The Flood legend is one of the "stones" in the foundation of Christian culture. Therefore, the material by the researcher George Smith, published in 1872, became a sensation, from which it followed that the plot for the Old Testament was borrowed by Jewish authors from the ancient Sumerians.
The Sumerian civilization is considered more ancient than the Egyptian, and preceding the civilizations of Assyria and Babylon that appeared later in the Lower Mesopotamia of the Tigris and Euphrates. The term "Sumerians", by the way, is rather arbitrary, since their self-name is unknown to us. Archaeological data show that we are talking about the people of a non-Semitic group. Meanwhile, the title of one of the Assyrian kings featured "the king of Sumer and Akkad." The Babylonians and Assyrians belonged to the group of southern Semites and spoke a language they called Akkadian. Accordingly, it was decided to designate the non-Semites subject to him as the Sumerians.
Ziusudra's two lives
It is difficult to judge when they appeared in the Lower Mesopotamia, but clearly not later than the middle of the 4th millennium BC. Where exactly they came from is unclear, but they can hardly be considered an autochthonous (indigenous) population. The fact is that, according to geologists, even before the appearance of the Sumerians, the Lower Mesopotamia was flooded, and then again became land, when the shores of the Persian Gulf acquired their present shape. This interpretation does not exclude the version that the Sumerians lived here even before the flood and somehow managed to survive the catastrophe.
What was said in the text of the clay tablet, published in 1872 by George Smith, as well as in additional materials he found a little later?
So, nine successive kings ruled in the Sumerian land for 277200 years (!). The capitals of Sumer changed, and the list of kings is closed by Ziusudra, who ruled for 36 thousand years in the city of Shuruppak.
The name of the king in translation meant "Life after long days." Such a translation already contains a reference to the Flood, that is, it is understood that this character, as it were, lived two lives, in the interval between which the catastrophe occurred.
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In the Sumerian legend, it is reported that, for unknown reasons, the gods gathered for a meeting decided to destroy people, washing them away with the Great Flood. But the god of wisdom Enki (Eia), to whom Ziusudra brought worthy sacrifices, informed him of the danger, ordering his pet to build a huge boat, take his family, best friends, as well as birds and all four-legged animals into it.
Ziusudra faithfully followed all the instructions. The flood lasted seven days and nights, during which a huge vessel was carried through the raging water element. Then, when the elements calmed down, the "captain" of the ship consistently released "on reconnaissance" Pigeon, swallow and crow. The first two birds returned, but the raven did not fly back, from which it was concluded that the land was close.
After a while, the ship landed at a certain mountain Nimush in Armenia. Having built the altar, Ziusudra brought bulls and sheep as a thankful sacrifice to the gods. Enki appointed the city of Kish as the new capital, and later the main gods of the Sumerian pantheon An and Enlil granted Ziusudra a long life and "eternal breath".
Unknown people
The difference between the Sumerian legend and the Old Testament tradition of Noah came down to details.
Enki, before informing his pet about the coming catastrophe, ordered him to come to a certain huge wall.
Among the Sumerians, the Flood lasted seven days and seven nights, while in the Bible, in a storm, Noah's ark was carried across the sea for forty days.
Noah sent a raven and pigeons on reconnaissance in search of land, and these attempts lasted three whole weeks. Ziusudra also attracted a swallow to participate in the reconnaissance, the search for a parking space took less than a week. The question of whether it is possible to identify Mount Nimush with Mount Ararat mentioned in the Bible remains open (although it is probably possible).
For the sacrifice of thanks to Yahweh, Noah built an altar, on which, for the glory of the gods, he burned reeds, myrtle cedar and incense. Ziusudra, as already indicated, sacrificed domestic animals.
As you can see, the differences between the legend of Ziusudra and the legend of Noah are so insignificant that one can unequivocally state that the authors of the corresponding biblical text simply borrowed the plot from the Sumerians.
This obvious conclusion looked almost shocking at the end of the 19th century, since, as many thought, it undermined the authority of the main book of Christianity.
It turned out that the fundamental biblical legend, next in importance after the legend of Adam and Eve, is just a transposition of the legend of the ancient pagans, about whom nothing is really known at all.
Some researchers pointed out that the story of the Great Flood is characteristic of many peoples and should be considered a so-called universal folk motif. However, before gaining "universality", the plot had to be generated by some kind of pracivilization. And all over it turned out that this most ancient civilization was precisely the Sumerian one.
The 32-year-old British engraver George Smith uncovered a tablet with the legend about Ziusudra in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanapal, where he collected materials for his works on ancient subjects. He studied Assyria as a hobby, but after a sensational publication he became seriously interested in the topic. The editor of The Daily Telegraph gave him money for an expedition to Nineveh, and, two years later, Smith presented new ancient texts.
In this case, it was about Babylonian and Assyrian retellings of the same plot, and these sources were also older than the biblical ones. The only thing is that in them Ziusudra was called in Akkadian Utnapishtim, which can be translated as “He found life”. That is, we are talking about the Flood again.
In the Babylonian version of the legend, Ziusudra is called Atrahasis ("Superior in wisdom"). The names of the gods also changed, and a comparison with other materials from Assyrian and Babylonian sources made it possible to reconstruct the history of the Sumerians in general terms.
