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THE SUMERIAN ACCOUNT

Before proceeding to an analysis of the length of the Deluge in the
biblical account, it is expedient to consider first the length of the
Deluge in the Mesopotamian tradition.

The Mesopotamian representation of the Deluge has been preserved by
four sources of information:
* a fragmentary Sumerian tablet;
* a story which must have originally had independent existence and
was later inserted into the national poem of the
Assyro-Babylonian-speaking peoples of Mesopotamia, the Epic of
Gilgamesh
* an episode in another Assyro-Babylonian poem called the Epic of
Atarhasis
* the summary compiled in Greek by the Babylonian priest Berossos.

The earliest presentation of the Deluge is the Sumerian one which
dates from as early as the third millennium B.C. This presentation,
which has been preserved by a Sumerian tablet, is of fundamental
importance, but it has not received the attention it deserves because
of the timing of its discovery and because of the condition of the
cuneiform tablet that preserves it.

From the excavations of the city of Nippur, conducted in 1892 and
1893, there was brought to the Pennsylvania University Museum an
unusually rich collection of cuneiform tablets: about 35,000 in all,
many written in Sumerian. It will require the diligence of a few
generations of specialists to sort and interpret them. In 1913 the
Sumerologist Arno Poebel, while searching through this collection, was
able to identify and decipher a tablet containing the earliest known
account of the Deluge. It was an extraordinarily important discovery,
but it had a disappointing aspect, in that two thirds of the precious
tablet were missing and large sections of the rest were chipped off or
illegible. The text had been written in three columns on the face and
the reverse of a clay tablet: what remains is the bottom third of the
three front columns and the top third of the three back columns.
Scholars who have dealt with this text have been so concerned with
bemoaning the fragmentary nature of what we have that they have
overlooked the conceptual unity of the entire presentation. Even by
reading the scattered pieces, one should sense the formal and
intellectual compactness of the original text, some 350 lines.

Poebel's discovery of a Sumerian presentation of the Deluge was a
momentous one, but it came as an anticlimax after the shattering
impact of the revelation of the account of the Deluge contained in the
Epic of Gilgamesh. The announcement in 1862 that the biblical account
of the Deluge had a close counterpart in an older piece of Babylonian
literature marked a turning point in the history of biblical studies.
It came just at the right time in terms of readiness of the audience.
Several writers have understood the historical coincidence that the
communication by Sidney Smith in 1862 followed closely the publication
in 1859 of Darwin's The Origin of Species, a book which has been
understood as inflicting a mortal blow to Judeo-Christian cosmology
and even ethical system. More specifically, it changed entirely the
way in which biblical scholars approach the text of Genesis. Since the
last century the Epic of Gilgamesh has been the object of intensive
investigations not only because some parts of it are relevant to
biblical studies, but also because it was of great general
significance, being the national poem of the Semitic-speaking people
of Mesopotamia. It was so popular that it was translated into other
languages, as the discovery of fragments of Hurrian and Hittite
translations indicates. Because of the attention focused on this
extensive and complex work, the Sumerian presentation of the Deluge
has been studied as a supplement to the interpretation of the later
Epic of Gilgamesh, and has not been evaluated on its own terms.

In pointing out what has been overlooked in the interpretation of the
Sumerian presentation of the Deluge, I shall start with the
interpretations submitted by Samuel Noah Kramer, because his works
enjoy a popularity that makes them accessible to the general reader
and because the opinions of this leading figure of Sumerian studies
are based on a full awareness of all research conducted by other
specialists in the field.

The longest uninterrupted section of the surviving text of the
Sumerian presentation is composed of the bottom of column III and the
top of column IV. In Kramer's translation it reads:

The flood. . .
Thu[s wa]s treated . . .
Then did Nin[tu weep] like a . . .,
The pure Inanna [set up] a lament for its people,
Enki took coun[sel] with himself, Anu, Enlil, Enki, (and) Ninhursag
. . . ,
The gods of heaven and earth [uttered] the name of
Anu (and) Enlil.
Then did Ziusudra, the king, the pashishu [of] . . . ,
Build a giant . . . ;
Humbly obedient, reverent|ly| [he] . . . ,
Attending daily, constantly [he] . . . ,
Bringing forth all kinds of dreams, [he] . . . ,
Uttering the name of heaven (and) earth, [he] . . .
. . . the gods a wall . . . ,
Ziusudra, standing by its side, list[ened].
"Stand by the wall I will say a word to thee, [take my word],
[Give] ear to my instruction:
by our . . . a flood [|will sweep|] over the cult centers;
To destroy the seed of mankind . . . ,
Is the decision, the word of the assembly [of the gods].
By the word commanded by Anu (and) Enlil . . . ,
Its kingship, its rule [|will be put to an end|]."

