Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation, Part I

Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII

A long time ago, somewhere between seven and nine thousand years ago, in a land that does not exist anymore, there probably lived a man named Ziusudra, and he was probably a righteous man, who feared at least one god. He almost certainly took a religious pilgrimage to the region we now call the Bosporus Straits, and had a realization so profound that it seemed to drive him to great madness.

When we peer and tread through the mists of prehistory, we can only ever speak with so much certainty. It is the ingrained habit of real historians (as opposed to ancient aliens theorists) to only speak of things of which they're certain, in order to avoid the embarrassment of being professionally wrong. But they also sacrifice the ability to push the frontiers of history out of their otherwise laudable caution. But we cannot afford to leave the dreaming to the Chariots of the Gods crowd.

By narrating hypotheses out of tentative best guesses derived from the available evidence at the edges of our collective knowledge, I am daring someone to do the research necessary to prove me wrong. I'm also giving them a target to aim at, to prove, disprove, or refine and tweak. But even if everything I write here is one day disproven, which I highly doubt, I will not regret having committed these notions to metaphorical paper. Ego is a small thing to risk for science.

That said, I still can only speak with so much precision with the evidence at hand, which is comparative mythology, climate records, genetics, and linguistics. The dates given above are rather imprecise, and cannot be otherwise at the moment. But I am sure that advances in the science and funding of archaeology will one day permit us to firm up these dates. I don't pretend to be a Bishop Ussher. At best I can interpret a narrative, guess what things caused other things caused other things. The chronology of events is more essential to the fact of the matter than the precise dating of events, and I fully expect to be disproven on the dating but largely upheld on the chronology.

With those caveats out of the way, let us return to our pious Ziusudra. I use this name for a figure that we all know better as Noah because, as the more complicated name to say and as the name used in the oldest Sumerian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is likeliest to have been his real name, if he really existed. There are other names older than Noah given in Babylonian poetry, including Uta-napishti and Atram-hasis. "Uta-napishti" is Akkadian for "he who saw life," and is a later epithet for Ziusudra. "Atram-hasis" is a translation of Ziusudra from Sumerian into Akkadian, and means "exceedingly wise." The Hebrew "Noah" means "one who will lead to rest."

It is certainly possible that Ziusudra did not really exist, or that the myths told about him were a composite of several different people, the way King Arthur is suspected to be, or perhaps even that he was just a national archetype standing in for a whole people, like Uncle Sam or John Bull. But one way or another, ancient people from many different cultures took the truths they saw his life's story imparting seriously. Whatever the literalness of the man, the stories told about him speak to deeper historical truths about the times in which he was said to have lived, and to the people who kindled his memory.

The composite theory is especially valid, because there are at least two different Ziusudras, going by the Greco-Roman sources that sifted through the facts available to them in the classical era. There was a member of the court of the Achaemenid kings, a contemporary of the era of Alexander the Great. He was likely named for a previous one, the way that anyone today named Joshua is not in fact one-third of the Christian trinity. Pliny the Elder concluded there was at least one other, who lived around roughly 6200 BC, which roughly falls between the dates of 5600 BC to 6800 BC offered by the co-authors of the Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

I believe there may even be three Ziusudras, because a third figure is identified in the Sumerian King List as the king of Shuruppak right before a known flooding of Mesopotamia around 2900 BC. An early version of the Epic of Gilgamesh called the Genesis of Eridu relates that Ziusudra was warned by the Sumerian god Enki to build a boat, which is carried by the flooding Euphrates all the way to a "Mount Nisir" on the other side of the Persian Gulf. The Sumerian word for "mountain," kur, is also the word for "country," and Thorkild Jacobsen's translation of the Genesis of Eridu translates the phrase "Mount Nisir" as "Dilmun," a Bronze Age kingdom centered on modern-day Bahrain.

Further complicating matters is that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ziusudra is said to live in Dilmun, and when Gilgamesh meets him there, Ziusudra tells him about a plant that bestows youth, at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. So Gilgamesh finds the plant but loses it. Why this matters to us is that roughly the same time as the Black Sea deluge, there was a deluge of the Persian Gulf. The current shoreline went from uninhabited to dotted with cities around 5600 BC, suggesting that the precursors of Dilmun may well have lived at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

Continue on to Part II