The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (21 page)

8

Fragmented Stories

S
QUINTING IN THE DIM
LIGHT
of a windowless, unheated basement room of the British Museum, George Smith rose slowly from his seat stunned by what he’d just read. Spread out before him in neatly reassembled baked clay fragments lay the story of Noah’s Flood—or at least the basic elements of it. The blocky symbols of ancient cuneiform told of a divine warning about an impending flood conveyed to a righteous man, the building of a great boat, the riding out of days and nights of rain, and the eventual stranding of the boat on a mountain when the floodwaters receded. Smith’s excitement echoed throughout the museum. How could the biblical flood story be inscribed on a broken clay tablet excavated from a Sumerian library older than the Bible itself?

It was a shocking revelation. Who in Victorian England or among Christians around the world would have imagined that the story of the biblical flood was a degraded pagan myth and not the other way around? And yet, Smith had just uncovered tangible proof that the biblical flood was a recycled Babylonian story.

Running around the room in exhilarated agitation, Smith shed his jacket and tie, shocking co-workers attracted to the commotion. Normally such behavior might have gotten him fired. But his puzzled colleagues tolerated his odd demeanor as word quickly spread about the assistant curator’s astounding discovery.

Born in 1840, Smith became obsessed early with Mesopotamian archaeology. He eventually entered an apprenticeship with a banknote engraver, though he was far more drawn to fascinating accounts of excavated Assyrian palaces. Intrigued with explorer Henry Rawlinson’s discovery of how to translate the cuneiform alphabet, Smith dreamed of resurrecting the stories preserved in the columns of tiny wedgelike characters impressed into clay tablets. He spent his meager income on obscure textbooks and his evenings learning to read arcane inscriptions and mastering a dead language. After work he haunted the British Museum, where the staff noticed the enthralled youth’s interest in the collection of fragmented clay tablets. Who knew what mysteries lay hidden in the thousands of fragments in the museum’s collection?

George Smith’s reconstructed cuneiform tablet of the Babylonian flood story
(
by Alan Witschonke based on an illustration in Smith, G., 1876,
The Chaldean Account of Genesis
, Scribner, Armstrong & Co., New York, p. 10
).

For half a decade, from 1849 to 1854, archaeological expeditions returned crates containing thousands of clay tablets to the British Museum. Digging through the rubble of ancient Nineveh, near the modern Iraqi town of Mosul, excavators discovered the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s library dating from around 670
BC
. Not recognizing their significance at first, the museum’s curators thought the tablets were decorated pottery. After minimal precautions were taken to protect them on the way to London, crates full of broken tablets arrived at the museum and sat neglected in storerooms.

All those worthless fragments turned out to be the remains of the world’s oldest books. The secrets of a dead civilization lay scattered in countless pieces of an archaeological jigsaw puzzle. Smith’s knowledge of cuneiform uniquely qualified him for the job of sorting fragments excavated from the rubble of the Royal Assyrian library. The museum hired him in 1863 as a curator’s assistant.

He faced quite a challenge. Some tablets were broken into more than a hundred pieces. Reconstructing them would be a tedious task, ideal for a detail-oriented introvert. Smith threw himself into his job and was soon matching tiny pieces of broken clay together. A natural at grouping fragments by color and shape, he had a remarkable knack for reassembling the jumbled pieces into whole tablets.

For almost a decade the quiet curator’s assistant painstakingly pieced tablets back together, patiently working through the museum’s collection. Then, one damp fall morning in 1872, he noticed references to the creation of the world. He soon found a large fragment on which two of the original six columns of writing were intact, two were half-preserved, and two were missing. It seemed to tell of a great flood.

But only part of the intact fragment was legible; the rest lay covered beneath a thick white deposit. Frustratingly, the curator in charge of cleaning tablets was away, and Smith was not authorized to take on the task. Naturally high-strung and nervous, Smith became increasingly agitated waiting for the curator to return. When he finally did, Smith pounced on the cleaned fragment.

Scanning down the third column, he struck gold.

My eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge.
¹

The partial account Smith described was a speech given by a character he provisionally named Izdubar (who eventually came to be known as Gilgamesh after scholars refined their understanding of Sumerian). Recalling Izdubar’s name from other fragments, Smith searched for them and gradually reconstructed the tablet, piecing the story together as he completed the second column. He then found and reassembled additional, overlapping copies that filled in the sixth column and nearly completed the first column. It was like multiple editions of the same book. Further investigative work turned up more fragments, nearly completing an account of a great flood.

