The Great Flood and Its Aftermath

everyone and welcome to the pen Museum I'm Jillian seekers and I'm the Williams director here the museum and I'm delighted to welcome you to the first speaker and this year's great lecture series on great catastrophes as we are now in the final weeks of monumental renovations I am really hoping the only catastrophes left are for this series do hope you'll join us on November 16th and 17th for our opening weekend celebrations the galleries are looking spectacular for those of you who've seen our new galleries of the of the Middle East this is these are our new galleries of Africa and Mexico and Central America and I'm absolutely thrilled with them of course when you enter our new fully restored entranceway the first thing that you will see is Sphynx of ramses ii which moved with sound fanfare across the museum this summer so I look forward to seeing you all then it always gives me great pleasure to welcome our speaker a good colleague and friend of mine dr. Steve tinny wears many hats here at the Museum he's the Deputy Director of Museum he's the chief curator head of collections and research and director of the Center for the analysis of archaeological material and associate curator in charge of the babylonians section and since that doesn't seem to keep him busy he's also the clark research associate professor of a siri ology intends Near Eastern languages and civilizations department and the director of the Pennsylvania Sumerian dictionary project yes so Steve received his bachelor's degree in Seri ology from Cambridge University and his doctorate from the University of Michigan in addition to the Syrian a Sumerian dictionary project which he first joined as a postdoctoral research assistant over 20 years ago his research interests include the literary and intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia and a wide range of efforts to bring digital approaches to the study of the ancient Near East to greater publics Steve will be discussing the Great Flood and its aftermath I hope you will be able to join us for a range of catastrophes this year up next will be Kathleen Morrison and Emily hammer who will discuss using archaeology to improve climate change models and in December the series will be moving back to the fully renovated Harrison auditorium which looks fantastic and is for the first time in its history now air conditioned as well as renovations when an interim please join me in giving a wearable welcome to Steve okay the first question on is it's my mic on it just seems to me that this is going to be a year of non-stop catastrophe jokes right like I hope my lecture isn't a catastrophe for example well thank you all for coming that's a great turnout to kick off the season the great flood and its aftermath the great flood is probably one of the most famous things in ancient Mesopotamia this shot is a gallery shot from a few years ago in fact everything seems like a few years ago but it's four years ago now where we had a small special exhibit for the Pope's visit to Philadelphia and the flood tablet was one of its stars and this is what we still lovingly call the flood tablet the Cimmerian flood tablet although as you'll see it's not quite true anymore it's not a catastrophe though we should have a swear jar for every speaker who uses the word catastrophe too many times in there - all right is this gonna be overdone you know it's gonna be overdone so I know many of you are old hands many of you know some of this but I'm gonna start off just by orienting you in time and space we are in the Middle East tonight and we are particularly in what is now Iraq and we are looking at materials written materials primarily from these cities in the south war and Nippur and CIPA and also up here in the north from Nineveh where there's a very very important ancient library that was collected by a king called a Shivani Powell around 650 BCE and number of the tablets you see will be from that library we're gonna cover quite a time range not as much as I sometimes do actually because turns out that flood stories in uniform culture and actual Mesopotamian culture don't really come in and sell after around 2000 BCE now that doesn't mean the exist before they may or may not have but we don't have them so tonight we're only recovering about 1,500 years of time okay and I'll try to keep that all clear as we move forwards and I'll explain a bit more about sumerian and akkadian and connect form as we go along rather than do it all up front so one of the reasons the flood is so well-known in Mesopotamia is that it's a tremendous part of the consciousness of some of the great world religions right there's a version of it in the Hebrew Bible which was translated into Greek and into Latin this is from the Gutenberg text of the beautiful front page and one of the things you'll see as we go through this evenings I'm going to use a lot of very beautiful medieval through Victorian illustrations imaginations of the flood and up here oops appears the part where go this is chapter 7 God says to Noah take you you're on all of your household into the ark right and many people who are familiar with either Christianity or Islam know this material as I just intimated there's a version of the flood story and Noah's story and Noah narrative in the Quran and both the Old Testament versions and the Quranic version serve different purposes and the Mesopotamian ones I'm going to discuss I'm not going to discuss those in detail if you want to try asking some questions I may or may not pretend to know enough to answer them it's not really my field of expertise but there's such a fascinating topic the flood is something I always teach in my undergraduate