The 12th Planet (62 page)

On the Mount of Salvation the ship came to a halt;

Mount
Ni
ir
["salvation"] held the ship fast,

allowing no motion.

For six days Utnapishtim watched from the motionless ark, caught in the peaks of the Mount of Salvation—the biblical peaks of Ararat. Then, like Noah, he sent out a dove to look for a resting place, but it came back. A swallow flew out and came back. Then a raven was set free—and flew off, finding a resting place. Utnapishtim then released all the birds and animals that were with him, and stepped out himself. He built an altar "and offered a sacrifice"—just as Noah had.

But here again the single-Deity-multideity difference crops up. When Noah offered a burnt sacrifice, "Yahweh smelled the enticing smell"; but when Utnapishtim offered a sacrifice, "the gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor. The gods crowded like flies about a sacrificer."

In the Genesis version, it was Yahweh who vowed never again to destroy Mankind. In the Babylonian version it was the Great Goddess who vowed: "I shall not forget.... I shall be mindful of these days, forgetting them never."

That, however, was not the immediate problem. For when Enlil finally arrived on the scene, he had little mind for food. He was hopping mad to discover that some had survived. "Has some living soul escaped? No man was to survive the destruction!"

Ninurta, his son and heir, immediately pointed a suspecting finger at Enki. "Who, other than Ea, can devise plans? It is Ea alone who knows every matter." Far from denying the charge, Enki launched one of the world's most eloquent defense summations. Praising Enlil for his own wisdom, and suggesting that Enlil could not possibly be "unreasoning"—a realist—Enki mixed denial with confession. "It was not I who disclosed the secret of the gods"; I merely let one Man, an "exceedingly wise" one, perceive by his own wisdom what the gods' secret was. And if indeed this Earthling is so wise, Enki suggested to Enlil, let's not ignore his abilities. "Now then, take counsel in regard to him!"

All this, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" relates, was the "secret of the gods" that Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh. He then told Gilgamesh of the final event. Having been influenced by Enki's argument,

Enlil thereupon went aboard the ship.

Holding me by the hand, he took me aboard.

He took my wife aboard,

made her kneel by my side.

Standing between us,

he touched our foreheads to bless us:

"Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human;

henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife

shall be unto us like gods.

Utnapishtim shall reside in the Far Away,

at the Mouth of the Waters!"

And Utnapishtim concluded his story to Gilgamesh. After he was taken to reside in the Far Away, Anu and Enlil

Gave him life, like a god,

Elevated him to eternal life, like a god.

But what happened to Mankind in general? The biblical tale ends with an assertion that the Deity then permitted and blessed Mankind to "be fruitful and multiply." Mesopotamian versions of the Deluge story also end with verses that deal with Mankind's procreation. The partly mutilated texts speak of the establishment of human "categories":

... Let there be a third category among the Humans:

Let there be among the Humans

Women who bear, and women who do not bear.

There were, apparently, new guidelines for sexual intercourse:

Regulations for the human race:

Let the male ... to the young maiden....

Let the young maiden....

The young man to the young maiden ...

When the bed is laid,

let the spouse and her husband lie together.

Enlil was outmaneuvered. Mankind was saved and allowed to procreate. The gods opened up Earth to Man.

14

•

WHEN THE GODS FLED FROM EARTH

What was this Deluge, whose raging waters swept over Earth?

Some explain the Flood in terms of the annual inundations of the Tigris–Euphrates plain. One such inundation, it is surmised, must have been particularly severe. Fields and cities, men and beasts were swept away by the rising waters; and primitive peoples, seeing the event as a punishment by the gods, began to propagate the legend of a Deluge.

In one of his books,
Excavations at Ur,
Sir Leonard Woolley relates how, in 1929, as the work on the Royal Cemetery at Ur was drawing to a close, the workmen sank a small shaft at a nearby mound, digging through a mass of broken pottery and crumbled brick. Three feet down, they reached a level of hard-packed mud—usually soil marking the point where civilization had started. But could the millennia of urban life have left only three feet of archaeological strata? Sir Leonard directed the workmen to dig farther. They went down another three feet, then another five. They still brought up "virgin soil"—mud with no traces of human habitation. But after digging through eleven feet of silted, dry mud, the workmen reached a stratum containing pieces of broken green pottery and flint instruments. An earlier civilization had been buried under eleven feet of mud!

