The Ark Before Noah

by Irving Finkel

  A cuneiform tablet from Jahudu, a marriage contract including individual Judaean names.

  (picture acknowledgement 11.11)

  Ultimately it was descendants of these Judaean settlers in Babylonia who generated the Babylonian Talmud in their academies between the second and fourth century AD, writing in several Aramaic dialects mixed with biblical and later Hebrew. The Talmud is made up of the Mishnah (‘case histories’) and the Gomorrah (principles). The essential preoccupation is to facilitate the clarification of exact meaning in a given textual passage. This is achieved by a variety of learned approaches, in which different views are very often attributed by name to those revered teachers and individuals who thought of them, built up from insights and interpretations that developed in the academies over many generations. At the heart of all the ordered discussion is, of course, the Bible.

  The Talmud is the latest corpus of writings in which the direct influence of earlier Babylonian tradition and learning is discernible. Such influences can take the form of loanwords from Babylonian into Aramaic, or the survival of Babylonian ideas and practices (medicine, magic and divination or the playing of the Royal Game of Ur, for example). Particularly revealing in this regard are Talmudic word play and interpretation which parallel those long established in the native Babylonian academies, such as in the commentaries quoted in Appendix 1. These devices are ultimately due to the multivalent characteristics of cuneiform signs and their presence in rabbinic learning written in alphabetic Aramaic undoubtedly reflects the consequence of that first Judaean acquaintance with cuneiform scholarship. The influences of the specifically cuneiform world on the Judaean exiles and their successors have often remained unexplored, but they were certainly far-reaching and long-lasting. One eloquent measure of permanent Babylonian influence is the fact that the month names used today in the Modern Hebrew calendar preserve the ancient names as used in Nebuchadnezzar’s capital:

  Babylonian: Hebrew:

  Nisannu Nisan

  Ayaru Iyar

  Simanu Sivan

  Du’ūzu Tammuz

  Abu Av

  Ulūlu Elul

  Tashrītu Tishrei

  Arahsamna Marcheshvan

  Kislimu Kislev

  Ṭebetu Ṭebet

  Shabatu Shevat

  Adaru Adar

  In contrast we know the names of only four native ancient Hebrew month names: Aviv (which in modern Hebrew is the word for spring, but which was previously used for the month Nisan), Ziv (Iyar), Ethanim (Tishrei) and Bul (Marcheshvan). Living in Babylon the Judaeans naturally adopted the prevailing calendar. The old names fell out of use, but the Babylonian words live on and are heard in daily conversations all over the world today.

  12

  What Happened to the Ark?

  The map of the world ceases to be a blank;

  It becomes a picture

  Full of the most varied and animated figures.

  Each part assumes its proper dimensions.

  Charles Darwin

  In all the stories, as the floodwaters subsided, the Ark with its precious cargo landed safely on top of a mountain. Life on earth escaped by the skin of its teeth so the human and animal world could regroup and carry on as before with renewed vigour. Where the great craft actually landed, and what happened to it, only became important afterwards.

  Different traditions grew up about the identity of the mountain, for the ancient Babylonian story always retained its importance within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Earlier, in the cuneiform world, there had also been more than one tradition about it. As we have seen, our oldest versions of the Flood Story, including the Ark Tablet, come from the second millennium BC, but, most unhelpfully, no tablet from that period tells us anything about the Ark landing. To push things further we really need a contemporary Babylonian map.

  Fortunately we have one.

  The Babylonian Map of the World

  The map in question is nothing less than a map of the whole world. It is one of the most remarkable cuneiform tablets ever discovered, so smart that it has its own Latin nickname – in the world of Assyriology at least – the mappa mundi, notwithstanding other claimants for the title. It is, in addition, the earliest known map of the world, drawn on a tablet of clay.

  The Babylonian Map of the World, front view.

  (picture acknowledgement 12.1)

  The most important element is the drawing, which takes up the lower two-thirds of the obverse. It is a brilliantly accomplished piece of work. The known world is depicted from far above as a disc surrounded by a ring of water called marratu in Akkadian. Two concentric circles were drawn in with some cuneiform precursor of a pair of compasses whose point was actually inserted south of Babylon, perhaps at the city of Nippur, the ‘Bond of Heaven and Earth’. Within the circle the heartland of Mesopotamia is depicted in schematic form. The broad Euphrates River runs from top to bottom, originating in the northern mountainous areas and losing itself in canals and marshes in the south. The great river is straddled by Babylon, awesomely vast in comparison with other cities on the map, which are represented by circles, some inscribed in small cuneiform signs with their names. The locations of cities and tribal conglomerations are partly ‘accurate’ but by no means always so. The crucial components of the heartland are assembled within the circle, but this is no AA map for planning a motoring trip: the relative geographical proportions and relationships of the encircled features are far less important than the great ring of water that surrounds everything, while even further beyond is a ring of vast mountains that marks the rim of the world. These mountains are depicted as flat, projecting triangles; each is called a nagû. Originally they numbered eight.