classes because it goes on and on it's not only in the Abrahamic religions but it also is very much part of the medieval imagination it features in a number of histories of the world including this fantastic 15 century one that's actually in the Penn libraries and was featured in the sacred writings exhibit when the Pope came with this beautiful drawing of how the ark was imagined to be you see our Kanoa Noah's Ark right and there are there's a flood story in one or two Latin horses as well or classical authors as well over it includes it in his metamorphosis and it's not quite the same but there's lots of moments in it that a reminiscent of either the version in the in the Old Testament or which has a lot of similarities for the with the Mesopotamian versions and it almost appeared in a book there's a Lost Caxton translation of the metamorphosis into English and this happens to be a manuscript which we believe was derived from that book so once you get things put into books obviously they become practically mass items compared to individual manuscripts right so the upshot is that the flood story was known by tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people over time in one way or another tremendous part of the sort of human consciousness if you like and then I discovered this in my extensive Google research for this paper as you do and I couldn't stop myself using it this is a 1927 National Guard poster well I do it's a poster the pictures from my 27 but it's referencing in the 1927 Mississippi floods where the guard planes spotted numbers of people and held in there in their rescue and it's the great flood of 1927 the great flood is one of those images that we carry with us and projects into the future and for sure if we watch the newspapers in the media and we'll see it again right so what about the message Mesopotamians story what's up with that where does it come from what does it consist of how do we have it this gentleman George Smith is one of the reasons we have it he was one of the mid 19th century asuri ologists who worked on the materials from Nineveh and actually found fragments which he identified as part of what we now call the Gilgamesh myth which he called is dubar but a very smart guy he's working about 20 years after he their form had been deciphered and he immediately recognized the importance of this and actually persuaded the Daily Telegraph to send another expedition back to the site of Nineveh to find more pieces of the fruit of the broken tablets he had found and this is one such tablet that have been broken into pieces he actually did find more fragments of it and in 1872 presented it at a scholarly meeting in 1874 published it as the 11th tablet of the is do bar legend and we still call it Gilgamesh 11 so he was really a pioneer and you can imagine what a tremendous few roar this caused because you have an entire Victorian culture centered around the Bible and the Old Testament and suddenly have these weird and wonderful canary tablets which look like nothing on earth written by people who are mentioned in the Bible the Assyrians right and telling us a tale a narrative that toward intents and purposes also occurs in the Old Testament so that really put the surrey ology on the map they made a surio G what it was for the first 30 or 40 years which was basically in the service of biblical studies and it took that amount of time before it became a much more independent academic or intellectual enterprise and without apologizing I'm going to focus on Mesopotamia tonight but as I say ask me questions about the other stuff if you want so this is one form of Gilgamesh this is from about 650 BCE from a bunny pals library wrong way here's the the better-known tablet you see in all the pictures of this it's also basically the same text the scribes wrote multiple copies of this one of the interesting things we're learning as we understand more about the intellectual history of Mesopotamia is that in fact it's not very common to write complete sets of things like Gilgamesh so although probably there were some in a Shibani pals library which was large and very atypical most people didn't probably own a complete set so when we talk about the whole story we're talking partly about things that people knew and partly about what they wrote the Gilgamesh flood story goes back to an earlier one from a composition that we call simply Atrahasis after the name of the person who features most prominently in it he's the flood survivor Atrahasis means exceedingly wise and I'll come back to this a bit later there are several different names of flood survivor but they all have to do with understanding the ways of the god Enki or aya who's the god of magic and wisdom and helps humanity in various ways and these three tablets as you are looking at here although they look like more to you are actually an incredibly precious thing because they were originally the whole Atrahasis story written on three tablets by one person one scribe okay and this is here tablet one this is in the British Museum this is the only remaining fragment of tablet two it's possible there are others out there in collections that haven't been identified but I doubt it this one actually is in the Morgan Library in New York and this is tablet three and this big pieces in the British Museum and this little piece which Chuck just about joins it fits where it touches is actually in Geneva and this is actually not uncommon for tablets excavated or dug up by local villagers in the 1870s when the British Museum were buying tablets on the market and the Louvre was buying them and they were collectors here buying them and sometimes the fragments get separated and they're never of