Sir Leonard jumped into the pit and examined the excavation. He called in his aides, seeking their opinions. No one had a plausible theory. Then Sir Leonard's wife remarked almost casually, "Well, of course, it's the Floodl"

Other archaeological delegations to Mesopotamia, however, cast doubt on this marvelous intuition. The stratum of mud containing no traces of habitation did indicate flooding; but while the deposits of Ur and al-'Ubaid suggested flooding sometime between 3500 and 4000
B.C.
, a similar deposit uncovered later at Kish was estimated to have occurred circa 2800
B.C.
The same date (2800
B.C.
) was estimated for mud strata found at Erech and at Shuruppak, the city of the Sumerian Noah. At Nineveh, excavators found, at a depth of some sixty feet, no less than thirteen alternate strata of mud and riverine sand, dating from 4000 to 3000
B.C.

Most scholars, therefore, believe that what Woolley found were traces of diverse local floodings—frequent occurrences in Mesopotamia, where occasional torrential rains and the swelling of the two great rivers and their frequent course changes cause such havoc. All the varying mud strata, scholars have concluded, were not the comprehensive calamity, the monumental prehistoric event that the Deluge must have been.

The Old Testament is a masterpiece of literary brevity and precision. The words are always well chosen to convey precise meanings; the verses are to the point; their order is purposeful; their length is no more than is absolutely needed. It is noteworthy that the whole story from Creation through the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is told in eighty verses. The complete record of Adam and his line, even when told separately for Cain and his line and Seth, Enosh, and their line, is managed in fifty-eight verses. But the story of the Great Flood merited no less than eighty-seven verses. It was, by any editorial standard, a "major story." No mere local event, it was a catastrophe affecting the whole of Earth, the whole of Mankind. The Mesopotamian texts clearly state that the "four corners of the Earth" were affected.

As such, it was a crucial point in the prehistory of Mesopotamia. There were the events and the cities and the people
before
the Deluge, and the events and cities and people
after
the Deluge. There were all the deeds of the gods and the Kingship that they lowered from Heaven
before
the Great Flood, and the course of godly and human events when Kingship was lowered again to Earth
after
the Great Flood. It was the great time divider.

Not only the comprehensive king lists but also texts relating to individual kings and their ancestries made mention of the Deluge. One, for example, pertaining to Ur-Ninurta, recalled the Deluge as an event remote in time:

On that day, on that remote day,

On that night, on that remote night,

In that year, in that remote year–

When the Deluge had taken place.

The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, a patron of the sciences who amassed the huge library of clay tablets in Nineveh, professed in one of his commemorative inscriptions that he had found and was able to read "stone inscriptions from before the Deluge." An Akkadian text dealing with names and their origins explains that it lists names "of kings from after the Deluge." A king was exalted as "of seed preserved from before the Deluge." Various scientific texts quoted as their source "the olden sages, from before the Deluge."

No, the Deluge was no local occurrence or periodic inundation. It was by all counts an Earthshaking event of unparalleled magnitude, a catastrophe the likes of which neither Man nor gods experienced before or since.

•

The biblical and Mesopotamian texts that we have examined so far leave a few puzzles to be solved. What was the ordeal suffered by Mankind, in respect to which Noah was named "Respite" with the hope that his birth signaled an end to the hardships? What was the "secret" the gods swore to keep, and of whose disclosure Enki was accused? Why was the launching of a space vehicle from Sippar the signal to Utnapishtim to enter and seal the ark? Where were the gods while the waters covered even the highest mountains? And why did they so cherish the roasted meat sacrifice offered by Noah/Utnapishtim?

As we proceed to find the answers to these and other questions, we shall find that the Deluge was not a premeditated punishment brought about by the gods at their exclusive will. We shall discover that though the Deluge was a predictable event, it was an unavoidable one, a natural calamity in which the gods played not an active but a passive role. We will also show that the secret the gods swore to was a conspiracy against Mankind—to withhold from the Earthlings the information they had regarding the coming avalanche of water so that, while the Nefilim saved themselves, Mankind should perish.

