were man-made of hardened clay, mostly but not always square or oblong in shape, into which the wedgelike signs were incised when the clay was still wet and soft (Fig. 19).

Figure 19

Curious what they represented and what they said, European consuls stationed in various parts of the Ottoman empire pioneered what can be considered modern Near Eastern archaeology; its beginning - excavating ancient Babylon - took place south of Baghdad in Iraq in 1811.

(In a twist of fate, clay tablets discovered in the ruins of Babylon included several whose cuneiform inscriptions recorded payments in silver coins by Alexander for work done in clearing debris from the Esagil temple.)

In 1843 Paul Emile Botta, the French Consul in Mosul, a town now in Kurdish northern Iraq in what was then Ottoman-ruled Mesopotamia, set out to excavate an ancient source of such clay tablets at a Tell (ancient mound) near Mosul.

The site was named Kuyunjik after the nearby village; an adjoining Tell was called Nebi Yunus (‘Prophet Jonah’) by the local Arabs.

Botta abandoned the site after his initial probes there were unproductive. Not to be outdone by the French, the Englishman A. Henry Layard took over the site three years later.

The two mounds, where Layard was more successful than Botta, proved to be the ancient Assyrian capital Nineveh that is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible, and that was Jonah’s destination according to the Bible’s tale of Jonah and the Whale.

Botta found success farther north, at a site called Khorsabad, where he uncovered the capital of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721-705 B.C.) and his successor, King Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.); Layard gained fame as the discoverer of both Nineveh and, at another site called locally Nimrud, of the Assyrian royal city Kalhu (named Calah in the Bible).

Not counting Babylon, the finds by both provided, for the first time, physical evidence corroborating the Bible (Genesis, chapter 10) about the hero Nimrod and Assyria and its major cities:

He was first to be a hero in the Land;
And the beginning of his kingdom:
Babel and Erech and Akkad, all in the Land of Shine’ar.

Out of that Land there emanated Ashur, where Nineveh was built - a city of wide streets, and Calah, and Ressen - the great city which is between Nineveh and Calah.

At Khorsabad the excavators uncovered, among the lavish wall ^reliefs glorifying Sennacherib and his conquests, panels depicting his siege of the fortified city of Lachish in Judea (in 701 B.C.).

The Bible (2 Kings and in Isaiah) mentions that siege (in which Sennacherib prevailed) as well as his failed siege of Jerusalem. Layard’s finds included a stone column of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (858-824 B.C.) that described, in text and carved drawing, his capture of King Jehu of Israel (Fig. 20) - an event reported in the Bible (2 Kings, 2 Chronicles).

Wherever finds were made, it seemed, it was like digging up the veracity of the Bible.

(By another twist of fate, Layard’s sites Nimrud and Nineveh were on opposite sides of the river bend where Alexander had crossed the Tigris River and delivered the final blow to the Persian army.)
 

Figure 20
 

By the end of the 19^th century, as the rumblings of the conflagration known as World War I became more ominous, the Germans joined the archaeological race (with its mapmaking, spying, and influence-peddling ramifications).

Outflanking the French and the British, they took control of sites farther south, uncovering at Babylon (under the leadership of Robert Koldewey) most of the sacred precinct, the Esagil temple-ziggurat, and the grand Processional Way with its varied gates including that of Ishtar (see Fig. 5).

Farther north Walter Andrae unearthed the olden Assyrian capital Ashur - named ' the same as the land Assyria itself and its national god Ashur (Ressen, which was also mentioned in Genesis and whose name meant ‘Horse’s Bridle’, turned out to have been an Assyrian horse-raising site.)

The Assyrian discoveries offered not just corroboration of the Bible’s historical veracity; the art and iconography also seemed to bear out other biblical aspects.

Wall reliefs in Khorsabad and Nimrud depicted winged ‘angels’ (Fig. 21) akin to the divine attendants described in the vision of the Prophet Isaiah (6:2), or that of the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision (1:5-8, where each had four wings but also four faces, one of which was an eagle’s).
 

Figure 21
 

The discovered sculptures and wall depictions seemed to also support some of the statements attributed to Berossus regarding what one would describe today as ‘bio-engineering gone awry’ - of men with wings, bulls with human heads, and so on (as earlier quoted).

In Nineveh and Nimrud, the entrances to the royal palaces were flanked by colossal stone sculptures of human-headed bulls and lions (Fig. 22); and on wall 'reliefs, there were images of divine beings dressed as fish (Fig. 23) - the very image of Oannes, exactly the way Berossus had described him.

Although it had been, when Berossus was writing, almost four centuries since Ashur, Nineveh, and other Assyrian centers had been captured and destroyed, and some three centuries since the same fate befell Babylon, their ruins were still visible without excavation - with the sculptures and wall reliefs for all to see, illustrating what Berossus was talking about.

