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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Survival / Success
- Subject: Philosophy/Religion/Spirituality
- Published: 04/13/2016
FLOODS OF MYTHOLOGY
An Investigation into Ancient Catastrophes
By Peter W. Mills MA PhD
All religions, by their very nature, require an "origin of everything" mythology, to fill the gap between ignorant superstition and proper scientific understanding, and to be their "how it came about" explanations. The Australian Aborigines, for example, believe that in a previous time called the Dreamtime the spirits moved through the void and assembled the land, the rocks, the trees, the animals, and the people in the appearance they now have. In the mythology of the Aztecs, the goddess Itzpapalotl reigned over a paradise called Tomoanchan, where the gods created the first members of the human race.
The Judaic creation story of the Garden of Eden, inherited by both Christianity and Islam, should be viewed in the same light, as a simple tribal creation myth, one of many throughout the world devised by primitive minds in order to offer an explanation for existence whilst giving credit for everything to a creator or creators in the spirit world. The fact that the Bible's creation story is a pure myth, similar in nature to that of other primitive cultures such as the Aborigines, can actually be proven, for these stories included in the Old Testament of the Bible, which represent a transcription of ancient Jewish mythology, are themselves inherited from the even earlier myth cycles of other, pagan, civilisations.
For example: “…And the lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam... and he took one of his ribs.., and... made... a woman.” (Genesis 2:21). This Biblical account of the creation of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden is probably familiar to just about everybody. However, it is based upon a much earlier version of the same myth that has been discovered set down on clay tablets in cuneiform script by the ancient Sumerians, dating back some three to four thousand years BC, long before the Bible as we know it today, and the people who wrote it, were even conceived.
The very name "Eden" is probably derived from the Akkadian word edinu and the Sumerian eden, both meaning a plain or steppe. Sumerian cuneiform is one of the oldest known forms of writing and was itself passed on to the ancient Babylonians, who also inherited much of the earlier Sumerian religious mythology.
In the nineteenth century, Sir Austen Henry Layard (1807-1894) and his colleague Rassam, whilst excavating in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nineveh, discovered the great library of the Assyrian king Asshurbanapal (died circa 631 BC). After years of excavations in both Nineveh and Nimrud, more than twenty five thousand sections of clay tablets inscribed in the strange wedge-shaped cuneiform script made by pressing a stylus into clay were sent to the British Museum for translation.
Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895), an army officer stationed at the British residency in Baghdad, had already discovered what was, in effect, a “cuneiform Rosetta Stone” on a giant rock face at Behistun near Kermanshah in Persia (now Iran), where an inscription of the Record of Darius was carved in cuneiform characters in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. This enabled the cuneiform script to be deciphered. Rawlinson began the translation of the tablets in Baghdad and continued the task in the British Museum after his return to England in 1855, publishing a book, Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. In 1866 George Smith (1840-1876), the scholar who was to discover the as-yet unknown Epic of Gilgamesh amongst the museum collection, joined Rawlinson as his assistant to complete the immense task.
On the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, Smith found, to his surprise, an account of a great flood that bore a strange similarity to the story of the biblical deluge, publishing it as a book with the title A Chaldean Account of the Deluge, in which he also showed that this appeared to be a copy of a far older version written at Uruk (the biblical Erech). A fragment of Gilgamesh containing the account of the death of Enkidu was also discovered at Megiddo in Palestine which indicates that it must have been known to the Canaanites who lived in this area and therefore to the writers of the earliest scrolls that were eventually to become the Bible.
A reading of the translated cuneiform accounts, amongst which a Creation myth more ancient than the Biblical version was also discovered, suggests most powerfully that these were the actual pagan origins of the later but equivalent tales in the Old Testament.
The Sumerian creation legend, which is quite beautiful, states that the great goddess Ninhursag fashioned a wonderful and perfect garden in the east, which was named Dilmun, the Sumerian for Paradise. Here in this place, she “…made green plants flourish, and from here the waters of the world flowed…” This idea of the “waters of the world” was incorporated into Hebrew mythology in the form of the rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddikel, Naher and the Phrath, or Euphrates, that were said to flow out of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:10-14).
The Sumerian Paradise was a “…pure land, fresh and bright, that knew neither sickness nor death…” Into this wonderful garden, Ninhursag placed a man whom she had made herself out of clay and dust, Enki. Ninhursag regarded Enki as her brother, for she had made him a male version of her own image and breathed life into him. This mythology will seem strangely familiar to anyone who has read the Bible.
