 Okay, so the world of Atrahasis, the world we're stepping into, it's cosmology is an unusual one. And we can piece it together from things like the text. We can also piece that together with cultural clues, like visual representations of what the universe looked like. And this is one example. This is called the Ata cylinder seal. It has these inscriptions or these carvings of images in reverse. And what you do is you take that and you roll it in wet clay. And then you can see the image the way it's meant to look. So it works like a stamp. And on this seal, we see some characters that we can recognize if we know enough about them. So for instance, we have Inky here. Remember who is the god of the water that comes from beneath the earth? That is the sweet water, the fresh water, as opposed to the ocean water. And you see that he's got these sort of water wings. And we see this a lot. There's not only water wings, but there are fish either swimming up it or something. And wherever we see this individual with the horned helmet that indicates a god and these water wings, we know that's Inky or Aia. Then we have over here a hunter with a bow whose crown also indicates that he's a god on the far left. And this is probably El Lill. El Lill is referred to as having a bow as a storm god. Maybe, maybe not, but it's possible. Then we have Astarte or Ishtar, who we'll later see as Inanna in the Epic of Gilgamesh, standing on top of these mountains. And we recognize here the mountains that hold up the world, presumably with Mesopotamia down here. And this character here, we see these sort of wavy lines coming up from his shoulders. Similar to Inky's water wings, we have the sun god Shamash is rising. So he's coming up between the mountains. So we can see that this is probably the world. Up here, the gods are sort of standing very large and very distant from the world. But their attention is all focused on that little middle area there. This is something like what the world would have looked like. Something like their cosmology. And the beginning of Atrahasis is a cosmogony that explains how that cosmology came to be. So in this cosmogony, the Anunnaki, the elder gods of the Mesopotamians, create the Igigi, the younger gods, the younger generation of gods. And they do it especially for the purpose of creating the world, creating the world the Mesopotamians knew. And that means they dig the riverbeds like the Tigris and Euphrates river. That's the first thing of importance that's described in the text, which lets us know how important the Tigris and Euphrates river were to the Mesopotamians. It's described as their lifeblood. They dig the riverbeds, they dig the canals between those rivers. Notice the mixed image schema of the rivers described as canals. Now rivers don't have to be dug. Nobody went along some ancient army corps of engineers and dug out the trenches for the rivers to go in, water finds the lowest point and then continues to move that direction. But they equated these with the canals. They themselves had been creating for centuries before that would enable them to irrigate crops and that sort of thing. So the gods are imagined as doing this. That's where these things came from. That's where the world came from, the work of gods. Also notice the time period they work for. They're described as working for 3,600 years. Not only the text we're reading right now coincidentally is about 3,600 years old. It was that long ago that the text was written. More importantly, it's a hexadecimal number. It's a round number not because it's divisible by 10 but because it's divisible by six. This is something we get from the Mesopotamians through the Greeks. We have 360 degrees in a circle. We have 12 hours in a day. Each of those hours is divided into 60 minutes. All of these mathematical figures that are divided into a base six number system come from the Mesopotamians because the Greeks and the other people around the ancient world knew that the Mesopotamians were the masters of math. And that was part of their cosmology. That's their drive to understand the world is what made them innovate a lot of the principles of mathematics that we still carry on today. Now we also have the introduction of conflict. The conflict at first is the fact that the Aegean have to build the world and it's a lot of work. So they want to rebel. They want to especially confront the chief of the Gigi who was one of the Anunnaki, one of the elder gods, El-Lil and tell him that we're tired of working. We're not gonna do it anymore. And with this we have what memory researcher, Michael Shudson that I mentioned in the first week, first unit, described as narrativization term. He gets from Hayden White, a historian. But narrativization is when we take history or we take our personal memory and instead of just remembering it exactly as it happened, we try to put it into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. There's an original state of equilibrium. Then there's some conflict introduced and that conflict is resolved to create the end. In this case it's not history and it's not memory that's being turned into narrative. It's the whole, since the beginning of time, the creation of the world itself has to be fit into a narrative form. It can't just be a scientific explanation of physical forces interacting. We need protagonists, we need antagonists, we need conflict, we need resolution of conflict and that's what we have in this cosmogony. So the Gigi confront LLil and it's a confrontation that's maybe kind of humorous. It's LLil is this powerful god of war and storms and that sort of thing. But these lesser gods that work for him come to his house, literally he has a house and he tells his vizier Nusku to lock the gate and stand in front of me. So he's kind of hiding behind this servant of his because he's afraid of this group of protesting workers. So there could be something humorous about this and it might come from the fact that the particular culture, that the particular city-state in Mesopotamia that's creating this version of the narrative might not revere LLil that much but they clearly revere Inki. So Inki is much more mature, he's compassionate for first the Gigi, he wants to solve their problem and later he's gonna show compassion for human beings when none of the other gods will and he's very diplomatic about it. He doesn't just enforce his own will on everybody else. So we may have cultures that revere different gods differently so they portray them differently in the narrative even though they're telling the same basic story. But it may not have been that easy to figure out exactly what was happening because of the way the text itself presents the elements of the story. So if you look at in