They did not have a single state. There was a certain alliance of city-policies, within which the status of the capital passed from Eridu to Bad Tibir, then to Larak, then to Sippar. The name Shuruppak translates as "a healing place" or "a place of complete well-being." Judging by the data of archeology, this city was not the capital, but it was a place where huge reserves of bread, sufficient to feed the whole country, were stored.
The Tigris and Euphrates became for the Sumerians and Akkadians the same feeding rivers as the Nile was for Ancient Egypt. The development of agriculture, the creation of irrigation systems led to the development of crafts.
Then, if we turn to legend, the Sumerian civilization suffered a terrible natural disaster. As one of the clay tablets reported: "After the flood washed away (the country) and the kingdom was sent down from heaven (for the second time), Kish became the seat of the throne."
This second kingdom entered a period of decline after the South Semitic tribes that appeared in Mesopotamia created their own states - the Babylonian and Assyrian kingdoms.
The Sumerians gradually mingled with the aliens, despite the fact that the assimilation process probably knew its ups and downs. According to archeological data, at the end of the III millennium BC. They were something like a conquered nation, but several centuries later, both in Babylon and Assyria, Sumerian culture became a role model.
And it remained such a standard until Assyria and Babylon, in turn, disappeared into the civilizations of a later time.
A legend for all time
The question of exactly when the Flood occurred, judging by geological studies, does not have a clear answer.
The University of Pennsylvania expedition led by archaeologist Erich Schmidt, who worked in the Shuruppak excavations in the 1930s, discovered a cultural layer consisting of deposits of clay and silt.
On the basis of chemical analysis, it was concluded that the flooding dates back to the turn of the 5th and 4th millennia BC. and caused damage to the largest cities in Sumer.
The great flood described in the Bible is dated according to the Old Testament very accurately - 2104 BC. or 1656 from the creation of the world.
As you can see, the amazing similarity between the Sumerian and Old Testament legends does not mean that we are talking about the same flood.
Jewish authors borrowed the plot from the Sumerians to describe a disaster that happened almost two and a half millennia earlier. But the first, more ancient flood really became an epoch-making event for Mesopotamia.
The data on the grand catastrophe are also confirmed by other ancient sources, primarily the ancient Assyrian epic "The Legend of Gilgamesh".
Its main character Gilgamesh goes from an "ordinary" hero to a mighty ruler, endowed with the gift of a long life spanning tens of thousands of years. And even dying, he does not go into oblivion, but becomes the ruler of the underworld.
It is quite natural that in one of the episodes Gilgamesh meets another long-liver Ziusudra, who, however, appears under the Babylonian name Utnapishtim. And he addresses him with a speech:
Then Utnapishtim repeats what was already stated in the oldest version. The main difference is that he lists in some detail who and what he took on his ship:
Further, Utnapishtim tells how he survived the catastrophe, however, a later fragment with his story about gaining longevity, unfortunately, has not survived.
And they didn't say "thank you"
The historical period when the Jewish authors of the Old Testament borrowed the Sumerian legend of the Flood can be determined quite accurately - 598-582 BC, the time of the "Babylonian captivity" of the Jewish people.
However, in order not to belittle the talents of the authors of the Old Testament and the depth of their texts, researchers focus on the moral and ethical difference between two versions of the same tradition.
The Sumerian gods, judging by the surviving texts, decided to destroy the earth just like that - either on a whim, or because of a bad mood.
Yahweh in the Old Testament sends the Flood to the earth as a punishment for human sins. And he decides to save Noah because he led the life of a righteous man. Alfred Jeremias writes: “The Bible's account of the Flood contains a hidden power that can affect the consciousness of all mankind. There is no doubt that this very goal was set in the recording of the Flood account: to teach people moral behavior. No other description of the Flood from those that we find in sources not related to the Bible, in this respect, is completely different from the story given in it."
Herman Gunkel agrees with Jeremias: “The Babylonian text about the Flood seems to have been specially compiled in order to make the superiority of Israel's idea of One God even clearer and more distinct. On the other hand, the Bible crosses out all those descriptions of the Flood that were known to the ancient world before it: their repulsive images lose any meaning."
But even here, when considering both legends from the standpoint of moral and ethical, everything does not look so simple. Analyzing the text of the Sumerian legend, another researcher Kramer notes that in it Ziusudra "appears as a pious and God-fearing king, in all his deeds guided by the instructions received from the gods in dreams and predictions." That is, the god Enki protects and saves him from death not just like that, but as a reward for a righteous life.
In general, it is not worth excluding the moralizing component from the Sumerian legend only on the basis that the representatives of this civilization were pagans and, so to speak, “did not grow up” to a humanistic philosophy. This legend has both a philosophical depth and a moral component. Without them, representatives of later civilizations would hardly have turned to the legend of the Flood again and again.
Water or sword?
One of the versions associated with the legend of the Sumerian Flood suggests that this is not a flood at all. For example, in a number of texts the "flood" is the name of the punishments that befell the king of the Akkadian dynasty Naram-Suena. For his unrighteous life, the god Enlil sent various calamities to him, the most serious of which was the invasion of the Kuti tribe. The invaders destroyed the capital of the country, Nippur, which later became an annual religious ritual with the participation of several thousand mourning women.
Magazine: Mysteries of History №34. Author: Dmitry Mityurin