such joins we have pieces in our collection which if we were to join them would go together with pieces in the Louvre in Paris or in the in Berlin museums or in the British Museum but what this means is that we have kind of although it's very incomplete as you can see we've kind of a snapshot of the Atrahasis story and it features the flood as part of it so I'm going to put that into context as we work our way through this is just a late piece of Atrahasis just to make the point that as rehearses actually has version from about 1600 or so and versions that go all the way down through to about 650 or so in a Shabana palace library and one of the interesting things is the flood story occurs natural causes and it occurs in Gilgamesh and the same people have these two tails in their heads but they don't see them as mutually exclusive they're just different parts of the same tradition yeah and when you're looking at here just to explain the canary form a little more soaked in air form is a writing system which is made by impressing a stylus on to clay and it makes these triangular shapes on the clay and we draw these shapes as triangular outlines to help people read them this fragment here is actually just this piece down here this tablet is has several pieces that that join as you're becoming used to write and Cannell form is used for a handful of languages there are only two that I'm really going to deal with today one is Sumerian that's the language my research specialty it's the best language right it's interesting it's the most interesting language I mean it killed them I Kali see this on YouTube is the most interesting language because it's an isolate it has no family relatives living or dead right and that it's very interesting in terms of world typology but it's we understand there primarily because ancient scribes translated Sumerian into the other language that I'm going to use reference several times tonight which is Akkadian and Akkadian is a language that's in the Semitic language family so it's closely related to languages like Hebrew and Arabic so we understand it relatively well now I mentioned that the Sumerian flood tablet wasn't quite that anymore there's a couple of new pieces in the last few years this is still an emerging field one is this piece which probably came out of the ground in the 19th century and was brought in to be assessed by a keeper in the British Museum named Irving Finkel he's a very smart guy understood immediately what it was and has christened it the ark tablet and you can read earrings book called the ark before Noah which is a great book which will tell you huge amount about the tablet and about the flood story and about things like where we think the ark might have thought to have come to rest and so forth for me I'm gonna reference it here because it's clearly aligned with if not part of the Atrahasis story and it actually gives us a little bit more technical detail on how to build an ark if we should need to this piece has not yet been properly edited and translated so I will actually use it today you can actually read quite a lot from the photo this is unfortunately a piece off the antiquities market we are not quite as beset by those pieces as you might think but there certainly are you know hundreds of them this is certainly a part of a flood story which will be published by Konrad Falk in the collection of a collector in Norway called a skinned mutton skin and this this is a brilliant piece of work by a former student here former student of mine I'm proud to say Jeremy Peterson who worked on a project to create an online repository of materials about aura and in doing so worked on all the literary fragments from aura and you can see they're quite small fragments in some cases a mother Jeremy's brilliance is is that he goes through drawers full of small fragments and joins them to bigger fragments or are the small fragments which he did with the nipper tablets here and he's done it with this and it's another version of the Sumerian flood story from or and we sort of knew about one of the pieces of it but he's actually be able to recover now some extremely important fragrancy lines which show who the first King created by the gods while some will come back that later so the flood you know flood studies I guess is an ongoing thing and here's our verse Sumerian flood table we call it the Cimmerian flood tablet because although there are a number of versions of flood in Akkadian until recently there were no others in Sumerian and in fact it's pedigree is a little bit suspect by which I don't mean it's a fake but there are those who think that maybe it's actually a Sumerian text that was written by somebody who knew the Akkadian text to create a Sumerian flood story I think that's a lot less likely now actually now that we have the aura piece it may shows that there were other versions of the aura of the flood story in existence so interestingly the Sumerian piece has a few Akkadian words written on it so that I mean the or piece so it's time to tell you some stories rightness what I like to do in these talks I'm gonna sort of go through a collection of flood elements because one of the points I'm gonna make is that in Mesopotamia probably nowhere in fact it's never just about the flood it's the flood in a context you have some kind of pre flood or creation or something like that then you have the flood and then you have something that happens afterwards you have the aftermath yeah so this is not quite the start of the Sumerian flood story though it is the start of this tablet you can see this is the top edge here yeah and it starts off the gods created humanity very nice and the animals were multiplying below all