Surprisingly, the story paralleled the biblical story. The mighty King Izdubar had conquered monsters and united the feuding kingdoms between the Tigres and Euphrates but fell ill in old age. Fearing man’s last enemy, death, he sought out Sisit (later translated as Utnapishtim), the immortal survivor of the great flood the gods sent to destroy humanity. Warned of an impending flood, Sisit built a ship and caulked it with bitumen before loading his family and animals aboard to ride it out. After seven days and nights they ran aground on a mountainside and Sisit sent out a dove, a swallow, and finally a raven to search for dry ground.

While this ancient cuneiform narrative was similar to the more recent biblical story, Smith saw more differences between the two stories than just the number of days and nights of rain (seven versus forty). The Mesopotamian story alluded to a maritime tradition. The ark was called a ship. It had a pilot wise enough to take it on a trial voyage before the flood arrived. In contrast, the biblical story suggested inland authors unfamiliar with seafaring. The biblical ark was simply described as a great box. Did the Babylonian and Hebrew stories represent different versions of the same events? Or was the biblical flood a reworking of the Babylonian story?

On December 3, 1872, Smith presented his findings to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, sharing the stage with the prime minister and the dean of Westminster. His lecture captivated scholars and the general public alike. Newspapers trumpeted the discovery of a prebiblical source for the biblical flood story. Immediately after his presentation, the
Daily Telegraph
offered Smith the princely sum of a thousand guineas to search for more tablets at Ashurbanipal’s ruined library. The British Museum jumped at this publicity bonanza, granting Smith six months’ leave.

Map of Mesopotamia showing the modern shoreline and the position of the shoreline in ancient Sumeria when Ur and Shuruppak were in the coastal estuary.

With no field archaeology training, and after digging through the ruins for just eight days in May 1873, Smith found a fragment that completed the first column of the tablet under reconstruction at the British Museum. It filled in the part of the story that included the command to build a ship and load it with animals. Near the end of his trip, Smith also found fragments of additional tablets describing the creation of the world in six days as well as man’s temptation and fall.

In unearthing multiple copies of the same stories, Smith discovered how the Genesis stories grew out of much older texts. The Assyrian king was apparently a bibliophile whose agents sought out inscribed tablets for his literary treasure house. Multiple tablets with different versions reflected the evolution of the flood story. Some versions dated from long before Ashurbanipal’s rule. It could not be considered coincidence; Smith kept finding more and more evidence corroborating a prebiblical flood story.

Smith thought more than ten thousand inscribed tablets were originally housed in the upper floors of the ruined palace. Apparently arranged by subject, some tablets formed a series, the longest of which consisted of over a hundred individual tablets. Each shared the title that began its series, and each was numbered with its position in the series and started with the last phrase of the preceding tablet.

This once well-organized library lay in ruins. Scorch marks showed that many tablets broke apart during the fiery destruction of Nineveh. Subsequent treasure seekers also took a toll, tossing tablets aside in the quest for better loot. Finally, cycles of rain and drying splintered most tablets into piles of clay shards.

Smith shipped crates and crates of fragments back to London. As he fitted them back together he discovered that the flood story was the eleventh of a twelve-tablet series. Different tablets revealed several distinct versions. One nearly complete tablet revealed that the gods sent a great flood to destroy the city of Shuruppak. This version referred to the flood survivor as Atrahasis, who, like Sisit, built a ship, sealed it with bitumen, and loaded it with his wealth, family, and beasts of the field. As in the other version, the great flood raged over the surface of the earth for seven days and nights, killing all living things. After the ship came to ground on a mountain, Atrahasis sent out a dove, then a swallow, and finally a raven before disembarking after the waters receded.

Henry Rawlinson, Smith’s mentor who, decades before, stumbled onto the key to deciphering cuneiform, seized upon the twelve tablets as proof that the flood story was a solar myth tied to zodiac symbols in which each tablet corresponded to a different sign. The tablet that contained the flood story corresponded to the eleventh month, the rainiest time of the year, the month ruled by the storm god.

But Smith thought this ancient story from Ashurbanipal’s library recorded an ancient catastrophe dating back long before the Bible. Maybe the Jews adapted an older Babylonian story to monotheism. Smith composed a table showing how basic elements occurred in the same order in the biblical and Babylonian narratives. However, he saw enough differences in the details to believe the stories represented distinct traditions recording the same events. Perhaps the mountaintop on which the ark landed was a Mesopotamian temple, rising above the floodwaters and offering a beacon of hope to anyone adrift on the submerged lowlands.

After returning to England from his second expedition in 1874, Smith focused on combing through the thousands of fragmented tablets to reconstruct those that told the history of the world from the creation to the flood. He found tales of the building of the Tower of Babel and of the Confusion of Tongues. In their account of the world’s creation, the cuneiform tablets told of the initial chaos from which the universe was made and how, after each step along the way, the gods pronounced their creation good. Smith even found a tablet telling of the fall of a celestial being corresponding to Satan.