In further support of his thesis Landsberger pointed out that the island of Bahrain, in the south of the Persian Gulf near Qatar
possessed deities with authentic Sumerian names such as the chief god En-zak and his spouse Me-skil-ak. This circumstance supports an overseas origin for the Sumerians, since it is improbable that the island was colonized from southern Mesopotamia.99
Landsberger went on to speculate that the spark of Sumerian genius might have been imported from the Indus Valley civilization across the Arabian Sea to the east,100 an interesting idea in itself. However, because he was writing in the 1940s he did not have access to modern knowledge about the astonishing changes that took place in the Persian Gulf at the end of the last Ice Age. He was thus unable to consider a far more radical possibility that the new science has revealed.
Explosive implications
Kurt Lambeck’s work on the Persian Gulf initially drew my attention because it spoke of a marine flooding incident – the Flandrian transgression between about 6000 and 5500 years ago – that temporarily shifted the northern coast of the Gulf more than 150 kilometres inland and made Ur and Eridu beachfront property.
Lambeck’s study was published in 1996 in the Earth and Planetary Science Letters, a specialist geological journal that probably does not cross the desks of a great many archaeologists.101 He had focused on the period from 18,000 years ago – around the peak of the last glaciation – until today and had taken into account all the key variables including
the response of the earth to glacial unloading of the distant ice sheets and to the meltwater loading of the Gulf itself and the adjacent ocean. Models for these glacio-isostatic effects have been compared with observations of sea-level change, and palaeoshoreline reconstructions of the Gulf have been made.102
Now, as I looked more closely into Lambeck’s research, I realized that it could have unexplored and potentially explosive implications for the prehistory of Sumer:
From the peak of the glaciation until about 14,000 yr BP [years before the present] the Gulf is free of marine influence out to the edge of the Biaban shelf. By 14,000 yr BP the Strait of Hormuz had opened up as a narrow waterway and by about 12,500 years ago the marine incursion into the Central Basin had started. The Western Basin flooded about 1000 years later. Momentary standstills may have occurred during the Gulf flooding phase at about 11,300 and 10,500 yr BP…
In other words the whole of the Persian Gulf – in fact to a point well beyond the Strait of Hormuz in what is now the Gulf of Oman – was dry land between 18,000 and 14,000 years ago. Only then did the sea begin to transgress into the Gulf itself, first as a narrow waterway, later as a recurrent cycle of powerful short-lived floods, each followed by a partial recession of the floodwaters, then a standstill, then renewed flooding at irregular intervals.
I knew from my first encounter with Lambeck’s research that the present shoreline of the Gulf had been reached, and then temporarily exceeded, around 5500 years ago during the Flandrian transgression. But what I had not immediately understood was the extraordinary geological drama that had unfolded between 14,000 years ago, when the Gulf first began to flood, and 7000 years ago, when the city-state of Eridu was established at the north-western end of the Gulf and, along with it, the way of life that would soon flower as Sumerian civilization.
The floor of the Gulf
Lambeck himself was convinced that there must be some connection between the flooding of the Gulf and ‘the Sumerian problem’:
The early record is incomplete and numerous questions have been raised. Who were the Sumerians, where did they come from? When did they arrive? Did they arrive from a mountainous region beyond Iran or did they arrive by sea? Were they descendants from earlier Neolithic settlers in the region, from the Ubaid culture at 4500–3500 BC or from the even earlier Eridu culture at about 5000 BC [archaeologists often refer to the Eridu culture as ‘Ubaid I’ – i.e. the earliest stage of the Ubaid culture].103 Whatever directions the search for answers to such questions may take, a significant element in the puzzle must be the evolution of the physical environment of the Gulf itself.104
The last observation sounded particularly relevant to my concerns; however, Lambeck went on to qualify it by suggesting that the only epoch that historians and archaeologists really need to pay attention to is ‘the latter period of the flooding of the Gulf and the subsequent flooding of the low-lying delta region [the Flandrian transgression] when sea-level rose perhaps a few metres above its present level between 6000 and 3000 yr BP’.105 If archaeologists were interested in the earlier period between 18,000 years ago down to as recently as 7000 years ago – when a large part of the Gulf floor was still dry land – then they should focus on its role as a corridor of migration: ‘a natural route for people moving westwards from east of Iran. Is this the route travelled by the ancestors of the Sumerians?’106
What Lambeck did not do, anywhere in his paper, was invite consideration of another possibility, even though it is suggested by some of his own data. This is the possibility that the dry floor of the Gulf could itself have been a place of permanent settlement at some point during the 11,000 years between 18,000 and 7000 years ago.
If it was, then why shouldn’t an urban culture have evolved here, just as the myths of the antediluvian cities suggest?
After all, orthodox archaeology has already accepted the existence of very ancient cities elsewhere in the Middle East – such as Catal Huyuk in Turkey (at least 8500 years old), Jericho in Palestine (more than 10,000 years old)107 and, indeed, Eridu in Mesopotamia (where, as we’ve seen, the oldest shrines are thought to be about 7000 years old). Knowing the inundation history of the Gulf as well as we now do, therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that the ruins of cities that are literally ‘antediluvian’ could be concealed beneath its increasingly polluted, industrialized and militarized waters …
Dotted line represents projected course of Tigris-Euphrates through the Palaeo-Gulf.