The ancient monuments literally corroborated what he had written.

Figure 22

Figure 23

But with all the unearthing of Assyria’s and Babylon’s grandeur, treasures, and larger-than-life art, the most important discoveries were the countless clay tablets, many assembled in actual libraries, where the first tablet on a shelf listed the titles of the other tablets on that shelf.

Throughout Mesopotamia - indeed, throughout the ancient Near East - virtually each major urban center had a library as part of either the royal palace, the main temple, or both. By now, thousands upon thousands of clay tablets (or fragments thereof) have been found; most linger, untranslated, in museum and university basements.

Of the main libraries discovered, the one of the greatest consequence was Layard’s find among the ruins of Nineveh: The great library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (Fig. 24, from his monuments; 668-631 B.C.). It contained more than 25,000 (!) clay tablets.

Their inscribed texts - all using cuneiform script - ranged from royal annals and records of workers’ rations to commercial contracts and marriage and divorce documents, and included literary texts, historical tales, astronomical data, astrological forecasts, mathematical formulas, word lists, and geographic lists.

Figure 24

And then there were rows of tablets with what the archaeologists classified as ‘mythological texts’ - texts dealing with varied gods, their genealogies, powers, and deeds.

Ashurbanipal, it turned out, not only collected and brought back to Nineveh such historical and ‘mythological’ texts from every corner of his empire - he actually employed a legion of scribes to read, sort, preserve, copy, and translate into Akkadian the most important of them. (Depictions of Assyrian scribes show them dressed as dignitaries -  attesting to their high status.)

Most of the tablets discovered at Nineveh were shared between the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople (Istanbul in today’s Turkey) and the British Museum in London; some related tablets found their way to the main museums of France and Germany.

In London, the British Museum engaged a young banknote engraver and amateur ‘Assyriologist’ named George Smith to help sort out cuneiform tablets.

With a keen ability to recognize a particular characteristic of a cuneiform line, he was the first to realize that various fragmented tablets belonged together, forming continuous narratives (Fig. 25).

Figure 25

There was one about a hero and a Flood, another about gods who created Heaven and Earth and also Man.

In a Letter to the Editor about it in a London daily, Smith was the first to draw attention to the similarities between the tales in those tablets and the biblical stories in Genesis.

Of the two ancient story lines, the one of the greatest religious ramifications was the one akin to the biblical tale of Creation.

As it happened, the studies in that direction were led by a succession of scholars not in England but in Germany, where pioneering ‘Assyriologists’ such as Peter Jensen (Kosmologie der Babylonier), Hermann Gunkel (Schdpfung und Chaos), and Friedrich Delitzsch (Das babylonische Weltschdpfungsepos) utilized additional finds by the German archaeologists to form a more coherent text and understand its religious, philosophical, and historical scope.

At the British Museum in London, added to the tablets that Smith had been piecing together were new discoveries by a Layard trainee, Hurmuzd Rassam, at Nineveh and Nimrud.

Pursuing the Creation story line, the Museum’s Curator of Egyptian and Babylonian Antiquities, Leonard W. King, found that a veritable Epic of Creation was in fact inscribed on no less than seven tablets.

His 1902 book, The Seven Tablets of Creation, concluded that a "Standard Text" had existed in Mesopotamia that, like Genesis, told a sequential tale of Creation - from Chaos to a Heaven and an Earth, and then on Earth from the Gathering of the Seas to the Creation of Man - not in the course of the biblical six days plus a day of self-gratification, but over six tablets plus a laudatory seventh.

The tale’s ancient title, conforming to its opening words, was the Enuma Elish ("When in the Height Above").

Tablets from various sites seemed to have identical texts, except in the name by which the Creator Deity was called (the Assyrians called him Ashur, the Babylonians Marduk) - suggesting that they were all renditions adapted from a single canonical version in Akkadian.

However, the occasional retention of some odd words, and names of celestial deities involved in the events -  names such as Tiamat and Nudimmud - suggested that such an original version might not have been in Assyrian/Babylonian Akkadian, but in some other unknown language.

The search for origins, it was evident, was only beginning.

***

Back to Victorian England and George Smith: There and at that time, it was the other story line - the tale of the Deluge and a non-biblical ‘Noah’ - that captured popular imagination.

Focusing his attention accordingly, the prolific George Smith, poring over thousands of tablet fragments from Nineveh and Nimrud and matching pieces together, announced that they belonged to a full length epic tale about a hero who discovered the secret of the Great Flood.

The three cuneiform signs naming the hero were read by Smith Iz-Du-Bar, and Smith assumed that he was really the biblical Nimrod - the "mighty hunter" who, per Genesis, had started the Assyrian kingdoms - in line with the name of the ancient site, Nimrud, where some of the tablets were found.

