The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (22 page)

His luck eventually ran out on his third expedition. He ignored the advice of locals at his dig and set off for Syria during the hottest part of the summer. After contracting dysentery, he died along the way, in August 1876.

Smith’s astounding discovery upended conventional thinking about the origin of flood stories. His conclusion was revolutionary: key parts of the Old Testament were adapted from older pagan tales. Until then, Christians generally argued that pagan flood stories from other cultures were rooted in the biblical story. After Smith’s revelation, even conservative theologians began to concede that the story of Noah’s Flood lay rooted in an historical Mesopotamian flood rather than a global disaster.

Smith’s startling proof that the biblical account of the Flood originated in older Babylonian stories set off a scramble among archaeologists to find Mesopotamian flood deposits. Everyone believed that evidence for a civilization-ending flood could be found there. This soon became a nagging problem, as archaeologists were not able to find evidence for such an enormous flood and fell into arguing over which of their local flood deposits recorded the biblical flood. Like geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-century archaeologists faithfully searched for evidence of the Flood.

In 1922 British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began excavations at the biblical patriarch Abraham’s hometown, the ancient city of Ur, along the Euphrates River near the modern town of Nasiriya in southern Iraq. Convinced only a combination of unusual circumstances could turn typical delta flooding into the biblical flood, Woolley dug for evidence of a catastrophic flood. He eventually found what he was looking for in more than ten feet of well-sorted, water-laid silt that buried a ruined city. Three additional feet below layers of ash, rubble, and pottery fragments lay the soil upon which southern Mesopotamia’s earliest farmers had built Ur. Long before Abraham’s day, an ancient flood had buried the birthplace of the biblical patriarch.

When he found a similar sequence of flood deposits burying cultural debris at two more locations near Ur, Woolley claimed to have unearthed deposits from a great flood that swept away early villages. He lost no time telegraphing London to report his supposed geological footprint of the biblical flood. Returning the following year, Woolley’s team found ten feet of water-laid sand deposited atop yet more cultural debris at another location. Convinced he had found evidence of a regional flood, he concluded that here, surely, was the signature of Noah’s Flood.

Woolley’s discovery was a sensation. The news he had uncovered evidence of the biblical flood electrified the public as it spread across headlines, radio, and newsreels. Suddenly, the hunt was on again to find more proof of Noah’s Flood.

Working at Kish, an ancient Sumerian city well upstream of Ur and eight miles east of Babylon, a team of Oxford archaeologists led by Stephen Langdon found more flood deposits. Langdon’s and Woolley’s teams promptly began bickering about who had unearthed the biblical flood. Defending the sanctity of his deposit, Woolley maintained that eight layers of sediment containing distinctively different cultural debris, and therefore representing the coming and going of several societies, separated the Kish and Ur flood sands. Woolley insisted that Langdon’s deposits could not represent the same flood. Naturally, his Ur flood was the real Flood; Langdon’s later Kish flood, Woolley maintained, was just another garden-variety Mesopotamian flood.

Soon both Woolley’s and Langdon’s stories were called into doubt by archaeologists’ inability to find similar deposits at nearby Tell Obd. Subsequent borings and trenches revealed Woolley’s flood deposit could not be traced very far. All signs pointed to a local deposit formed when a burst levee inundated a few square miles of floodplain. If one of these deposits recorded Noah’s Flood, it was a very local affair.

Through decades of academic squabbling, Woolley promoted his Ur flood as the real thing. In 1956, writing in the
Palestine Exploration Quarterly
, he claimed that cuneiform tablets dividing the reigns of Mesopotamian kings into periods before and after the Flood confirmed his discovery. Entombed beneath the silt at Ur lay ruined houses with distinctive pottery characteristic of the earliest settlements. Above the lowest layer containing cultural debris, the pottery changed to a different style that he interpreted as belonging to a new culture that arrived from the north. Woolley believed his Ur flood destroyed everything in the delta except the largest towns, which had grown tall enough to rise like peaks above the floodwaters.

From everything he’d seen, Woolley concluded that the story of this flood was part of Abraham’s cultural heritage from Ur. The district of Haran, where Abraham subsequently lived, even had a version of the flood story in which the name of the hero was similar to “Noah.” Woolley argued that Abraham’s family had adopted the local flood story, purged it of all references to false gods, and handed it down through oral tradition to become the basis for the story recorded in Genesis.