In these and all inundation maps in this book, the black lines represent modern coastlines, the light tint is land and the dark tint is sea.
A river ran through it
During the period from the Last Glacial Maximum until about 10,000 years ago the Ice Age world was generally colder and more arid than it is today, with average temperatures depressed by several degrees even in tropical and equatorial zones. However, these conditions are likely to have been much less severe within the micro-region of the antediluvian Gulf – essentially a large, well-protected, low-lying valley.108
Its notable feature, which undoubtedly would have been a magnet for life of all sorts including human beings – was that the Tigris and the Euphrates flowed through it, united as a single mighty river.109 The river’s course seems to have run along the northern side of the valley and at different periods appears to have passed through as many as three large, freshwater lakes in the Gulf’s Western and Central and Eastern Basins.110 It exited the Gulf through the narrows now known as the Strait of Hormuz and formed its delta on the Biaban Shelf to the east.111 The delta was relatively small for such a large river, which suggests to scientists that it must have dumped most of its load of fertile alluvial silt in and around the shores of the lakes that it filled along the way.112 Over thousands of years this would have created areas of great natural fertility within the valley where agriculture, if practised, might have been extremely productive.
For a while things could only get better and, despite the remorseless advance of the sea after the Strait of Hormuz was breached 14,000 years ago, conditions in the rest of the Gulf may for a long while have remained extremely pleasant. I was particularly interested to learn of a comprehensive study done in 1988 by the COHMAP group which showed that ‘the Indian monsoon system penetrated into the southern and eastern portions of south-west Asia during the period of 12,000 to 9000 years ago, and then retreated’.113 The implication was that throughout this period the Gulf, along with other parts of south-west Asia, would have
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enjoyed both winter rains and in some areas also summer rains or ephemeral summer storms. This rainfall would have increased grazing opportunities, particularly in semiarid areas, but would have had little effect on the growth of winter cereals that formed a principal base of early agriculture.114
A protected valley … a great river … lakes … fertile soils … bountiful rainfall… The palaeo-climatological literature left me with the distinct impression that the Gulf around 10,000 or 12,000 years ago could have been a very unusual place … indeed a secret garden blessed with an ideal climate, offering nearly optimum conditions for the emergence of a civilization.
A sea change
What changed everything was the sea. As Lambeck tells it:
By 14,000 yr BP the Hormuz Strait has opened up as a narrow waterway and the flooding of the lowlands to the west begins, first with the flooding of the Eastern Basin by marine water soon after 13,000 BP. Marine influence is first experienced in the Central Basin before about 12,500 BP … The Western Basin lake remains free from marine incursion until about 11,500 BP. The northern part of the Gulf remains dry at this time, as does a vast area south of the palaeo-Gulf, although this plain contains numerous shallow topographic depressions. Until about 11,000 BP the northern part of the Persian Gulf floor would have been a relatively flat but narrow plain, hemmed in between the palaeo-Gulf and the southern foothills of the Zagros mountains forming the present coastline.
As the sea-level rises the Gulf continues to expand and the marine influence spreads into the northern region. By about 10,000 BP the north-east margin of the Gulf has approached its present position in several localities, particularly east of about 52 degrees longitude. Much of the southern part of the Gulf remains exposed until about 8000 BP and areas such as the Great Pearl Bank are not submerged until shortly after this time.115
I have deliberately chosen not to summarize Lambeck’s blow-by-blow account of the flooding of the Gulf, but to let him speak for himself. He does not dramatize or interpret his data but presents it neutrally, without speculation, as a good scientist should.
I am not a scientist and I have a different approach. What I see here is first and foremost a mystery – the mystery of Sumerian origins – ‘the Sumerian problem’ as archaeologists like to call it. When I look closer I find that not only do we not know where the Sumerians came from but also that their language is unique in the world – apparently unrelated to any other known language. Closer up still and I learn that the Sumerians preserved traditions of a terrible flood that had nearly obliterated mankind from the earth and that had inundated the five antediluvian cities of their ancestral homeland. There had been survivors in a great ship who had been carried by the floodwaters to another land and had settled there in order to renew the ruined earth, replenish the seed of mankind, and preserve the ancient wisdom and the worship of the gods. For this reason those who later traced their line and religion from these survivors always remembered history as being divided into two periods – before and after the flood – and recorded the dynasties of their rulers in exactly the same way-with the list of the historical kings preceded by the list of the antediluvian kings, the latter reigning for a very long period.116
I review the archaeological literature for rational explanations of the Sumerian flood tradition and find that most of the experts agree it must have been rooted in some kind of historical truth; they point to the temporary inundation of Ur around 5500 years ago, either by gigantic river floods or by the marine incursion known as the Flandrian transgression. But when I look further and try to match up the details of the flood tradition to the archaeological facts I find that nothing really fits; nevertheless there are strange resonances between the evidence and the myths.