your book and pages 12 and 13, you see some repetitions that might be a little bit confusing at first. Notice repetitions like this, everything in your text is there for one reason or another. It might not make good storytelling the way we're used to it, it may not be the kind of thing you would find in a novel but that's all the more reason to analyze what it is and then try to come to an explanation of how it got there, make an inference about how it got there. In this case on page 12, we have the same passages read more than once or written more than once. Elil is talking to Nusku and he says, Nusku open your door, take your weapons, stand before me. Incidentally those brackets where stand before me is written. The brackets indicate something is missing, there's a break in the text and yet Stephanie Daly has filled in those brackets. You can probably see if you look further down where that information is coming from. But he says, take up your weapons in the assembly of the gods, bow, then stand and then tell them your father Anu, your counselor, warrior Elil, your chamberlain Nenerta and your canal controller Inugi have sent me to say who is in charge of this rabble, the Igigi who were revolting, who is in charge of the fighting, who declared war, who ran to the door of Elil. Then Nusku takes the message, he does what he's told, he goes to the assembly of the Igigi on behalf of Elil because Elil is hiding in his house. It's Nusku that gets sent out to go negotiate with this gang. And he bows, he tells the message and we have the same text repeated. Your father Anu, your counselor, warrior Elil, your chamberlain Nenerta and your canal controller Inugi have sent me to say who is in charge of the rabble, who is in charge of the fighting, who declared war, who ran to the door of Elil. Now you're probably thinking, why is this in here twice? Is this a mistake? And if it was a novel, it wouldn't make much sense, there wouldn't be any reason for that to be there. But remember, if this had an oral tradition before it was inscribed in tablets, then this would have been sung. We would have had the harpist singing this and when you're reading something and you hear something repetitive like that, it doesn't make sense. You don't like having to read the same thing over again when you don't know why you're doing that. But if it's a song, then we like to hear a chorus over and over again. Probably a chorus. This is probably why it's being repeated. The same thing just below that. In blue box number one, the Igigi are giving Nusku the reply to Elil. In blue box number two, Nusku is delivering that reply to Elil. The same lines, but with a different role in the narrative. In other words, they tell something different even though it's using the same words. The first time it's Elil speaking, or in the yellow box number one, it's Elil speaking to Nusku. And yellow box number two, it's Nusku speaking to the Igigi. In blue box number one, it's the Igigi speaking to Nusku. And in blue box number two, it's Nusku speaking to Elil, delivering that message back and forth. It plays a different role in the story. But then we have a different kind of repetition. If you notice that red box, this is Stephanie Dolly, the editor, letting us know that there's a gap in the text at this point where we have the line, the warning signal was loud enough, we kept hearing the noise, then there's a break in the word do and then there's another break in the word tasks and then we have a lot of missing lines, broken tablets. So instead of just leaving it there and letting us guess what happens, she takes one of the standard, actually two of the standard Babylonian fragments and uses that to fill in the narrative. But remember the standard Babylonian version was written a thousand years after Epic Aya is writing the old Babylonian version. So there are gonna be some differences. And the fact that she's taking a whole text and adding it in, she's not trying to smooth it out, she's not just adding a transition in there. And so there is a repetition that's there because she's placing one text beside the other. So if you don't notice the letters in the left hand margin, it might seem like the text repeats itself or it may seem this is the same thing happens twice in the story. It might seem that there's half of an event that stops and starts over with the beginning of the event before describing what happened next. It seems like LL and the Agy resolve their differences and they come up with a new plan, but then at the bottom of page 13 we're back to having new school play, diplomat and the feud is still going. So you have to pay attention to the editorial notes in order to notice that this is a redaction. This is a combination of texts. And if you flip over to page 14 you see the second standard Babylonian fragment added. And it contains information not included in the first SBV fragment. So that means it also duplicates things we've already read. So it duplicates a line from the old Babylonian version but it contradicts the old Babylonian version. So first of all Inki is called Aya. That's a name that was used for him in other Miss Batamian city states that had slightly different ideas about who he was. Similar enough that you knew that Inki and Aya were basically the same god of the waters beneath the earth who helps out mankind who sends the seven sages to teach civilization and technology and writing and all of this. Same things happening. So we didn't know it's basically the same character but slightly different beliefs about it. And obviously a different name. So there's a clue in the name Aya that this is coming from a different culture, same basic story but a different narrative. And not only is Inki named something different but he as Aya is saying in the standard Babylonian version what Anu said in the old Babylonian version. So it's not just a different name for one character. It's a different role for that character in this other narrative. So it's Inki or Aya who sympathizes with the Igigi and argues their case before the Anunnaki in El El. This isn't just a change of name. It changes the story and it does so to create a transition to the next event in the story and so it makes sense. The next thing is the creation of man and it makes more sense that Aya who's gonna suggest the creation of human beings and suggest that this is a way to resolve the conflict. It makes more sense that he is the one to make this the speech. Now this type of repetition is called the doublet. The first type of repetition when it looked like a song, a chorus that was sung over and over again, that's called a refrain. And that term you don't have to know. But notice it's there for a reason that tells a different part of the story