In 1964, British archaeologist Max Mallowan, the husband of mystery writer Agatha Christie, summarized the evidence for a prebiblical Mesopotamian origin for the story of Noah’s Flood. Mallowan considered the biblical story to have come from an oral account of traumatized survivors of a regional flood. Sumerian scribes subsequently preserved the story on clay tablets of the type George Smith would eventually reassemble and translate. But none of the flood deposits that archaeologists were squabbling over had been large enough to belong to a flood capable of wiping out all of Mesopotamian civilization. If one account of flooding was the source of the biblical story, it was the tale of a local disaster that developed into the myth of a global flood.

Although there was no consensus among archaeologists as to which, if any, of these deposits was from Noah’s Flood, when the Tigris River flooded in 1954 and submerged the floodplain for hundreds of miles around Baghdad, it alerted everyone to the reality that enormous floods could submerge the area. Surely, some thought, such events could have been recorded in Mesopotamian flood stories. Despite bitter arguments, archaeologists generally favored the idea that the origin of the strikingly similar Sumerian, Babylonian, and biblical stories lay in catastrophic flooding along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This made sense; after all, to the residents of Mesopotamia, their home was the entire civilized world.

It’s nearly impossible today to understand how gargantuan ancient floods were, because today so many of the world’s rivers have been engineered to reduce floods. To imagine the devastating effects of an unusually large flood on an ancient low-lying region, we can look at the 2008 flooding of Burma’s heavily populated Irrawaddy River delta, where in some areas nine out of ten inhabitants drowned overnight. The populated lowlands filled up like bathtubs when the levees broke. The story of a great flood that submerged the world would have been perfectly plausible to those living in Mesopotamia’s flood-prone estuary, where everyone was no more than a few generations removed from a locally disastrous flood.

By the time Smith took his ill-fated trip to Syria, he realized that the ancient tablets that so captivated him recorded multiple versions of the story of a great flood. As it turned out, Smith discovered portions of at least three flood stories that predated the biblical story by centuries, if not millennia. The earliest, a Sumerian version, featured Ziusudra as the hero. The middle version, the Akkadian story of Atrahasis, was later integrated into the third version, the Gilgamesh epic, with Utnapishtim (Sisit) as the Babylonian flood survivor. Smith’s discoveries showed that Mesopotamian flood stories had a long and complex history dating back to the frontier between mythology and history.

The earliest version of the flood stories that Smith uncovered preserved an older tale inscribed around 1600
BC
. This Sumerian version of the story told of the flooding of Shurrupak, a city about 30 kilometers north of Uruk in southern Iraq. Another version divides history into the time before and after the flood and names Ziusudra as the last pre-flood king of Shuruppak. Excavations at Shurrupak revealed that a flood did indeed destroy the city around 2800
BC
. Perhaps the story of a flood that destroyed the city circulated for a thousand years before it was pressed into clay and baked for posterity.

The surviving fragments of the Sumerian version open with a speech by the supreme god Enlil telling how he established kings to rule over each of the five Sumerian city-states. When the capricious gods later decided to destroy mankind, pious Ziusudra overheard from a sympathetic god that a great flood was coming. So he built a large vessel and rode out the flood for seven days and nights. After making appropriate offerings to the gods, he was rewarded with eternal life for having saved humanity.

This even-then ancient story served the political establishment of Mesopotamia by reinforcing the divine sanction of kingship and promoting the interests of priests who kept the temples. Whatever its origin, the Sumerian flood story proved useful enough to the ruling class that when King Hammurabi conquered Sumer and founded the Babylonian empire around 1800
BC
, the narrative was rewritten and characters renamed in Akkadian, the language of Babylon.

The earliest copy of the middle version of the flood story (starring the hero-king Atrahasis) dates from around 1635
BC
—a little before the earliest surviving copy of the much older Sumerian story was created.

The Akkadian version begins with the lesser gods toiling in the fields to maintain the all-important irrigation system used to grow food for the greater gods. After decades of backbreaking work, the lesser gods rose up, burned their tools and stormed the chief god Enlil’s house. Roused from sleep, Enlil called an assembly and sought the advice of Enki, god of fresh waters, who proposed solving the dilemma by creating people to work the fields.