The similarities, or parallels, do not stop there. Enki was not happy, for he was without a companion of his own kind. In the Sumerian tablets, it is told how the goddess came to Enki in the garden and placed him into a deep slumber. When he awakens, he groans in pain. The epic Sumerian poem continues: "…My brother, what hurts you? My rib hurts me…” Ninhursag then explains what she has done: “…I have given birth to you, of your rib, to Ninti…”
Ninti was the first mortal woman, according to Sumerian mythology, and became Enki’s wife. There are still further indications that the myth of Adam and Eve originated here (or else with even earlier Stone-Age tales on which the Sumerian legends were themselves based). Enki is said to have eaten plants that were sacred to the goddess Ninhursag and was cursed by her for so doing, a striking parallel to the story of the eating of the apple in Eden. In Sumerian, the name “Ninti” can mean “she who makes live”. The Hebrew name “Eve” derives from chavva, (hawwa, hava, heva) “living one”.
A less obvious parallel between the Bible and earlier pagan myths can be found in the Sumerian king lists. In Genesis 4, eight patriarchs are listed as living before the biblical flood. In Genesis 5, there are ten of these patriarchs. All of these are stated to have had extraordinarily long lives (for instance: “…And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years…” Genesis 5:27). According to the version of the king list recorded on a clay tablet now kept in the Schøyen Collection of original historical manuscripts in Norway (MS 2855), there were eight Sumerian kings before the Sumerian flood. On the version of the king list inscribed on the tablet called the Weld-Blundell Prism now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, (#AN1923.444) there are ten rulers prior to the flood. In both versions, these also lived to incredible ages.
There is an obvious conclusion to be leaped at that the two sets of lists of 8 and 10 names, one set from the Bible, the other from Sumerian tablets, can be related, and certain scholars have attempted this with some interesting results, although it must be emphasised that (so far) there is no actual proof of the congruence of the two sources.
Comparing the two longer versions listing ten names, the suggestion has been made (by the Institute for Biblical and Scientific Studies amongst others) that the Sumerian and biblical names can be associated in the following way: Alulim or Allum (Adam), Alalgar (Seth), Kidunnu (Enosh), Alimma (Kenan), En-men-lu-ana (Mahalalel), Dumuzi (Jared), En-sipad-zid-ana (Enoch), En-men-dur-ana (Methuselah), Sukurlam (Lamech) and Ziusudra (or Zin-suddu) (Noah).
One interesting result of linking the two sets of lists in this way – even though it is as yet a hypothetical exercise – is that both Ziusudra and Noah are associated with legends of building a huge boat to save their families from a great flood. It is also interesting to see that Adam, the Bible’s “first man” of Eden, equates with Alulim, the first recorded king at the city of Eridu in Sumer.
According to Sumerian mythology, Eridu (which some have associated with “Eden”) was founded by Enki, the Sumerian version of “Adam”. The Akkadians equated Enki with the water-god Ea, whose son was named Adamu and Adapa. Linguistically, the “p” of “Adapa” could transmute to an “m” in Hebrew to produce the name “Adama”. In the Sumerian language, the word a-dam can mean “humans” or “humanity” and the word adam in Hebrew is similar and can mean “man”, also “earth” (adamah), “soil” and “light”.
It must always be remembered that, for certain periods of their history, various significant components of the Hebrew tribes were wanderers without a precise land of their own, or else influential groups of them were held in bondage by other cultures for some generations. Wherever their various tribes settled for a time, in freedom or in bondage, they associated with whatever population was there before them, inheriting their legends, as well as picking up the tales and customs of traders and travellers in the usual way, absorbing them into their own myths, naturally with the details changed to reflect their own culture.
Consequently, they inevitably soaked up large pieces of the prevalent legends and mythologies of other ancient peoples such as the Egyptians and Sumerians. Abraham himself, no less, was a Sumerian, from the citadel of Ur, and there is no possible doubt that he would have been thoroughly familiar with the various Sumerian myths.
The “deluge” legend set down in the cuneiform tablets of Gilgamesh describes a pantheon of gods including Anu the lord of the firmament, Enlil the warrior and counsellor, Ninurta the warlord and Ennugi the “watcher over canals”. Enlil addresses the council of the gods and says: “…The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel…”
The gods therefore decide that mankind must be destroyed by sending a great flood to drown the world. However, the god Ea warns a man named Ut-Napishtim of what is to happen and instructs him to build a boat, giving him specific measurements of the length, width and other dimensions and instructing him to: “…then take up into the boat the seed of all living creatures…”
The account then describes in some detail how Ut-Napishtim builds the huge boat despite the scepticism of the people and their elders and loads on board his family, a selection of craftsmen, and all beasts “both wild and tame”. The gods command Ut-Napishtim to enter the boat and batten it down. “…Then the gods of the abyss rose up – Nergal released the dams of the nether-waters…” The goddess Ishtar, the “sweet-voiced Queen of Heaven” bewails the fate of humankind as; “…For six days and nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world… When the seventh day dawned… the flood was stilled...”
