A large dish of slop sat flat on what was clearly now going to be his bed-seat. It was the source of a rich smell that permeated the room, clawing its way into the woven seatbacks—and into my clothes where I was certain it would linger for days. It looked to be part soup and part gelatin.
“Pudding?” I asked. “Noah’s Pudding?”
The disheveled gentleman pounced on the words, replacing them with “Aşure.” He offered to share his bowl, passing it toward me and asking, “Ick?” It was a soup of leftovers, traditionally concocted from what Noah’s family might have found on the floor of the Ark: dribbles of barley, leftover vegetables cut and dropped in a pot of other remainders, along with dried fruits mixed with assorted nuts—the earliest muesli.
I let my pack fall to the floor and folded out a bed set-up opposite him. As we were leaving the station, Murat attempted to pour some of the Aşure into a cup, doing so simultaneously as he rose and handed it to me. The train then unexpectedly shunted to a start, and the soup lapped over the side of Murat’s bowl and into my container. Falling backward to my seat, I clutched the dish, happy to be traveling by train. Noah’s Pudding spilled across my wrist.
We traded more food before Murat dozed off. My sausage was a hit, as were the breads. We exchanged cheeses, and between the two of us there were six or more varieties. We lapsed into sign language and repeating basic words to understand one another, happy in our struggle to do so.
He told me, or I took it to be, that he was traveling to Elazig.
I said about myself, for conversation’s sake, “Tatvan to Van.”
Murat replied, “Kurdish.”
“You are Kurdish?”
He shook his head sideways—saying “Kurdish” in an unmistakably negative way—adding, about himself, “Turkish!” as though one could be either but not both.
The third and fourth seats in our couchette remained vacant. If it stayed this way, we’d not have to lower the upper bunks. I would be able to watch the moon’s progress. It neared a half moon now, moving toward full in the coming week.
Murat fell asleep, his head crooked into the windowpane and cushioned with a train-issue pillow. He snored with a pleasant rhythm that aligned his breathing with the train’s steady noises. Hills slipped away outside the window until we slowed to let a very long freight train take a priority whiz by us, blocking the view. When the freight finished its intrusion, the fields seemed suddenly larger, the rises of land more distant, the green landscape more brown, as though we’d let a seasonal month pass in those minutes.
* * *
Rifling through my pack, I found the copy of Gilgamesh I’d bought in Göreme. I propped myself against the train compartment’s wall with its little reading light and lost myself in the book.
Out of Mesopotamia, there are three particular flood stories of old brought to light in the past 150 years by archaeologists—their possible sequence being the Sumerian flood story, which flows to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Atrahasis Epic, the latter oral story committed into writing mid-seventeenth century BCE or earlier. It is profound in its similarities of an impending flood and preservation of selected life from a destroyed earth. I was reading a translation of the separate though related original epic poem about Gilgamesh (or, in Sumerian poems, Bilgames), an historic king believed to have lived sometime between 2700 and 2500 BCE. It is the longest example of writing in the Akkadian language used by Babylonia and Assyria. The periodic merging of the Bilgames and Gilgamesh stories is an early example of combining oral flood histories.
To avoid direct communication between a god and a man, the Gilgamesh story has the flood epic’s hero, Utnapishtim, overhear Ea, “the cleverest of the gods,” whisper a directive not to a person but to the inanimate reed fence around Utnapishtim’s house:
Reed fence, reed fence, listen to my words.
King of Shuruppak, quickly, quickly
tear down your house and build a great ship,
leave your possessions, save your life.
The ship must be square, so that its length
equals its width. Build a roof over it,
just as the Great Deep is covered by the earth.
Then gather and take aboard the ship
examples of every living creature.
The design is unorthodox for a boat. It is equal sided; lending itself to a cube description. Utnapishtim relates what happened when the ship was ready and the angry gods were prepared to proceed:
At first glow of dawn, an immense black cloud
rose on the horizon and crossed the sky.