together they made livestock and quadrupeds are spitting things in the steppe in the high step they something to join us plants everywhere there's a missing verb at that time the canal was not dug this is very common in sumerian creation stories Sumerian literature doesn't do very well at describing something you can't imagine that is the world before civilization and Korea so the way they describe creation is a pre creation rather is as a negation of everything they used to right now the canals will not Doug they in ditch will not dread dredged there were no snakes there were no scorpions no lions no hyenas the dog and wolf would not present so this is before life as we knew it is how this tablet starts off right and then in the break the piece that I'm not giving in full they create and assign the first cities to God's and this is also in the the pen the Sumerian flood tablet and on the reverse when we pick up again among those cities ever do which is the city of the god Enki ayah the god of wisdom and magic they established as the leader probably when you see words in italics in my translations it means that we're not quite certain that that's what was there either because we don't understand the word or because there's a break maybe but it's pretty clear that it has something to do with kingship they let a man who was lying maybe among its widespread teeming people and Enlil and Enki the fathers of the gods chose a loo limb for the shepherd ship of the entirety of the teeming people they called that name Ahlul in my translation is based on Jeremy's but it's not quite the same Sumer ologists always disagreed on translations it's a matter of principle with us so a loom is the first known king in the smearing King let's do not come back to that so this is fantastic we didn't know this before right and for us that's really exciting I guess I can see you're having difficulties I'm following my excitement but believe me it's really exciting okay trust me so now let's look at astral houses that's right house this is fascinating because it's such an extensive account as I said by one person and Atrahasis begins with something that you know may have been in the Cimmerian flood story as well we just don't have those pieces the furry first words are when the gods like man that's how it was known in antiquity by the first words when the gods like man did the work bore the loads the gods load was too great they worked to the work too hard the trouble too much the great Anunnaki was a collective term for the higher gods made the eggie which is a collective term for the lower gods carry the workload seven fold sevens a magic number in Mesopotamia you can see loss of sevens this evening and I'm not here to tell that or how's this story each day but maybe I could another time if I got invited back but to cut a long story short the gods don't like this they don't like the sweat and the toil and you can't blame them really right and so they rebel and there's a god called Allah no relation to Islamic Allah I realized as I was typing it that I should be clear about that who is a ringleader for them and this the text continues so here by the way I said I would explain a bit as it winds along this tablet has four columns it would originally been a perfect rectangle along there so there's column one this is the very start of the text and the top left there's column 2 column 3 and column 4 and then when it turns over it's got another four columns on the back so we number those columns one through eight and you'll see that I have tried to put the column numbers in Roman and the line numbers in Arabic script so you can sense how much of a gap there is so I've skipped over all of this basically and we're around here somewhere right on the tablet so the gods listen to Alice speech set fire to their tools put aside their spades for fire their loads for the god fire God they flared up when they reached the gate of warrior n Lil's dwelling it was Knights the middle watch the house was surrounded the god Enlil had not realized it he had no idea what he was what was coming for him villagers with pitchforks basically right and so after this slightly awkward scene you know a fair bit of rebellion passes obviously the major goes don't get killed it gets dealt with but they make a deal they say okay we understand the minor gods don't want to do all the hard labor we've got an idea will create humanity to do the hard labor so now you know why every day is such a challenge right well it was it was meant to be okay and so one of the important aspects of Atrahasis actually is the creation of humanity again not something I'm gonna dwell on in detail today but a little bit so Bailey Ely I bring her in because she comes back after the flood you'll see her in a few minutes the womb goddess is present let the womb goddess create offspring and let man bear the load of the gods this is the point right they called her up and said create humanity and into all these different words for the for the same goddess mommy and nin to Bella eally they like to be scholarly and show off in all these fancy words nin to made her voice heard and spoke to the great gods it is not proper for me to make him the work is ank ease as the god of magic and wisdom he makes everything pure if he gives me clay that I will do it and that's what happens they set up this system they nip off pieces of clay and create seven women and seven men and humanity is created okay and they do the work of the gods and they're extremely successful problem is they're too successful when these catastrophes happen Astra houses it's clear they happen not because humans did anything really wrong but because there were too many of them and they