even if it uses the same words. But this, we know because the editor tells us this is a different, this is a redaction of a different narrative. And the clue, even if she didn't tell you that, you would know because here's the same event described over again in different terms with slight alterations. So a doublet is the same story told in the same narrative twice. And it usually contains some sort of alteration or some sort of a contradiction that's the kind of thing that would not normally be in a refrain. So it's as if we've got this gap and we take a chunk of one story, try to cram it into another story and it kind of sort of fits, but not quite. So we have these kind of doublets several times throughout the text. And throughout the text of this from Esopotamia. On page 21, we have another with the standard Babylonian version. On pages 23 to 27, we have a really long passage with the SBV tablets. And that seems to start over in retail story elements that we've already read. And so it's very confusing if you're not noticing the SBV and OBV over in the left-hand column. Why is this happening again? Why is the Sarupu disease happening twice? And the reason is that the editor, Stephanie Dolly, she does this to try to give the OBV narrative that's transcribed by Ipik Aya the way he writes it. And then the standard Babylonian version, the way it's written and not adding her own 20th century, even though she's an expert, she's trying not to add her own words. She's just trying to give us the words as they come to us from those tablets. But remember this experience untangling the doublets and the contradictions in this redaction. Because we're gonna have to do it again later in ancient texts that we might not have realized were redactions. So the Igigi are pacified by being told that they aren't gonna have to do the work of the gods anymore. The solution of that is Inki or Aya decides to create human beings. Human beings will do the work of the gods. And he does this with the womb goddess. She's described as the womb goddess Nintu most commonly, but for several passages she's referred to as Bellet Eli and sometimes she's referred to as Mami. Just like a child would say Mami. She's basically this mother goddess. And the fact that she has different names within the same text probably indicates that everybody has a mother goddess and several different mother goddesses were probably combined at some point long before even the old Babylonian version was written. So by the time the OBV is written, she's already known by several different aspects. But notice the way that she creates human beings. She's the womb goddess. Shouldn't she give birth to human beings? Well, she kind of does, but she goes through this ritual that has more imagery. It comes from this schema about baking bricks. The schema of you take clay, you bake them in an oven and they come out hard and you're able to then do something with them in the world. You have to bake them in the oven in the kiln in order to make them usable. The same thing. Creating human beings from clay, firing them in the kiln. And there's no mention of a womb, but the kiln itself seems to be the womb. And so we also have Inki's necessary role in this. Seems to indicate the way the Mesopotamians conceived of the role of the man in the procreation process. He has to have something to put into the womb before Beled Elie or Nintu is able to create human beings using her womb. So we have a very distinct metaphor here. So we have one schema is the womb itself, the mother's way of carrying a child determined and giving birth. That's one concept, one schema, one way of imagining something in the real world. The other schema is the schema for the way bricks are baked in a kiln or can you form tablets or anything else in the Mesopotamian world that uses this resource that's so abundant. So two schemas combined give us this metaphor. And it's probably not the way you conceive of or anyone in our culture typically conceives of the ways human beings are brought, but we still use other metaphors, other schemas. This metaphor also gives us a lot to think about with the role of the God Ilewela. They have to, in order to create life in these clay human beings they create, they have to sacrifice this God named Ilewela or he who had intelligence. And they say, let us hear the drumbeat forever after. Let a ghost come into existence from the God's flesh. Now the drumbeat seems to indicate the heart. Here we have another metaphor, a pretty easy to understand metaphor. So Ilewela who had intelligence, they slaughtered in their assembly. Nintu mixed the clay with his flesh and blood. They heard the drumbeat forever after that. They heard the heartbeats of human beings after that, presumably. A ghost came into existence from the God's flesh and she, Nintu, proclaimed it as a living sign. The ghost existed so as not to forget the slain God. And page 16 goes on to tell us how far-sighted Inki and wise mommy went to the room of fate. The womb goddesses were assembled. He trod the clay in her presence. She kept reciting in incantation. For Inki staying in her presence made her recite it. So she goes through this very ritualistic process. She's not just making clay the way you would do if you were in a hurry. And then after that, she makes these rules for the people. She says, in the house of a woman who is giving birth, the mud brick should be put down for seven days. Billet Ilew, wise mommy shall be honored. The midwife shall rejoice in the house. And when the woman gives birth to the baby, the mother of the baby shall sever herself. In other words, the umbilical cord. Some areas are broken here, but we get that this is not only a ritual that's being performed once, but she's giving these rules for performing this ritual in the future. And so this is an explanation of where the ritual comes from. We do this, we being the ancient Mesopotamians, do this ritual because this is the way human beings were created. And this is what an ideology is. It's an explanation with a story about where a ritual came from. It may or may not be accurate in this case, probably not, but they needed an origin story for this thing that's such an important part of their culture, part of their ritual that goes with birth. And we also have an origin story about a more familiar ritual, although it's hard to make out. We see the lines, a man to a girl, and then a break in the line. Then the next line, there's another break. But a beard can be seen, then something's missing on a young man's cheek. In gardens and way sides, the wife and her husband choose each other. So what we might have explained here is a marriage ritual. And this is the origin of marriage. The ritual of marriage for the Mesopotamians