Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition

by L. W. King

(1) This illustrates the damage the Tigris itself is capable
of inflicting on the country. It may be added that Sir
William Willcocks proposes to control the Tigris floods by
an escape into the Tharthâr depression, a great salt pan at
the tail of Wadi Tharthâr, which lies 14 ft. below sea level
and is 200 ft. lower than the flood-level of the Tigris some
thirty-two miles away. The escape would leave the Tigris to
the S. of Sâmarra, the proposed Beled Barrage being built
below it and up-stream of "Nimrod's Dam". The Tharthâr
escape would drain into the Euphrates, and the latter's
Habbânîyah escape would receive any surplus water from the
Tigris, a second barrage being thrown across the Euphrates
up-stream of Fallûjah, where there is an outcrop of
limestone near the head of the Sakhlawîyah Canal. The
Tharthâr depression, besides disposing of the Tigris flood-
water, would thus probably feed the Euphrates; and a second
barrage on the Tigris, to be built at Kût, would supply
water to the Shatt el-Hai. When the country is freed from
danger of flood, the Baghdad Railway could be run through
the cultivated land instead of through the eastern desert;
see Willcocks, The Near East, Oct. 6, 1916 (Vol. XI, No.
283), p. 545 f.
(2) It was then that Sir William Willcocks designed the new
Hindîyah Barrage, which was completed in 1913. The Hindîyah
branch, to-day the main stream of the Euphrates, is the old
low-lying Pallacopas Canal, which branched westward above
Babylon and discharged its waters into the western marshes.
In antiquity the head of this branch had to be opened in
high floods and then closed again immediately after the
flood to keep the main stream full past Babylon, which
entailed the employment of an enormous number of men.
Alexander the Great's first work in Babylonia was cutting a
new head for the Pallacopas in solid ground, for hitherto it
had been in sandy soil; and it was while reclaiming the
marshes farther down-stream that he contracted the fever
that killed him.

From this brief sketch of progressive disaster during the later historical period, the inevitable effect of neglected silt and flood, it will be gathered that the two great rivers of Mesopotamia present a very strong contrast to the Nile. For during the same period of misgovernment and neglect in Egypt the Nile did not turn its valley and delta into a desert. On the Tigris and Euphrates, during ages when the earliest dwellers on their banks were struggling to make effective their first efforts at control, the waters must often have regained the upper hand. Under such conditions the story of a great flood in the past would not be likely to die out in the future; the tradition would tend to gather illustrative detail suggested by later experience. Our new text reveals the Deluge tradition in Mesopotamia at an early stage of its development, and incidentally shows us that there is no need to postulate for its origin any convulsion of nature or even a series of seismic shocks accompanied by cyclone in the Persian Gulf.

If this had been the only version of the story that had come down to us, we should hardly have regarded it as a record of world-wide catastrophe. It is true the gods' intention is to destroy mankind, but the scene throughout is laid in Southern Babylonia. After seven days' storm, the Sun comes out, and the vessel with the pious priest-king and his domestic animals on board grounds, apparently still in Babylonia, and not on any distant mountain, such as Mt. Nisir or the great mass of Ararat in Armenia. These are obviously details which tellers of the story have added as it passed down to later generations. When it was carried still farther afield, into the area of the Eastern Mediterranean, it was again adapted to local conditions. Thus Apollodorus makes Deucalion land upon Parnassus,(1) and the pseudo-Lucian relates how he founded the temple of Derketo at Hierapolis in Syria beside the hole in the earth which swallowed up the Flood.(2) To the Sumerians who first told the story, the great Flood appeared to have destroyed mankind, for Southern Babylonia was for them the world. Later peoples who heard it have fitted the story to their own geographical horizon, and in all good faith and by a purely logical process the mountain-tops are represented as submerged, and the ship, or ark, or chest, is made to come to ground on the highest peak known to the story-teller and his hearers. But in its early Sumerian form it is just a simple tradition of some great inundation, which overwhelmed the plain of Southern Babylonia and was peculiarly disastrous in its effects. And so its memory survived in the picture of Ziusudu's solitary coracle upon the face of the waters, which, seen through the mists of the Deluge tradition, has given us the Noah's ark of our nursery days.

(1) Hesiod is our earliest authority for the Deucalion Flood
story. For its probable Babylonian origin, cf. Farnell,
Greece and Babylon (1911), p. 184.
(2) De Syria dea, 12 f.

Thus the Babylonian, Hebrew, and Greek Deluge stories resolve themselves, not into a nature myth, but into an early legend, which has the basis of historical fact in the Euphrates Valley. And it is probable that we may explain after a similar fashion the occurrence of tales of a like character at least in some other parts of the world. Among races dwelling in low-lying or well-watered districts it would be surprising if we did not find independent stories of past floods from which few inhabitants of the land escaped. It is only in hilly countries such as Palestine, where for the great part of the year water is scarce and precious, that we are forced to deduce borrowing; and there is no doubt that both the Babylonian and the biblical stories have been responsible for some at any rate of the scattered tales. But there is no need to adopt the theory of a single source for all of them, whether in Babylonia or, still less, in Egypt.(1)

(1) This argument is taken from an article I published in
Professor Headlam's Church Quarterly Review, Jan., 1916,
pp. 280 ff., containing an account of Dr. Poebel's
discovery.

I should like to add, with regard to this reading of our new evidence, that I am very glad to know Sir James Frazer holds a very similar opinion. For, as you are doubtless all aware, Sir James is at present collecting Flood stories from all over the world, and is supplementing from a wider range the collections already made by Lenormant, Andree, Winternitz, and Gerland. When his work is complete it will be possible to conjecture with far greater confidence how particular traditions or groups of tradition arose, and to what extent transmission has taken place. Meanwhile, in his recent Huxley Memorial Lecture,(1) he has suggested a third possibility as to the way Deluge stories may have arisen.

(1) Sir J. G. Frazer, Ancient Stories of a Great Flood (the Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1916), Roy. Anthrop. Inst.,
1916.

Stated briefly, it is that a Deluge story may arise as a popular explanation of some striking natural feature in a country, although to the scientific eye the feature in question is due to causes other than catastrophic flood. And he worked out the suggestion in the case of the Greek traditions of a great deluge, associated with the names of Deucalion and Dardanus. Deucalion's deluge, in its later forms at any rate, is obviously coloured by Semitic tradition; but both Greek stories, in their origin, Sir James Frazer would trace to local conditions—the one suggested by the Gorge of Tempe in Thessaly, the other explaining the existence of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. As he pointed out, they would be instances, not of genuine historical traditions, but of what Sir James Tyler calls "observation myths". A third story of a great flood, regarded in Greek tradition as the earliest of the three, he would explain by an extraordinary inundation of the Copaic Lake in Boeotia, which to this day is liable to great fluctuations of level. His new theory applies only to the other two traditions. For in them no historical kernel is presupposed, though gradual erosion by water is not excluded as a cause of the surface features which may have suggested the myths.

This valuable theory thus opens up a third possibility for our analysis. It may also, of course, be used in combination, if in any particular instance we have reason to believe that transmission, in some vague form, may already have taken place. And it would with all deference suggest the possibility that, in view of other evidence, this may have occurred in the case of the Greek traditions. With regard to the theory itself we may confidently expect that further examples will be found in its illustration and support. Meanwhile in the new Sumerian Version I think we may conclude that we have recovered beyond any doubt the origin of the Babylonian and Hebrew traditions and of the large group of stories to which they in their turn have given rise.