Interpreters understand that a decision had been reached in the
council of the gods to send the flood, and that some gods, being
dissatisfied with the decision, tried to contrive a way to save the
seed of mankind. This would be an example of "primitive democracy" in
the relations among the Sumerian gods. I would rather understand that
the decision of the council of the gods was to take away power from
some gods; this entailed the destruction of the cosmic order they
represented and hence of the cult centers that conformed to this
order. The destruction of mankind was a byproduct of this decision.
When a city was destroyed by another city, the Sumerians understood
that a decision had been reached in the council of the gods to crush
the god of the defeated city.

The divinities that bewail the forthcoming disaster for mankind are
Nintu, also called Ninhursag, the goddess of childbirth, and Inanna,
the mother goddess of the Sumerians; they represent the biological
aspect of life. The representative of the intellectual aspect of life
is Enki, god of wisdom, mathematics, science, technology, and any form
of rational structure. Apparently he plans to create a new cosmic
order.

Column IV mentions the decision of the gods to destroy the seed of
mankind and then breaks off. About the missing lines that followed the
section I have been discussing, Kramer states: "The text must have
continued with detailed instructions to Ziusudra to build a giant boat
and thus save himself from destruction."

Interpreters understand that Ziusudra, king of Shuruppak, was saved
because of his great piety and that the construction of the Ark was
mentioned in the lines of column IV that followed the preserved ones.
Here interpreters have misconstrued the Sumerian text by reading into
it the biblical presentation of the Deluge. I understand that the
means of salvation is mentioned in the lines that are preserved.
Following the instructions of Enki, King Ziusudra, who is described as
a pashishu, keeper of the counting table in a temple^(120) that is, as
a mathematician, builds "a giant . . ."; unfortunately a key word is
missing at this point, but it can be gathered that it was a matter of
a construction in which walls were of essence. Ziusudra may have built
a ziggurat or a temple; either one had the function of embodying the
basic structure of the cosmos and of preserving it. It must be kept in
mind that the fundamental element in a ziggurat or a temple was its
dimensions and that Enki was first of all a god of surveying,
particularly of the surveying that went into the construction of
canals and embankments which made life possible in Mesopotamia. The
missing section must have dealt with the transition by which a
construction of bricks, a temple or a ziggurat, came to function as a
boat. I will discuss the problem in my explanation of the structure of
the Mesopotamian and biblical Arks. The difficulty of this leap, a
difficulty that exists at least for us, has been realized by those
biblical commentators who ask how Noah could have built the Ark on dry
land. The Egyptians bridged the conceptual gap physically by burying a
boat next to the tombs of their kings, tombs that were intended to
lift them up to heaven. The notion that a sacred building would help
in escaping the flood was not a difficult one for the ancients, as
indicated by the rabbinical sources that argue whether the Temple of
Jerusalem was submerged or not.

We must not read into the Sumerian text the biblical view that Noah
was saved because of his simple piety; the Sumerian view was more
intellectualistic. Ziusudra was saved because he was able to follow
the instructions of Enki. The fact that Ziusudra was a king is not
incidental, since Sumerian kings were conceived as the first surveyors
of the state. In Mesopotamia kings are often represented as holding in
their hands instruments of surveying as symbol of authority; in Egypt
the pharaohs are regularly portrayed as holding in their hands tools
such as a ruler or a coil of rope. It must also be remembered that in
all ancient cultures to measure accurately was understood as an aspect
of religious piety.

Genesis, too, preserves a version (9:20) according to which Noah is a
man of technical skill. I will discuss this passage in detail below.
The fact that in this part of Genesis there surfaces a tradition about
Noah's figure different from the main one can be explained by the
Sumerian presentation and by the reference to artisans in the Epic of
Gilgamesh.

