The Ark Before Noah
Page 30
I cannot help but wonder if the netherworld depicted in the famous myth entitled the Descent of Ishtar, an ultra-depressing limbo, is not where the spirits all waited until, so to speak, there was a summons:
To the gloomy house, seat of the netherworld,
To the house which none leaves who enters,
To the road whose journey has no return,
To the house whose entrances are bereft of light,
Where dust is their sustenance and clay their food.
They see no light but dwell in darkness,
They are clothed like birds in wings for garments,
And dust has gathered on the door and bolt.
The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld: 4–11
Admittedly the poem tells us that no one can get out and there is certainly a very strict and overbearing gatekeeper always there, but perhaps the system was primarily organised to keep the great masses there until they were called for, to be let out one by one. Gates, after all, work in two directions.
Mesopotamian rituals concerned with the dead and indeed all texts to do with ghosts make it clear that they are supposed to stay quiet and peaceful in the Netherworld, but it is never explained what they are supposed to be doing there or what they are waiting for. There was no moral assessment of a person’s life ahead of them, no punishment or reward, and certainly no choice between a heaven and a hell; the Mesopotamians never had that set of problems. But if there were no destination beyond the waiting, what were they waiting for, if not for the call to step back on the great cycle of birth and death, as and when there was a vacancy?
Ishtar, trying to get in to look for her dead lover, is refused entry by this gatekeeper so she shouts at him:
“Gatekeeper! Open your gate for me!
Open your gate that I may enter!
If you will not open the gate that I may enter,
I will break down the frame, I will topple the doors.
I will raise up the dead to devour the living,
The dead shall outnumber the living!”
The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld: 14–20
Normally one pictures this outcome as a sort of Hollywood zombie movie, but I wonder whether the real fear was not that if all the sojourners in the Land-of-No-Return were let out at once the delicate, calibrated balance between life and death would be irredeemably destroyed.
The one-third and two-third divine component of the spirit and the demon is reminiscent of the description of the heroic Gilgamesh and his personal genesis:
Gilgamesh was his name from the day he was born
Two-thirds of him a god but a third of him human.
Gilgamesh I: 47–48
Gilgamesh = one-third humanity + two-thirds male divinity
While king lists are uncertain about the parentage of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, the Old Babylonian version of his story gives his mother as the goddess Ninsun, while his father is sometimes recorded as Lugalbanda, a mortal who in time had to be elevated to divinity as Ninsun’s husband. The divine-to-mortal balance of Gilgamesh’s make-up is thus out of sync with mythological tradition; it is perhaps because he was alive and not dead that the divine element is male (ilu not ištaru). The tripartite division in Gilgamesh’s case now makes sense if it is reckoned, as in the Atrahasis story, that he, too, is composed of flesh, blood and spirit, but it is back to front in that the god contributes flesh and blood and man the spirit. At any rate this hybrid quality in Gilgamesh was obviously instantly apparent – almost like a smell – to beings who were themselves a mixture, such as the scorpion-folk (half-man, half-scorpion) on duty at Mount Māšu, the mountain of sunrise:
There were scorpion-men guarding the gate,
Whose terror was dread and glance was death,
Whose radiance was terrifying, enveloping the uplands –
At both sunrise and sunset they guard the sun –
Gilgamesh saw them and his face grew dark with fear and dread,
He collected his wits and drew near their presence.
The scorpion-man called to his female:
“He who has come to us, flesh of the gods is his body.”
The scorpion-man’s female answered him:
“Two-thirds of him are god but a third of him is human.”
Gilgamesh IX: 42–51
One final point concerns the name of the boatman Ur-Shanabi, who ferried Gilgamesh across the cosmic ocean at the border of the world to meet Utnapishti, the Babylonian Noah. Ancient Babylonian scholars analysed this name as Man-of-God-Ea, because ur in Sumerian means ‘man,’ and shanabi is ‘40,’ which is a mystic god number that can be used to write Ea’s name. On the other hand shanabi also means ‘two-thirds,’ so the boatman’s name could be equally well be understood as Two-Thirds-Man. Perhaps he too was a ‘mixed-up’ sort of chap, but it wouldn’t do to argue with the heads of the Babylon Academy too often.