Smith’s reading of the fragments, indicating the existence of an Assyrian Deluge story matching the one in the Bible, caused such excitement that the London newspaper The Daily Telegraph offered a grand prize of a thousand Guineas (a Guinea being worth more than a Pound Sterling) to anyone who would unearth missing fragments that would provide the full ancient story.

Smith himself took up the challenge; he went to Iraq, searched the sites, and returned with 384 new fragmented tablets.

They made possible the piecing together and sequencing of all twelve (!) tablets of the epic tale, including the crucial "Deluge Tablet," Tablet XI (Fig. 26). (As to the prize: It was the Museum that gratefully collected it, claiming that Smith went to Iraq while in its employ...)

Qne can only imagine the excitement of discovering the Hebrew Bible’s tale of the Deluge and of Noah written down in other ancient languages unrelated to the Bible - a text of what has since been known as the Epic of Gilgamesh (the initial reading ‘Izdubar’ was in time dropped for the correct Gilgamesh).

But the euphoria was not without problems, among them the variety of gods involved in the event, compared to a sole Yahweh in the Bible. Confounding the scholars, a king named Gilgamesh was nowhere listed as a Babylonian or Assyrian king.

The hero Gilgamesh, scholars found, was identified in the very opening lines on Tablet I as king of Uruk, a city (according to the text) of wide walls and great ramparts.

Figure 26
 

But there was no ancient site by that name anywhere in Babylonia and Assyria.

As the tale was pieced together, it was also realized that Gilgamesh himself was not the hero of the Flood. Being "two-thirds of him divine," his adventures were in search of immortality; and it was in the course of that search that he heard the tale of the Flood from one called Utnapishtim - a Mesopotamian ‘Noah’ who had actually survived the catastrophe.

So who was Gilgamesh - scholars and press wondered -  if he was neither the biblical Noah nor the biblical/Assyrian Nimrod?

In 1876 Smith summed up his various findings in a short book, The Chaldean Account of Genesis.

It was the first book to announce and compare the ancient texts discovered in Mesopotamia with the Creation and Deluge tales in the Bible. It was also Smith’s last book: He died that same year, at the young age of 36; but it ought to be remembered that it was the ingenuity and findings of this self-taught master of Akkadian that served as the foundation for the subsequent myriad studies.

Those studies also uncovered the existence of yet another, more firsthand Deluge tale; its significance to our quest is that it had probably been a Berossus source. Titled in antiquity, as usual, after its opening words Inuma ilu awilum ("When the gods as men"), it has come to be known as the Atra-Hasis Epic, after the name of its hero who tells the story of the Deluge firsthand - making him, Atra-Hasis, the actual ‘Noah’ of this Deluge version.

This is Noah himself speaking!

For unclear reasons, it took time for scholarly attention to focus on this crucial text - crucial because in it Atra-Hasis (= ‘The Exceedingly Wise’) tells what had preceded the Deluge, what brought it about, and what happened thereafter.

In the course of piecing together the text’s three tablets, a tablet-fragment marked "S" was essential for identifying the name Atra-Hasis; the "S" stood for Smith; it was he who, before he died, had found the key to another amazing ‘Babylonian’ tale of gods, Man, and Deluge.

As to the hero’s name, it has been suggested, with little doubt, that Atra-Hasis, transposed as Hasis-atra, was the Xisithros/Sisithros in the Berossus Fragments - the tenth pre-Diluvial ruler in whose time the Deluge had occurred, just as Noah was the tenth biblical ancestor in the line of Adam!

(This name transposition is one of the reasons for linking Berossus to the Atra-Hasis text. Another is the fact that it is only in this Mesopotamian version of the Deluge tale is there mention of the episode - mentioned by Berossus - of the townspeople questioning the building of the boat.)

It was all a wonder of wonders: Transcending time from the Babylonian Berossus in the 3^rd century B.C. to the 19^th century A.D., Bible-believing Western Man actually held in hand "a Hebrew Deluge text written in cuneiform" (as a Yale University publication called it in 1922, Fig. 27), inscribed on a tablet from a 7th century B.C. Assyrian library.

This was an incredible time-bridging of at least 2,600 years; but that too proved to be just an interim way station on the march back in history.

Figure 27

Once again, this Assyrian text appeared to have a similar or parallel Babylonian version.

It too contained unfamiliar words and names, certainly not of Semitic-Akkadian provenance - gods named Enlil, Enki and Ninurta, goddesses named Ninti and Nisaba, divine groups called Anunnaki and Igigi, a sacred place named Ekur. Where have they all come from?

