What can we deduce further? Even formally speaking, the Ark Tablet is unusual for a literary document; it looks more like a letter or business record. Literature usually comes larger, with more than one column of writing per side and more text. As literary compositions evolved, the component tablets became fixed in content, so that eventually everyone knew with Gilgamesh I how many lines there should be, and how much of the story it covered. With a large composition, tablets recorded as a catchline the first line of the subsequent tablet, assuring the reader of what came next. Tablet 1, line 1, also served as the name for the whole composition, so the Epic of Gilgamesh was known to librarians as He Who Saw the Deep.
The Ark Tablet, in comparison, is small, with one column of text per side, and its total of sixty lines of writing completely fill both obverse and reverse. This is no complete chapter from within a conventional tablet sequence but a very specific and unusual kind of extract, so it is important to try and establish where the underlying full narrative that must lie behind this fits within the tradition.
The tablet begins very abruptly with the celebrated ‘Wall, wall! Reed fence, reed fence!’ speech (Old Babylonian Atrahasis III, col. I 21–2, and Gilgamesh XI: 21–2). Behind it probably stands a ‘Tablet no. III’ of some edition of the full Atrahasis story.
(Old Babylonian Schøyen in Chapter 5 has four columns of text and its content crosses over from Old Babylonian Atrahasis Tablet II to III, so it represents a really different structure. From its shape there might have been originally thirty lines per column, giving a rough line total of 120 lines. From several standpoints the Schϕyen tablet is maybe a century or more older than the most well-known Sippar edition of Old Babylonian Atrahasis and can be regarded as the oldest version of the story we have had. For the same reasons it is probably also slightly older than the Ark Tablet, but while sign shapes, spelling and other details rule out their being contemporaneous or even the work of a single scribe, it is quite likely that the Ark Tablet represents the same Old Babylonian version of the Atra-hasīs story.)
The story of Atra-hasīs, the Ark and the Flood is, by any criteria, literature. It is mythological in nature and eventually epic in proportion, but certainly literature. From this standpoint the detailed practical boat-building data embedded in Atra-hasīs’s Ark Tablet proclamations also comes as a surprise, all the more so given that the technical and practical specifications that we have disentangled in Chapter 8 are not arbitrary or ‘mythological’ but practical and realistic.
What are technical specs doing in the middle of an exciting story? For most listeners, What was going to happen next? was surely more pressing for the listener than do-it-yourself waterproofing!
Two factors could have contributed to the inclusion of the very technical boat-building material.
The primary factor could well be audience demand. Recounting the Atrahasis story to fisher- or river-folk who built and used boats for their livelihood is likely to have provoked questions from listeners such as, What did the boat look like? How big was it? Where did all the animals sleep? This seems to me inevitable, and would demand that any good storyteller had answers ready; a giant coracle would be best because they never sink, everybody would have been in one, animals often rode in them, and each listener could easily imagine ‘the biggest coracle you ever saw’, portrayed with outstretched arms and gaping eyes. There was no need for dimensions or detail: The world’s biggest coracle which would need buckets and buckets of bitumen … The shape, size and interior construction of the vessel could be developed and exaggerated at will, depending on the audience.
Eventually, though, a second phase is reached, when a good deal more ‘hard’ information than is strictly needed for telling a good story is incorporated. How did this come about? Such material can only derive from classroom investigation.
It is of the deepest significance that the quoted ‘specs’ in this literary document are not only realistic but actually mathematically accurate. Transposed into a modern technical drawing as a model for a building programme the vessel that emerges is lifelike, in proportion to a real coracle, and capable of construction. Such a state of affairs cannot for a moment be accidental. If a storyteller were to improvise figures for the world’s largest boat off the top of his head he would take recourse to fairytale measurements, as we have seen, like ‘a hundred double-miles’ or ‘ten thousand leagues’. The input of ‘exact’ coracle-building and waterproofing data into the story not only inevitably reflects a schoolroom background, but of itself implies that the same issues had been sensibly worked out in the classroom.