When Ut-Napishtim’s great boat eventually comes to ground on Mount Nisir (possibly in Iraq), he releases a dove but, finding no other dry land, the dove returns to him. A swallow is then released with the same result. Then he sends out a raven who does not return, so he knows the bird has found some dry land at last. He sets up an altar on the mountain top to give thanks to the gods, whereupon the goddess Ishtar comes to the place and lifts up her “…necklace with the jewels of heaven…”, a rainbow, as a sign of safety for Ut-Napishtim and his family.
From the eighteenth century BC there still survives the earlier epic of Atrahasis, the Akkadian hero whose mythology was adapted to provide the flood story in Gilgamesh, with certain alterations being made by the transcriber to “improve” the mythical flood to a world-scale event where it was originally concerned only with the flooding of a local river. (For example, Atrahasis 3:4 “…like dragonflies they have filled the river…” becomes Gilgamesh 11 “…like the spawn of fishes they fill the sea…”)
On a single fragmentary clay tablet excavated from the city of Nippur in Sumer - today’s Iraq - was found a record of an ancient Sumerian myth concerning Ziusudra, a wise king who reigned over one of the Sumerian city-states (mentioned on the king list described earlier). He was a good king who obeyed the gods in all things. The tablet describes the creation of humans and animals and recounts a flood myth containing the following verse: “...for seven days and seven nights, the flood had swept over the land, and the huge boat had been tossed about by the wind storms on the great waters... Ziusudra opened a window on the huge boat...”
Ziusudra can be identified from the Sumerian king list as the ruler of Shuruppak (or Curuppag, “The Healing Place”) which is a site at present-day Tell Fa’rah on the Euphrates in Iraq, and in the king list his entry confirms this is the same person because after his name are the lines: “…The flood swept thereover…” A local river flood has been identified from deposits excavated from Shuruppak and dated by radio-carbon analysis to the decade following 3,000 BC. Since line 23 of the 11th Gilgamesh tablet refers to Ut-Napishtim as being a “man of Shuruppak”, there is actual written evidence that the Gilgamesh account was based on that of Ziusudra and that this was the local river flooding event behind the various Mesopotamian myths which inspired the biblical story of Noah first written much later, during the first millennium BC.
(The tradition is that the first five books of the Old Testament were written by Moses, who lived after 1500 BC and probably around 1450-1410 BC: historical analysis indicates it was actually the product of at least four different authors writing during a more recent period between 950-539 BC.)
There are a great many similarities that prove the biblical flood story is copied from the other more ancient myths; for instance, the description of the smell rising from the various deluge heroes’ altars of thanksgiving: “The gods smelled the savour” (Atrahasis 3:34); “The gods smelled the sweet savour” (Gilgamesh 11:160); “And the Lord smelled the sweet savour” (Genesis 8:21).
A similar myth can be found from the Aztecs of Mexico, which also contains an echo, even if unconnected, of the story of the Tower of Babel: "…When mankind was overwhelmed by the deluge, none were preserved but a man named Coxcox and a woman called Xochiquetzal, who saved themselves in a little barque, and having afterwards reached land upon a mountain called Colhuacan, they had a great many children. These children were all born dumb, until a dove from a lofty tree imparted languages to them, but differing so much that they could not understand one another."
The Native American Indians have various deluge stories. A legend of the Choctaw people tells how, long ago, men became so corrupt that the Great Spirit destroyed them in a flood. Only one man was saved, a prophet whose warnings the people disregarded, and whom the Great Spirit then directed to build a raft from sassafras logs. After many weeks, a small bird guided the prophet to an island where the Great Spirit changed the bird into a beautiful woman who became the wife of the prophet. Their children then repopulated the world.
In the tribal mythology of the Mi’kmag nation of New England, eastern Canada and the Gaspé Peninsula, the human race grows increasingly evil until the sun-god causes torrential rain to bring a great flood to destroy mankind. A man and woman survive in canoes and repopulate the earth.
Likewise, there are several Australian Aboriginal flood stories. One tells how, long ago, there was a flood that covered the mountains so that many of the Nurrumbunguttias, or spirit men and women (“ancestors”), were drowned. Others, including Pund-jil, were caught up by a whirlwind into the sky. When the waters receded, and the mountains appeared again, and the sea went back into its own place, the son and daughter of Pund-jil went back to earth and became the first of the true men and women who live in the world today.