Much of our greatly increased knowledge of the Deluge and the events preceding it comes from the text "When the gods as men." In it the hero of the Deluge is called Atra-
H
asis. In the Deluge segment of the "Epic of Gilgamesh," Enki called Utnapishtim "the exceedingly wise"—which in Akkadian is
atra-
h
asis.

Scholars theorized that the texts in which Atra-
H
asis is the hero might be parts of an earlier, Sumerian Deluge story. In time, enough Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, and even original Sumerian tablets were discovered to enable a major reassembly of the Atra-
H
asis epic, a masterful work credited primarily to W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard
(Atra-
H
asis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood).

After describing the hard work of the Anunnaki, their mutiny, and the ensuing creation of the Primitive Worker, the epic relates how Man (as we also know from the biblical version) began to procreate and multiply. In time, Mankind began to upset Enlil.

The land extended, the people multiplied;

In the land like wild bulls they lay.

The god got disturbed by their conjugations;

The god Enlil heard their pronouncements,

and said to the great gods:

"Oppressive have become the pronouncements of Mankind;

Their conjugations deprive me of sleep."

Enlil—once again cast as the prosecutor of Mankind—then ordered a punishment. We would expect to read now of the coming Deluge. But not so. Surprisingly, Enlil did not even mention a Deluge or any similar watery ordeal. Instead, he called for the decimation of Mankind through pestilence and sicknesses.

The Akkadian and Assyrian versions of the epic speak of "aches, dizziness, chills, fever" as well as "disease, sickness, plague, and pestilence" afflicting Mankind and its livestock following Enlil's call for punishment. But Enlil's scheme did not work. The "one who was exceedingly wise"—Atra-
H
asis—happened to be especially close to the god Enki. Telling his own story in some of the versions, he says, "I am Atra-
H
asis; I lived in the temple of Ea my lord." With "his mind alert to his Lord Enki," Atra-
H
asis appealed to him to undo his brother Enlil's plan:

"Ea, O Lord, Mankind groans;

the anger of the gods consumes the land.

Yet it is thou who hast created us!

Let there cease the aches, the dizziness,

the chills, the fever!"

Until more pieces of the broken-off tablets are found, we shall not know what Enki's advice was. He said of something, "... let there appear in the land." Whatever it was, it worked. Soon thereafter, Enlil complained bitterly to the gods that "the people have not diminished; they are more numerous than before!"

He then proceeded to outline the extermination of Mankind through starvation. "Let supplies be cut off from the people; in their bellies, let fruit and vegetables be wanting!" The famine was to be achieved through natural forces, by a lack of rain and failing irrigation.

Let the rains of the rain god be withheld from above;

Below, let the waters not rise from their sources.

Let the wind blow and parch the ground;

Let the clouds thicken, but hold back the downpour.

Even the sources of seafood were to disappear: Enki was ordered to "draw the bolt, bar the sea," and "guard" its food away from the people.

Soon the drought began to spread devastation.

From above, the heat was not....

Below, the waters did not rise from their sources.

The womb of the earth did not bear;

Vegetation did not sprout....

The black fields turned white;

The broad plain was choked with salt.

The resulting famine caused havoc among the people. Conditions got worse as time went on. The Mesopotamian texts speak of six increasingly devastating
sha-at-tam's
—a term that some translate as "years," but which literally means "passings," and, as the Assyrian version makes clear, "a year of Anu":

For one
sha-at-tam
they ate the earth's grass.

For the second
sha-at-tam
they suffered the vengeance.

The third
sha-at-tam
came;

their features were altered by hunger,

their faces were encrusted ...

they were living on the verge of death.

When the fourth
sha-at-tam
arrived,

their faces appeared green;

they walked hunched in the streets;

their broad [shoulders?] became narrow.

By the fifth "passing," human life began to deteriorate. Mothers barred their doors to their own starving daughters. Daughters spied on their mothers to see whether they had hidden any food.

By the sixth "passing," cannibalism was rampant.

When the sixth
sha-at-tam
arrived

they prepared the daughter for a meal;

the child they prepared for food....

One house devoured the other.