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By Root 2710 0

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.

Part of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus showing how to calculate the area of a triangle

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Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

Papyrus found at Thebes (near Luxor), Egypt

AROUND 1550 BC