For example, we’ve seen that Eridu, always named as the first and oldest of the antediluvian cities, was never flooded; yet the archaeological evidence does make it a strong contender, with its 7000-year-old shrines to the water-god Enki, for the title of ‘oldest’ Sumerian city.
Conversely, Ur, which is not mentioned in the flood tradition at all, was most definitely flooded around 5500 years ago. Shurrupak, which is named as one of the antediluvian cities, was likewise flooded, but not until 700 years later.
So, for me, the theory that connects the Sumerian flood tradition with whatever event it was that flooded Ur is a ‘dog that don’t hunt’. I would honestly sooner conclude that the Sumerians had made the whole thing up than agree that they were so geographically ignorant and historically naive that they were incapable of distinguishing between a universal flood capable of wiping out humanity and a local flood – however large. Since we respect them so highly in other departments – as the builders of the world’s first schools, for example, the inventors of the world’s first bicameral congress, the compilers of the world’s first law codes,117 etc. – shouldn’t we also respect the Sumerians’ own evaluation of the great deluge that they say swallowed up the cities of their ancestors so long ago in the past?
A new hypothesis
Then I come across Kurt Lambeck’s data. What it tells me is that the floor of the Persian Gulf was entirely exposed until as recently as 14,000 years ago, that between 12,000 and 9000 years ago it would have been a veritable Garden of Eden, and that, despite continuous flooding, large areas of the Gulf floor remained above the waves until somewhere between 8000 and 7000 years ago. Since these included the Great Pearl Bank – between modern Dubai and Qatar near Bahrain – I find it difficult to believe it is a coincidence that deities with authentic Sumerian names were worshiped in ancient Bahrain or that the first definite evidence of an identifiably ‘Sumerian’ presence in Iraq is at Eridu around 7000 years ago – so soon after the Great Pearl Bank was inundated.
In short, although I stress again that I’m no scientist, I believe that Kurt Lambeck’s data is strong enough to justify an entirely new hypothesis on the subject of ‘the Sumerian problem’. I think it’s time to consider seriously the possibility that the true story of Sumerian origins may have proved so elusive because it is veiled beneath the waters of the Persian Gulf. In that case, Eridu and the other four ‘antediluvian’ cities of Mesopotamia might well bear the same relationship to the original antediluvian cities of the Gulf floor as Halifax, Nova Scotia bears to Halifax, England or as Perth, Australia bears to Perth, Scotland. They could, in other words, have been named in memory of other, older cities somewhere else – normal, well-testified behaviour by migrants of almost all cultures in every epoch. Moreover, in this case we are not even required to imagine that the migration came from very far away but merely from the flooded lowlands of the Gulf towards the nearest higher and productive ground that was blessed by the same Tigris/Euphrates river system as the floor of the Gulf had once been.
At this point I find that the hypothesis and the existing archaeological evidence begin to converge nicely. Yes, it seems to be true that Eridu stands out as one of the earliest ‘nascent’ cities of Sumer, yes, the date of submersion of the Great Pearl Bank coincides quite closely with the date of foundation of the first shrines to Enki at Eridu, and yes, the Sumerians did have distinct memories of an advanced antediluvian culture that had been destroyed by a great flood.
But still, the flooding of the Gulf was a long-term event, wasn’t it, spread out over more than 6000 years? Surely something that gradual, that predictable, is no more likely than the localized flooding around Ur 5500 years ago to have inspired the Sumerian tradition of the sudden world-destroying flood that threatened the survival of mankind?
Before I attempted to test my Sumerian hypothesis further by trying to set up a proper diving expedition in the Gulf (written authorization required in triplicate from Saddam Hussein, the US Navy, the CIA, Texaco, the President of Iran, the King of Saudi Arabia, and the Emirs of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Dubai) I decided that I had to learn more about the behaviour of the world’s oceans in the key 7000-year period from roughly 14,000 to 7000 years ago.
I
knew already that this had been the peak period of the meltdown of the last Ice Age. I knew already that it had been a period of great turbulence and instability. It was therefore by no means impossible that something had happened at the global level during these millennia that could have projected a truly cataclysmic flood into the sheltered valley of the Gulf.
In fact, as I was to discover, it could have happened more than once …
3 / Meltdown
Athenian: Do you consider that there is any truth in the ancient tales?
Clinias: What tales?
Athenian: That the world of men has often been destroyed by floods … in such a way that only a small portion of the human race survived.
Clinias: Everyone would regard such accounts as perfectly credible.
Plato, Laws, vol. I, book III
It is clear that the [Beverley Lake] drumlins … must have been submerged in the formative flow … minimum depths of about 20 metres were required … On a helicopter traverse along the north shore of Georgian Bay, a single field of bedrock erosional marks was noted that had a width of at least 50 kilometres … [These] drumlins and erosional marks indicate meltwater floods that were competent to remove the largest boulders … Flow widths, equal to the widths of drumlin and erosional-mark fields, were in the range of 60 to 150 kilometres … Volumes of water required to sustain such floods would have been of the order of one million cubic kilometres, equivalent to a rise of several metres in sea level over a matter of weeks.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 7