were too noisy and there's a reason for this which will come - towards the end of the talk so 600 years less than 600 passed and the country became too wide the people to numerous the country was as noisy as a bellowing bull the god and they'll brew Restless at their racket and they'll had to understand - a noise and he said to the great gods I can't sleep the humanity is so noisy right you know if you have if you have or if you've had children you know you sympathize some extent right but not with the next bit not supposed to sympathize with the next bit give the order that syrup or disease shall break out so then for this tablet rest of this tablet and the whole of tablet - and some of tablet 3 what happens in our houses is there's a series of attempts by Enlil to wipe out humanity and each attempt is thwarted and the first one this is at the end of tablet 1 so on the on the other side of this down on this part of the tablet somewhere in comes Atrahasis now there was one Atrahasis whose ear was open to his god Enki the ear is very important because the ear in sumerian yesh took is actually one of the seats of wisdom and if you are broad of ear or open of ear you understand things and particularly what you understand this the ways of the God and Atrahasis which means exceedingly wise means exceedingly wise in a specific way which is that he doze how he needs to behave towards Enki air and that's why he gets selected to be the flood survivor right so that does a line in some way but without quite the same overtones of righteousness with why Noah is the flood survivor in the biblical story and my new is the flood survivor in the Quranic version yeah and Anki tells him how to deal with the the the disease and with other plagues and storms and so forth and ultimately with the flood the flood version in Atrahasis is very very similar to one in Gilgamesh in most of its points among a view in details I'm going to go through the Gilgamesh one in detail in a few minutes but I wanted Allie for a second on the flood survivor so the flood survivor in the sumerian flood tablet is called Ziusudra which is a very nice name z means life and hood means day and sued in sumerian means to be remote or far-off and in this part of the Mesopotamian conception of mortality that we all have a day on which we're going to die and in the Assyrian royal inscriptions they gloat when they kill their enemies prematurely and they say I made him die on a day that wasn't his right I made him die of premature death and Ziusudra means one who has a life with a far-off day yeah he's not gonna die for a long long time and he's humble committed reverent he's a priest he has the same thing going on with Enki as Atrahasis basically and the flood survivor in Gilgamesh is called wooden episteme eenz finder of life and the flood frame in Gilgamesh is not as extensive because in Gilgamesh it's arrived that really via Gilgamesh his travels and he reaches the end of the world and meet certain efficacy but when Odin the pitched he first starts to tell him the flood story he says let me disclose Oh Gilgamesh a matter most secret to you I will tell a mystery of the gods and the mystery is the flood story and in Gilgamesh to anticipate what I'm going to say by the end of the talk the flood is bound up with knowledge so the ark tablet how do you build an ark well you can read Irving's book I didn't bring out an extensive quote here and I won't spend the time to read it in detail but you can see just as I talk there are specifics about the amount of bitumen you'll need about the number of stanchions Irving argues fairly convincingly that the ark has the form in this text at least of a large coracle or gopher which is a kind of a flat round bow that they use in Mesopotamia so this is all that's on the tablet basically I mean there's a few other important things now I really want to spend some time and tell the story of the Gilgamesh flood so this is gonna be based on Gilgamesh tablet 11 highly abridged it's about 300 lines until the whole tablet but 200 of the flood story the tablets are from as I said a Shibani powers library in the movie and I've Illustrated it with artworks representing aspects of the imagined deluge because one of the great things about the alignment of the Biblical Flood story with the Mesopotamian one is that you have all these fantastic images you don't have Mesopotamian ones they didn't ever make a single picture of the flood story that well tomorrow they'll be within the present but not but not that we know of yet okay so what the pushed him talks to Gilgamesh who's arrived from this long journey and he's as you some of you know he's defeated the monster hawawa and his friend Enkidu has died and he's gone on this long quest following the death of his friend Enkidu because he wants to be immortal basically and he arrives at the Pistons dwelling really at the end of the earth I love the fish Tim tells him the story of you know how the gods decided to destroy humanity and how air or Anki tipped him off ayoh was expressly forbidden to talk directly to the flood survivor so he talked to the wall that's what this thing was about here wall wall read wall read wall it's a great trick right so Anki talks to the wall and that wall reflects it through the flood survivor and then wouldn't have pitched him sort of settles in and tells the actual story of the core of the flood he says the weather to look at was full of foreboding I went into the boat and sealed my hatch to the one who sealed the boat pulls or the ship right I gave my palace with all its good it always strikes me that's question or general questionable generosity so gonna be wiped out in 10 minutes / here have it at the very first