is coming from this initial action by these two gods, or Nintu is the one who's making these rules that will govern later generations with marriage, with rituals about birth, and that sort of thing. So bringing humans into the world ends the conflict between El Il and the Igigi. But then, of course, we take on that conflict. It doesn't seem to be the work that humans complain about, but the fact of human existence becomes its own issue. We have three disasters, natural disasters take place, and they all start, notice each section of this starts with the phrase, 600 years, less than 600 years past. This lets us know that we're moving on to the next chapter, the next sequence. So we have these three disaster sequences. First is the Sarupu disease, then is the drought, and then it's the flood. Now it might seem like more than three plagues, because we have more redactions of the SBV interspersed. So if you thought the gods sent the Sarupu disease twice, and they seem to think it was a great idea both times, that's probably because the SBV repeats the OBV. You have to pay attention to the left-hand column. But notice why do the gods send these three disasters in the first place? It might, it's pretty easy to trivialize to say that it seems kind of ridiculous. The country became too wide, the people too numerous. The country was as noisy as a bellowing bull. The god grew restless at their clamor. Elil had to listen to their noise, end quote. So Elil complains about losing sleep from the noise created by humanity. And from his point of view, it's human beings are just a nuisance. This might seem like a nuisance wouldn't be worthy of killing off the entire population. This might seem overkill. But remember from the way Elil acted in the confrontation with the Igigi, he's not being portrayed very sympathetically. We can say pretty easily that he's the antagonist of the whole Atrahasas story. He's the bad guy. He's the one who's causing the problems. But beyond just Elil's motivation for wiping out humanity, notice that there is a real problem that we can imagine in the historical context of ancient Mesopotamia. That first line, the country became too wide, the people too numerous. So as fertile as Mesopotamia was, it could every now and then have reached a maximum population, the maximum population it could support. And when people come to live together in large numbers in an urban area, and keep in mind this is the first large urban area, these individual city states in Mesopotamia. This is the first time that people then become dependent on resources on food and that sort of thing that aren't coming from land immediately around them. If they live in this very overpopulated area, they depend on the farmers out in the swamps, in the reed swamps around these city states to bring the food in. And if that dries up, they can't, if it's every man for himself, every person for themselves, they can't just sort of grab food within walking distance. They're very far removed. And all of a sudden this large population is in this area that because of some drought, because of some disease, has removed all of their resources. So this would be much more deadly than it would be. The same event, a drought or a plague, would be if it was in a sparsely populated area. Also, if the disease is affecting human beings, it's gonna be transmitted much more quickly in an urban area where people come together in a very tight living space. And we hear what happens to human beings as a population, but that's when at the bottom of page 18, this is when we have the character of Atrahasis, the only named human being in the whole story. And it's through his eyes that we see everything that happens to the human race. At the bottom of page 18, now there was one Atrahasis, whose ear was open to his God, Inky. He would speak with his God and his God would speak with him. And of course, the thing that he says to Inky is he complains about what's happening to human beings and he wants to know how can Inky help. This is a very early example of what we'll later call the theodicy problem. It's not a term you need to know just yet. But when bad things happen to people who do what the gods want or what they think the gods want, they wanna know why, why am I being punished? Or is this a punishment? Why is this happening? Why doesn't the God who I am loyal to help me out in this situation? And in this case, when we have a polytheistic system, obviously it's because it's not the one good God that you're loyal to, it's another God that's creating this problem. But that also, that doesn't mean it's necessarily that simple because in order for Inky to help humanity, he has to defy the will of the other gods. And that becomes the real sort of dramatic tension for the rest of the story. So we might say because of the title, the title as it's been given to us, not the title that those Sumerians gave or the Babylonians gave it, which was when the gods like men or when the gods instead of men, the first line. But because we're calling it Atrahasis, we might think, Atrahasis must be the protagonist. But the fact that we're just now being introduced to him, this is called a character exposition. The first time we see this character comes so late. And his problem, by the time it affects him, it's already something that's been in the works for a while. And it's Inky who's actually gonna take the necessary steps to solve that problem or at least tell Atrahasis how to solve that problem. And Inky really has a lot of tension that he has to, dramatic tension that he has to solve with his fellow god Elil. May indicate that the protagonist could be Inky. I'm not gonna say it's one or the other, but we have at least a dual protagonist here. And it's through advice that Inky gives that the first two disasters are able to be averted. Both, in both cases, we have a god who is tasked with holding something or sending out something to destroy humanity. The first is Namtara. Namtara is the vizier of the goddess of the underworld, Erish Kigal, who we'll come back to when we talk about the epic of Gilgamesh. But there's this idea that he controls the bolt to the gate of the underworld. Whatever bad things are down in the underworld, the world of death, the world of disease and all of that, it's locked up. But Namtara can unlock that gate and let this disease out. And that's what he's been ordered to do. It doesn't seem that he wants to do that, but it's what he's ordered to do. And in the next play or the next disaster, the drought, we have the rain god Adad is tasked with locking up the rainwater so that water doesn't fall. And Inky, as the god of the underground rivers, is supposed to keep the opsu, the underground water, locked up as well. Inky can be