In the Sumerian Flood Story Ziusudra actually overhears the god Enki talking to the wall:
153 “Side-wall, standing at the left side … ;
154 Side-wall, I want to talk to you; [heed] my words,
155 [Pay attention to] my instructions … ”
The speech in Old Babylonian Atrahasis:
Pay attention to the message that I will speak to you:
20 “Wall, listen to me!
Reed wall, observe all my words!
Destroy your house, build a boat,
Spurn property and save life.”
And in Middle Babylonian Ugarit:
12 “Wall, hear … ”
And in Assyrian Recension:
15 “… ! Reed hut! Reed-hut!
… pay attention to me!
… make a boat (?) … ”
And in Gilgamesh XI:
“Reed fence, reed fence! Brick wall, brick wall!
Listen, O reed fence! Pay heed, O brick wall!
O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu,
Demolish the house, build a boat!
25 Abandon riches and seek survival!
Spurn property and save life!
Put on board the boat the seed of all living creatures!”
Recruiting Atra-hasīs’s reed walls and fences as a kind of jungle telegraph enables Ea to persist with the claim that he didn’t actually tell Atra-hasīs himself what was going to happen. He just happened to murmur it out loud near the great reed walls, and it is not really his fault if some echo reached Atra-hasīs. How is this image to be understood?
The answer comes from the injunction to pull down the house in order to build the boat from the raw materials. As Lambert put it, and I entirely agree with him,
We are to conceive Atra-hasīs as living in a reed house such as are still found in southern Mesopotamia where reeds grow to an enormous height. No doubt the wind might whistle through the reed walls, and Enki seems to have whispered to his devotee in the same way, since it was no longer himself but the wall that transmitted the message. Since reed boats were as common as reed houses, the obvious course was to pull up the bundles of reeds which composed the walls of the house and to fasten them to a wooden framework as a boat.
Reed architecture: a mid-twentieth century mudhif of Abdullah of the Al-Essa tribe, in the marshes of S. Iraq.
(picture acknowledgement 6.1)
Reed boats: the characteristic fishing boat of the marshes that dates back to the time before the Flood.
For the original readers of Atrahasis the events of the story were of course unfolding in the remotest antediluvian past, and this reed-and-water landscape of the southern marshes with its characteristic houses and boats would be how urban Babylonians of the second millennium BC imagined their own aboriginal world to have been in its entirety. For them this was the ultimate backdrop to the story of Atrahasis and Enki’s inspiring speech. What is extraordinary is that we can still look in on this life in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq, for it survived more or less unchanged from primeval times right down until the murderous interference of Saddam Hussein twenty years ago. Many authors have written on the Iraqi marshes and their people and have drawn attention to what has happened there. Recently, the return of surviving families, who had fled east for their lives, offered the first sign that the original environment might one day be restored. Perhaps in no other area of Mesopotamian studies has it been possible for the modern world to bring things to life by virtue of an almost unchanging ancient landscape; many photographs show traditional reed houses, floating as though comprising a small island, with livestock happily milling about inside the fence roundabout. The same skilful use of plaited reeds can engender cathedral-like buildings of extraordinary beauty, as well as slim, almond-shaped boats high in prow and stern, which navigate the shallows like minnows to allow the leisured spearing of fish.
Atra-hasīs in this incarnation does not live in a mud-brick house in a city with temples and palaces; his house is made of reeds, strong and willowy, that can easily be recycled to plait a lifeboat if that is what is needed. By the time the story surfaces in first-millennium Gilgamesh the house is of mud-brick with a reed fence; the old resonant wording endures.
The elegant shape of the marsh boat is very ancient. There are examples pictured on seals; one of Woolley’s graves at Ur included a model of one in bitumen. Two of the known Flood Story tablets enshrine a reed ‘ark’ constructed in the tradition of this antediluvian long marsh boat. It is old-fashioned, dysfunctional and, to be frank, of little more use than a prototype, but we had better have a look at it.
A bitumen boat model of the mid-third millennium BC from a Sumerian grave in the city of Ur.
(picture acknowledgement 6.3)
The Prototype Ark
Two later second-millennium Flood versions from the old Sumerian city of Nippur (in southern Iraq) espouse this basic prototype form: the Sumerian Flood Story and Middle Babylonian Nippur. That both these tablets originated at Nippur does not force us to conclude that there was a strong-minded boat club there with its own ideas of what constituted a proper ark, but it is intriguing that the tradition only survives in Nippur sources.
In the Sumerian Flood Story the Ark is called a giš.má-gur4-gur4, which Miguel Civil, the Sumerologist whom I would follow anywhere, translated simply as ‘huge boat’. It occurs three times within four lines, so we can be in no doubt as to the reading:
After the flood had swept over the land for seven days and seven nights
And the destructive wind had rocked the huge boat
(giš-má-gur4-gur4) in the high water
The Sun god came out, illuminating heaven and earth.
Ziusudra made an opening in the huge boat
And the Sun god with his rays entered the huge boat.
