Page 391 - The Tigris Expedition

Five Months for Us, Five Millennia for Mankind
punished mankind; then, already in pre-Christian times, they
received a Hebrew variant from the Hellenistic Jews; and indepen­
dent of both.of these they had received the Egyptian version
i following their intimate contact with the Nile country. If we care
for the opinion of the ancient people whose cultural origin we seek,
we have to bear with their flood stories which obstruct everything
beyond. The Egyptians arc no exception, if we arc to trust the
authority of Plato.
About four centuries before Christ, the thinker Plato wrote his
dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which he has Critias tell Socrates
about Solon’s interview with the learned priests of Sais, an Egyp­
tian city at the head of the Nile delta. We arc told that the story is a
strange one, ‘but Solon, the wisest of the seven wise men, once
vouched its truth’. Solon started by telling the Egyptians about the
beginning of history according to Greek memories, about how
Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the deluge, and he tried to enumer­
ate their descendants in order to work out how long ago the flood
had occurred. He was then interrupted by a very old Egyptian
priest, who told him that the Greeks were like children, with no
ancient civilisation and no memories before the last flood. More
than one flood had struck the Mediterranean and destroyed all
growing civilisations, sweeping all scribes and learned men into the
sea from Greece and surrounding territories. The only survivors in
those parts had been unlettered and uncultivated herdsmen and
shepherds in the mountains. Thus ‘writings and other necessities of
civilisation’ had been destroyed, and the Greeks and their neigh­
bours had to ‘begin again like children’, in complete ignorance of
their own past achievements. But these disastrous flood waves had
not struck Egypt in the same way. According to the old priest,
written records from the earliest times had consequently been
preserved in their temples. The oldest writings were said by the
priest to describe the important events which he dated to a period
nine thousand years before Solon’s visit to Egypt:

64. The end of Tigris, but we had the answers. You were still
floating high after five months, and you had carried eleven men and
all their necessities 4,200 miles, or 6,800 kilometres, from
Mesopotamia (Iraq) by way of the Dilmun (Bahrain), Makan
(Oman) and Meluhha (Indus Valley) of the Sumerians, across the
Indian Ocean and past the Punt (Somalia) of the Egyptians, to
Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea.
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