In the days before Covid 19 dominated the media and news outlets, the focus of attention was on the floods inundating large swathes of the country. Lumped together rather vacuously by the insurers as 'Acts of God', the irony is that responsibility was not so much due to divine agency as human agency: global warming.
However, the metaphor does add a frisson of mystery and hidden intentionality that may not be entirely out of place. Suddenly civilisation seems vulnerable and the future uncertain. Perhaps there are lessons to be learnt, as in those ancient flood stories such as the great biblical flood, that the hubris of mankind has its limits.
From the very beginnings, civilisation has had a fraught relationship with floods and the present spectre is the harbinger of a change of almost incomprehensible proportions, something that would have been very much at the forefront of people’s minds at the outset. Our present predicament is perhaps nudging us to a renewed appreciation of our beginnings.
Sumerian prehistory Despite having origins shrouded in mystery it is generally agreed that the Sumerians were a remarkably inventive people and were, ‘the first city dwelling people with monumental temples and tombs, sophisticated craftsmanship and writing.’1 Indeed the invention of the cuneiform script, dating from the late fourth millennium, is often regarded as the Sumerians’ greatest achievement, the one that ultimately revolutionised the world. And it is writing that has given us the oldest written story of origins, the Emuna Elis, discovered on clay tablets in the ruins of Nineveh by A.H. Layard, between 1848 and 1876. This discovery, together with the so-called ‘Eridu Genesis’, and their translation by George Smith is the stuff of legend and in itself a gripping story: in 1872 Smith first revealed to the world the Babylonian story of the Flood and the adventures of Gilgamesh – stories that had been written 1,500 years before the better known biblical ‘Book of Origins’ (Genesis).
Though the clay tablets from Nineveh date from the 7th century BCE, they represent a cycle of Sumero-Akkadian stories of much older lineage. Like the ‘Eridu Genesis’, these stories are associated with the origin of the cities they designated, and which themselves were primarily regarded as sacred places created by the gods as their abodes.2 As with the Emuna Elis the story begins, ‘When all the lands were sea’, the abode of Tiamat the primal force of chaos – female of course! The sea mixed with the fresh water, the Apsu, to form a lake on which a reed mat created by Marduk floated. A small mound arising from a lake on which Eridu was situated was deemed to be the very point at which the heavens were thought to have first touched the Earth, providing the foundation on which the city could stand. It was then that Enki (or Ea)–- the male god of water, knowledge and crafts – could get to work ‘fashioning the dark headed (people)’ So the mythological cycle and the archaeological story seem to concur that history did indeed begin in Sumer, rising from a flooded world.
But there is a problem with this story of origins, and it is revealed in the language of the script that records it. When studying this issue the great American Sumerologist, Samuel Kramer, noticed a curious thing: many words for specialist occupations, tools and crafts seemed to be of non-Sumerian origin. As Kramer noted, 'Among these words were those for farmer (engar), herdsman (udul) and fisherman (shuhudak), plough (apin) and furrow (apsin), metalworker (tibira) and smith (simug), carpenter (nangar) and basketmaker (adduh)…’3 The list goes on: it is as if the Sumerians had not only adopted words but, by implication, the occupations and artefacts that had been developed by preceding cultures over a considerable period of time.
This indication of the significance of preceding cultures to that of Sumer was given support by the remarkable work of the archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat on the origins of cuneiform script.4 Studying the mysterious clay ‘tokens’ that were found in settlements scattered across a wide area of the Middle East in the four millennia before Sumer, she came to see that they were the records of trading transactions.
And this is not all. Even further north in 1961 a Romanian archaeologist, Dr. N.Vlassa, made a remarkable discovery whilst excavating the Transylvanian site of Tataria. More clay tokens!
The shock of disbelief caused by their discovery was due not only to their age, c.4,500 BCE, but the pictograms inscribed upon them. As the British archaeologist, Sinclair Hood, wrote: ‘The signs on the Tartaria tablets…are so comparable with those on early tablets from Uruk…as to make it virtually certain that they are somehow connected with them.’ The similarity was emphasised not only by the nature of the signs but the similarity of dividing the tablets into groups of signs.