Even Kramer, the greatest living Sumerologist, has not been able to
escape the prison of our biblical conditioning when he explains the
lines about Ziusudra in these terms: "He is described as a pious,
god-fearing king, who is constantly on the lookout for divine
revelations in dreams and incantations. Ziusudra seems to station
himself by a wall, where he hears the voice of a divinity. . . ." The
wall was not an incidental detail, but the key element of the means of
salvation.

If we can free ourselves from our ethnocentric blindfolds, we should
realize that it is the biblical account that is puzzling: why should
Noah have been singled out from all mankind? This peculiarity of the
biblical account is made clear by the Quran where Noah is mentioned
again and again. The unusual case of Noah is exploited to the full by
Islamic revelation: among all the prophets Mohammed identified himself
most of all with Noah, whom he lists among the prophets. The case of
Noah explains how Allah could have chosen as the instrument for his
dispensation an ordinary man without any supernatural powers. Further
the figure of Noah is used in the Quran to convey one of its basic
tenets, a tenet which can be roughly compared with the Protestant
doctrine of the priesthood of all believers: any man, without unusual
personal gifts and without outside help, can be saved if he follows
obediently the commands of Allah. Kramer thinks like a Muslim when he
writes:

5; Since man was created for no other purpose than to serve the gods,
it was obviously his major duty to perform and perfect this service in
a manner pleasing and satisfactory to his masters. Why was Ziusudra
saved from the destruction of the deluge? Because he had humbly and
piously performed the daily rites of the gods.

As a final remark I may observe that it is correct to refer to refer
to Ziusudra as pious, provided one is clear about what pious means in
this context. We must keep in mind that the Romans called pius a
person who is scrupulous and exact in fulfilling his tasks in all
spheres of life, not just the religious one.

We must not be misled by the fact that the instructions which Enki
gave to Ziusudra were conveyed in a dream. Even careful scholars like
Kramer who are perfectly acquainted with Sumerian culture have been
led astray by our modern attitude towards the significance of dreams.
For the Sumerians dreams were a superior way of access to truth, but
more exactly to truths of a specific rational order. King Gudea
received in a dream the mathematical specifications for the
construction of a temple, starting with the exact definition of the
lineal standard to be employed.

Islamic thought may help us in penetrating the view of dreams in
Sumerian culture. Only the words that came to Muhammad when he was in
a state of trance are held sacred by Muslims; these are considered to
express verbatim the will of Allah and are never confused with those
the prophet uttered when he was in a conscious state. Some of the
visions came to Muhammad in his sleep.^(121)

In order to elucidate this point I may refer to the opinion of
al-Ghazzali (1058-1111), the greatest theologian of Islam.^(122)

Al-Ghazzali states that there are three worlds: one is the world of
our senses which is subject to change; the other (alam al-malakut) is
the one that exists by God's eternal decree, without development,
without addition or diminution; between these two there is a third one
which also appears to be eternal, but could be changed by God's
decree. The soul of man comes into contact with the alam al-malakut in
dreams and ecstasies; this is the way prophets obtain divine
knowledge. As examples of the entities that belong to the alam
al-malakut al-Ghazzali lists the following: The things of the heavens,
the preserved tablet, the pen, the balance, measures, etc. These
examples indicate how close al-Ghazzali still was to what had been the
thinking of his native Mesopotamia more than three millennia earlier.

In the preserved part of column V of the Sumerian tablet we can read
the account of the flood. The Deluge is described as being brought by
a great windstorm, which apparently caused rain to pour, and the
waters of the seas, which were an extension of the primeval great
water, to rise. What remains of column V reads:

All the windstroms, exceedingly powerful, attacked as one,
At the same time, the flood sweeps| over the cult centers.
After, for seven days (and) seven nights,
The flood had |swept over| the land,
(And) the huge boat had been tossed about by the windstorms on the
great waters,
Utu came forth, who sheds light on heaven (and) earth.
Ziusudra opened| a window of |the huge boat,
The hero Utu| brought his rays into| the giant boat.
Ziusudra, the king,
Prostrated himself before Utu,
The king kills an ox, slaughters a sheep.