Sumerian Flood Story: 204–8
The Sumerian word for boat is giš.má, where giš shows that it is made of wood, and má means boat. In Akkadian the corresponding word is eleppu, like its English equivalent a feminine noun.
There is a common, everyday kind of Sumerian river boat called a má-gur, which gave rise to the Akkadian loanword makurru. The name literally means a ‘boat that gurs’. Unfortunately, no one is absolutely sure what this verb ‘gur’ means, or how a má-gur differs from a plain má. We can say, if it is helpful, that any makurru is an eleppu but not every eleppu is a makurru. Whatever technically distinguishes a makurru from eleppus in general, the two words are often regarded as synonymous in literature; in Old Babylonian Atrahasis the Ark is referred to both as an eleppu and as a makurru, much as we might say ‘ark’ and ‘boat’ of the same vessel in English.
The Sumerian Flood Story mentions a super version of the giš-má-gur called the giš.má-gur4-gur4, evidently a special, outsized form of the same. This giant makurru-boat does not seem to be mentioned in any of the numerous documents from daily life concerned with boats, and perhaps it only took to the water in the world of mythology. Nevertheless it did warrant inclusion as line 291 of the cuneiform boat list, part of the ancient dictionary list-of-words project upon which we so often depend, in which old Sumerian words for boats and their parts are matched with their more modern equivalents in Akkadian. Line 291 records for us that the Sumerian word giš.má-gur-gur, like the giš.má-gur, also gave rise to a Babylonian loanword, makurkurru. It is this loanword makurkurru that is the type of ark in Middle Babylonian Nippur, and we are expressly told that it is made of reeds:
“[Fine reeds], as many as possible, should be woven (?), should be gathered (?) for it;
… build a big boat (eleppam rabītam)
Let its structure be [interwoven (?)] entirely of fine reed.
… let it be a makurkurru-boat with the name Life-Saver.
… roof it over with a strong covering.
Middle Babylonian Nippur: 5–9
This ‘big boat’ of makurkurru type could be roofed over. I particularly like the fact that the makurkurru in Middle Babyloni
an Nippur has the name ‘Lifesaver’, Nāṣirat Napištim. It should have been painted on the prow in 3D luminous cuneiform signs, even if they skipped the champagne at the launch.
WHAT SHAPE WAS THIS KIND OF BOAT THEN?
We can identify the characteristic shape of the makurru with the help of a geometrical diagram from the world of cuneiform educational mathematics, much like that illustrated in the following chapter. This shows two circles, drawn with one overlapping the other. Here a Babylonian teacher is expounding the mathematical properties of the pointed almond or biconvex shape generated by such intimate circles. We learn from him at the same time that this shape is called makurru, which will therefore evoke or correspond to the outline of a contemporary makurru boat, seen from above.
This is a boat that is, broadly speaking, in the same family as the traditional ancient craft from the marshes. I think it is fair to conclude that this is what the Nippur boat-builders had in mind, and that these mid-second-millennium accounts preserve a narrow almond-shaped reed-boat tradition that has been associated with the Flood Story from the moment it came into being. Enlil’s speech is the hallmark of the Atrahasis story, probably honed to a pithy brevity and dramatic effectiveness through a long oral history, refined even into a kind of Mesopotamian mantra. The flood hero has been informed by Enki, in traditional terms, that a horrible watery end is nigh. He must encapsulate and safeguard the very germ of life, animal and human, so that the familiar planet can be revivified when it is all over. He must build a lifeboat. Perhaps, with the passage of time, or even the odd outbreak of uncomfortable flooding, people began to think that a makurru, however large, might not hack it when it came to saving the whole world. It is under those circumstances – in my view – that the prototype came to be replaced by a model that was superior in every way, ideal for world conservation purposes, namely the biggest rope and bitumen coracle the world had ever seen.
7
The Question of Shape
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’
Edward Lear
The most remarkable feature provided by the Ark Tablet is that Atra-hasīs’s lifeboat was definitely, unambiguously round.
No one had ever thought of that possibility. Confronting the fact comes, initially, as a shock. For everyone knows what Noah’s Ark, the real Ark, looks like. A squat wooden affair with prow and stern and a little house in the middle, not to mention a gangplank and several windows. No respectable child’s nursery at one time was ever without one, with its chewed pairs of lead or wooden animals.
A classic example of a toy Noah’s Ark and animals in painted wood; from about 1825 and probably German.
(picture acknowledgement 7.1)
Sunday entertainment.
(picture acknowledgement 7.2)
The tenacity of the conventional Western vision of the Ark is remarkable, and remains, at least to me, inexplicable, for where did it come from in the first place? The only ‘evidence’ that artists or toymakers had before them was the description in the Old Testament where, as we will see, Noah’s Ark is altogether a different proposition.
Whatever the pattern was before, we can now see that the Mesopotamian ark from Old Babylonian times was unquestionably round. We learn this fact from the new Ark Tablet, the remarkable and unexpected contents of which will now hold our attention for many pages to come. For this tablet, with its sixty lines, has more to offer than any other cuneiform tablet I have ever encountered, and it is the duty of any self-respecting Assyriologist to give such a document the full squeeze treatment and ensure that no possible item of information inside it is left unextracted.
