Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [77]
In this story, Enlil was in charge of the minor gods who were digging the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. When they complained about the work and revolted, the gods decided to create mankind to do the work instead, and Nintur, the goddess of birth, mixed some clay with blood and created man. But when the population of men grew too large, the noise they made kept Enlil awake at night, and he asked the gods to send a plague to thin out mankind. A wise man, Atrahasis—whose name literally means “exceedingly wise”—got wind of this divine plan and consulted Enki, the Sumerian water god, who was a bit of a trickster and a friend of mankind.
Enki told the people to keep quiet and make offerings to the plague god to avert the disaster. But as time went by, Enlil again wanted to destroy noisy mankind, this time with a drought. Again, disaster was averted by Enki’s intervention. When the people’s noise disturbed him a third time, Enlil ordered an embargo on land bounty, but Enki saved mankind from starvation by filling the canals and rivers he controlled with fish.
Finally Enlil decided to send a great flood, and this time Enki advised Atrahasis to build a boat and take his family and animals on board. All mankind was destroyed, except Atrahasis and his family, who survived and repopulated the earth.
So, did the biblical authors “sample” these ancient Mesopotamian stories, conveniently borrowing them, perhaps while they were in captivity in Babylon? Or were these just common stories that were “floating around” the ancient Near East? This question has troubled scholars and archaeologists since it was first raised in 1872. Of course, biblical purists completely reject that notion, holding that Noah’s story, like the rest of the Bible, is the divinely inspired word of God. But the many parallels are too striking to ignore.
Whether the Hebrew story is borrowed or original, the existence of so many flood stories around the world raises a larger question: was there ever one cataclysmic flood in earth’s history that would explain these many myths?
Among the most intriguing new insights into the old flood question have come from the research done by Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter C. Pitman 3d, authors of Noah’s Flood: the New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (1998), and the man who discovered the Titanic, deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard. The two scientists theorized that sometime around 5600 BCE, there was a major inundation of the Black Sea—then a freshwater lake—by water rushing in from the Mediterranean through the present Bosporus Straits. In 2000, Ballard, using his famous underwater equipment, bolstered their argument with the discovery of remains of wooden houses beneath the Black Sea near the Turkish shore. Their theory, simply stated, is that this cataclysmic event destroyed everything for some sixty thousand square miles, killing tens of thousands of people. This ancient deluge then provided the historical memory for all of the flood narratives that later emerged, including those of Mesopotamia, ancient Israel, and Greece.
It would not necessarily explain flood accounts of many other civilizations. To that, writer Ian Wilson has a six-word answer in his recent book Before the Flood: “The end of the Ice Age.” The earth has experienced numerous ice ages in its 4-billion-year-plus history. The last of these occurred about sixteen thousand years ago—well within the time scale that modern humans have been around. Arguing that the sudden and cataclysmic rises in sea levels from melting ice would have struck many human populations clustered along seashores, Wilson argues, “It stands to reason that these events must have been responsible for at least some of the Flood stories that are commonplace in the folk memories of so many people around the world.”
Beyond the obvious interest in explaining the biblical story, the Ryan-Pitman thesis—enthusiastically endorsed by Ian Wilson—is that a wide-spread antediluvian