PART FOUR
The emergence of cities and states in different parts of the world had many consequences, among them the appearance of the world’s first written literature and the development of scientific and mathematical knowledge. These early cities and states did not exist in isolation, but were connected through extensive trade networks by road and sea. The majority of the world’s population nevertheless still lived in scattered communities, but these people created many sophisticated objects, notably of materials such as bronze and gold which have often survived. Many of these objects were clearly made as demonstrations of power, designed to impress subjects, visitors and possibly posterity.
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Clay writing tablet from Nineveh (near Mosul), northern Iraq
700–600 BC
The biblical story of Noah, his ark and the Great Flood has become so much part of our language that any child in Britain can tell you that the animals went in two by two. But the story of a Great Flood is one that goes back far beyond the Bible to many other societies. Which leads to a big question: we know about the Flood now because somebody long ago wrote the story down – but when did the very idea of writing down a story begin?
Locals from Bloomsbury often drop in to the British Museum. Just over 140 years ago, one of those locals, a regular lunchtime visitor, was a man called George Smith. He was an apprentice to a printing firm not far from the Museum, and he had become fascinated by the collection of ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets. He became so engrossed by these that he taught himself to read the wedge-shaped, cuneiform script in which they were written, and in due course he became one of the leading cuneiform scholars of his day. In 1872 Smith studied a particular tablet from Nineveh (in modern Iraq), and that’s what I want to look at now.
The library where we keep the clay tablets from Mesopotamia – there are about 130,000 of them – is a room filled with shelves from floor to ceiling, with a narrow wooden tray on each shelf with up to a dozen clay tablets in it – most of them fragments. The piece that in 1872 particularly interested George Smith is about 15 centimetres (just under 6 inches) high and made of dark brown clay, and it’s covered with densely written text organized into two close columns. From a distance, it looks a bit like the small-ads column of an old-fashioned newspaper. It would originally have been rectangular, but sections have broken off in the past. But this fragment, once George Smith had grasped what it actually was, was going to shake the foundations of one of the great stories of the Old Testament, and raise big questions about the role of scripture and its relationship to truth.
Our tablet is about a flood – about a man who is told by his god to build a boat and to load it with his family and animals, because a deluge is about to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth. The tale on the tablet was startlingly familiar to George Smith because, as he read and deciphered, it became clear that what he had in front of him was an ancient myth that paralleled and – most importantly – predated the story of Noah and his ark. Just to remind you, here are a few snippets of the Noah story from the Bible (Genesis 6:14–7:4):
Make thee an ark … and of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring unto the ark … I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
And here’s a snippet of what George Smith read on the clay tablet:
demolish the house, and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn property, save life. Take on board all living things’ seed! The boat you will build, her dimensions all shall be equal: her length and breadth shall be the same. Cover her with a roof, like the ocean below, and he will send you a rain of plenty.
That a Hebrew biblical story should already have been told on a Mesopotamian clay tablet was an astounding discovery – and Smith knew it, as a contemporary account tells us:
Smith took the tablet and began to read over the lines which the conservator who had cleaned the tablet had brought to light; and when he saw that they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there, he said, ‘I am the first man to read that after 2,000 years of oblivion.’ Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!
This really was a discovery worth taking your clothes off for. The tablet, now universally known as the Flood Tablet, had been written down in what is now Iraq in the seventh century BC, roughly 400 years before the oldest surviving version of the Bible narrative. Was it thinkable that the Bible narrative, far from being a specially privileged revelation, was merely part of a common stock of legend that was shared by the whole Middle East?
It was one of the great moments in the nineteenth century’s radical rewriting of world history. George Smith published the tablet only twelve years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. And, in doing so, he opened a religious Pandora’s box. Professor David Damrosch, from Columbia University, gauges the Flood Tablet’s seismic impact:
People in the 1870s were obsessed by biblical history, and there was a great deal of controversy as to the truth of the biblical narratives. So it created a sensation when George Smith found this ancient version of the Flood story, clearly much older than the biblical version. Prime Minister Gladstone came to hear his lecture describing his new translation, and it was reported in front-page articles around the globe, including one in the New York Times in which they already noted that the tablet could be read in two quite different ways – does this prove the Bible is true, or show it’s all legendary? And Smith’s discovery gave further ammunition to both sides in the debate as to the truth of biblical history, debates over Darwin, evolution and geology.
What does it do to your perception of a religious text when you discover that it comes from an older society, with a very different set of beliefs? I asked the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks:
Clearly there is a core event behind both narratives, which was a great flood, part of the folk memory of all the peoples of that area. What the ancient texts that tell flood stories do is talk essentially of the great forces of nature being controlled by deities who don’t like human beings very much, and for whom ‘might makes right’. Now the Bible comes along and retells the story, but does so in a unique way – God brings the flood because the world was filled with violence, and the result is that the story becomes moralized, and that is part of the Bible’s programme. This is a radical leap from polytheism to monotheism – to a world in which people worshipped power, to the Bible’s insistence that power must be just and sometimes compassionate, and from a world in which there are many forces, many gods, fighting with one another, to this world in which the whole universe is the result of a single rational creative will. So the more we understand what the Bible is arguing against, the deeper we understand the Bible.
But the Flood Tablet was important not just for the history of religion; it is also a key document in the history of literature. Smith’s tablet comes from the seventh century BC, but we now know that other versions of the Flood story had originally been written down a thousand years before that. It was only later that the Flood story was woven by storytellers into the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great epic poem of world literature. Gilgamesh is a hero who sets off on a grand quest for immortality and self-knowledge. He confronts demons and monsters, he survives all kinds of perils, and, eventually, like all subsequent epic heroes, he has to confront the greatest challenge of them all: his own nature and his own mortality. Smith’s tablet is just the eleventh chapter of the story. The Epic of Gilgamesh has all the elements of a cracking good tale, but it’s also a turning-point in the story of writing.
Writing in the Middle East had begun as little more than bean-counting – created essentially for bureaucrats to keep records. It had been used above all for the practical tasks of the state. Stories, on the other hand, were usually told or sung, and they were learnt by heart. But gradually, around 4,000 years ago, stories like that of Gilgamesh began to be written down. Insights into the hero’s hopes and fears could now be shaped, refined and fixed – an author could be sure that his particular vision of the narrative and his personal understanding of the tale would be transmitted directly, and not constantly reshaped by other storytellers. Writing moves authorship from the community to the individual. Hardly less important, a written text can be translated, and so one particular form of a story could now pass easily into many languages. Literature written down like this can become world literature. David Damrosch puts it in perspective:
Gilgamesh is now very commonly assigned as a very first work in literature courses, and it shows a kind of early globalization. It’s the first work of world literature that circulates widely around the ancient world. The great thing about looking at Gilgamesh today is that we see that, if we go back far enough, there’s no clash of civilizations between the Middle East and the West. We find in Gilgamesh the origins of a common culture – its offshoots go off into Homer, the 1001 Nights, and the Bible – so it is really a sort of common thread in our global culture.
The fine, small cuneiform writing of the Flood Tablet was pressed into damp clay
With the Epic of Gilgamesh, represented here by Smith’s Flood Tablet, writing moved from being a means of recording facts to a means of investigating ideas. It changed its nature. And it has changed ‘our’ nature: for literature like Gilgamesh allows us not just to explore our own thoughts but to inhabit the thought worlds of others. That, of course, is also the point of the British Museum, and indeed of the objects that make up this thread of human history that I’m attempting to trace: they offer us the chance of other existences.