Measurement of a practical nature – the number of bricks in a wall, the quantity of barley to feed a gang of workmen – was the bread and butter of the scribal schools once apprentices had learned to read and write to a basic level. It is natural, moreover, that a teacher, attempting to interest inattentive schoolboys in dry mensuration, should light on one novelty or another to secure their attention. Probably it was often necessary. In one contemporary school composition the boys are set to recite Sumerian verbal paradigms, using as a model the verb ‘to fart’, and it is not hard to imagine that a teacher who opened his lesson with the announcement that Today we are going to learn ‘to fart’ would certainly have commanded full attention for the morning. So we might hear a teacher remark one morning: Given that the Ark – as every Babylonian knew since the cradle – was the world’s largest coracle, if it measured such-and-such a size across and its walls were of such-and-such height to accommodate all the animals, let us ask ourselves, What was its surface area? How many miles of ropes would you need to build it? How much bitumen would you need to waterproof its surfaces? All much more fun to work out than prosaic equivalents about canal dykes and mountains of cereal.
It is here that the great ŠÁR or ‘3,600’ measurements are so extraordinary, because, as was freely conceded earlier, any cuneiformist encountering such numerals in a literary context would immediately class them as huge round numbers and nothing more, whereas in the Ark Tablet each such numeral is to be taken absolutely at face value. Very large numbers written in bunched-up compounds of ŠÁR signs bring to mind the similar-looking numbers for the giant regnal years before the Flood recorded in the Sumerian King List. It is not unlikely that advanced Old Babylonian pupils will have looked at this text with their teacher and discussed such huge numerals, while at the same time it could easily be understood that they might think that Atra-hasīs, being an antediluvian himself, would naturally use antediluvian numbers of this kind in his own calculations. It is surely for this reason that they are used in the Ark Tablet to communicate the great measurements needed.
From the school mathematical tablet illustrated on this page we can see that calculation of the area of circles or circles within squares was part of a well-ordered investigation of geometrical matters. We can assume, therefore, that whoever contributed this data to the flow of the Atrahasis story must have been put through this particular wringer himself, and that the circle-within-a-square image that underlies the passage in the story reflects his own classroom experience.
Despite the frequency with which boats and bitumen are mentioned in cuneiform texts there is no other text that even alludes to, let alone details, the way in which bitumen had to be applied to a completed boat. Such matters were second nature in the riverside boatyards where coracles were continuously in production and everybody knew inside out what to do, but the calculation of quantities here, crucially, is based on real facts.
Some specific need, or burst of inventiveness, must have led to the incorporation of hard data within this literature. Given our present knowledge, we cannot know whether it was taken up within Atrahasis in general, or whether a very human reluctance to cope with figures might not have meant that, for non-boatmen, these hard-won details were really otiose: the narrative of Gilgamesh XI at any rate was certainly happy to reduce them to a minimum.
From this standpoint the contrasting lack of detail about the animals t
hat were supposed to be rescued is noticeable. In a different milieu one might have expected a full list, from cockroaches to camels, to assure listening farmers that no species was left behind. Perhaps we are to assume that if anyone called out Which animals do you mean? or What about all the different kinds of snakes? a good storyteller would have thought that through too and have the answers up their sleeve.
(a) Bunched-up šār signs in Ark Tablet line 12. (b) More in Ark Tablet line 21. (c) The immaculate calligraphy of the šār signs in the Weld–Blundell copy of the Sumerian King List.
(picture acknowledgement 13.1)
14
Conclusions: Stories and Shapes
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.
John Masefield
I think it is only fair to offer anyone who has actually been reading this book a summary in one place of the conclusions I have reached about the transmission of the Flood Story and the evolving forms of the Ark as a result of these various investigations.
