Page 38 - The Tigris Expedition

In Search of the Beginnings
was recorded in the Old Testament. He probably saw the boat
models, some of silver and some of asphalt-covered reeds, which
the priests buried as temple offerings from prudent sailors, and he
must have been familiar with the kind ofships that docked along the
local wharfs and river banks.
As Hagi sat there on the floor of his reed-house and described the
building principle of the jillabie, its ribs clad with reeds water­
proofed with bitumen, it sounded like a miniature of a famous
vessel described in the Old Testament. Mention Noah’s Ark and
people will smile with happy childhood memories of the naive
story of a bulky house-boat and a gangway packed with pairs of
elephants, camels, giraffes, monkeys, lions, tigers and other beasts
and birds of all kinds, herded by a friendly old man with a long
beard. As a boy, when I played with wooden animals parading into
a wooden Ark, I never dreamt there was anything to learn from the
old tale, still less that I should come to the homeland of the legend or
study learned volumes which attempted to trace its origin.
The Hebrew version of Noah and the Flood, as known to us from
the Old Testament, might have survived as oral tradition until
recorded in Hebrew characters centuries before the time of Christ.
It seems equally possible that a patriarch like Abraham was not
illiterate, since he came from a city where script in varying forms
had been in use for more than a millennium. However this may be,
the Noah myth dates back to a remote period in human history,
antedating the spread of civilisation from the Middle East into
Europe. The ark described was not a European ship but a
Mesopotamian watercraft. The story is one of joint Judaic and
Moslem belief and allegedly came with Abraham, who grew up in
Ur. The migrating tribe of Abraham could not have avoided
passing through the Assyrian kingdom in northern Mesopotamia,
and there is even reason to believe that they spent some time there.
By then the Assyrians, too, were well familiar with the story of
the flood that had destroyed the majority of mankind. The vast
library of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal, which consisted of tens
of thousands of inscribed tablets, was found in 1872 to include a
detailed version of the Universal Deluge. It is so similar to the
younger Hebrew version that both must clearly have had a com­
mon origin. Since the Assyrians acquired their writing system as
well as their mythology from the Sumerians, and since the Hebrews
claim to have come from the former Sumerian capital, Ur, it would
be reasonable to suspect that Sumer would be the common source
of the Assyrian and Hebrew Deluge stories.
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