The seventeenth century Jesuit priest Martinus Martini (1614-1661), famous for travels in which he compiled notes from which Dutch cartographers prepared detailed maps of China, and also for his essays “The War of the Tartar People” and “The First Chapter of the Chinese History”, reported the ancient Chinese legend of mankind's rebellion against the gods: "…The Earth was shaken to its foundations. The sky sank lower towards the north. The sun, moon, and stars changed their motions. The Earth fell to pieces and the waters in its bosom rushed upwards with violence and overflowed the Earth..."
The ancient Chinese account Shujing (“Book of History”) written around 700 BC or earlier, recounts a great deluge in the reign of the emperor Yao, where “…flood waters reached to the heavens…” According to the tale, the principle survivor, Da Yu, founded the first Chinese dynasty. Interestingly, many of the Chinese deluge myths from different regions make mention of a woman named Nuwa who survives and repopulates the world.
In India, the Hindu scripture the Shatapatha Brahmana relates how the god Vishnu warns a man named Manu of a forthcoming deluge that will destroy all living things. Vishnu instructs Manu to build a boat to escape the flood. In Tahiti there is a Polynesian legend of a deluge when the entire island sank beneath the sea except for the top of Mount Pitohiti, where a single couple manage to survive with their animals. In Hawaii a similar myth has a couple named Nu’u and Lili-noe surviving a deluge on the top of Mauna Kea.
The Bahnars, an ancient tribe of Cochin, China, have a myth of how the rivers swelled "...until the waters reached the sky, and all living beings perished except two, a brother and a sister, who were saved in a huge chest. They took with them into the chest a pair of every sort of animal..."
A myth from Egypt tells of an ancient creation god, Tem, who was responsible for a primeval flood, which covered the entire earth and destroyed all humankind except those in Tem's boat.
The Incas of Peru also had a tradition of a deluge which relates that "...the water rose above the highest mountains in the world, so that all people and all created things perished. No living thing escaped except a man and a woman, who floated in a box on the face of the waters and so were saved."
The pagan tribes of Europe and Scandinavia had similar legends: In Nordic myth Bergelmir the son of Thrudgelmir escaped from a great flood caused by the death of the frost giant Ymir, Bergelmir’s own grandfather. Bergelmir and his wife managed to float to safety in a hollow tree trunk.
In fact, there are over five hundred such legendary deluge myths from different parts of the globe. It has been suggested that they represent a dim and distant racial memory, preserved in mythologies, of the tremendous worldwide flooding that occurred when the ice melted at the end of the last Ice Age some ten to fourteen thousand years ago.
Scientific investigation has shown that this melting was rapid rather than gradual and resulted in immense torrents and floods lasting between a few years and a few decades, during which time the world's sea level rose considerably. In Europe, the Mediterranean and Black Sea rose, drowning Neolithic farming settlements that can still be identified on the present seabed, and the English Channel was formed, turning mainland Britain into an island. Other flood theories prefer more recent global changes, such as a collapse of the land between Spain and Africa allowing the Atlantic to catastrophically flood through to form the Mediterranean, although this is scientifically doubtful.
It is, however, not even necessary to invoke such cataclysmic natural forces in order to explain the worldwide occurrence of parallel flood myths from the most ancient of times. Most of the world’s large ancient centres of civilisation naturally first grew in close proximity to rivers, vital for drinking water, crops and trade, and rivers are always subject to catastrophic flooding as we still see to our cost in the present day.
Some supporters of the "truth" of the Bible sometimes gleefully quote these ancient world deluge legends as "proof" of Noah's flood in the Old Testament. However, such reasoning is entirely fallacious and self-contradicting, for according to the Bible itself only Noah and his family were specifically saved from the deluge and everybody else in the world at that time was drowned, without exception. If the Old Testament stated something like: "...And God also ordered that Ziusudra the Sumerian, Ut-Napishtim the Babylonian, Deucalion the Greek, Coxcox and Xochiquetzal the Aztecs, Pund-Jil the Aborigine and a few hundred others scattered here and there around the world should also build boats and rafts to save their various peoples..." then the story of Noah might perhaps be removed from the realms of pure mythology. Unfortunately for adherents of the historicity of the Bible, it says no such thing.
Each of these deluge legends from around the world represents an aspect of the tribal mythology of the people to whom they belong, a dim and distant folk memory of severe but natural disasters incorporated into the necessary mythological background explaining how things became as they are at the “beginning of the world” and providing a salutary warning for people to avoid offending their various gods. The Old Testament is no exception and must be understood as merely representing a regional version of this worldwide habit.