The tablets were but part of the wider Vinca culture of the Danube valley, named after the site discovered in 1908 by Miloje Vasic. This culture was so advanced that Vasic and others originally believed it to be from the first millenium BCE.
However, carbon-dating of objects pushed the date back to c 5300 BCE.
But how could this be? Tartaria is over 1,500 miles from Sumer. And more was yet to come.
Further tablets discovered in 1969 near Gradesnica in western Bulgaria were even older at 6000 to 7000 years old and bore a ‘script’ remarkably similar to the Linear A script later found in Minoan Crete.5 The pre-history of writing stretches across four millennia and is of interest in reformulating our understanding of the origins of Sumerian culture, suggesting its origins lie further north in the preceding cultures in Syria and Anatolia where the Neolithic farming revolution began.6 This is further suggested by a curious detail in the Epic of Gilgamesh. At one point in his journey to learn from Uta-napishti the secret of gaining immortality, Gilgamesh has to cross the ‘Waters of Death’.
On his arrival at the bank he is angered to see that the ferryman has 'things of stone' attached to the boat. Suspecting a trick to sink the boat, Gilgamesh destroys the stones whereupon the ferryman says, 'The stones, O Gilgamesh, enabled my crossing…The stones were with me to take me across.’7 This episode seems quite unintelligible, except in the context of one place in the world: the Bosphorus Strait leading to the Black Sea. But its relevance is provided by an understanding of the unique marine hydrology of this particular place, where the warmer more saline water from the Mediterranean flows north over the colder water currents from the Black Sea flowing south. The strength of the undertow is such that boats seeking to cross the strait need only attach a weight which can reach down into the lower current to be dragged along effortlessly against the surface flow.8 For the Epic of Gilgamesh to have recorded such an arcane phenomenon indicates a surprising familiarity with an area that it is over a thousand miles from the story's putative place of origin.
But what exactly is the connection between these various systems of writing, and if indeed some process of diffusion was responsible, what caused it and how did it take place? The answer to these questions came from an unlikely source in the 1960s when two American marine biologists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, were studying crustaceans in the Black Sea. The presence of fresh water molluscs in what is now the Black Sea indicated that it was once an inland lake fed by the great rivers of Russia, the Volga, Don, Dnieper and also Danube. Surprisingly the molluscs had suddenly died out at a time that could be precisely radio-carbon dated to 5,600 BCE. Further investigation revealed that at this date a massive layer of sedimentation had been deposited, spreading out from the Bosphorus across the sea bed. Given the date in the sixth millennium BCE, it was clear that a global feature since the Ice Age had been the slow but relentless rise in ocean sea levels from melting ice. This would also have affected the sea level of the Mediterranean and all that restrained this rise in the east was a narrow land ridge across the Bosphorus that acted like a dam holding back the entire Mediterranean from the much lower lying Black Sea area. About 5600 BCE it burst, causing a catastrophic flood of water cascading through the Bosphorus at a flow equivalent to 200 Niagara Falls at 50 mph, producing a roar that could have been heard hundreds of miles away.9 This catastrophic event must have caused the flooding of 60,000 square miles of what was formerly fertile low-lying grassland, probably rich in megafauna and ideal for human settlement.
Further investigation by oceanographer Dr.
Robert Ballard, using a roving submersible, soon revealed evidence of human settlement: ‘As we went very carefully – practically inch by inch – over this site, we began to see stone tools…We were able to see that this structure more or less is the shape of what one would think is an ancient house. It had ceramics. It had these ground stone implements. It had the clear remains of walls made out of mud with sticks and beams.’10. In short, here was an inhabited area that had been settled for thousands of years and then suddenly destroyed, necessitating a rapid dispersion of its survivors with whatever skills they might have developed.