First, as has been widely accepted, the iconic story of the Flood, Noah and the Ark as we know it today certainly originated in the landscape of ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. In a river-dependent land where flooding was a reality and disastrous destruction always remembered, the story was all too meaningful. Life, always at the mercy of the gods, surviving against all odds by means of a single vessel whose crew, human and animal, withstood the cataclysm to repopulate the world. The story in its earliest form must go back, far beyond any writing, into the very distant past, rooted in their circumstances and integral to their very basic existence.
In Mesopotamian terms, the remote world as it existed before the Flood was visualised as the unchanging landscape of the southern Iraqi marshes, where houses and boats were made of reed, and where, to build a lifeboat, the one could easily be recycled as the other. Here, as I see it, the boat type for the early story was naturally long and narrow, high in prow and stern, efficient in movement along the shallow waterways. Larger boats with that basic ‘almond’ shape were known in Sumerian as a magur; the huge version needed in flood circumstances had to be a super magurgur.
In the written accounts from the early second millennium BC we encounter two traditions about the shape of the Ark, which sprang from a common ancestor. At Nippur in southern Iraq the original reed magurgur tradition persisted unquestioned. Elsewhere, however, we see, starting with the clear description provided by the Ark Tablet, that the Ark was a much more practical and appropriate kind of boat, the round coracle. Coracles were not used in the marshes, but were very common on the heartland rivers, especially the Euphrates, as a water taxi that could transport people, livestock and materials from one side to the other with no fear of sinking. Boats of this kind were not made from reed but from coiled palm-rope, being effectively a great basket waterproofed all over. Coracles came in all manner of sizes; the one to do the job for Atra-hasīs would break all records.
I argue, therefore, that the traditional understanding of the boat plan changed from magur (long and thin) to coracle (big and round). Evidence is not plentiful; from the second millennium BC we only have two other cuneiform descriptions of the Ark beyond that in the Ark Tablet, but both of these – as we can now see – thought of the boat as round, and I see this process as representing an old-fashioned prototype superseded by modern improvement.
Transmission in the early second millennium BC was as much oral as written; in the hands of front-line performers or narrators, such a change in ark model would be natural: it produced better sense and a better story for their listeners. That this change from the ancient idea did come about does not surprise me at all; one relevant factor is that itinerant storytellers would probably usually work with riverside populations for whom the Ark had to be a credible and functional vessel, and a coracle would be just the job, as everyone knew.
Atra-hasīs’s round Ark had a base area of 3,600 m2 and one deck.
The only other description of a cuneiform ark available to us is the one in the classical Gilgamesh story. Here we are presented with an ark that embodies two important innovations: one, it is neither an almond-magur nor a round coracle but a cube with walls of equal length and height; two, this is an ark that to the practical Mesopotamian mind would never work adrift on the bosom of the floodwaters.
As already alluded to, and laid out below in Appendix 2, it is possible to understand how the underlying Old Babylonian coracle of circular plan in which ‘length’ and ‘breadth’ were equal could be interpreted in Late Assyrian Gilgamesh as a square plan, and how the Old Babylonian single deck could later develop into six decks, themselves divided into seven parts, sub-divided into nine. This double process is partly due to textual misunderstanding or adjustment, and partly to a kind of midrashic enthusiasm that had Utnapishti’s own iconic vessel blossom into something virtually unrecognisable, magnificent-sounding and practically dysfunctional. Nevertheless, the textual clues show that the narrative behind Utnapishti’s Ark in Gilgamesh certainly derived from the traditional Old Babylonian round coracle.