FLOODS OF MYTHOLOGY(Peter Mills)
FLOODS OF MYTHOLOGY
An Investigation into Ancient Catastrophes
By Peter W. Mills MA PhD
All religions, by their very nature, require an "origin of everything" mythology, to fill the gap between ignorant superstition and proper scientific understanding, and to be their "how it came about" explanations. The Australian Aborigines, for example, believe that in a previous time called the Dreamtime the spirits moved through the void and assembled the land, the rocks, the trees, the animals, and the people in the appearance they now have. In the mythology of the Aztecs, the goddess Itzpapalotl reigned over a paradise called Tomoanchan, where the gods created the first members of the human race.
The Judaic creation story of the Garden of Eden, inherited by both Christianity and Islam, should be viewed in the same light, as a simple tribal creation myth, one of many throughout the world devised by primitive minds in order to offer an explanation for existence whilst giving credit for everything to a creator or creators in the spirit world. The fact that the Bible's creation story is a pure myth, similar in nature to that of other primitive cultures such as the Aborigines, can actually be proven, for these stories included in the Old Testament of the Bible, which represent a transcription of ancient Jewish mythology, are themselves inherited from the even earlier myth cycles of other, pagan, civilisations.
For example: “…And the lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam... and he took one of his ribs.., and... made... a woman.” (Genesis 2:21). This Biblical account of the creation of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden is probably familiar to just about everybody. However, it is based upon a much earlier version of the same myth that has been discovered set down on clay tablets in cuneiform script by the ancient Sumerians, dating back some three to four thousand years BC, long before the Bible as we know it today, and the people who wrote it, were even conceived.
The very name "Eden" is probably derived from the Akkadian word edinu and the Sumerian eden, both meaning a plain or steppe. Sumerian cuneiform is one of the oldest known forms of writing and was itself passed on to the ancient Babylonians, who also inherited much of the earlier Sumerian religious mythology.
In the nineteenth century, Sir Austen Henry Layard (1807-1894) and his colleague Rassam, whilst excavating in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nineveh, discovered the great library of the Assyrian king Asshurbanapal (died circa 631 BC). After years of excavations in both Nineveh and Nimrud, more than twenty five thousand sections of clay tablets inscribed in the strange wedge-shaped cuneiform script made by pressing a stylus into clay were sent to the British Museum for translation.
Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895), an army officer stationed at the British residency in Baghdad, had already discovered what was, in effect, a “cuneiform Rosetta Stone” on a giant rock face at Behistun near Kermanshah in Persia (now Iran), where an inscription of the Record of Darius was carved in cuneiform characters in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. This enabled the cuneiform script to be deciphered. Rawlinson began the translation of the tablets in Baghdad and continued the task in the British Museum after his return to England in 1855, publishing a book, Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. In 1866 George Smith (1840-1876), the scholar who was to discover the as-yet unknown Epic of Gilgamesh amongst the museum collection, joined Rawlinson as his assistant to complete the immense task.
On the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, Smith found, to his surprise, an account of a great flood that bore a strange similarity to the story of the biblical deluge, publishing it as a book with the title A Chaldean Account of the Deluge, in which he also showed that this appeared to be a copy of a far older version written at Uruk (the biblical Erech). A fragment of Gilgamesh containing the account of the death of Enkidu was also discovered at Megiddo in Palestine which indicates that it must have been known to the Canaanites who lived in this area and therefore to the writers of the earliest scrolls that were eventually to become the Bible.
A reading of the translated cuneiform accounts, amongst which a Creation myth more ancient than the Biblical version was also discovered, suggests most powerfully that these were the actual pagan origins of the later but equivalent tales in the Old Testament.
The Sumerian creation legend, which is quite beautiful, states that the great goddess Ninhursag fashioned a wonderful and perfect garden in the east, which was named Dilmun, the Sumerian for Paradise. Here in this place, she “…made green plants flourish, and from here the waters of the world flowed…” This idea of the “waters of the world” was incorporated into Hebrew mythology in the form of the rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddikel, Naher and the Phrath, or Euphrates, that were said to flow out of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:10-14).
The Sumerian Paradise was a “…pure land, fresh and bright, that knew neither sickness nor death…” Into this wonderful garden, Ninhursag placed a man whom she had made herself out of clay and dust, Enki. Ninhursag regarded Enki as her brother, for she had made him a male version of her own image and breathed life into him. This mythology will seem strangely familiar to anyone who has read the Bible.