We have seen that the tablet begins with a classic ancient speech advocating a boat of recycled reeds. Without pause Enki lays out unambiguously for Atra-hasīs what he is to do, which is to build something altogether different:
Draw out the boat that you will make
On a circular plan;
Let her length and breadth be equal,
Let her floor area be one field, let her sides be one nindan (high).
10. You saw kannu ropes and ašlu ropes/rushes for [a coracle before!]
Let someone (else) twist the fronds and palm-fibre for you!
It will surely need 14,430 (sūtu)!
Reading lines 6–7 for the first time was certainly an adrenalin-stirring moment, and my first reaction – as anybody’s would have been – was can this be right? A circular plan … ?
But then, thinking it over, staring into space with the tablet precariously poised over the desk, the idea began to make sense. A truly round boat would be a coracle, and they certainly had coracles in ancient Mesopotamia and when you thought about it a coracle is exceptionally buoyant and would never sink and if it happened to be difficult to steer or stop from going round and round that would not matter, because all it had to do was keep its precious contents safe and dry until the waters receded. So, no need to gasp and stretch one’s eyes. On the contrary, it made a lot of sense, and what was going on here was something serious and valid and highly interesting …
The Akkadian word for the Ark is, here too, eleppu, ‘boat’. The phrase ‘circular plan’ in Akkadian is eṣerti kippati, in which eṣertu means ‘plan’, and kippatu ‘circle’. The Ark Tablet does not use a special word for coracle, although there was one in Akkadian, quppu, as we will see.
Enki tells Atra-hasīs in a very practical way how to get his boat started; he is to draw out a field-sized plan of the round boat on the ground. The simplest way to do this would have been with a peg and a long string; the peg is stuck in what becomes the middle of the circle, the boat-builder walks the taut string round to mark the circumference, much as described later in this chapter by Colonel Chesney in laying out a differently shaped boat. The stage is thus set for building the world’s largest coracle, with a base area of 3,600 m2, with a diameter of, near enough, 70m. Atra-hasīs actually probably did not need to be told such elementary stuff. There is good background from other cuneiform texts where the word uṣurtu, the more common form of eṣertu, is used of the plan of a building detectable on the ground.
Then comes Enki’s remark, ‘let her length and breadth be equal’, at first sight disconcerting because everyone knows what a circle looks like and therefore what a circular boat would look like. This is a god speaking, however, who is not concerned with the theoretical nature of circles but with reinforcing the image of a round boat; unlike any other boat, it has neither prow nor stern but is the same width – or as we would say, diameter – in all directions. Enki’s instructions to be build a coracle were very specific, given the plan he had in mind, and his servant Atra-hasīs had to be clear on this.
A circle within a square forming part of an exercise in Sumerian geometry; this large tablet is the teacher’s reference copy with all the answers.
(picture acknowledgement 7.3)
Atra-hasīs in the Ark Tablet, one senses, knew as much about boats as the next man, although Enki did have to encourage him about details, suggesting that he could get help (lines 10–12) as he began to contemplate just what lay ahead of him in building the world’s first Super Coracle.
It was obviously a sound idea to tackle the first reading of this new inscription with the familiar Flood Story texts close at hand, and there were further surprises to come. I discovered before long that two of the tablets, both conveniently in the collection of the British Museum and easily consulted, also proved on reinvestigation to feature an ark that was round. The crucial cuneiform signs were in one case damaged and in the other without good context, but in both the key word kippatu, ‘circle’, was there in the clay.
Old Babylonian Atrahasis
In Old Babylonian Atrahasis the section which describes the Ark is closely related to th
e wording of the Ark Tablet but is incomplete. In line 28 we can now recognise the partly preserved word kippatu:
“The boat which you are to build
[Let its … ] be equal [(…)] […]
28 […] circle … […]
Roof it over like the Apsû.”
The cuneiform signs readable in line 28 are: […] ki-ip-pa-ti x x [x (x)].
Assyrian Smith
Lines 1–2 of Assyrian Smith, close enough in date to the first-millennium Gilgamesh XI tablets, contain the same important matter, but although the word has long been correctly read its significance could never be appreciated, and even now it is still not quite clear how this passage should be understood because it is incomplete.
“[…] … let [its … be …]
2 […] … like a circle … […]”
The cuneiform signs in line 2 are: […] x ki-ma kip-pa-tim x […]
There is a crucial difference in the second case, one thousand years on, in that the boat, or some characteristic of it, is now ‘like a circle’, which of course is not the same thing as being a circle, but it would be a stern sceptic who insisted that this was unconnected with the shape of the vessel itself, in view of the other two accounts. It is evident that Enki’s description befuddled Atra-hasīs, who in this later Assyrian version of the story emerges as much more self-effacing than his Old Babylonian counterpart and asks for a guide drawing; one imagines a hand reaching down with Rembrandt’s pointed finger to trace the explicit shape on the ground:
The Ark Before Noah Page 12