There is a possibility that a cosmology was assumed here which is
close to that presented in the Quran. In dealing with creation, the
Quran does not distinguish between the landmass and the seas, as we
would. In the thinking of the Quran the emerged land is unimportant;
when the Quran refers to tracts of land it mentions rivers, sources,
and other bodies of sweet water. This conception is understandable in
the case of people who lived in areas where land is worthless without
sources of water; the people of Mesopotamia lived in a similar
geographical environment. The Quran divides the surface of the earth
into al-bahrain, "the two seas." One of the most prominent aspects of
creation was the separation of the two seas: begin

25:23

And He who has untied the two seas; one palatable, sweet, and the
other salty, bitter; and has set a barrier and a forbidding ban
between them. ;

begin

55:19-20

He has untied the two seas, though they meet. There is no barrier
between them. They encroach not.

It could be that in the Sumerian conception the flood consisted in
letting the waters of the two seas run together, breaking the barrier
established at creation.

There is definite evidence that the Sumerians understood the cosmology
of the two seas separated by a wall in the sense of al-bahrain of the
Quran. Geoffrey Bibby, a member of the Danish group that excavated the
ancient Dilmun, observes that it may be significant that the Arabic
name of the island of Dilmun is al-Bahrein, "two seas." He even
wonders whether in some ancient language Dilmun may have meant "two
seas." Bibby calls attention to the fact that in the Quran al-Bahrein
occurs as a technical cosmological term: in creation there are two
seas, that of sweet water and that of salt water. The sea of sweet
water is what we would call today the landmass in opposition to the
seas. Particularly revealing is Sura 25, verse 55. This Sura answers
those who were asking Mohammed to show miracles that would prove the
power of Allah; the answer is that the mere ordering of heaven and
earth proves the power of Allah, and there is no need for further
miracles.

There are some traces of this cosmology in the Old Testament. The
clearest mention of it is in Job 5:22:

Have you no fear of me? says the Lord; will you not shudder before
me, before me who made the shimmering sand to bind the sea, a
barrier it can never pass? Its waves heave and toss but they are
powerless; roar as they may, they cannot pass.

The barrier, however, will be broken, as in the case of the Deluge, by
the sins of mankind, whose "wrongdoing has upset nature's order"
(5:25).

Other references to this conception in the Old Testament, such as
Proverbs 8:28-29, are not as clear:

When he made the skies above when he fixed the foundations of the
earth when he set the sea its limit, so that the waters should not
transgress its command.

An unprejudiced outsider could expect biblical scholars to establish
parallels between the Old Testament and the Quran as a matter of
routine, but even in our day and age there remains such a surprising
parochialism among biblical scholars that they never quote the Quran.
For this reason I have not been able to find one author who is aware
of the occurrence of the mentioned cosmological conception in the Old
Testament. Biblical scholars are aware only of the alternative
cosmology by which the barrier that separates the waters is the vault
of heaven which restrains the heavenly water. But this cosmology must
be a later adaptation of the original one of the "two seas," since its
presentation in Genesis 1:6 is not clear or consistent.

Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters,
to separate one body of water from the other.

A later hand in the writing of Genesis realized the difficulty
involved in the fact that the vault of heaven does not separate two
bodies of water, and to resolve it added 1:9:

Let the waters under the heavens be gathered in a single basin, so
that the dry land may appear.

By ignoring the cosmology of the "two seas" (al-bahrain) biblical
scholars create problems for themselves in the explanation of the
"splitting" of the waters in the account of the Exodus from Egypt.
They have to present this event as much more miraculous than it was
according to the Old Testament.

The windstorm which stirred up the waters of the two seas also caused
darkness. The flood wiped out the cult centers which were set and
built according to the old geodetic system. I would understand that
only the cult center of Ziusudra survived because he had built it
according to the specifications of the new cosmic order. It is to be
remarked, first of all, that the account is brief; this brevity
requires an explanation. Given our biblical conditioning, we may find
it surprising that the text should deal sketchily with a point that
seems crucial to us: the explanation is that the flood itself was
merely a prop used to convey a mathematical concept which was dealt
with in the rest of the text. There is only one detail which seems to
be colorful and which happens not to be mentioned in Genesis: the
flood was accompanied by darkness and ended when Utu, the sun-god,
brought its rays into the Ark. This detail seems colorful to us, but
probably expresses the scientific concept that the reordering of the
geodetic system involved a reordering of the celestial coordinates;
there was darkness in the period of transition. One must compare the
words of the Sumerian text with the words used by the people of our
culture in referring to Copernicus in the period in which the
Copernican revolution was being accepted.

