Page 41 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition

with a big ship at a place called Dilmun and from there reaching Ur
in Mesopotamia, also by sea.
It is regrettable that the tablet is broken where the building of the
big vessel is described, but since Ziusudra and Utu-nipishtim arc
clearly two names for the same royal ship-builder, we may draw
some inference from the Assyrian version. In the earliest epic ever
rediscovered, the Assyrian poet sent his hero, King Gilgamesh, by
boat to the ancestral land of Dilmun, where the long-living King
Utu-nipishtim tells his own story of the flood. He first introduces
himself as the son of King Ubara-Tutu, who ruled in Shuruppak
before the universal disaster, then he alludes in poetic terms to the
words of the ocean-god who told him how to build the ship:
‘Reed-house, reed-house. Wall, wall. Reed-house, listen! Wall
listen! Man from Shuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu. Tear down your
home and build a ship!’
Obviously, by tearing down a reed-house one could only build a
reed-ship. This is also in conformity with the Hebrew version. The
instruction to Noah was: ‘Make yourselfan ark with ribs of cypress;
cover it with reeds, and cover it inside and out with pitch.’5
Even the Assyrian epic hints at their boat-building king using
some covering on his reed-ship. It was none less than Utu-
nipishtim who said, after tearing down his royal reed-house: ‘sixsar
of pitch I poured into the melting-pot, three sar of asphalt I added.
Three sar of oil were brought by the mixing crew, apart from one
sar kept in the hold and two sar hidden by the captain.’
The boat-building principles accredited to Noah were indeed
those used in miniature in the building of the jillabie described by
Hagi and seen by me with six men on board near Babylon.
Naturally, the dimensions of the royal vessels of antiquity would
have been in proportion to the sizes of the other structures built in
the days of the totalitarian kingdoms. The Assyrian epic gives the
dimensions of King Utu-nipishtim’s ship as one ‘iku\ a field
measure which equals the ground plan given for the Tower of
Babel.6 Although this measure is hardly to be taken literally, it
would nevertheless have been easier to build a structure that big out
of long reed-bundles freely harvested in the vast marshes than out
of small bricks each moulded and baked in brick ovens.
The Hebrews were rather more modest in their measurements;
they recorded that the vessel was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45
feet deep, which was only four times longer than Matug’s
makeshift recd-gare which I had measured myself.
The Assyrians probably added something for the benefit of

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