Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (23 page)

It would not necessarily explain flood accounts of many other civilizations. To that, writer Ian Wilson has a six-word answer in his recent book
Before the Flood
: “The end of the Ice Age.” The earth has experienced numerous ice ages in its 4-billion-year-plus history. The last of these occurred about sixteen thousand years ago—well within the time scale that modern humans have been around. Arguing that the sudden and cataclysmic rises in sea levels from melting ice would have struck many human populations clustered along seashores, Wilson argues, “It stands to reason that these events must have been responsible for at least some of the Flood stories that are commonplace in the folk memories of so many people around the world.”

Beyond the obvious interest in explaining the biblical story, the Ryan-Pitman thesis—enthusiastically endorsed by Ian Wilson—is that a wide-spread antediluvian civilization once existed in and around the Black Sea. The survivors of the Black Sea inundation then spread out, taking civilization with them. It is an audacious idea, which would essentially require rewriting archaeological—and human history—textbooks. But recent archaeological work done in Turkey, at Catalhoyuk, and more recently in the northeast corner of Syria near Turkey’s Taurus Mountains, have provided some support to this revision in long-held ideas of how and where civilization developed.

Was the Tower of Babel in Babylon?

History, myth, and biblical traditions all come crashing together in the largely familiar account of the Tower of Babel, a story which appears in Genesis 11. In this tale, men have come from the east and settled in Shinar—a biblical place understood to be the kingdom of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia. The men all speak the same language and decide to build a city and a tower to “make a name for ourselves.” But when God comes down and sees this activity, in which men are making bricks to build a tower with its “top in the heavens,” He is not happy. Men are making their way heavenward. Threatened and annoyed, God decides to confuse their speech so that the tower-builders cannot understand one another. After the construction of the tower is thrown into chaos, God scatters these people all over the face of the earth. The biblical account has traditionally been viewed as an explanatory myth that accounts for the world’s many different languages and the spread of different nations.

But in exploring life and myth in the “cradle of civilization,” it should be noted that many more languages were spoken over the centuries in Mesopotamia than elsewhere, due to the successive waves of people who conquered or moved through the area, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, and later, Persians. The conquerors of Mesopotamia all spoke different languages, so Babylon’s “multicultural” history, and Israel’s place in that history, need to be taken into account when considering the Bible story and its historical background.

The first great Babylonian civilization had flourished between 1800 and 1600 BCE, under Hammurabi and other kings. The Babylonians later fell to the Kassites, who ruled Babylon from the sixteenth to the twelfth century, in what is called the
Kassite Period
. Speaking a little-known language, they came from the Caucasus region, the mountainous area between the Black and Caspian Seas (an area that today includes Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as Chechnya, the restive and very troubled region of Russia).

The Assyrian Empire, based in northern Mesopotamia, took control of Babylon during the 700s BCE, but the city resisted Assyrian rule, and King Sennacherib of Assyria destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE. The New Babylonian, or
Chaldean
,
Empire
began in 626 BCE, when the Babylonian military leader Nabopolassar became king of Babylon. Nabopolassar won control of Babylon from the Assyrians, and under his reign, the Chaldean Empire grew to control much of what is now the Middle East. Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadrezzar II rebuilt the city on a grand scale. During the reign of Nebuchadrezzar, from 605 to 562 BCE, workers built huge walls almost 85 feet (26 meters) thick around the outside of Babylon, and people entered and left the city through eight bronze gates. The grandest of these was the Ishtar Gate, decorated with figures of mythical dragons, lions, and bulls made of colored, glazed brick. The Ishtar Gate opened onto a broad paved avenue connecting the Temple of Marduk inside the walls and the site of the great New Year festival. Nebuchadrezzar’s main palace stood between the Ishtar Gate and the Euphrates River, an area that may have included the famed Hanging Gardens. The ancient Greeks described these gardens, which grew on the roof of a high building, as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Temple of Marduk stood in an area to the south and included the famed ziggurat tower.

The function of the ziggurat has inspired several theories, including the idea that these towers may have originated as burial mounds—just as the Egyptian pyramids started with kingly tombs—from which the god-king Marduk could be resurrected. Another idea is that each of these towers served as a symbolic “sacred mountain,” typical of many mythologies, as home of the gods. Pointing out that Mesopotamia was flat and had no natural high places—such as the Greek’s Mount Olympus—to serve as home of the gods, Daniel Boorstin argues that in many cultures, “where there were no natural mountains, people built artificial mountains…. ‘Ziggurat’ means both the summit of a mountain and man-made stepped tower.”

But Boorstin’s interpretation is not shared by everyone, and there are disagreements over the rationale for the ziggurats. Historian Gwendolyn Leick argues that there is nothing in Mesopotamian literature to substantiate that the ziggurat was meant to imitate or evoke a natural mountain. Instead, she writes, “In areas prone to flooding this was a practical device, and the towering sanctuaries must have been reassuring sights as high and therefore safe places, not necessarily to keep the people safe, but to protect the gods, upon whose benevolence all life depended.”

By all accounts, the grandest of these ziggurats was the temple complex in the city of Babylon that may have been first built around 1900 BCE, then expanded by Nabopolassar and continued by his son Nebuchadrezzar, a project that took forty-three years. Designed to signify the triumph of Babylon over its enemies, Nebuchadrezzar’s ziggurat was clearly awesome, involving the production of at least 17 million bricks. Many historians and archaeologists agree that this was the same tower described in Genesis.