The puzzlement was even greater when it became known that a partial Atra-Hasis tablet that had somehow made its way to the private Library of J. Pierpont Morgan in New York City circa 1897 contained a ‘colophon’ - a notation by the tablet’s scribe - that dated the tablet to the 2nd millennium B.C. Assyriologists were now looking at a leap back of 3,500 years!

Efforts to piece together as complete a text as possible from various tablets and several renditions resulted in tracing in the British Museum and in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, Turkey, of all three tablets (even though broken in parts) of that Babylonian version of Atra-Hasis.

Fortunately, preserved in each one was the scribal statement giving his name, title, and date of completing the tablet (as this one at the end of the first tablet):

Tablet 1. When the gods like men.
Number of lines 416.
[Copied] by Ku-Aya, junior scribe.
Month Nisan, day 21,
[of the] year when Ammi-Saduka, the king, made a statue of himself.

Tablets II and III were likewise signed by the same scribe and were also dated to a particular year in the reign of King Ammi-Saduka.

It was not an unknown royal name: Ammi-Saduka belonged to the famed Hammurabi dynasty of Babylon; he reigned there from 1647 to 1625 B.C. Thus, this Babylonian version of the Noah/Deluge tale was a thousand years older than AshurbanipaVs Assyrian version.

And it too was a copy - of what original? The incredulous scholars had the answers right in front of them.

On one of his tablets Ashurbanipal boasted thus:

The god of scribes has bestowed on me

the gift of the knowledge of his art.
I have been initiated into the secrets of writing.
I can even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian.
I understand the enigmatic words in the stone carvings

from the days before the Flood.

Apart from disclosing the existence of a "god of scribes," here was a confirmation by an independent source, centuries before Berossus, of the occurrence of the Deluge, plus the detail that there had been "enigmatic words," preserved in stone carvings "from the days before the Flood" - a statement that matches and corroborates the Berossus assertion that the god Cronos,

"revealed to Sisithros that there would be a Deluge... and ordered him to conceal in Sippar, the city of the god Shamash, every available writing."

And then there is the prideful boast in the Ashurbanipal statement that he,

"could even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian."

Shumeriarit The puzzled scholars - who had managed to decipher Babylonian, Assyrian, Old Persian, Sanskrit - wondered what Ashurbanipal was talking about. The answer, it was realized, had been provided by the Bible all along.

Hitherto, the verses in Genesis 10:8-12 about the domains of the mighty hero Nimrod had inspired the decipherers of those ancient languages to name the mother tongue of Babylonian and Assyrian Akkadian’, and served as a Discoverers’ Map for the excavating archaeologists; now these verses also clarified the Shumerian mystery:

He was first to be a hero in the Land;
And the beginning of his kingdom:
Babel and Erech and Akkad, all in the Land of Skine’ar.

Sumer (or more correctly, Shumer), was the biblical Shine’ar - the very land whose settlers after the Deluge attempted to build a tower whose head could reach the heavens.

The search for Noah, it became clear, had to go to Shumer - the biblical Shine’ar - a land that undoubtedly predated the brought-back- to-light capitals of Babylon, Assyria, and Akkad.

But which land, and where, had it been?

THE DELUGE
The common notion of the biblical Deluge (Mabul in Hebrew, from the Akkadian Abubu) is one of torrential rains whose outpour floods, overwhelms, and sweeps away everything on the ground below.

In fact, the Bible (Genesis 7:11-12) states that the Deluge began when,

"all the water sources of the Great Deep burst apart."

It was only after that (or as a result thereof) that,

"the sluices of the skies opened up, and the rain was upon the Earth forty days and forty nights."

The Deluge ended in likewise sequence (Genesis 8:2-3), when first "the water sources of the Great Deep," and then "the sluices of the sky," shut down.

The varied Mesopotamian records of the Deluge describe it as an avalanche of rising waters storming from the south, overwhelming and submerging all as it rushed forth.

The Akkadian version (Gilgamesh Tablet XI) states that the first manifestation of the Deluge was,

"a black cloud that arose from the horizon," followed by storms that "tore out the posts and collapsed the dikes."

 

"For one day the South Storm blew, submerging the mountains, overtaking the people like a battle... seven days and [seven] nights blows the Flood-Wind as the South Storm sweeps the land... and the whole land was submerged like a pot."

In the Sumerian tale of the Deluge, howling winds are mentioned; rain is not:

"All the windstorms, exceedingly powerful, attacked as one... For seven days and seven nights the Flood (A.ma.ru) swept over the land, and the large boat was tossed about by the windstorms on the great waters."

In Twelfth Planet and subsequent books, I have suggested that "the Great Deep," where the "South Storm" originated, was Antarctica; and that the Deluge was a huge tidal wave caused by the slippage of the ice sheet off Antarctica - causing the abrupt end of the last Ice Age circa 13,000 years ago. (See also Fig. 43.)

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