Appendix 2
Investigating the Text of Gilgamesh XI
1. The Shape
The argument that Utnapishti’s Ark was originally a round coracle like that described in the Ark Tablet raises three problems that need to be addressed:
Problem (a):
How does a round boat turn into a square one?
Answer:
The Ark Tablet gives us explicitly the height of the sides of the boat, and this makes perfect sense of the boat’s proportions:
9 lū 1 NINDAN igārātuša
And let be one nindan (high) her sides.
Atrahasis Vocabulary Box:
Akkadian lū, ‘let be’.
Sumerian NINDAN = Akkadian nindānu, ‘nindan measure’.
Akkadian igāru, pl. igārātu, ‘wall’.
Utnapishti’s description of the finished sides of his boat in Gilgamesh XI runs over two lines and repeats the measurement:
58 10 NINDAN.TA.ÀM šaqqā igārātuša
Ten nindan each stood high her sides,
59 10 NINDAN.TA.ÀM
Ten nindan each.
Gilgamesh Vocabulary Box:
Akkadian šaqû, ‘to be high’.
Sumerian NINDAN = Akkadian nindānu, ‘nindan measure’.
Akkadian igāru, pl. igārātu, ‘wall’.
TA.ÀM just means ‘each’.
This repetition of ‘ten nindan each’, acceptable enough in a Romantic poem, reads very awkwardly in Akkadian. It could just be an error, for this can easily happen when an editor is amalgamating separate written sources to produce one text. More probably, though, the repetition of ‘ten nindan each’ was introduced by some Gilgamesh redactor to make sense of the text in his hands, reasoning that if length and breadth were identical, as it says in line 30, he should give each its height. Losing sight of the circle at this point gave the old description – ‘her breadth and length should be the same’ – which originally reinforced the idea of the circular plan – a wholly different meaning, which led to the permanent misunderstanding in Gilgamesh XI that Utnapishti built himself a square ark. The original, simple round vessel, subjected to subsequent textual elaboration, thus jelled into an implausible cube, and the Assyrian text, vivid and meaningful enough in itself, left Utnapishti with a waterborne life capsule that was utterly impractical. The Ark whose vital statistics are quoted in Gilgamesh XI: 61–3 has provoked a good deal of discussion ever afterwards but it is, from a historical point of view, a phantom.
Problem (b):
How can the wall height in Gilgamesh XI be ten times higher (ten nindan = sixty metres) than those in the parent text tradition (one nindan = 6 metres)?
Answer:
The crucial point is that the measure of one nindan for the wall-height in the Ark Tablet results, as we shall see, in a coracle of normal proportions, so this has to be taken very seriously. In cuneiform writing, 10 is represented by a single diagonal cuneiform wedge and 1 by a single upright. The 10 now found in the Gilgamesh XI tablets could either be an ancient misreading of the original number ‘1’ or could reflect a deliberate ‘
upgrading’ of the numeral because of the idea that everything about the Ark was going to be big.
Problem (c):
Why, in the Gilgamesh story, does Utnapishti only draw up a work-plan after five days of hard labour when the basic shell of the craft is already finished?
Answer:
The explanation again comes from comparing the received text with the Ark Tablet version. The out-of-place verbal form in Gilgamesh line 60, ‘I drew up her design’, which has always been interpreted as a verb in the past tense, should really be understood as the imperative, ‘draw up her design!’ as Ea commands Atra-hasīs in Ark Tablet line 6. (The cuneiform spelling makes these two similar-sounding verbal forms confusable.) Originally this line belonged right after the contents of Gilgamesh line 31, when the hero was receiving his instructions, in parallel with the Ark Tablet.