At this point, the pieces of the kaleidoscope took on a new configuration: a cataclysmic flood that destroyed a whole cultural world. Fleeing inhabitants dispersed in different directions, taking with them skills and knowledge acquired over millennia. Hitherto unknown but sophisticated ‘new’ cultures, like the Vinca of the Danube area, introduced farming, metallurgy (copper smelting) and proto-writing (of which the Tataria tablets were a part). Early forms of writing and monumental stone megalith constructions – as if in ‘insurance’ against flooding – spread around the Mediterranean, the latter attributed by Plato to mythical Atlanteans: stories of a great flood with its hero crossing the Bosphorus; the impetus given to more distant societies and cultures to the south, later seen as ‘the cradles’ of civilisation. In all, this panorama offered a rather different picture of origins than the one we had long been used to. And all driven by a great flood!
But something else was happening in the world of the sixth millennium that preceded the rise of Sumer. The distinguished geneticist and phylo-geographer, Stephen Oppenheimer, has carried out extensive research on the peoples of Southeast Asia, whilst assessing population changes resulting from the rise of sea levels that followed the Ice Age. He has reproduced a picture of the widespread cultural destruction and dispersion in a vast diaspora that mirrored what was happening in the Middle East. For here also were stories of floods, a lost Eden, the sacred tree of immortality, and ancestral conflicts that echoed those of the West.11 So much so that Victorian missionaries evangelising the remote Pacific Islands were surprised to hear that the islanders already seemed to know a form of the Bible stories they had come to preach.
All this happened in the millennium before the Sumerian culture appeared in Mesopotamia, in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE. Part of the original mythology found in the Eridu Genesis refers to ‘the Seven Sages’ (Apkallu), who arrived by boat to teach the widom of civilisation to mankind.
One of these was deemed the mortal son of Enki, named Adapa, also known as Oannes, who is represented as a half-man, half-fish demigod.
Part of this sharing of wisdom may well have included knowledge of boat-building, fishing, metallurgy and, in particular, copper working.
And when Sir Leonard Woolley first uncovered ‘the flood’ silt layer at Ur, one of the things he found was enigmatic ‘lizard like’ terracotta female figurines unlike anything else found in the area and which remain unexplained but which have, according to Oppenheimer, features suggesting an Asian origin.
Drawing together all the elements of this meandering narrative to form a conclusion about the origins of Sumer and civilisation, a further configuration emerges in the kaleidoscope of the past. We can begin to see that in the post Ice Age period – between 11,000 and 7,000 BCE – the rise of global sea levels began to disturb settled agricultural communities in both Europe (the Black Sea area) and Southeast Asia (Sundaland) that had begun to develop a considerable range of skills and crafts, as well as complex social organisation. One of the consequences of flooding was the movement of cultural groups and the diffusion of their knowledge. Two such significant movements were southwards from Anatolia, along the valleys of the Mesopotamia and westwards along the rim of the Indian Ocean. By the sixth millennium these two movements met serendipitously on the shores of the Arabian Gulf and their interaction in the coastal area of Sumer, first at Eridu and then at other regional sites, provided the catalyst of what we have come to know as the origin of Western civilisation. The rest, as they say, is history!
Notes
- The Times, Atlas of the Ancient World (1989). ↩
- Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (Penguin, 2002). ↩
- Samuel Kramer, The Sumerians, Their History, Culture and Character (Chicago, 1963) p. 41. ↩
- Denise Schmandt-Besserat Before Writing: from counting to Cuneiform (Univ. of Texas Press, 1992). ↩
- The evidence is analysed in detail by Richard Rudgley, op.cit. Chapter 4. The Signs of Old Europe:Writing or Pre-Writing? ↩
- ‘Civilization’s True Dawn’, New Scientist, 5 October 2013. ↩
- The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin, 1999) p. 126). ↩
- For more details, Ian Wilson, Before the Flood (Orion, 2001) p. 42. ↩
- William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood:The New Scientific discoveries about the event that changed History (Simon & Schuster, 1998). ↩
- Quoted from Ian Wilson, Before the Flood, op.cit p. 68. ↩
- Stephen Oppenheimer, The Eden of the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). ↩
Dominic Kirkham's book From Monk to Modernity was published in Britain by SOF in 2015 and a second edition is now out in the US. His latest book Our Shadowed World is published by Wipf and Stock (Eugene OR, 2019).