  The Babylonian Map of the World is justly famous and always on exhibition in the British Museum, but the surface of the clay is so delicate that it is has never been kiln-fired by the Museum’s Conservation Department, as is usually recommended to safeguard the long-term survival of cuneiform tablets. Now it is never even moved from its case or given on loan for exhibition. The reason for this is that when the tablet was on loan somewhere many years ago the nagû triangle in the lower left corner somehow became detached and, disastrously, lost.

  When the mappa mundi was acquired by the British Museum in 1882 there were four triangles preserved, two complete and two with only the bottom section surviving. The tablet was first published in a sober German journal in 1889 and we have several other ink drawings and photographs that show the map at different times with the SW triangle still in position there, and these can be relied on as giving a faithful picture.

  It must be said that damage or loss of this kind to our cuneiform tablets happens exceedingly rarely, and it is doubly unfortunate that it should have happened to a Map-of-the-World ‘triangle’, but it so turned out that I was able in a strange way to make up for this accident, with consequences for this book that I could never have anticipated. The British Museum excavations conducted in the Mesopotamian sites of Sippar and Babylon by the archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam in the later decades of the nineteenth century uncovered cuneiform inscriptions in quite staggering numbers. When they arrived in the Museum they were all registered by a cuneiform curator, who recorded basic details, allotted each a running number within its group, and housed each in a glass-topped box on the collection shelves. There was such a waterfall of incoming clay documents that the largest in a given consignment were naturally attended to at once, then all the good-sized pieces and so on. The tablets and fragments in each packing case often arrived wrapped in a twist of paper. Each consignment also included large quantities of small fragments – for Rassam’s workmen were, thank goodness, careful to collect every scrap of writing – but it often turned out that the curator in London had no chance to finish dealing with all the tiny pieces, some of which might contain only two or three signs of writing, before a fresh and important packing case arrived to claim his attention. The consequence was that over time a huge accumulation of small tablet fragments buil
t up that would one day need to be dealt with. These fragments were often only a corner of a business document (‘Witnesses: Mr … ; Mr … ; Mr …’) or a flake from the surface (‘Day 1, Month 4, Darius year …’), which of themselves might not seem to hold much promise, but they are all treasure, for they all belong to and will ultimately join other pieces in the collection; in the end (probably after centuries of labour!) most of the cuneiform tablets in the British Museum will be completed and their inscriptions become fully readable. This entails a jigsaw puzzle of ungovernable proportions; all Assyriologists who work on our collection play this game and dream that one day the tantalising missing piece that they need so badly will turn up to be glued into place by a patient conservator. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes a mere scrap can turn out to be of the greatest significance.

  For many years (as already confessed) I ran an evening class in cuneiform after hours in the British Museum. Once a week a loyal troupe of die-hards turned up to be initiated into the mystery of the wedges; we read all sorts of texts together and sometimes they even did a little homework. The class carried on for several years and by the time it reluctantly wound down one of the students, Miss Edith Horsley, had become a convinced cuneiform devotee and was anxious to continue as a volunteer in our Department. This seemed a good opportunity to have a crack at some of the long-ignored fragment collections. Miss Horsley was to unwrap and lightly clean the fragments from one of the chests, sort them as best she could and re-box them. After all those classes she certainly knew what a cuneiform business document looked like, so we agreed that she would distinguish corners, edges and body sherds, while anything that looked odd, or non business-like, should go in a special pile to be examined by me every Friday afternoon. On the whole these oddments turned out to be either pieces of school text in untidy writing or tabular lists of astronomical numbers, but one week on top of the pile was a scrap of inscribed clay with a triangle.

  I have tried already to convey how life as a cuneiformist is full of adrenalin moments, but this was an extreme case. For I knew instantly, as any tablet person would, that this fragment with a triangle must join the mappa mundi. It had to. With trembling hands I picked up the fragment, put it in a little box, and rushed off to collect my keys to open the case in Room 51 and try it. But when I got downstairs the Map of the World tablet was, unbelievably, not in its place. I had forgotten in all the excitement that it was on exhibition elsewhere in the building as part of a historical display of maps put together by the British Library (who were then still on the Bloomsbury premises). It was an abominable wait until Monday morning. Then, at last, a librarian turnkey met me, a museum assistant and Miss Horsley to give us access so that we could test the join. Finally the locks opened. The triangle fragment fitted so snugly in the gap that it would not come out again.

  This, however, is but the tip of the iceberg. The triangular nagû belonged right next to the long-known cuneiform label on the tablet that read: ‘Six Leagues in between where the sun is not seen.’ The new nagû was itself inscribed ‘Great Wall’. It could not be the Great Wall of China, of course, but an earlier big wall that was already known from cuneiform stories.

