A historic object returns to Iraq. What does this have to do with Noah's Ark?

 

A 3,600 year old clay tablet telling part of the Epic of Gilgamesh is being returned to Iraq after being looted from a museum during the Gulf War in 1991.

The epic is a fascinating tale, written perhaps a millennium before the Book of Genesis. It recounts how human beings had become so numerous the noise they made was unbearable, and the gods could no longer sleep.  So they decided to ‘exterminate mankind.’ 

To achieve this, they ‘turned daylight to darkness’, and summoned up a storm and a half. ‘For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world.’ Then on the seventh day, the storm subsided, and the sea ‘stretched as flat as a roof-top.’ And mankind was ‘turned to clay’.

But not quite. One of the gods had a soft spot for a man named Utnapishtim and had tipped him off about the impending catastrophe. So he and his family had commissioned a boat and escaped. With them they took samples of ‘the beast of the field, both wild and tame’, as well as the ‘craftsmen’ who had built their vessel.

For anyone who knows the story of Noah’s Ark from the Bible, much of this will sound rather familiar. For the full story, see my book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books).

Apocalyptic floods in religions

The story of Noah is one of the best-known in the Bible – the universal flood, the warning to the one righteous man to save his family, the ark, the dove that goes out to find land, the sacrifice to God, the re-population of the earth.

But dozens of religions in different parts of the world have their own tales of apocalyptic deluges - perhaps a reflection of the fact that floods are the natural disaster most commonly suffered by humanity.

A story from the Middle East even older than Noah’s, The Epic of Gilgamesh, shows striking similarities. It relates how, as human beings grew in numbers, they started to make so much noise that the gods decided to destroy them all, apart from a solitary good man and his family who were tipped off, enabling them to escape in a huge boat.

Apart from the Middle East, tales of apocalyptic floods are also found in Greece and India, in south-east Asian countries such as Burma, Vietnam, and Indonesia; in New Guinea and Australasia; in many South Pacific Islands, the Philippines, Taiwan, the Kamchatka peninsula of Far Eastern Russia, Lithuania, Transylvania, and all over North and South America.

*For the full story, see my new book, Flood: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books) ISBN 978 1 78023 196 9. It also includes chapters on the deadliest floods in history, how floods have been portrayed in literature, art and films, how some of the most ambitious structures ever built by humans have been erected to protect against flooding, and how climate change may now be making humanity more vulnerable than ever to the waters.