A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [44]
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