glimmer of brightening dawn there rose on the horizon a dark cloud of black and bellowing within it was added the storm god the Annunaki those are the remember the important guards carry torches of fire scorching the country with brilliant flashes the stillness of the storm God passed over the sky and all that was bright turned into darkness for a day the gales flattened the country quickly they blew and then came the deluge even the gods took fright at the deluge they left and went up to the heaven of our new lying like dogs curled up in the open sweet voice to Bela Kili wailed the olden times have turned to clay it's a complete reversion right humans come from clay and they've been returned to clay because I spoke evil in the gods assembly how could I speak evil in the gods assembly and declare water kill my people it is I who gave birth those people are mine and now like fish they fill the ocean for six days and seven nights they're blue the wind downpour the Gale the deluge of flatten the land but the seventh day when it came that Yael relented the deluge ended the ocean that had thrashed like a woman in labor grew calm the tempest grew still the deluge ended I looked at the weather says it no fish team is hard remember he's speaking right he's all first-person narrative I looked at the weather it was quiet and still but all the people had turned to clay on the mountain of Nemo SHhhh the boat ran aground mountain Amash held the boat fast allowed it no motion the seventh day after that I brought out a dove let it loose off when the Dove but then it returned there was no place to land so back it came to me I brought out a swallow back it came to me I brought out a raven finding food it did not come back to me ring some bells I brought out an offering to the Four Winds I made sacrifice incense I placed on the peak of the mountain seven flasks and seven there's that magic number again I set in position read cedar and Myrtle I piled beneath them traditional purifiers the gods did smell the savour the gods to smell the savour sweet the gods gathered like flies around the man making sacrifice the gods depend on humanity for their food they created humanity do their labor and to feed them so destroying humanity not the smartest thing to do you know then at once better Lili arrived she lifted the flies of lapis lastly that al who had made for their courtship she has a necklace of flies we actually find them archaeologically little tiny little sassy flies o gods let these great beads in this necklace of mine make me remember these days and never forget them they don't want to do this again right memorial all the gods shall come to the incense but the incense let end they'll not come and they'll has caused this problem because he lacked counsel and brought on the deluge and delivered my people into destruction and then towards the end of the narrative and they'll says in the past or the pitch T was a mortal man but now he and his wife shall become like us gods Odin apish T shall dwell far away with the rivers flow forth this is not a gift this is a punishment right he's being removed from society yeah so far away they took me and settled me where the rivers flow forth so since I put aftermath in my title I felt I should address it even though the flood is really the high spot right so what I want to do in the last few minutes is bring out several different ways in which these flood stories get larger meanings on the one hand they're great stories right so for Gilgamesh there's two big issues here one is immortality or the futility of his search for immortality immediately after wooden episteme finishes and says they told me to live where the rivers flow forth he says but now who convened for you the Assembly of the Gods so you can find the life you searched for for six days and seven nights come do without slumber so with the Pistons challenges it took the flood to get me over to immortality and it took the Assembly of the Gods to get me immortality and he says essentially a bet you can't even stay awake for the period of the flood six days and seven nights and some of you remember in the story wouldn't have pushed him asks his wife to make bread and put it by Gilgamesh every day because no sooner has Gilgamesh said oh sure I can do that then he falls asleep right and they put seven locust of bread and then when he wakes up on the seventh day he says I was just resting my eyes right we'll do it but there is the bread in various stages decay and mold and rotting and dried out right so they so they make the passage of time concrete through the rotting bread so Gilgamesh fails to get immortality but the other big thing in Gilgamesh which I'm going to take the liberty of not describing in a huge amount of detail because you can actually look at the great journeys YouTube video that I did where I do discuss it and I must say somewhat embarrassing length is the return of knowledge because there's a Mesopotamian understanding of the fact that when the flood occurred and humanity was wiped down the one survivor was a very close follower of an Kyoya he had the knowledge of an Qian air Anke air but he was basically banished so all of the religious knowledge the cult knowledge went with him right and Gilgamesh actually credited with with bringing it back so at the start of the epic of gilgamesh it says he who saw the deep the foundation of the country who knew the proper ways was wise and everything so the deep knew the proper ways he every where explored the seats of power he knew the sum of wisdom about everything he saw the secret and uncovered the hidden he brought back intelligence from before the flood that's one expression of it in an earlier Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh caught actually the death of Gilgamesh in the mess up in the later Gilgamesh epic Gilgamesh doesn't die Enkidu dies but in the Sumerian tales in 18th century BC there is one about the death of Gilgamesh and when Gilgamesh is dying he gets all depressed and says don't feel a dunny thing and he gets cold in a dream before the Assembly of the gods and they look at all the things you've done the girls say to him and one of the things they say he's done after he's arrived that the Assembly of the gods they say in bold having founded many temples of the gods you reached Ziusudra in his dwelling place having brought down to the land the divine powers of Sumer which at that time were forgotten forever they're very explicit a thousand years earlier in the Sumerian version the orders the rituals the rites you carried out correctly the rites of hand-washing so part of the aftermath of the flood is the loss of knowledge but it's recovered by gilgamesh's activity so for the Sumerian version it's a little harder to understand what the aftermath involves because the tablets are still too broken but there's every hope of as you can see finding more but thanks to the new piece from or we do have a clearer idea of how closely that account aligns with several other documents only one of which I'm going to talk about here and the one I'm going to talk about is Sumerian king list which is best known from this eight column four-sided prism in Oxford as the weld Blundell prism and the King list is about surprisingly kingship right and clearly kingship or Shepherd ship is one of the concerns of the flood story and it reiterates that notion that things are restored afterwards and things continue and it does so because in the antediluvian section which is not in all versions of the King list and is probably deliberately aligned with the flood story this is not accidental kingship descended from heaven kingship was in error do so in the flood story ever do is the prime city in ever do a loo limb became king right so there's the same tradition in two different contexts which for sure are derived from the same people's thought processes and these kings have let's not be unkind and say absurd rains but let's say they have remarkably long rains right so a loo limb rain for twenty eight thousand eight hundred years al Algar ruled for 36,000 years goes on ensure a pack down here uber to to became king in one of their references in the Akkadian flood stories would Atrahasis is called the son of a buck who bought - - so he's thought of as a son of the last king before the flood in some contexts and then the flood swept over says quite simply after the floods have swept over and the kingship had descended from heaven the kingship was in Kish a new order so the flood in this context is like a big eraser in time right before it you have these Kings with very very long reins and after it you have Kings with still long reins but but less remarkable perhaps and finally Atrahasis the aftermath and context in that rehearses are different again and both interesting and frustrating because we don't quite have the text preserved all the way to the end but we have enough to see what's going on so at the end in columns 6 & 7 and of 6 & 7 of tablet 3 which is just 1 up there Enlil is making more declarations and he says come summoned into the womb God s confer with each other in the assembly ank he made his voice heard Anke a.m. and spoke to the womb goddess nin - you are the wound goddess who decreased destinies to the people let one third of them be something something broken ah let another third of them be something and in addition this is the this is where we get to understand what's going on here in addition let there be one third of the people among the people the women who gives birth but does not give birth successfully let there be the Pacha - demon among the people to snatch the baby from its mother's lap established from Bab 2n to a seat to women they shall be taboo that is they won't have children for religious reasons and thus control childbirth so what happens at the end of Atrahasis if you think back to what I was saying at the beginning of it the big problem with Atrahasis is the gods don't want to do the work they create you must do the work the humans are extremely successful probably because the gods forgot to make them mortal so they multiply uncontrollably and by the end of Atrahasis they're not saying let's wipe out humanity anymore because you know you'd also depend on them to do your work to build the temples and the temples where you live and where you get fed if you're a god but they are saying let's have mortality and let's have some kind of population control measures right so this is auric we're back like Gilgamesh to Ulrich and safety and to sum up and just what I've been saying for the last little while the flood story is a fantastic element in a number of stories in its own right but those narratives really only get meaning when you look at them in context next when you look at them in context they're always part of a cycle which involves a series of events kind of creation destruction and recreation and is one is paralleled not only on the apocalyptic scale which is really a one-off in a sense right but then in fact it gets aligned in Cimmerian degree texts for example with the kinds of destructions that happen when invaders come in and flatten and create environments like the flood and then go away and you rebuild so it becomes almost a metaphor for the way humans live thank you you

Channel: Penn Museum

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Length: 46min 54sec (2814 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2020