The next stage of the Flood and Ark story comes from the Book of Genesis. Comparison of the Hebrew text with Gilgamesh XI highlights such a close and multi-point relationship between the accounts that the dependence of one upon the other is unavoidable. I have thus maintained in this book what has often been proposed before: that the Hebrew text derives from and is predicated upon a cuneiform flood story forerunner or forerunners, but at the same time I have contributed the first explanation of the mechanisms that enabled that borrowing. In my view the Judaeans’ need for their own written history led them to incorporate certain Babylonian stories of early times for which their own traditions were inadequate. These stories had become accessible through the induction of their youthful intelligentsia into cuneiform writing and literature, whereby they encountered and read these stories in the original, as part of the curriculum. The process of literary adoption by the Judaeans imbued already-striking narratives with a fresh and independent moral quality, so that the Great Ages of Man, the Baby in the Coracle and the Story of the Flood experienced a new lease of life far beyond the moment that saw the final extinction of the venerable parent cuneiform traditions.
As we have seen, internal evidence has long been taken to reflect different strands of Hebrew within the biblical text as being the work of authors such as ‘J’ and ‘P’, and I have argued that differences between them with regard to the Flood Story are to be explained by distinct traditions within the cuneiform sources from which they are drawn, as in the case of the numbers of animals and birds to be taken on board. Not to be forgotten is one huge new component in this link: the Ark Tablet’s revelation that the animals went on board two by two, previously unknown in any cuneiform version and therefore considered to be an innovation in Genesis.
Comparison of Noah’s Ark with that of Utnapishti introduces the fourth shape, for Noah’s famous Ark is an oblong, coffin-shaped vessel of wood. When arguing for the close dependence of the Genesis Flood Story on the cuneiform heritage the contrast between Utnapishti’s cubic Ark (which is all we have for the first millennium BC), and Noah’s oblong Ark has previously been problematical and unexplained. Real boats of the Noah kind (described and photographed in the nineteenth century) are also numbered among the traditional river craft of the Land Between the Rivers, and evidence has been offered to identify such oblong craft with the Babylonian boat name ṭubbû, which surfaces, reshaped as Hebrew, in the Ark name tēvāh, assuming that the same kind of boat is meant by both. In terms of transmission we postulate that a practical oblong ṭubbû craft had already found its way into some cuneiform Flood Story (after the Utnapishti-type boat had been contemplated in some scribal circles and found implausible), and that it was this tradition which passed into Hebrew.
Since the whole description of Noah’s oblong Ark comes from Hebrew source J we cannot know whether the tradition about the shape in source P contained the same idea or something different. This would mean that the ṭubbû-barge was already a valid Babylonian tradition embedded in some version of the cuneiform Flood Story yet to be discovered and also that it was the one favoured by source J.
Most significant here is the fact that the area of the ground plan remained virtually unchanged despite the shifts in shape:
1. Atra-hasīs’s round coracle: 14,400 cubits2 (1 ikû).
2. Utnapishti’s cube: 14,400 cubits2 (120 cubits × 120 cubits = 1 ikû)
3. Noah’s Ark: 15,000 cubits2 (300 cubits by 50 cubits = 1.04 ikû).
The Utnapishti Ark, despite restructuring a circular plan as a square, retains the same ‘starting’ size of ground plan as originally communicated by Enki to Atra-hasīs, for this was no doubt constant in Old Babylonian texts, on one of which it drew. This shift of circle to square, at first reminiscent of an awkward peg in the hole and hard to dismiss, is after all not so drastic: given that the Old Babylonian ‘length’ and ‘breadth’ terms were disassociated from defining the original circle they led naturally to a square, while the identical ground area of 14,400 cubits2 was retained.
What is more remarkable – and assuredly no coincidence – is that the base area of Noah’s Ark is virtually identical to that inherited from cuneiform (within 4 per cent) at 15,000 cubits2, revealing it unmistakably as a reworking of the same original Babylonian idea, to construct on the same basis a boat of another shape altogether, one typical of practical, heavy-duty, riverine cargo barges.
In this light, the procession from circle to square and square to oblong within a single continuum, at first indigestible and incompatible, becomes explicable, and to my mind reinforces the linear descent from cuneiform into Hebrew, the tracing of which represents the core of the present work.
The Ark Before Noah Page 28