2. The Interior
These are the Akkadian verbs for constructing the five-star floating hotel as the late poet described it:
urtaggibši ana 6-šu, ‘I gave her six decks’ (verb: ruggubu)
aptarassu ana 7-šu, ‘I divided her into seven parts’ (verb: parāsu)
qerbīssu aptaras ana 9-šu, ‘I divided her interior into nine’ (verb: parāsu)
Gilgamesh XI: 61–3
Proposition: It seems to me that these three lines derive ultimately from the very ‘fingers of bitumen’ passage that is missing in Gilgamesh, signifying a gross misinterpretation of the underlying text.
Defence: The verb ruggubu (from the root RGB), ‘to roof’, in the form urtaggibši occurs only in one passage, Gilgamesh XI according to the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. There are admittedly not many contexts in life where deck-providing might be a central issue, and it is specious to argue that ‘to roof’ is not the same as ‘to provide with decks’, since the effect is the same. However, there is the very similar-sounding verb rakābu, rukkubu, šurkubu (root RKB) in the Old Babylonian account:
I caused the kilns to be loaded (uštarkib) with 28,800 (sūtu) of bitumen into my kilns …
I ordered the kilns to be loaded (uštarkib) with fresh bitumen … in equal measure …
Ark Tablet: 21 and 25
Perhaps the later tablet-editors found the Old Babylonian verb uštarkib, ‘I caused (the kilns) to be loaded’, confusing when not applied to vehicles or boats, as it almost always is, and as I certainly first interpreted it when struggling to understand those lines in the Ark Tablet. Perhaps, too, in an effort to make sense of an unclear passage, they associated the underlying root rkb with the noun rugbu, ‘loft’ or ‘upper room’, and came up with a derivative verb – as one can in Semitic languages – ruggubu, meaning ‘to fit with rugbus’. It is as if, in English, one were to say ‘deckify’ or ‘loftisise’; terms not in the dictionary but transparent in meaning.
Let us continue a little further in this vein. In Gilgamesh, the verb parāsu appears twice in the form aptaras, ‘I divided’, once with reference to the Utnapishti boat’s interior. This is an echo of the verb aprus, ‘I divided’, in the Ark Tablet, where the distinction between exterior and interior was the main point:
I apportioned (aprus) one finger of bitumen for her outsides.
I apportioned (aprus) one finger of bitumen for her interior.
Ark Tablet: 18–19
Careless recycling of an Old Babylonian text like the Ark Tablet could also explain the oddity that feminine suffixes for the boat are not given in Gilgamesh: 61–3, although they do appear correctly from line 64 onwards.
I suspect, too, that the Old Babylonian signs ŠU.ŠI standing for ‘finger’ in Ark Tablet 18–20, which include the cabins, were later interpreted as šūši, 60, and that the three 60s of the original became disassociated from bitumen-thicknesses. Instead they were thought to have something to do with the decks and chambers and evolved by distinct numerological activity and cosmological speculation into the sequence 6, 7 and 9, undoubtedly compounded by the conviction that the vessel itself was a giant, straight-sided cube. A sort of Babylonian midrashic development, subtle and full of allusion, then played long on Utnapishti’s over-inflated time-capsule, the simple 1,000-year old text subjected to theological-cum-philosophical interpretation and symbolical elaboration, as has been discussed at length in George 2003, Vol. 1: 512–13. (The theoretical Assyriological idea advocated by several scholars that Utnapishti’s Ark was connected with the multi-layered ziggurat temple at Babylon is rendered less innovative by the fact that Gilgamesh XI: 158 actually refers to the Ark, once landed on the mountain, as the ziggurat!)
The growing number of floors and subdivisions is also a practical response, for not all species were equally compatible, and humans might want separate quarters. For these reasons, one can understand how the Ark blossomed into a five-star skyscraper hotel with certain cosmic resonances. My suspicion, however, is that the Gilgamesh Ark as it came to be launched from Nineveh is primarily the consequence of textual misunderstanding compounded by the insertion of narrative without care as to overall meaning coupled with interventive editing. I doubt that many people who knew or heard the story ever believed for a moment that the Ark was really a perfect cube.
