Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation, Part III

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In any case, the Black Sea would have still existed before this event, but it would have been much smaller, a closed sea like the Caspian Sea, losing water only to evaporation. It would have been beneath the level of the ocean like the Dead Sea. There is no reason to believe that, when the very first cities arose in the Fertile Crescent around ten thousand years ago, that some of them would not have been settled beside the southern shore of this smaller Black Sea. It is perfectly possible that the Black Sea had cities on its coast before the invention of streets. (Indeed, in the oldest known city, Çatalhöyük, everyone walked around on the rooftops and with ladders.)

What is the benefit of settling near a salty sea? Then as now, trade. Archaeological evidence suggests that long distance trade fostered by pack animals in the Fertile Crescent predated but presaged the first societies with unequal classes. Then as now, mercantile prowess led swiftly to economic inequality, which led to political inequality, which led to god-kings. And as the newly-born bourgeoisie needed a place to keep their stuff, and as the people the mercantile god-kings hired to make and protect their stuff settled around those early granaries and warehouses, cities were gradually invented.

Also, any sea, regardless of saltiness, will have rivers flowing into it. Even small babbling brooks would have satisfied the needs of the first cities. Turkey still has many cities and villages built besides such minor watercourses beside the current Black Sea shore, and it's doubtless that this would have been the truth even all the way back then. And with any source of fresh water near any acceptably flat piece of land at that latitude, agriculture is possible. Beside a sea, fishing also is possible, as well as pearl diving or shell collecting. This would have provided enough useful and beautiful goods to sustain long distance trade, as well as provided an easy means for it.

We know something about the culture of the Mediterranean of prehistory, if a much later prehistory than Ziusudra's: it had produced a religious culture by then that was so profound that it lasted for millennia, and boasted worshippers far beyond the Mediterranean who performed lengthy pilgrimage to distant ritual sites. Its most distant outpost, Stonehenge in Britain, was a site of pilgrimage from hundreds of miles and countries away.

The builders of Stonehenge specifically originated from Anatolia by way of the western Mediterranean. In other words, they and their religion grew up in the backyard of the wonders that would be Troy and Constantinople, in the backyard of the wonder that was already agriculture.

The ancient Anatolian religion was probably not the exact same one as the one at Stonehenge, though they were probably distantly related insofar as they likely used astronomical measurements to pick the most auspicious times to propitiate the divine with blood sacrifice. That describes a lot of religions that grew up in the Mediterranean basin, all the major pantheons, including the Babylonian pantheon that would eventually be whittled into Zoroastrianism, and Judaism and its spinoffs.

It makes sense that astronomically-assisted religion would prosper in a prehistoric society that had just invented long distance trade and classes. Astronomy is absolutely critical to any sailing done before GPS, and the merchants would have had the skill set and the wealth to support a middle class of priests. They would have also had the desire: close calls in seafaring are eternal, and responsible for the song "Amazing Grace," a large chunk of the temples of Poseidon and Neptune in the Roman Empire, and a surprising number of modern churches and ministries started by some sailor or another who promised to change their ways if only the divine would deliver them, and then kept their promise.

So whether the god or gods worshipped at the Bosporus in Ziusudra's time were the ones worshipped by the Stonehenge builders, the ancient Babylonians, King Priam of Troy, or was even the God of the Old Testament, is irrelevant to this story. The point is, this would likely have been a place of pilgrimage in Ziusudra's time. If not precisely at Troy, somewhere else along the Bosporus would have been a natural place for a pilgrimage site, as all trade routes converged there then as now.

There is further evidence for this connection between astronomical religious sites and coastal trading ports in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the beginning of the first tablet, Gilgamesh as king of Uruk is described as "(he) who restored the cult-centres of the Deluge / and set in place for the people the rites of the cosmos"(Andrew George, trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin 1999, 2). The cult centers couldn't have been destroyed by a flood if they weren't by a coast, and these cult centers shared in the astronomical knowledge that the traders' lives and fortunes depended on.

In the account in Genesis, Ziusudra is represented as a righteous man, one who is told by God to build an ark. When precisely Ziusudra would have received these instructions isn't mentioned in Genesis, but permit me to advance a theory. Genesis does relate that Ziusudra could build a rather large ark capable of holding several of every animal Ziusudra would have known about, and therefore we can guess that he could afford the animals and the ark. So he would have been bourgeois, with all the mercantile and religious trappings of the bourgeois of his day. His righteousness would have derived from his religious observance in these traders' shrines to which he made pilgrimage on his way through.

All it would have taken is one trip past a precarious and crumbling cliff holding back the Sea of Marmara for Ziusudra to get dreams of gopherwood dancing in his head. If you live at the bottom of what is essentially a failing dam, and you're one of a few in your society rich enough to travel to see that dam, it makes sense that you might invent survivalism in the weirdest way possible. If he got this idea in the course of a religious pilgrimage, it makes sense too that he would ascribe it to his god.

Ziusudra is said in Genesis to have been the last righteous man left in a wicked society beset by "giants" or "sons of God" better known as Nephilim, whose wickedness in mating with human women supposedly motivated the Flood. It seems likelier that the Nephilim were merely the folk memory of Neanderthals, who were indeed more muscular (and therefore more "giant") than modern humans. Evidence for organized bands of Neanderthals collapses after 40,000 years ago, with the arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe and the Near East. Yet, archaeological evidence suggests that the Neanderthals held on for the longest in the Near East, battling the ancestors of modern humans back and forth from 90,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the final flowering of our speech 40,000 years ago. Folk stories of magical creatures (Nephilim, elves, dwarves, pixies, Bigfoot, etc.) living in forests and wastelands on the borders of human knowledge, threatening to steal their young and their women, seems somewhere between the ancient equivalent of being afraid of the dark, and vestigial tales of Neanderthals. The further back one goes towards the past, the likelier this is to be true. The predominance of these tales in Russia and the Near East, even to the modern day, suggests that the Neanderthals fled to a hardscrabble area bordering them both, possibly the Circassian steppe bordering the modern Black Sea.

Continue reading Part IV