Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

We should never forget that in antiquity, before writing, people performed prodigious feats of memory. It was by no means unknown for thousands of lines of poetry to be memorised: this is how literature was preserved and disseminated. Once writing had evolved, however, two early forms of written literature may be singled out. There was in the first place a number of stories that prefigured narratives which appeared later in the Bible. Given the influence of that book, its origins are important. For example, Sargon, king of Akkad, emerged from complete obscurity to become ‘king of the world’. His ancestry was elaborated from popular tales, which tell of his mother, a priestess, concealing the fact that she had given birth to him by placing him in a wicker basket, sealed with bitumen, and casting him adrift on a river. He was later found by a water drawer who brought Sargon up as his adopted son. Sargon first became a gardener . . . and then king. The parallels with the Moses story are plain. Sumerian literature also boasts a number of ‘primal kings’ with improbably long reigns. This too anticipates the Old Testament. In the Bible, for example, Adam begot his son Seth at age 130 and is said to have lived for 800 more years. Between Adam and the Deluge there were ten kings who lived to very great ages. In Sumer, there were eight such kings, who between them reigned for 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king. The texts unearthed at Ras Shamra/Ugarit speak of the god Baal fighting with Lotan, ‘the sinuous serpent, the mighty one with seven heads’, which anticipates the Old Testament Leviathan. Then there is the flood literature. We shall encounter one version of the flood story in the epic of Gilgamesh, which is discussed immediately below. In that poem, the flood-hero was known as Utnapishtim, ‘Who Found [Eternal] Life’, though he was also known in similar legends as Ziusudra or Atra-hasis. In all the stories the flood is sent by the gods as a punishment.⁶³

The very name, Mesopotamia, between the rivers, suggests that floods were a common occurrence in the area. But the idea of a Great Flood seems to have been deeply embedded in the consciousness of the ancient Middle East.⁶⁴ There are three possibilities. One is that the Tigris and Euphrates flooded together, creating a large area of water. According to Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, the flood revealed in the silt he found there could have meant an inundation twenty-five feet deep that was 300 miles long and 100 miles across.⁶⁵ This has been called into question because Uruk, fifteen miles from Ur, and situated lower, shows no trace of flood. A second possibility, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, is that a terrible earthquake hit the Indus valley area of India in about 1900 BC and caused the diversion of the river Sarasvati. This, the mighty river of the ancient Hindu scripture, the Rig Veda, was ten kilometres wide in places but is now no more. The event that triggered this great catastrophe must have caused huge floods over a very wide area. The last possibility is the so-called Black Sea flood. According to this theory, published in 1997, the Black Sea was formed only after the last Ice Age, when the level of the Mediterranean rose, around 8,000 years ago, sluicing water through the Bosporus and flooding a vast area, 630 miles from east to west, and 330 miles from north to south.⁶⁶