Appendix 3
Building the Ark – Technical Report (with Mark Wilson)
To safeguard the world’s largest boat
They smoothed on a bitumen coat
They brought in the oracle
Who said, of their coracle,
‘Though dry I doubt it will float.’
C. M. Patience
Atra-hasīs’s Ark
The following notes on the text of the Ark Tablet look at each building section in turn, supporting what can be gleaned from the tablet and interpolating from construction accounts of other similar traditional vessels. For clarity, the calculations involved are carried out in Babylonian units. We take ‘one finger’ as our basic unit of length, after the Babylonian ubānu ‘finger’ measure which is used in the Ark Tablet. One Babylonian finger is approximately 12/3 cm and it is usual to take it as exactly that for ease of calculation.
MEASURES
Length:
1 ubānu = 1 finger ≡ 1.666 cm
1 ammatu (cubit) = 30 fingers
1 nindanu = 12 ammatu = 360 fingers
Area:
1 ikû = 100 (= 10 × 10) nindanu2 = 12,960,000 fingers2 = 3,600 m2
Volume:
1 qa = 216 (= 6 × 6 × 6) fingers3 = 1 litre
10 qa = 1 sūtu = 2,160 fingers3
1 gur = 300 qa = 64,800 fingers3
1 šar = 3,600 (sūtu) = 7,776,000 fingers3
‘Floor area’ is qaqqaru, ‘ground’, which also has the more specific meaning ‘surface’, or ‘area’. Here it means the floor of the boat, as we are told in the technical dictionary:
Sumerian giš-ki-má = Babylonian qaq-qar eleppi (GIŠ-MÁ), ‘wooden floor of a boat’
crib: giš = īṣu, ‘wood’; ki = qaqqaru, ground’; má = eleppu, ‘boat’
1. OVERALL DESIGN AND SIZE
The fundamental facts regarding the Ark are given in lines 6–9. The Ark has a circular design, and is to be built inside a circle drawn out on the ground. We are told that its base area is one ikû, and that its walls are one nindan high. That is (using Area = π × Radius2), its diameter is 67.7 metres, its walls six metres tall. As it is essentially a giant coracle, its construction methods have been compared with those of the traditional Iraqi coracle, or guffa, as reported by Hornell.
This record-breaking guffa differs from its conventional relatives in several ways. Chief among these is the existence of a roof, obviously indispensable. Although the roof is not explicitly mentioned in the construction details, we are assured of its final presence by the fact that we are told that Atra-hasīs goes on to it to pray later on in the tablet.
2. MATERIALS AND THEIR QUANTITIES FOR THE HULL
Lines 10–12 give the materials for the hull of the boat, and these are described as the ‘ropes and rushes of a boat’.
The ropes: kannu
This word, kannu ‘A’, means a fetter, band, rope, belt or even a wisp of straw. It can be tough enough to restrain a runaway slave or make a wrestler’s belt, and slim enough to be a hair band. The verbal root from which it derives, kanānu, means ‘to twist’, or ‘to coil’, which is natural for a word meaning ‘rope’.
The rushes: ašlu
There are two identical-looking words pronounced ašlu. ‘A’ means ‘rope’, ‘tow rope’, ‘surveyor’s measuring rope’; ‘B’ means a kind of rush which can be used to make matting for furniture but also, in narrow quantities, as a thread or twine. This is the ašlu we want. It is written with a complex cuneiform sign that also serves for other types of rush, and is thus distinct from ašlu A, which is a true rope.
The structure is thus made totally of plaited palm-fibre rope and rushes, whose intrinsic twisting and interlacing immediately suggests the process of basket weaving, and from this we conclude the form to be a giant coiled rope basket. That this is produced before any internal framework is consistent with Hornell’s account of how a traditional Iraqi guffa is manufactured.
As well as the material for the basket – palm fibre – we are also told its required volume. This rope volume is 4 šar (4 × 3,600) + 30 = 14,430 ‘units’ of material to make the basket alone.