In what remains of column VI we learn that Ziusudra was granted
immortality "like a god." Some commentators express surprise at this
raising of an ordinary man to the level of the gods, particularly
since Ziusudra may have been an historical king. But we have a
parallel in Egyptian culture: Imhotep, who was the vizier of King
Zoser of the Third Dynasty, and was a man of humble origin who rose to
high position because of his skill, was the only mortal whom the
Egyptians worshipped as one of the gods. This happened because Imhotep
was considered a great scientist, mathematician and architect; we know
for a fact that he established stone architecture in Egypt and
designed the first pyramid. In the Sumerian case, however, the
immortality granted to Ziusudra had a more specific meaning: the new
geodetic system was said to be the final one; it had to last forever.
The immortality granted to Ziusudra is the equivalent of the statement
of Genesis 9:8-17 to the effect that the divinity made a covenant with
Noah and his sons never again to let the waters rise in a flood:
"Never again shall all living creatures be cut off by a deluge, never
again shall there be a deluge to destroy the earth." This statement is
indeed surprising in the context of the Old Testament, because it
would imply that never again shall there be sinners, never again will
mankind stray from the right path. But the very words of Genesis
indicate that in this episode the issue is purely of cosmological
nature: no mention is made of man or mankind in particular, reference
being made only to the destruction of living flesh in general and to
the destruction of the entire earth itself.

In Genesis the rainbow is mentioned as the guarantee of the covenant
never to send a Deluge again. The episode of the rainbow does not
appear in the Mesopotamian representations of the Deluge. The
followers of the anthropological school who try to explain the
biblical narratives by comparative mythology and folklore have not
found a convincing counterpart to the biblical symbolism of the
rainbow in any culture. It follows that the biblical writers or their
immediate predecessors invented the symbolism of the rainbow in order
to express the idea that the newly established great circle was the
final one. It was an obvious symbolism that did not require drawing on
established mythological imagery. The symbol of the rainbow in Genesis
is the equivalent of the statement in the Sumerian text that Ziusudra
was immortalized as "the preserver of the name of vegetation and the
seed of mankind."

There is no reason to express surprise at the information that the
immortalized Ziusudra would live in the land of Dilmun, which was not
in Mesopotamia, being an island in the Persian Gulf, visited by
Mesopotamian sailors and traders. The adoption of the new geodetic
system must have entailed the establishment of new basic meridians.
For instance,

You gave us a new sun, a new earth,
You uncovered a whole new cosmos.

A full geodetic system required the establishment of a date line. The
date line was conceived by the ancients either as the place where the
sun rises or where the sun sets. I shall explain all this in a future
study of ancient geoography in which I shall have occasion of
interpreting the myth of Phaethon, which had to do with the fact that
the course of the sun was conceived as ending abruptly at the meridian
used as the date line.

The most specific statement about the flood was that it consisted of a
period of rainstorms and darkness that lasted seven days and seven
nights, because this number was the key to the new system of geodetic
measures: All that was necessary in order to know the new radius of
the earth and the height of the flood was to remember the number 7.

The specific information that the flood lasted 7 days and 7 nights
does not seem very revealing, since the ordering of the cosmos was
conceived as septenary in all cosmologies up to the Copernican
revolution. The number 7 becomes more significant only when we compare
it with the number 7+7 days in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

According to the account given in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh,
the seastorm and the rainstorm raged for "six days and six nights,"
and quieted down on the 7th day. On this day Utnapishtim opened the
window and saw nothing but an endless extension of level sea water.
There follows a section full of repetitions in which Mount Nisir held
"the ship fast and did not let it move" for the first, second, third,
fourth, fifth, and sixth day. On the seventh day Utnapishtim sent out
successively a dove, a swallow, and a raven; only the raven found a
resting place and did not come back.

In conclusion, we can be sure that at least according to the Epic of
Gilgamesh the episode of the Deluge lasted 14 days (7 + 7).
120. One could say "keeper of the exchequer," using the English term
in its original meaning.
121. In any case Muhammad covered his head when he felt
inspiration coming to him; the veiling of the head was a regular
practice of Arabian soothsayers.
122. Al-Ghazzali is as important in the history of Islam as St.
Augustine in the history of Christian thought. His views are
particularly significant because, although he was a theologian and
as such a systematic thinker, he was militantly reacting against
rationalistic and philosophical interpretations of Islam and tried
to remain completely faithful to Islam's popular religious
traditions; nobody questions his orthodoxy.
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