Sources | The Great Deluge | Introduction

Stories of floods appear in most ancient mythologies, manifested as apocalyptic events caused by a God or gods. The Mesoamericans, Chinese, ancient Greeks and Scandinavians1 all suffered the wrathful storms of a vengeful deity. Human civilisation grew around river systems, with the Amazon, Indus, Nile-Kagera2, Yellow River and Yangtze, and the Kızılırmak bearing some of the earliest, as humankind wrestled with the life-giving properties of fierce local waters, and created canals, flood plains and dykes. Gathering around the plains of their mighty twin rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, the ancient Sumerians of the 4th Century BC were probably the earliest civilisation of the Fertile Crucible5 in the Middle East and their tale of a great deluge is a prime example of poetic myth-making based on natural elements. It is also the earliest known story of apocalyptic literature, and embedded in our consciousness it’s a primary source for modern gothic, sf and dark fantastic fiction.

Sumeria and Babylonia

The earliest Sumerian legend is a written record (on tablets of clay) of much earlier oral traditions. It is described in the Eridu Genesis (c. 2300 BC)6, and is the source of the later Dream of Atrahasis (c. 1600 BC)7 from the Hammurabi’s Babylonians8, the inheritors of Sumerian knowledge. The subsequent flood story relayed by Utnapishtim9 in the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1200 BC) as the eponymous hero attempts to gain immortality, gives a more detailed account. Modern archeological evidence does point to a huge flood across the rivers10 of Ancient Near East from c. 3500 BC–2600 BC creating an event that certainly would have appeared world-ending to the emerging civilisations of the time. The King Lists from Ancient Sumeria11 show rulers with apparently long lives preceding the flood, entering the mythology and religion of a region ruled variously by the vying city states of Ur, Babylon, Akkad Uruk and others. Interestingly, the father of Atrahasis, Ubaratu, the last named King in the list before the flood, is listed as living 18,600 years, and is named in the Dream of Atrahasis when the god Enlil whispers to Atrahasis. Such rulers are referred to as Antediluvian12, adding to their legendary status, and they come from an era when history was recorded according to the life-length of individual rulers, rather than an objective standard of year lengths. Apocalyptic tales of floods derive from such times of myth-making, as humankind moved from Iron to Bronze ages13, battling with the natural world around them, casting tools and weapons, developing the means to record, describe and write, and slowly gathering control over their landscape.

Retelling the Myth

The retelling of this story has its challenges because the source material bears so many gaps. The three versions come to us on fragments of clay tablets and cylinders (especially from the great Library of Ashurbanipal, the names are different, the gods and their relationships with each other vary and we experience the narrative through the emerging discovery of translations and the painstaking skill of scholars beach-combing and cross-referring, refining their understanding in much the same way that scientists find new answers to the questions of the beginnings of the universe by finding more evidence and asking yet more questions. Recent work about the dates of the Sumerian King List for instance, point to a possible misunderstanding about the calendar dating system used by Sumerians, with the pictograms of early language originally developed to describe measurements and quantities on a base 60 system15, rather than the rationalised systems introduced by the contemporaneous Akkadian Empire16, and modern Western decimal system, raising questions about the description of calendar year cycles used in Sumerian texts.

In Other Traditions

This Deluge story retells an event perhaps some 1000 years before any written record, and clearly informs the biblical tale of Noah and the Ark. But the Ancient Near East is not alone, for many early civilisations treat the apocalyptic events of local flooding in such terms, from India to China, the Phillippines to Mesoamerica, ancient Greece, and the Abrahamic tale of Noah and the Ark. It’s also worth noting that the Babylonian civilisation that brought us The Dream of Atrahasis thrived at roughly the same time as the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt (c. 2030-1650 BC), the Shāng (商) Dynasty around the Yellow River in China (c. 1920-1200 BC), and the Olmec cultures of c. 1500 BC in Mesoamerica. Across the world peoples with little or no contact were developing their language and religions, wrestling with the same challenges brought by proximity to their own life-giving rivers. 

The Tale Retold

The three main sources on which this new version is based were conveyed in a form of verse. It’s not the sort of poetry we’re used to: there are no rhymes and if there is alliteration or accented rhythm that’s lost in the translation. Each line does contain a whole idea though, and much repetition throughout adds to the sense of an epic retelling, highlighting the rhetorical nature of the original oral sources that informed the written texts. The tales are written in the first person, told to the listener as a story within a story, in the context of a longer myth.

This new version is written as prose, and in the third person. Some liberties have been taken with the original translated text in order to recreate a tale that’s satisfying to the modern ear, but an attempt has been made to retain the epic nature of the myth, and the key event-moments of a tale more well-known through reputation than actual reading. This is not intended as a scholarly exercise, but broadly represents the combination of sources and offers an internal consistency to the names of the gods and humans.

It’s also worth mentioning that the myth is firmly placed in a man’s world where the exercise of physical strength was dominant, a powerful relic of the hunter-gather epoch, and so it makes uncomfortable reading to a 21st century sensibilities, for here the women are only wives, mothers or slaves, and generally nameless, even the goddesses when named, are restricted to authority over fertility, birth, and the hearth.

Connections

For my own writing, the world building of the Sumerians, the codifications of the Babylonians and the fragmentary access to their beliefs and their determination in the face of powerful natural forces, create a vivid space for exploring our place in the universe, arguably more so than the well-trodden paths of the Romans and the Greeks. I’m fascinated by all points of origin, from scientific explorations of dark matter and the Big Bang, to the mythic evocations of pre-eternity and creation. Such themes are expressed in terms of chaos and darkness, light and shadow, the arrival or creation of creatures who come to dominate or threaten this world or the universe itself. With the Earth of humans and the Heavens of the Sumerian gods co-existing in time and space the apocalyptic effect of events across all realms affect the existence of all things and offers so much opportunity for exploration. My fiction, in the forthcoming series These Fantastic Worlds, with characters who cross the divides of time, returning demons and creatures to their proper places, explores these mythic connections to the dark fantastic, the other-worldly, the horrors and fears of dark, ancient spaces.

The full text of the new prose version of The Great Deluge (Retold) will appear in the next post.

LinksEridu Genesis link. At earth-history.comLink to the original fragments of verse Epic of Atrahasis at Livius.orgEpic of Gilgamesh, translated by R. Campbell Thomson, here. At the Sacred Texts.More about Gilgamesh: https://www.ancient.eu/gilgamesh/Information about Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, at the British Museum.More about the wonders of the Ancient Library of Ashurbanipal.Map of the Fertile Crucible (from the Linking to Thinking blog)Archeological evidence for the flood.A version of the Sumerian King List on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.Here’s a clear explanation of the mathematical basis of base 60 and its origins in Sumerian cuneiform.

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