relied on by humanity to come up with a way around that. But in both the case of Namtara and the case of Adad, Inky has to come up with a way to get them to change their mind and not do what Elil has made them promise to do. He's got to get them to feel sympathy for humanity. And to do this, he does something that might be kind of hard to follow in the narrative. What he does is tell Atrahasis to tell his people to not revere your gods, to not make sacrifices. He says, do not revere your gods, do not pray to your goddesses, but search out the door of Namtara, the god of the underworld. Bring a baked loaf into his presence. May the flower offering reach him. May he be shamed by the presence and wipe away his hand. Now, his hand being his action, how do you get him to take away this thing he's done? Well, you don't necessarily threaten him, but notice that human beings have stopped sacrificing to the gods. It doesn't say exactly sacrificing, but by not revering your gods, not praying to your goddesses, they're sort of cutting off connections between themselves and the rest of the gods, but they're going to bring a loaf to Atta. They're gonna bring a sacrifice, sorry, to Namtara. By bringing the sacrifice to Namtara, they're doing something, even though he is persecuting them, they are showing kindness to him that they're not showing to the other gods, and this seems to be why he is shamed by it. So if you do something to hurt someone else, but they do something to help you after that, knowing that you're hurting them, then of course you feel ashamed, and that seems to be what leads first Namtara and then later Adad to do this, to wipe away their hand, to recall the action that hurt humanity. But in order for this to work, you have to get these gods to feel a certain way. In other words, you have to know what's gonna cause them to feel sympathy for humans. And Atrahasis does this, but their sympathy comes from the devotion that they see in human beings. So they have to be thinking about what humans think. So a human has to think, how do I get a god to think I feel this way? And notice it's Inky who has to get Atrahasis to understand that he needs to get Adad and Namtara to think that he thinks highly of them, that he has respect for them even though they're persecuting him. So this is four levels of what we'll call theory of mind. I'm not gonna put that in red text yet. We'll get to it again. We'll have a longer explanation of how theory of mind works in a later lecture. But it's the ability to think about what other people are thinking and to think about what other people think you think or what other people think yet other people think. And it goes to this level of complexity really sort of, it's a struggle for us to figure out when we're reading the text. But notice this is how we interact with people every day. We wanna know did I offend someone or does this person think that I'm not offended by what he just said? Something like this, we have to do this every day and novels, whether it's 3,600 years ago or today, novels really push this element of our psychology, our ability to think about what other people and other characters think and how they think about other characters. So we'll definitely come back to this in all the texts we read throughout the rest of the semester. But this is all I'm gonna say about it right here. But if you're trying to figure out what happened, why did these diseases end, it seems to be because Inky came up with a plan to get the God sympathetic to humans but he had to get out your hausis to perform these steps in order for that to work. So we have the Sarupu disease that the gods decide. LL is really the one pushing this. He's the one that wants to wipe out human beings because they're too populist, they're too noisy, they've spread out too far. So all the gods agree, Inky seemingly reluctantly and then Inky comes up with a way to make the one God that's sort of acting that plague, acting that drought, causing it to happen using his hand, his own agency. Get that God to change his mind. So the first sort of sequence is the Sarupu disease, the second sequence is the drought, and then the third sequence we recognize. That's the flood. Since these tablets were discovered, the thing that popped into everyone's mind, at least everyone in the Western world, the Judeo-Christian world was, hey, I've heard this story before, I know this, this is Noah's Ark. This is the story of Noah gathering the animals onto this giant boat in order to survive this storm sent by a God, but Noah himself was warned by God to do this ahead of time so that human beings would survive. I know this story, I've heard it before. But remember, everything we've gone through in this class up to this point has led us to be careful of this kind of association. When I read an unfamiliar text, like Shank and Abelson say, I tend to try to match it with a story I already know. But once I do that, I then limit what I'm able to see in that unfamiliar text. I act like that Cambridge University student who's trying to recall the Chinook story of the War of the Ghosts. When I read about a canoe, I might forget the canoe because I don't really have a clear concept of what a canoe is. Instead, I think of a rowboat. I get bits and pieces from this new text, but I fill in, I try to make it fit into a pattern that comes from my culture. This is why we need to be very careful when we read Atrahasis and when we read the next flood text that we're going to read. This is not the same narrative. It might be the same story. We see enough clues to tell us that this is basically the same story, but there are gonna be key differences that are gonna be very important to the different cultures that we're gonna read this story in. So the history of cuneiform archeology has been defined by this search for the Sumerian genesis, which is what some of these fragments were called in the late 19th century, early 20th century when they were discovered. This is how you get people's attention. Say, hey, I found an older version of the Bible or something that confirms the biblical flood or something that confirms what you already know, what you're familiar with. But when you actually study it the way a scholar needs to study it, you need to focus on not how this, not just to find it by the way it fits your familiar schemas and your familiar scripts, but the way it is represented in its original context. So we don't want to, just like the scholar might, or the Cambridge student might confuse the Chinook canoe for a boat or a rowboat, we don't wanna confuse what's happening with the flood in Atrahasis with the description of the flood in Genesis, although of course that parallel is gonna be there. We don't throw away that