The similarities, or parallels, do not stop there. Enki was not happy, for he was without a companion of his own kind. In the Sumerian tablets, it is told how the goddess came to Enki in the garden and placed him into a deep slumber. When he awakens, he groans in pain. The epic Sumerian poem continues: "…My brother, what hurts you? My rib hurts me…” Ninhursag then explains what she has done: “…I have given birth to you, of your rib, to Ninti…”
Ninti was the first mortal woman, according to Sumerian mythology, and became Enki’s wife. There are still further indications that the myth of Adam and Eve originated here (or else with even earlier Stone-Age tales on which the Sumerian legends were themselves based). Enki is said to have eaten plants that were sacred to the goddess Ninhursag and was cursed by her for so doing, a striking parallel to the story of the eating of the apple in Eden. In Sumerian, the name “Ninti” can mean “she who makes live”. The Hebrew name “Eve” derives from chavva, (hawwa, hava, heva) “living one”.
A less obvious parallel between the Bible and earlier pagan myths can be found in the Sumerian king lists. In Genesis 4, eight patriarchs are listed as living before the biblical flood. In Genesis 5, there are ten of these patriarchs. All of these are stated to have had extraordinarily long lives (for instance: “…And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years…” Genesis 5:27). According to the version of the king list recorded on a clay tablet now kept in the Schøyen Collection of original historical manuscripts in Norway (MS 2855), there were eight Sumerian kings before the Sumerian flood. On the version of the king list inscribed on the tablet called the Weld-Blundell Prism now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, (#AN1923.444) there are ten rulers prior to the flood. In both versions, these also lived to incredible ages.
There is an obvious conclusion to be leaped at that the two sets of lists of 8 and 10 names, one set from the Bible, the other from Sumerian tablets, can be related, and certain scholars have attempted this with some interesting results, although it must be emphasised that (so far) there is no actual proof of the congruence of the two sources.
Comparing the two longer versions listing ten names, the suggestion has been made (by the Institute for Biblical and Scientific Studies amongst others) that the Sumerian and biblical names can be associated in the following way: Alulim or Allum (Adam), Alalgar (Seth), Kidunnu (Enosh), Alimma (Kenan), En-men-lu-ana (Mahalalel), Dumuzi (Jared), En-sipad-zid-ana (Enoch), En-men-dur-ana (Methuselah), Sukurlam (Lamech) and Ziusudra (or Zin-suddu) (Noah).
One interesting result of linking the two sets of lists in this way – even though it is as yet a hypothetical exercise – is that both Ziusudra and Noah are associated with legends of building a huge boat to save their families from a great flood. It is also interesting to see that Adam, the Bible’s “first man” of Eden, equates with Alulim, the first recorded king at the city of Eridu in Sumer.
According to Sumerian mythology, Eridu (which some have associated with “Eden”) was founded by Enki, the Sumerian version of “Adam”. The Akkadians equated Enki with the water-god Ea, whose son was named Adamu and Adapa. Linguistically, the “p” of “Adapa” could transmute to an “m” in Hebrew to produce the name “Adama”. In the Sumerian language, the word a-dam can mean “humans” or “humanity” and the word adam in Hebrew is similar and can mean “man”, also “earth” (adamah), “soil” and “light”.
It must always be remembered that, for certain periods of their history, various significant components of the Hebrew tribes were wanderers without a precise land of their own, or else influential groups of them were held in bondage by other cultures for some generations. Wherever their various tribes settled for a time, in freedom or in bondage, they associated with whatever population was there before them, inheriting their legends, as well as picking up the tales and customs of traders and travellers in the usual way, absorbing them into their own myths, naturally with the details changed to reflect their own culture.
Consequently, they inevitably soaked up large pieces of the prevalent legends and mythologies of other ancient peoples such as the Egyptians and Sumerians. Abraham himself, no less, was a Sumerian, from the citadel of Ur, and there is no possible doubt that he would have been thoroughly familiar with the various Sumerian myths.
The “deluge” legend set down in the cuneiform tablets of Gilgamesh describes a pantheon of gods including Anu the lord of the firmament, Enlil the warrior and counsellor, Ninurta the warlord and Ennugi the “watcher over canals”. Enlil addresses the council of the gods and says: “…The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel…”
The gods therefore decide that mankind must be destroyed by sending a great flood to drown the world. However, the god Ea warns a man named Ut-Napishtim of what is to happen and instructs him to build a boat, giving him specific measurements of the length, width and other dimensions and instructing him to: “…then take up into the boat the seed of all living creatures…”
The account then describes in some detail how Ut-Napishtim builds the huge boat despite the scepticism of the people and their elders and loads on board his family, a selection of craftsmen, and all beasts “both wild and tame”. The gods command Ut-Napishtim to enter the boat and batten it down. “…Then the gods of the abyss rose up – Nergal released the dams of the nether-waters…” The goddess Ishtar, the “sweet-voiced Queen of Heaven” bewails the fate of humankind as; “…For six days and nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world… When the seventh day dawned… the flood was stilled...”