  Making a join to the Map of the World was really something. I was perhaps a little preoccupied with this achievement and fell naturally into telling everybody within earshot about it, whether or not they were interested. A day or so later, queuing in the Museum Staff Canteen, I mentioned it to Patricia Morison, then editor of the British Museum Magazine, who immediately talked me into writing something. I had remarked to her blithely that this was just the sort of snippet that would come over well at the end of a day’s television news, when the broadcaster, struggling to dispel the gloom caused by the day’s events, likes to finish with such news as a pregnant cat being safely rescued from the top of a lighthouse by helicopter. It was nevertheless a very considerable shock the following morning to receive a telephone call from the front hall to say that Nick Glass and the Channel 4 news team had arrived to see me and Miss Horsley and the fragment. The magazine editor and he were neighbours, and she had apparently mentioned all this over the garden fence to him …

  ‘Have you ever lost a piece of a jigsaw puzzle down the back of the sofa?’ asked Trevor McDonald, wrapping up the 7 o’clock news the following evening. ‘Well, today in the British Museum …’

  So, there was the whole story in full Technicolor, featuring our Mesopotamian Galleries, our Tablet Collection, our students at work in the Students’ Room, Miss Horsley surrounded by all her dusty fragments of tablet and, to top it all, wizard computer graphics (this was 1995) that showed the triangle fragment in blue jumping of its own accord into the empty space on the tablet. The whole report lasted four minutes and forty-two seconds. It was pure Andy Warhol. And it was my birthday. Little did I know it then, but that nagû join would have the most remarkable consequences for my subsequent Ark investigation …

  The cuneiform handwriting dates the map to, most probably, the sixth century BC. The map’s content undoubtedly reflects Babylon as the centre of the world; the dot that can be seen in the middle of the oblong that is the capital city probably represents Nebuchadnezzar’s ziggurat. The tablet contains three distinct sections: a twelve-line description concerning creation of the world by Marduk, god of Babylon; the map drawing itself; and twenty-six lines of description that elucidate certain geographic features shown on the map.

  These first twelve lines differ from the text on the reverse in spelling many words with Sumerian ideograms, and we can deduce that the scribe himself viewed this section as distinct from the map and its description from the double ruling across the width of the tablet that follows line 12. This ideographic style of spelling is fully in keeping with the first millennium BC date of the tablet itself, which is established by topographical terms in the map, in addition to the word marratu, as already mentioned. There were certainly eight nagûs originally. All are of the same size and shape, and where the tablet is still preserved we can see that the distance between them, travelling round parallel to the circular rim, varies between six and eight bēru or double hours, a measurement conventionally translated as ‘Leagues’.

  The Babylonian Map of the World, back view.

  (picture acknowledgement 12.2)

  The whole of the reverse is given over to a description of these eight nagûs, stating that in each case it is the same seven-League distance across the water to reach them, and describing what is to be found on arrival. It is heart-breaking that such an interesting text is so broken, but as seasoned Assyriologists we are now resigned to the rule that the choicer the context the harder it will be to decipher.

  While it has been argued that the map in its present form cannot be older than the ninth century BC – for this is the time when the word marratu is first used for sea, for example – in my opinion the conceptions behind the map and the description of the eight nagûs are much older, originating in the second millennium BC; in fact dating back to the Old Babylonian period in which the Ark Tablet was written. This can be concluded from the description’s very spellings, for the words are written in plain syllables in a style abhorred in first-millennium literary manuscripts, where ideograms, as found in the first twelve lines of this same tablet, are usually favoured. With this in mind we find ourselves with a cosmological system and tradition that is much older than the document on which it is written. The nature of the Map of the World tablet falls thereby into sharper focus: it represents an old tradition partly overlaid with later data or speculative ideas. The scribe at any rate tells us that his production is a copy from an older manuscript.

  The world in the map is portrayed as a disc, and we can therefore assume that the world itself was generally visualised in the same way at the time when the map originated. The circular waterway marratu, which is written with the determinative for river, derives from the verb marāru, ‘to be bitter’. Since this word, although marked with the river sign, certainly means sea in other texts, we translate i
t here as ‘Ocean’, although ‘Bitter Sea’ or ‘Bitter River’ are equally possible. In eight directions, beyond that water, lie the nagûs. In the first millennium BC this word has a very practical meaning, used of regions or districts that are politically or geographically definable and literally within normal reach. In the mappa mundi, however, the meaning is quite different. These eight nagûs are giant mountains beyond the rim of the world which are unimaginably remote. Although necessarily depicted as triangles they must be understood as mountains whose tips would gradually appear above the horizon as they were approached across the Great Ocean.

  In placing the mountainous nagûs in this position the cosmologists were answering with simplicity an unanswerable question: what lies beyond the horizon? It is rational to assume that there would eventually always be water, for all land known to man is fringed with water, but once across the marratu, what then? According to this system the world is hedged around by eight immense and unreachable mountains, which enclose the world like a fortress. Beyond that was the sky, or nothing, however you liked to look at it.

  This geographical actuality is explicit in the tag at the end of the document, which refers to the Four Quarters of the World as the stage on which the eight-fold triangle descriptions play out. This grand expression, in Sumerian or Babylonian, had been favoured by the kings of Mesopotamia to express the breathtaking reach of their kingdoms since time immemorial. The understanding of the map in its original incarnation therefore is that all outlying geography is situated on the flat; travel outwards across the ocean ring and there the traveller will find these remote mountain land masses waiting with their curious occupants or larger-than-life features. On the other hand the triangles that ring the circular world could also be conceived to point up into the heavens, so that the map, drawn on the flat, represents a world like an eight-pointed crown.