"On the seventh day the ship was completed. The launching was very difficult, so they had to shift the floor '. planks above and below, until two-thirds of the structure had gone into the water" of the Euphrates. Then Utnapishtim put all his family and kin aboard the ship, taking along "whatever I had of all the living creatures" as well as "the animals of the field, the wild beasts of the field." The parallels with the biblical tale - even down to the seven days of construction - are clear. Going a step beyond Noah, however, Utnapishtim also sneaked aboard all the craftsmen who had helped him build the ship.
He himself was to go aboard only upon a certain signal, whose nature Enki had also revealed to him: a "stated time" to be set by Shamash, the deity in charge of the fiery rockets. This was Enki's order:
"When Shamash who orders a trembling at dusk will shower down a rain of eruptions - board thou the ship, batten up the entrance!"
We are left guessing at the connection between this apparent firing of a space rocket by Shamash and the arrival of the moment for Utnapishtim to board his ark and seal himself inside it. But the moment did arrive; the space rocket did cause a "trembling at dusk"; there was a shower of eruptions. And Utnapishtim "battened down the whole ship" and "handed over the structure together with its contents" to "Puzur-Amurri, the Boatman."
The storm came "with the first glow of dawn." There was awesome thunder. A black cloud rose up from the horizon. The storm
tore out the posts of buildings and piers; then the dikes gave. Darkness followed, "turning to blackness all that had been light;"
and "the wide land was shattered like a pot."
For six days and six nights the "south-storm" blew.
Gathering speed as it blew,
submerging the mountains,
overtaking the people like a battle. . . .
When the seventh day arrived,
the flood-carrying south-storm
subsided in the battle
which it had fought like an army.
The sea grew quiet,
the tempest was still,
the flood ceased.
I looked at the weather.
Stillness had set in.
And all of Mankind had returned to clay.
The will of Enlil and the Assembly of Gods was done.
But, unknown to them, the scheme of Enki had also worked: Floating in the stormy waters was a vessel carrying men, women, children, and other living creatures.
With the storm over, Utnapishtim "opened a hatch; light fell upon my face." He looked around; "the landscape was as level as a flat roof." Bowing low, he sat and wept, "tears running down on my face." He looked about for a coastline in the expanse of the sea; he saw none. Then:
There emerged a mountain region; On the Mount of Salvation the ship came to a halt; Mount Nisir ["salvation"] held the ship fast, allowing no motion.
For six days Utnapishtim watched from the motionless ark, caught in the peaks of the Mount of Salvation - the biblical peaks of Ararat. Then, like Noah, he sent out a dove to look for a resting place, but it came back. A swallow flew out and came back. Then a raven was set free - and flew off, finding a resting place. Utnapishtim then released all the birds and animals that were with him, and stepped out himself. He built an altar "and offered a sacrifice" - just as Noah had.
But here again the single Deity - multideity difference crops up. When Noah offered a burnt sacrifice, "Yahweh smelled the enticing smell"; but when Utnapishtim offered a sacrifice, "the gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor. The gods crowded like flies about a sacrificer."
In the Genesis version, it was Yahweh who vowed never again to destroy Mankind. In the Babylonian version it was the Great Goddess who vowed: "I shall not forget. . . . I shall be mindful of these days, forgetting them never."
That, however, was not the immediate problem. For when Enlil finally arrived on the scene, he had little mind for food. He was hopping mad to discover that some had survived. "Has some living soul escaped? No man was to survive the destruction!" Ninurta, his son and heir, immediately pointed a suspecting finger at Enki. "Who, other than Ea, can devise plans? It is Ea alone who knows every matter." Far from denying the charge, Enki launched one of the world's most eloquent defense summations. Praising Enlil for his own wisdom, and suggesting that Enlil could not possibly be "unreasoning" - a realist - Enki mixed denial with confession. "It was not I who disclosed the secret of the gods"; I merely let one Man, an "exceedingly wise" one, perceive by his own wisdom what the gods' secret was. And if indeed this Earthling is so wise, Enki suggested to Enlil, let's not ignore his abilities. "Now then, take counsel in regard to him!"
All this, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" relates, was the "secret of the gods" that Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh. He then told Gilgamesh of
the final event. Having been influenced by Enki's argument,
Enlil thereupon went aboard the ship.
Holding me by the hand, he took me aboard.
He took my wife aboard,
made her kneel by my side.
Standing between us,
he touched our foreheads to bless us:
"Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human;
henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife
shall be unto us like gods.
Utnapishtim shall reside in the Far Away,
at the Mouth of the Waters!"
And Utnapishtim concluded his story to Gilgamesh. After he was taken to reside in the Far Away, Anu and Enlil
Gave him life, like a god,
Elevated him to eternal life, like a god.
But what happened to Mankind in general? The biblical tale ends with an assertion that the Deity then permitted and blessed
Mankind to "be fruitful and multiply." Mesopotamian versions of the Deluge story also end with verses that deal with Mankind's
procreation. The partly mutilated texts speak of the establishment of human "categories":
. . . Let there be a third category among the Humans:
Let there be among the Humans
Women who bear, and women who do not bear.
There were, apparently, new guidelines for sexual intercourse:
Regulations for the human race:
Let the male ... to the young maiden. . . .
Let the young maiden. . . .
The young man to the young maiden . . .
When the bed is laid,
let the spouse and her husband lie together.
Enlil was outmaneuvered. Mankind was saved and allowed to procreate. The gods opened up Earth to Man. WHEN THE GODS FLED FROM EARTH
WHAT WAS THIS DKLUGE, whose raging waters swept over Earth?
Some explain the Flood in terms of the annual inundations of the Tigris-Euphrates plain. One such inundation, it is surmised, must have been particularly severe. Fields and cities, men and beasts were swept away by the rising waters; and primitive peoples, seeing the event as a punishment by the gods, began to propagate the legend of a Deluge.
In one of his books, Excavations at Ur, Sir Leonard Woolley relates how, in 1929, as the work on the Royal Cemetery at Ur was drawing to a close, the workmen sank a small shaft at a nearby mound, digging through a mass of broken pottery and crumbled brick. Three feet down, they reached a level of hard-packed mud - usually soil marking the point where civilization had started. But could the millennia of urban life have left only three feet of archaeological strata? Sir Leonard directed the workmen to dig farther. They went down another three feet, then another five. They still brought up "virgin soil" - mud with no traces of human habitation. But after digging through eleven feet of silted, dry mud, the workmen reached a stratum containing pieces of broken green pottery and flint instruments. An earlier civilization had been buried under eleven feet of mud! Sir Leonard jumped into the pit and examined the excavation. He called in his aides, seeking their opinions. No one had a plausible theory. Then Sir Leonard's wife remarked almost casually, "Well, of course, it's the Flood!" Other archaeological delegations to Mesopotamia, however, cast doubt on this marvelous intuition. The stratum of mud containing no traces of habitation did indicate flooding; but while the deposits of Ur and al-'Ubaid suggested flooding sometime between 3500 and 4000 B.C., a similar deposit uncovered later at Kish was estimated to have occurred circa 2800 B.C. The same date (2800 B.C.) was estimated for mud strata found at Erech and at Shuruppak, the city of the Sumerian Noah. At Nineveh, excavators found, at a depth of some sixty feet, no less than thirteen alternate strata of mud and riverine sand, dating from 4000 to 3000 B.C.