After Nebuchadrezzar conquered Jerusalem, he took Judah’s king as a captive to Babylon, and, in 586 BCE, destroyed Jerusalem’s Great Temple. Thousands of Jews, among the nation’s elite, were taken into captivity in Babylon, one of the most significant events in the history of Israel and the development of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. During this time, many of the books of Hebrew scripture were first written down.

In the bustling capital city, the captive Israelites would have heard many languages—with hints of ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian filling the air of the ancient bazaars. Clearly, the story of the Tower of Babel had great significance to the exiled Israelites, because it provided an interesting play on the name of the city of Babylon. In Babylonian, the city’s name means “the gate of the gods,” but in Hebrew, the word for Babylon is related to a word meaning “to confuse.” The author of the biblical Tower of Babel story was essentially using a bilingual pun, a typical Hebrew literary device, to disparage the people who had captured the Israelites and held them captive.

Finally, the Tower of Babel reflects a classic story line, in which the gods become annoyed when people get a little too full of themselves. The theme that the gods—or God—don’t want competition from mankind is a common one in myths, and usually it does not end up well for humanity. Mankind overreaching—whether by building high towers, trying to fly, or stealing fire—has been a mythic concept opposed not only by the God of the Hebrew Bible but by gods in other mythologies. However, it just may be part of human nature to strive for the heavens, whether that means building towers in the desert, erecting skyscrapers in the city, or sending rockets into space.

Was the Bible’s Abraham a man—or another Mesopotamian myth?

Mesopotamia was a land in which myths and men mixed. Gilgamesh was both real and a myth. Marduk was a myth, but one with great impact on biblical—and therefore on Western—history. But one of Mesopotamia’s most famous men ever is a mysterious figure whose very existence is an open question.

The biblical patriarch Abram—his name was later changed to Abraham, Hebrew for “father of a multitude”—is one of the most revered men in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What generations of believers may not know about this man, hailed as the “father of all nations,” is that he was from ancient Mesopotamia. According to Genesis, Abraham came from the city of Ur in Sumer, and was born in a direct line descended from Adam. According to Genesis, he then received a divine message to go to Canaan, a land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants. He dutifully obeyed God’s every command and was richly rewarded with many children and great herds.

But there is no specific proof outside the Bible or Koran that such a person existed. His name and exploits appear nowhere in Mesopotamia’s surviving tablets. While some scholars maintain that there was an actual Abraham, it is generally believed that he was a legendary figure. Supporters of the position that Abraham truly existed say that certain aspects of his life and travels fit within the framework of Mesopotamian history. References to many of the specific customs mentioned in the biblical story, including the idea that a man could have a legitimate heir conceived by his wife’s servant—as Abraham did—buttress their position.

Of course, to believers, the “historical” Abraham doesn’t matter as much as what he represents—a pioneer of faith. That faith is underscored in a crucial biblical event heavy with mythic overtones—the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. By agreeing to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac at God’s request, Abraham passes what is viewed as the supreme test of individual faith.

The aborted sacrifice of Isaac and the substitution of an animal in his place is, in the view of most scholars, the symbolic moment in which the ancient Jewish people rejected human sacrifice. In many of the cults and religions of the ancient Near East, including Mesopotamia, human sacrifice was practiced. In most of these cultures, the victims were ritually killed in a way that was meant to appease the gods, often to assure the fertility of the crops. In Mesopotamia, the whole purpose of human existence was to provide the gods with the necessities of life.

But back to the essential question: Did Abraham of Mesopotamia exist? Or was he the invention of Hebrew writers who created a “foundation myth” to justify Israel’s presence in the lands it eventually conquered? Doubts linger. And perhaps—barring some remarkable archaeological discovery—it is an unanswerable question. Given the historical background of Mesopotamian life and society, many of the details of Abraham’s story certainly have the historical ring of truth. Chances are that a man named Abraham—or an ancient Semitic version of that name—may well have existed and, like Gilgamesh or King Arthur, he was turned into a national legend over the centuries.

The story of Abraham ultimately stands as one more example of how one man’s myth is another man’s faith.

Who were El and Baal?

Any discussion of the myths of Mesopotamia would not be complete without discussing Canaan, the “Promised Land” that Abraham and his descendants had been granted by God. Located as a sort of land bridge connecting the great empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Canaan was both a battleground and a bustling bazaar that felt the influence of the great empires around it. Set in this crossroads of the ancient Near East, Canaan gave rise to a body of myths that drew heavily on the earlier Mesopotamian legends, and the Canaanite stories violently clashed with the beliefs and ideas of the people of Israel.

The people of what was Canaan—today comprising Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—were Semites, but over time, Canaan became a true Middle Eastern melting pot. Canaanites, and groups called Edomites and Moabites, settled the area and were later joined by the Philistines, who may have migrated from the Mediterranean islands of Crete and Cyprus. (The contemporary word “Palestine” is derived from the word “Philistine.”) Another group that moved to the region was the Phoenicians, who had been based in such Mediterranean coastal cities as Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Extraordinary sailors and dyers of cloth, they also get credit for devising the alphabet adopted by the later Greeks, which influenced Western writing.