Inside it the storm god Adad was thundering,
while Shullat and Hanish, twin gods of destruction,
went first, tearing through mountains and valleys.
Nergal, the god of pestilence, ripped out
the dams of the Great Deep, Ninurta opened
the floodgates of heaven …
The magnitude of the resulting flood covered the land, or at least the ground within sight of the soon-to-be floating vessel:
For six days and seven nights, the storm
demolished the earth. On the seventh day,
the downpour stopped. The ocean grew calm.
No land could be seen, just water on all sides,
as flat as a roof. There was no life at all.
The human race had turned into clay.
…
(then) I brought out a raven and set it free.
The raven flew off, and because the water
had receded, it found a branch, it sat there,
it ate, it flew off and didn’t return.
…
When the waters had dried up and land appeared,
I set free the animals I had taken …
Sitting on the Van Gölü Express and flipping through the book, I realized for the first time that all but one of the epic’s twelve chapters have nothing to do with a flood story. Rather, the book’s first half is about Gilgamesh and a rogue player named Enkidu with whom he has a conflict that resolves into an abiding friendship. Deeply disturbed when Enkidu is sentenced to death by the gods for an escapade they were both involved in, Gilgamesh embarks on a pilgrimage of self-examination to find everlasting life. He encounters a man who has achieved exactly that. The immortal man is Utnapishtim, survivor of the “Great Flood,” and the raconteur recorded in this epic’s eleventh chapter (colloquially known as the Flood Tablet because it is a separately retrieved ancient cuneiform tablet discovered in library ruins near Nineveh in the mid-1800s). Utnapishtim’s achievement of immortality is a post-flood gift from the god Enlil.
This drama foreshadows later written accounts of Noah and his flood adventures, with notable differences. Utnapishtim’s boat is square, or likely cube, to Noah’s rectangle, and has six stories to Noah’s Ark’s three. Each vessel has at least one window. The downpour that floated Utnapishtim’s boat lasted for a week compared with Noah’s forty days and forty nights. More people in addition to family are saved aboard Utnapishtim’s oversized houseboat, while only immediate family members are taken aboard Noah’s Ark. When it comes time to release birds in search of land, Noah has a raven and three doves in his story while Utnapishtim has a dove, a swallow, and a raven. Noah’s boat comes to rest “in the mountains of Ararat.” Utnapishtim lands elsewhere:
On Mount Nimush the ship ran aground,
The mountain held it and would not release it.
While some believe “the Mountain of the Ark” is to be found among the mountains of Ararat, the Epic of Gilgamesh makes it clear that Mount Nimush is also a candidate to be the Mountain of the Ark. If I could get to northern Iraq in my travels after climbing Mount Ararat, might I get near Nimush—or whatever the mountain is called today?
With the gentle rocking of the train and the darkness outside the window, I grew drowsy reading about Gilgamesh as the man who tried to escape the inevitability of death while being taunted by Utnapishtim:
An Assyrian sculpture thought to be Gilgames
h, King of Uruk, holding (some say strangling, others say overpowering) a lion. “This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world.” The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered the oldest great work of literature. This stone carved likeness of its prideful hero, from the eighth century BCE, was found in Khorsabad, Iraq, and is now in the Louvre, Paris. It stands 18 feet (5.52 m) tall. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Thierry Ollivier / Art Resource, NY.
… Who will convince them
To grant you the eternal life that you seek?
How would they know that you deserve it?
First pass this test: Just stay awake
For seven days. Prevail against sleep,
And perhaps you will prevail against death.
I held my head up and kept reading against the soothing tilt and sway of our carriage. There was an abrupt jolt as the Van Gölü Express cornered and picked up speed coming out of the curve, taking up the slack between cars. I looked across to see the jerking had not disturbed Murat, and so read more. Gilgamesh fails to “prevail” and falls into a long sleep, his later awakening bringing realization that his greater ambition will remain out of reach if he cannot even master the urge to sleep that befalls mortals.
