Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation, Part II

Part I Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII

So it seems here that the sources are conflating several different floods: a prehistoric flood in the Black Sea, a prehistoric flood in the Persian Gulf, and a barely-historic flood of the Euphrates. If "Ziusudra" was a common enough name for a Sumerian king to have by 2900 BC, that only adds to the complexity. Or perhaps this king of Shuruppak had a different name, but after surviving the flood took Ziusudra as a pious title. This Gordian knot simply tells us of the perils of analyzing prehistory: the ancients tried it, and clearly failed here. May we learn from their attempt.

It may not be immediately obvious where I'm going with all of this, but the source links are full of spoilers so let me be clear: I think that Noah and Zoroaster, the guy that started the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, are the same person. I didn't explain yet what "Ziusudra" means so let me do that now. As "Atram-hasis" is "Ziusudra" in Akkadian and means "exceedingly wise," and as "Ziusudra" and "Zoroaster" sound remarkably similar, we could just leave it there. Not good enough. Apparently the cuneiform scholars and devotees of Zoroastrianism don't agree on what "Zoroaster" means. The "aster" part is generally translated from the Avestan as "pertaining to camels" by all academic parties, with the "Zoro" part causing the confusion. The correct translation of "Zoro/Ziu," I believe, is "old" or "ancient." This is the most reliable translation because the later form of the name in Middle Persian, "Zardusht," implies that the original form of the root word in Avestan is "zarant" meaning "old."

I just think everyone's wrong about camels.

Related closely to Avestan is Sanskrit, the language of classical Hinduism, which is what its holy books were composed in. In Sanskrit, the word "sutra" means "rule or law." I'm pretty sure that if you're going to give the founder of a religion an epithet, "ancient law" is a better one than "old camels." Furthermore, Jewish tradition set down in the Talmud describes Noah as a lawgiver, and his seven "Noahide laws" as binding upon all humanity. Given this corroborating evidence, I think it's fair to conclude that "sutra" is the more apt word in Ziusudra's name, and that we should probably speak of "Zoroastrian-Judeo-Christian" values, tradition, etc.

Zoroastrianism therefore isn't an Abrahamic faith only because it predated Abraham, but it was probably in some form the faith that the monotheistic Abraham observed. Since Abraham is regarded as a founder of Judaism, his cavorting with Melchizedek (Hebrew for "righteousness is my king"), a high priest in Salem (much later Jerusalem), always struck me as odd. How could a priesthood exalting the Judeo-Christian God exist if Abraham's descendants hadn't invented it yet? But here we have a clue: he could have been a Zoroastrian. The fact that the likeliest etymology for Melchizedek's name exalts a divine quality and not a god itself like the names in other Mesopotamian and Levantine priesthoods is rather Zoroastrian. Persian kings often had names with "Arta," the Avestan word for "truth," in them, while surrounding faiths would have the names of the faithful contain the words of their gods themselves. Even our modern names do this: "Johnathan," "Daniel," "Ezekiel," all contain a Hebrew name for God in them. That Melchizedek's does not, but follows Zoroastrian convention, is noteworthy.

We have another bit of circumstantial evidence for this hypothesis that Noah and Zoroaster were the same person: the Qu'ran. Islam recognizes, outside of itself, three other "peoples of the Book:" Jews, Christians, and "Sabians," who have special privileges versus other non-Muslims under sharia law. Sabians have never been positively identified since that verse was penned, which gave Muslim rulers with vast populations of pagan subjects a loophole to get out of oppressing them religiously, by pretending that particular group must be the aforementioned Sabians. Hermeticists and Hindus have both been so lawyered in times past.

But in a tragically unsourced quote for my non-Arabic-speaking self on Wikipedia, Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (who died in Basra in 787 AD) is claimed to have said "The Sabians believe they belong to the prophet Noah, they read Zabur (the Hebrew Psalms), and their religion looks like Christianity." There are a range of sects, some more associated with Christianity than others, native to the region that would match this description. As Zoroastrianism hasn't been a state religion since the Umayyad conquest of Sassanid Iran, the splintering off of different sects without a strong central authority to keep them in line would be a natural progression of things for them. The "Sabian" reverence of Noah is the point, however, and all serious claimants to Sabianhood do revere either the name Noah or Zoroaster, and that, I can cite.

In any case, Ziusudra was probably born in a land that is now beneath the Black Sea. (How do we know that the Black Sea Ziusudra is the real one? By corroborating evidence we will get to later.) We know that the last Ice Age ended around twelve thousand years ago, and by 5600 BC at the latest, we know that the Black Sea had finally spilled through the Bosporus to inundate the basin.

This scientific fact dovetails quite nicely, more nicely than either side of our eternal culture war might dare to admit, with the anthropological fact that just about every culture on Earth near the ocean has a flood myth, and that the best-known and most enduring flood myths derive from cultures relatively close to the Black Sea basin. If the climate changed and the seas rose ten thousand years ago, we should expect to find flood myths from every culture descended from people who lived near the sea in those days. And if these floods affected some areas more than others, we would expect that the flood myths near those areas remained more pertinent to their successor cultures.

(If anything in this essay gets me hypercancelled on the left, it'll be the suggestion that we have something meaningful and historical to learn from religious texts, which every middle class socialist with a bad haircut can point to on the doll to say where they touched them. If anything in this essay gets me hypercancelled on the right, it'll be the suggestion that Holy Scripture has a relevant ongoing role to play in the interpretation of history, but that we must discard this sola scriptura every-word-is-literally-true mentality and approach it like scientists to do so.)

Continue to Part III