This worked well for a while, but after 1,200 years people had been so fruitful and had multiplied so prolifically that the constant commotion of human society disturbed the gods. Annoyed at being kept awake, cranky old Enlil sent a plague to quiet the land. After another 1,200 years, the problem recurred. So Enlil sent a great drought. But again, after another 1,200 years, noisy carousing kept Enlil up at night. Withholding the field-watering annual flood bought another millennium of peace and quiet. Then, when the infernal racket began all over again, Enlil had truly had enough. This time he planned to send a great flood to destroy humanity for good.

Each time that the angry god sought to exterminate the human pests he regretted releasing upon the land, Enki had thwarted his superior’s genocidal plan by tipping off the mortal King Atrahasis in time for some people to survive. Enlil finally realized that a lesser god was leaking his plans, so he swore them all to secrecy about the coming flood. This time, Enki loudly told the plan to the wall of Atrahasis’s reed hut. Atrahasis overheard the warning and converted his home into a boat, which he loaded with his family, possessions, animals, birds, and grains—everything he would need to re-create human society after the flood.

The makeshift boat rode out the storm for seven days and seven nights and then ran aground on a mountainside. After another seven days passed, Atrahasis sent out a dove to seek land. The dove returned unsuccessful. Atrahasis then sent out a swallow, also unsuccessfully. Finally, with the waters receding, he sent out a raven, which, finding land, did not return. The story ends with Atrahasis disembarking and sacrificing a sheep and burning incense offerings to the gods.

While the original Sumerian story shares striking details with that of Noah’s Flood, the parallels to the biblical story are even more apparent in the later elaborately detailed Babylonian flood story of Gilgamesh. Fearing death, Gilgamesh sought the secret of eternal life from Utnapishtim, the great king who saved mankind from the flood. Passages that are virtually identical show that the tale of Atrahasis was spliced into the Gilgamesh epic, with the name of the heroic flood savior changed to Utnapishtim (which some consider an old Babylonian translation of “Ziusudra”). One version of the Gilgamesh epic even refers to Utnapishtim as “Atrahasis.”

As Smith and others continued to find and translate more versions of the flood story, its historical background grew increasingly complicated. Each period and region possessed its own version, with no master version against which to compare all other versions. There were many versions of the Mesopotamian flood story. Societies throughout the region adopted the tale, adapting it to their language and culture.

The story of a great flood became widely known across the Middle East because Akkadian, the language of Babylon, served as the language of diplomacy until the first millennium
BC
. Novice scribes helped spread the story from one culture to another as they practiced their Akkadian by copying classic texts. It has even been argued that an abbreviation of Utnapishtim, with emphasis on its second syllable, was pronounced as “Noah” in early Palestine. As a foundational piece of regional lore, it’s a story the Jews would have been exposed to as they wept in captivity by the rivers of Babylon after their exile from Judea.

On the whole, the exile of the Jews to Babylon was a period of political banishment rather than outright enslavement. The Jews were treated well enough in their temporary home so that significant numbers chose not to return to Judea when their captivity ended. We know that at least some Jews rose in Babylonian society, if only because the Bible says that those who returned to the Holy Land dragged their own slaves with them. That they also took the Mesopotamian flood story fits the expected pattern in which a well-treated conquered people are more likely to assimilate their captor’s culture.

Still, the Genesis stories differ from Babylonian precursors in a very fundamental way. The contrasts between monotheistic and polytheistic culture is striking, and reading Genesis as literature intended to promote monotheism is illuminating. Genesis lists the pantheistic gods and says that one true God created them all. It is an epic poem with a purpose. Earth, sky, sun, moon, plants, and animals—they are not gods. According to Genesis, sea monsters were created on the fifth day.
²
This explicitly refutes the Mesopotamian creation story in which the patron god of Babylon subdued the forces of chaos, slaying the angry goddess that ruled the cosmic sea to create the world and everything in it. Here, perhaps, we find the original aim of the opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible: refuting the account of Creation posed by the polytheistic Mesopotamian culture.