parallel. We don't forget it. We just sort of put it over to the side and wait to see how well it fits. And something that we definitely did not expect to see was a god not talking to his subject and saying, build a boat, put all the animals on it. Instead, he's talking to a wall. On page 28 at the bottom, twice the gods prompted by El-Lil have sent some sort of disaster. Twice Inki has done something to undermine that plan and save humanity. So at the bottom of 28, we have El-Lil accusing Inki of sort of being underhanded. And he says, let us make farsighted Inki swear an oath. Inki made his voice heard, spoke to his brother gods, and he doesn't wanna swear this oath. He says, why should you make me swear an oath? Why should I use my power against my people? The flood that your idea of this flood, what is it to me? I don't even know. Or could I give birth to a flood? That is El-Lil's kind of work. So Inki is being roped in and we don't know, we have a huge gap of 31 lines. And we don't know exactly what happens there, but we get the impression that Inki has to swear this oath to these other gods. Then tablet three at the bottom of page 29 begins with Inki talking to a wall. And at first it may make no sense at all. He's literally talking to the wall. He says, wall, listen to me constantly. Read hut as a noun of address. He's saying the name, read hut. Make sure you attend to all my words. Dismantle the house, build a boat, reject possessions and save living things. The boat that you build, and then there's a couple of broken lines, roof it like the op-suit so that the sun cannot see inside it. Make the upper decks and the lower decks. The tackle must be very strong. The bitumen strong, in other words, the waterproofing tar must be strong to give it strength. I shall make the rain fall on you here. The wealth of birds, a hamper of fish. So he's giving instructions to build an ark, ark in our later terminology, but he's not giving it directly to Atrahasis. He's giving it to a wall. Why is he doing that? Well, we can infer that if he's sworn an oath, that oath must have been to not reveal to human beings. So instead of talking directly to Atrahasis, technically, he's not breaking his oath. This might seem rather dishonest to us, but Enki is known as this sort of trickster figure. Now, he's not like trickster figures in some other types of mythologies, like the Norse god Loki, who sometimes does good, but usually he's up to no good. Enki seems to be, you know, his heart's in the right place and he's actually very intelligent and he's doing the right thing for humans, but that means he actually has to lie to the other gods or at least come up with a way to not fulfill exactly the promise he made to them. He doesn't want to wipe out human beings. And so he's talking to this reed wall, but why is he talking to this wall made out of reeds, like the one you see here? Luckily, we know a lot about how these constructions, even 4,000 years ago, were built because up until Saddam Hussein, you know, actively attacked and massacred and relocated a lot of people that lived in the Mesopotamian reed swamps. Those people were still building these reed houses and reed boats the way they had built 4,000 years ago. The houses looked very much like the carvings that we see from 4,000 years ago. And we see why this type of construction could have lasted so long. When you take these individual reeds, they're very flimsy on their own. You wouldn't think you could build something out of this, but when you bind them strongly enough and you build them in this round, roofed architecture, by bending them, they work like arches. And arches are much more stable than a sort of square-shaped construction. So we still have houses or these temples and other buildings built this way from these bound reeds. But also, that's the way many of their boats were built. So you could see taking the material from a wall of a house like this and using that to construct something that would float. And be rather strong, not only strong, but flexible. Now there's a lot missing in exactly how this craft was constructed. But there are other tablets. And other versions, specifically of this flood incident and the A.I. or Inky telling Atrahasis or Zeosudra in another version. And later, as we'll see, someone called Utena pitched him, how to build this ark. But it's gonna be very difficult to not imagine the familiar Noah's Ark that we've seen since childhood. And if we think of this as not being built out of wood, not this sort of steamship or cruise liner that's built out of wood, that's the way it's usually represented in modern representations of Noah's Ark. But we imagine it as built out of reeds. We imagine it as something roofed like the Opsu. In other words, remember the water underground is covered by the ground. And Inky, who's the god of that realm of this underground lake or these underground waters is saying, you know, build this boat but put a roof on it like the Opsu. There is, more recently there was a tablet discovered that gives much more specific instructions on how to build this ark. That doesn't exactly match Atrahasis and it doesn't exactly match some of the other texts. But it does seem to be very, very old and very, very specific. If these people are living in houses like the one that Atrahasis lives in, if they are typically using boats that are built out of these reed boats and built out of bitumen, and they know how to build these things. So if you're talking to people who are familiar with this schema of boats, of houses, you're gonna have to describe it in terms that they would say, yeah, I think that would work. I think that would float. Because what you're describing or what Inky is describing is gonna be the largest boat that would have ever been built. Would have been bigger than anything that people would imagine, but it would be a bigger version of a schema they recognize. But there's still, experts are gonna say, hey, I don't think that would float or I don't know if that would work. So it's interesting that a recently discovered tablet that has recently been written about by Cuneiform scholar Irving Finkel gives very specific instructions. And using these instructions, Finkel and a documentary crew for the PBS program, NOVA, put together an actual arc. But Finkel noticed that the instructions on this new tablet do not look like the sort of pointed front craft that we're typically used to. They resemble what's called a coracle. This sort of completely round, not just almond shaped, but actually circular type of craft. And what's described is something like a coracle only much, much larger. And what Finkel and his construction crew that worked for PBS, what they were able to do in this PBS