When Ut-Napishtim’s great boat eventually comes to ground on Mount Nisir (possibly in Iraq), he releases a dove but, finding no other dry land, the dove returns to him. A swallow is then released with the same result. Then he sends out a raven who does not return, so he knows the bird has found some dry land at last. He sets up an altar on the mountain top to give thanks to the gods, whereupon the goddess Ishtar comes to the place and lifts up her “…necklace with the jewels of heaven…”, a rainbow, as a sign of safety for Ut-Napishtim and his family.
From the eighteenth century BC there still survives the earlier epic of Atrahasis, the Akkadian hero whose mythology was adapted to provide the flood story in Gilgamesh, with certain alterations being made by the transcriber to “improve” the mythical flood to a world-scale event where it was originally concerned only with the flooding of a local river. (For example, Atrahasis 3:4 “…like dragonflies they have filled the river…” becomes Gilgamesh 11 “…like the spawn of fishes they fill the sea…”)
On a single fragmentary clay tablet excavated from the city of Nippur in Sumer - today’s Iraq - was found a record of an ancient Sumerian myth concerning Ziusudra, a wise king who reigned over one of the Sumerian city-states (mentioned on the king list described earlier). He was a good king who obeyed the gods in all things. The tablet describes the creation of humans and animals and recounts a flood myth containing the following verse: “...for seven days and seven nights, the flood had swept over the land, and the huge boat had been tossed about by the wind storms on the great waters... Ziusudra opened a window on the huge boat...”
Ziusudra can be identified from the Sumerian king list as the ruler of Shuruppak (or Curuppag, “The Healing Place”) which is a site at present-day Tell Fa’rah on the Euphrates in Iraq, and in the king list his entry confirms this is the same person because after his name are the lines: “…The flood swept thereover…” A local river flood has been identified from deposits excavated from Shuruppak and dated by radio-carbon analysis to the decade following 3,000 BC. Since line 23 of the 11th Gilgamesh tablet refers to Ut-Napishtim as being a “man of Shuruppak”, there is actual written evidence that the Gilgamesh account was based on that of Ziusudra and that this was the local river flooding event behind the various Mesopotamian myths which inspired the biblical story of Noah first written much later, during the first millennium BC.
(The tradition is that the first five books of the Old Testament were written by Moses, who lived after 1500 BC and probably around 1450-1410 BC: historical analysis indicates it was actually the product of at least four different authors writing during a more recent period between 950-539 BC.)
There are a great many similarities that prove the biblical flood story is copied from the other more ancient myths; for instance, the description of the smell rising from the various deluge heroes’ altars of thanksgiving: “The gods smelled the savour” (Atrahasis 3:34); “The gods smelled the sweet savour” (Gilgamesh 11:160); “And the Lord smelled the sweet savour” (Genesis 8:21).
A similar myth can be found from the Aztecs of Mexico, which also contains an echo, even if unconnected, of the story of the Tower of Babel: "…When mankind was overwhelmed by the deluge, none were preserved but a man named Coxcox and a woman called Xochiquetzal, who saved themselves in a little barque, and having afterwards reached land upon a mountain called Colhuacan, they had a great many children. These children were all born dumb, until a dove from a lofty tree imparted languages to them, but differing so much that they could not understand one another."
The Native American Indians have various deluge stories. A legend of the Choctaw people tells how, long ago, men became so corrupt that the Great Spirit destroyed them in a flood. Only one man was saved, a prophet whose warnings the people disregarded, and whom the Great Spirit then directed to build a raft from sassafras logs. After many weeks, a small bird guided the prophet to an island where the Great Spirit changed the bird into a beautiful woman who became the wife of the prophet. Their children then repopulated the world.
In the tribal mythology of the Mi’kmag nation of New England, eastern Canada and the Gaspé Peninsula, the human race grows increasingly evil until the sun-god causes torrential rain to bring a great flood to destroy mankind. A man and woman survive in canoes and repopulate the earth.
Likewise, there are several Australian Aboriginal flood stories. One tells how, long ago, there was a flood that covered the mountains so that many of the Nurrumbunguttias, or spirit men and women (“ancestors”), were drowned. Others, including Pund-jil, were caught up by a whirlwind into the sky. When the waters receded, and the mountains appeared again, and the sea went back into its own place, the son and daughter of Pund-jil went back to earth and became the first of the true men and women who live in the world today.