This mortal reader nodded off as well, listening to the music of the train wheels accompanied by Murat’s descant snores.
I woke with a start, my heart pounding. One week before climbing Ararat, I dreamed that someone ahead of me in our climbing queue lacked oxygen, had fainted on the steepest part of the climb, and had fallen back onto the rest of us. We collapsed, domino-like, everyone tumbling down the mountainside.
Apprehension never sleeps. I put the dream down as a check on any overconfidence, nothing more. I tramped the train end-to-end, walking off my anxiety as well as the lure of sleep by pushing through heavy metal doors and into windy vestibules where the metal floorboards dueled, demanding my concentration as I stepped into another carriage. Our coach’s layout of compartments soon gave way to curtain compartments of bunk beds where only random snores betrayed passengers rocked to sleep. I jostled past these bedsides, careful not to fall in.
Murat was awake when I returned, sitting upright and looking uncomfortable. There had been a train announcement while I was walking the aisles, but I hadn’t understood it; nor could I hear it properly when it was repeated in English. Murat pointed at me with a confident directive. “Elazig.” I did not want to know what he meant.
A porter knocked on the door, asking for tickets. His English was good, but his news was bad. “You will get off at Elazig,” he said. Murat nodded. “There are track repairs,” the porter explained, not sounding sincere.
“But … Tatvan,” I said. “I want the ferry connection.”
“I wish you good luck.”
“I need to get to Tatvan,” I continued. “And then to Van.”
“Bus. You will get on a bus in Elazig. It will take you to Tatvan. No train to Tatvan. Bus.” He smirked. “Don’t make plans. Just live.”
When we were alone, I told Murat—who could not understand my comments except the key crossover words in our respective languages—about my intentions. “I will travel from Tatvan to Van and to Doğubeyazit. Then climb Mount Ararat.”
His brow furrowed. “Ararat?”
I made climbing motions, clutching at the air as if it held rock sided grips. I indicated a pinnacle by forming my fingers into a steeple. Murat shrugged his head while saying “Ararat?”
And then the light went on in my head’s lexicon. “Agri Dagh,” I announced.
He grinned. Mimicking my climbing pantomime, his smile faded, “Ick. No.” He found an English crossover word that yanked my heart into my throat with his tone. “Danger.”
* * *
Danger was not a deterrent for Friedrich Parrot. By the early 1800s, adventurers decided to contest “God’s prohibition against man’s ascending” Mount Ararat. At the forefront of this ambition was Parrot, an experienced mountaineer. He was in his late thirties when he achieved the first recorded summit of Mount Ararat in 1829, climbing in the full belief that he could reach the landfall site of Noah’s Ark, which he believed to be “one of the most remarkable events in the history of the world.”
A German doctor, Parrot was a medical officer in the Russian army. During the year he ascended Ararat, he was also a university professor of physics and pathology in the later-named country of Estonia. His patron for the expedition was the czar of Russia. In early May, Parrot’s expedition traveled south from Moscow to the shores of the Caspian Sea and through the Caucasus of Georgia to Yerevan. Arriving there in September, they had missed the favorable months for climbing.
Parrot’s party used St. Jacob’s monastery, on the northeastern side of Ararat, as a base camp. But a near-fatal mountainside slip and resulting fever during their first attempt forced Parrot to seek medical treatment, and the climbers retreated to the village Ahora (Agori, or Aghuri),9 just below the 4,000-foot mark of their ascent.
A second endeavor, six days later—from the northwest—also failed to summit, though they reached the 16,000 foot level, near enough to the top for Parrot to write they “set foot upon that region which certainly, since Noah’s time, no human being had ever trodden.”
During the third attempt, three peasant assistants in the climbing party turned back with illness. Undaunted, Parrot “pushed on unremittingly to our object, rather excited than discouraged by the difficulties in our way.” Even with the most confident ascent team, anyone attempting to summit Ararat must face the same nagging question en route to its peak: Will we make it?