documentary, The Secrets of Noah's Ark, is they were able to build the type of craft described in that flood tablet, only at one fifth the size. So they were able to take the instructions that Inky gives to Atrahasis. And they weren't able to build it at the size described, but they were able to build it one fifth that size. And there was moderate success getting it to float. But this at least gives us some idea of what the Babylonian type of arc might have looked like. So we don't have to do what the Cambridge University student in Bartlett's study did. We don't have to confuse one type of boat with another. We have a much better schema of what a boat looks like based on actual historical context. And I have posted a link to this documentary on Blackboard as extra resources. It's not required for you to watch, but it is very interesting. So it's more entertaining than I'm sure than these lectures. So it's worth a watch if you have time. But if we have an idea of an arc that is at least conceivable that could have been built, does that mean there was a real flood? Well, there were probably lots of floods. If we remember what Mesopotamia looks like and how the waters flow in from the mountains and the inclined areas to the northeast and west, we see that it's a watershed. We can imagine, yeah, there were probably a lot of floods. Now, some floods would have been bigger than others. There was speculation, or there actually is a layer or two in various archeological sites, a layer of silt, sometimes more than 10 feet thick, indicating that this is the kind of silt that would normally be brought in by a flood. It's ambiguous as to whether or not all of that silt came at the same time. So you'd have a layer of settlement. You'd have debris from where people had actually, when people had actually lived there. Then you would have a layer on top of that of silt going up like 10 feet. That seems to indicate that the people whose artifacts are buried underneath that were wiped out by a flood. And then maybe more archeological remains on top of the silt. So somebody came back and built there later. But it's ambiguous because it could be that the people moved away and there was years of sort of a little bit of silt at a time built up. But the reason that people weren't there might not have been because of the flood. It's ambiguous. But we do know that there are a periodic, what we tend to call hundred year floods when they happen here, the kind of floods that, a generation that experiences that flood remembers it very well. The next generation may have heard stories about it. The third generation might not take it very seriously or it might not seem like the kind of thing that could happen to them until a hundred years later it does happen again. This might be the kind of thing that was the largest flood anybody had ever seen, but it wouldn't have been the only one for centuries. And so in the introduction to Atrahasas, Stephanie Dali says, it is probable that these ancient Near Eastern flood stories are versions of a tale which originated in lower Mesopotamia, though not necessarily in a single devastation, not necessarily a single flood. The variety of detail found in them illustrates the kaleidoscopic character of the folktale in which certain basic elements are widely used in new combinations and are adapted to national interests and different literary settings. All of these flood stories may be explained as deriving from one Mesopotamian original used in traveler's tales for over 2,000 years along the great caravan routes of Western Asia, translated, embroidered, and adapted according to local taste to give a myriad of divergent versions. In other words, there may have been one flood that spawned this story, and then that story became retold different ways in different places. And so one original produces all these variations. But she also points out, there is the possibility of several different independent origins that cannot be dismissed. For the idea of a universal flood may well have arisen to explain observations in different places, things like different massive floods in different places at different times. Or she goes on to say there, the observation of marine fossils in mountains because people didn't know what we know about modern geology that what was once an ocean floor because of tectonic shift and that sort of thing gets pushed up into a mountaintop. They would have seen the skeletons, the fossils of fishes on mountaintops and thought, oh, this must have once been underwater. But she says, the story of the flood was one of the most popular tales of ancient times and is found in several ancient languages. We worked to suit different areas and cultures so that different settings and details are found in each version. So we may have one original with lots of variation. We may have different flood stories that converge into one and then of course continue to vary. So in the conclusion of Atrahasas, we have the flood arrive and unfortunately we have a huge gap of about 58 lines noted on page 33. But before and after that gap we have the goddess Nintu, remember the womb goddess, the mother goddess, is weeping. She now regrets the fact that the gods altogether decided to send this flood. And she in particular blames Elil, says we all did this because Elil wanted it. But her regret over the flood is something we're gonna see in later versions as well. And then after the flood, something happens in that 58 lines that leads us wondering how it ended. Where did the arc land? Where did what happened after that? But the lines that we pick up with on tablet three, column five, bottom half of page 33, we read that the gods smelt the fragrance, gathered like flies over the offering. When they had eaten the offering, Nintu got up and blamed them all. Then we have this speech from Nintu, blaming Elil for the flood and saying that she regrets what they've done. That might seem really weird. We might have no idea how to fit that into the script as we're trying to figure out what that is. Keep that in mind because in the two consecutive, the two next versions of the flood story, we're gonna read more about that, more explanation and see parallels, but parallels with deviations. Then we're told that Elil is still angry. He still doesn't want human beings to survive. He sees the boat on page 34. The warrior Elil spotted the boat and was furious with Yagigi. He says we, the great Anuna, all of us agreed together in an oath, no form of life should have escaped. How did any man survive the catastrophe? And Inky steps up and says, I did it in defiance of you. I made sure life was preserved. He goes on to say there's five lines missing, but then he says exact your punishment from the center and whoever