The seventeenth century Jesuit priest Martinus Martini (1614-1661), famous for travels in which he compiled notes from which Dutch cartographers prepared detailed maps of China, and also for his essays “The War of the Tartar People” and “The First Chapter of the Chinese History”, reported the ancient Chinese legend of mankind's rebellion against the gods: "…The Earth was shaken to its foundations. The sky sank lower towards the north. The sun, moon, and stars changed their motions. The Earth fell to pieces and the waters in its bosom rushed upwards with violence and overflowed the Earth..."
The ancient Chinese account Shujing (“Book of History”) written around 700 BC or earlier, recounts a great deluge in the reign of the emperor Yao, where “…flood waters reached to the heavens…” According to the tale, the principle survivor, Da Yu, founded the first Chinese dynasty. Interestingly, many of the Chinese deluge myths from different regions make mention of a woman named Nuwa who survives and repopulates the world.
In India, the Hindu scripture the Shatapatha Brahmana relates how the god Vishnu warns a man named Manu of a forthcoming deluge that will destroy all living things. Vishnu instructs Manu to build a boat to escape the flood. In Tahiti there is a Polynesian legend of a deluge when the entire island sank beneath the sea except for the top of Mount Pitohiti, where a single couple manage to survive with their animals. In Hawaii a similar myth has a couple named Nu’u and Lili-noe surviving a deluge on the top of Mauna Kea.
The Bahnars, an ancient tribe of Cochin, China, have a myth of how the rivers swelled "...until the waters reached the sky, and all living beings perished except two, a brother and a sister, who were saved in a huge chest. They took with them into the chest a pair of every sort of animal..."
A myth from Egypt tells of an ancient creation god, Tem, who was responsible for a primeval flood, which covered the entire earth and destroyed all humankind except those in Tem's boat.
The Incas of Peru also had a tradition of a deluge which relates that "...the water rose above the highest mountains in the world, so that all people and all created things perished. No living thing escaped except a man and a woman, who floated in a box on the face of the waters and so were saved."
The pagan tribes of Europe and Scandinavia had similar legends: In Nordic myth Bergelmir the son of Thrudgelmir escaped from a great flood caused by the death of the frost giant Ymir, Bergelmir’s own grandfather. Bergelmir and his wife managed to float to safety in a hollow tree trunk.
In fact, there are over five hundred such legendary deluge myths from different parts of the globe. It has been suggested that they represent a dim and distant racial memory, preserved in mythologies, of the tremendous worldwide flooding that occurred when the ice melted at the end of the last Ice Age some ten to fourteen thousand years ago.
Scientific investigation has shown that this melting was rapid rather than gradual and resulted in immense torrents and floods lasting between a few years and a few decades, during which time the world's sea level rose considerably. In Europe, the Mediterranean and Black Sea rose, drowning Neolithic farming settlements that can still be identified on the present seabed, and the English Channel was formed, turning mainland Britain into an island. Other flood theories prefer more recent global changes, such as a collapse of the land between Spain and Africa allowing the Atlantic to catastrophically flood through to form the Mediterranean, although this is scientifically doubtful.
It is, however, not even necessary to invoke such cataclysmic natural forces in order to explain the worldwide occurrence of parallel flood myths from the most ancient of times. Most of the world’s large ancient centres of civilisation naturally first grew in close proximity to rivers, vital for drinking water, crops and trade, and rivers are always subject to catastrophic flooding as we still see to our cost in the present day.
Some supporters of the "truth" of the Bible sometimes gleefully quote these ancient world deluge legends as "proof" of Noah's flood in the Old Testament. However, such reasoning is entirely fallacious and self-contradicting, for according to the Bible itself only Noah and his family were specifically saved from the deluge and everybody else in the world at that time was drowned, without exception. If the Old Testament stated something like: "...And God also ordered that Ziusudra the Sumerian, Ut-Napishtim the Babylonian, Deucalion the Greek, Coxcox and Xochiquetzal the Aztecs, Pund-Jil the Aborigine and a few hundred others scattered here and there around the world should also build boats and rafts to save their various peoples..." then the story of Noah might perhaps be removed from the realms of pure mythology. Unfortunately for adherents of the historicity of the Bible, it says no such thing.
Each of these deluge legends from around the world represents an aspect of the tribal mythology of the people to whom they belong, a dim and distant folk memory of severe but natural disasters incorporated into the necessary mythological background explaining how things became as they are at the “beginning of the world” and providing a salutary warning for people to avoid offending their various gods. The Old Testament is no exception and must be understood as merely representing a regional version of this worldwide habit.
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