Friedrich Parrot’s account of his expedition to Ararat, translated into English and expanded by W. D. Cooley, was published in 1846, five years after the climber’s death, as Journey to Ararat. It included five sworn affidavits Parrot had sought in support of his account—two from Russian soldiers and three from villagers who had accompanied him. Despite this, skeptics labeled him an impostor. One scholar asserted, “Ararat’s icecap was too steep and too slippery for human feet.” Parrot steadfastly claimed, “We stood on the top of Ararat.” Portrait by Alexander Julius Klünder (1829).
On October 9, 1829, “A last effort was required of us to ascend a tract of ice by means of steps, and with that accomplished, about a quarter past three … we stood on the top of Ararat.”
“Will we make it?” is an apt refrain among those who call home the troubled lands in the shadow of Mount Ararat: Iran, Armenia, and Turkey lie at its foothills, along with nearby Iraq, Syria, and the portentous Kurdistan. The silhouetted contours of bygone borders for Mesopotamia, Persia, Urartu, Greater Armenia, and the Ottoman Empire are as unavoidable as is the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL).
A prudent map of this area begins with religious cartography: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam come rapidly to mind, as do their subsets, whether Shia or Sunni, Maronite or Copt, Zoroastrian, Samaritan, and Druze, Shabakism, and Yazidi—a mere sample of the potpourri of faiths hereabouts. Over five millennia of societies in movement, settlement, and conflict, religious fervor has both dictated and crossed boundaries between countries often—absorbing recalcitrant territories under the banner of conversion-or-punishment. Today’s national borderlines are shifting fault lines, uneasily drawn because they are so difficult to ensure.
This part of the globe seems to satisfy a need for disorder. If you asked Mother Earth where she hurt the most, she might well point to the Middle East. Here is where many of humanity’s brightest hopes have been raised and crushed often. The region is known for killing up close and for efficient retribution for infractions. Its peoples feel misunderstood, maligned, and manipulated, in the land of foredoomed peace talks. The challenge for those who seek regional stability is monumental; dialogue is unfortunately less precise than a drone strike.
The concept of “Middle East” arose during the nineteenth century, when Britain created much of the West’s geographical terminology.
Cartographers noted the farthest travel destination eastbound from “home” was China—the Far East. The midpoint when traveling eastward for trade was designated as the Middle East.
Clear and consistent identification of the Middle East’s modern demarcation lines is not an easy task, whether one thinks in geographical terms, or political terms, or religious terms. On the latter, there are a plethora of ordained overlaps and doctrinal divisions.
To spark a discussion, one could commence with the struggle among the prophet Muhammad’s followers to choose his successor subsequent to his death in 632 CE. War broke out within the span of two generations, mainly between the proponents for continuing Muhammad’s family lineage, who viewed his son-in-law Ali as the necessary choice, and those who instead favored a consensus selection for the new Muslim caliph. Ali’s supporters, known as Shiat Ali (contracted to Shi’ites or Shiites, often as Shia), initially won sway over those favoring selection through consensus, the Sunnis.
Ali’s assassination in 661 pitted the two factions against one another in conflict that continues to this day. Clusters of believers became regional powers as populations grew and their expanding land bases consolidated.10 The divisions intensified as Persia (today’s Iran) became primarily Shia and the Ottoman Empire (including present-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq) became preferentially Sunni. Add the Kurdish dilemma to this stew. The Kurds, mostly Sunni but also Shia, Christian, Yazidi, Jewish, and Zoroastrian, have a demonstrated tolerance for other religions. In Iraq, notably under Saddam Hussein, Sunnis—a minority of the population—held power over the majority Shia. That situation shifted with the US invasion of the country in 2003, which deposed Hussein, resulting in the rise of a Shia-controlled government and a corresponding repression of Sunni influence. The latter factor is a cautionary reminder: to explain the enmity between Sunni and Shia as an “ancient rivalry” is to absolve responsibility from the many outside forces that have also mobilized and manipulated those divisions over centuries of meddling for their own political ends.
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