contradicts your order, and then 12 lines are missing. This passage is gonna become relevant to us in a much later lecture, but keep that in mind because I will come back to it. And then we might have a hard time figuring out what's happening in the final page. Inky is giving some sort of advice, although there are broken lines, and he says, let there be one third of the people, among the people, the woman who gives birth yet does not give birth successfully, and successfully is in parentheses potentially because it's been added. Let there be the Pasitu demon among the people to snatch the baby from its mother's lap. This sounds kind of cruel. Inky has helped avert three different global catastrophes, but now he's saying, let there be this sort of infant mortality. After that is the rule that certain types of priestesses will not be able to have children. So we have the establishment of a rule that certain people are not, one third of the people will not be able to have children. These priestesses will not be able to have children. Then we have 26 lines missing in that column and another eight lines in the next column. But this seems to indicate that the problem all along was population. The Anunnaki were sending these floods in order to control the human population, but rather than wiping them out, Inky is suggesting, how about we just control the number of people that are able to be born? And that is again an etiology of infant mortality and an etiology of why certain priestesses are not allowed to have children. It's because the gods need to keep the population down so they don't have to send another catastrophe. We'll come back to all of this when we get to the flood tablet in the Epic of Gilgamesh. So we don't have to understand everything just yet. We'll keep this in mind and then we'll have another text to compare it with later on. So in these fragments that we have from the hand of Epic Aya in the old Babylonian version, we have the most complete version of Atrahasis. And we have a lot of clues as to what's going on in other texts. But notice that we had to do a lot of redacting or at least Stephanie Dolly did that for us in the book Myths from Mesopotamia. She included the old Babylonian version of Epic Aya. She included two, at least two standard Babylonian tablets. These tended to create these doublets. These, the story would have started and then stop and then start over again and retell part of it and sometimes with conflicts and that sort of thing. This might seem a frustration. It might seem like a sort of a side note. But for our purposes, this is a very important lesson. It's a lesson we're gonna apply to every text that we're gonna read in the rest of this class. And if you're interested, I mentioned that I included a link to the, the arc before Noah, I'm sorry. I included a link to the Nova documentary, Secrets of Noah's Arc, which interviews the Cuneiform scholar Irving Finkel, who's the head of Cuneiform studies at the British Museum in London. He's the one that translated this tablet. He's the one that found the specifications for the coracle of the round arc. So I posted a link to that program. Also, if you're curious about the individual flood tablets, I've posted links to those at the museums that hold them. And Irving Finkel has written a book called The Arc Before Noah in which he talks about the archeology of flood tablets and helps to reconstruct that world. If this is the kind of thing that might be helpful for a paper or something like that in the future, or personal interest. But your next assignment for the next text, you're going to have to do the sort of thing that Stephanie Dolly has done. Next is Epic of Gilgamesh. And then the rest of this week, unit two, you're just gonna read the first few tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh. But when you do that, you're not gonna have to worry about the standard Babylonian version being interspersed with the old Babylonian version. Stephanie Dolly for Gilgamesh has separated the two. So the most complete text of Gilgamesh is the standard Babylonian version. And at the end of that, she includes, all by itself, the old Babylonian version. And what I'm asking you to do is read one part from the standard Babylonian version, then go to the old Babylonian version and read the corresponding part, then go back to the standard Babylonian version. So you're actually gonna have to do the redaction yourself. So in the schedule of readings on Blackboard, I list, first of all, I list several video lectures which I haven't produced yet. But as I produce them, I'll post them there. That text will become a link and you'll be able to click on it and go to YouTube or it'll be posted in the Unit 2 section below this video. But watch that introduction to Gilgamesh or go ahead and start reading the tablets. But be sure you read in the order I've prescribed in the schedule of reading section. Read Gilgamesh Standard Babylonian Tablets 1 through Tablet 2, Column 4. And that's on Stephanie Dolly's and Mrs. Mesopotamia pages 50 to 61. Then switch over to page 136 and read 136 through 142. And that's the old Babylonian version, Tablet 1, Tablet 2, and up to Tablet 3, Column 2. Then go back to the standard Babylonian version, read 61 to 77, then go to the old Babylonian version and read 142 to 148. So you're reading the same story, two different texts, two different narratives and you're doing the redaction yourself. Then you're gonna read about a tablet and read the text of a tablet that has been translated since Stephanie Dolly wrote your book, Wrote Miss from Mesopotamia. So you're gonna have to do some redaction outside the book. This is gonna be a lot of work, but it's gonna be worth it. This is an exercise in the kind of thing that storytellers and story scholars or textual scholars have had to do for, as we see, 4,000 years. So I've given you the links to an article about this newly discovered tablet and a link to a transcription, a translation of the tablet itself. Now obviously you're going to see transliteration from the cuneiform into our modern letters but with the pronunciation and with the words that you won't recognize. Obviously you don't have to read the ancient Babylonian, but there is an English translation in that PDF by Al Rawi and George. Read that translation. These are lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh that fit into an area where there's a gap in both the standard Babylonian version and the old Babylonian version that you have in Stephanie Dolly's text. But it's all laid out for you in the schedule of readings. So just follow those steps and if you're reading ahead before I make the video, it's gonna be okay. Just come back and watch the videos once they're up.