Page 42 - The Tigris Expedition

In Search of the Beginnings

readers when they wrote that Utu-nipishtim’s ship was built with
nine inner compartments and ‘six superimposed decks’. Again the
Hebrews were more modest: the Ark was supposed to have ‘three
decks, upper, middle and lower’.
Clearly the Assyrians, and also the Hebrews before they left
Mesopotamia, had seen big ships. Otherwise they would not even
have been familiar with the concept of vessels with more than one
deck. Nor should we underestimate the ability of the Sumerians to
build giant structures of reeds, when we know that they built real
mountains of sun-baked and oven-baked bricks, so huge in fact that
we would most definitely have thought it impossible in those days
but that the structures are still there to stupefy us, like the pyramids
in Egypt. That civilised societies in the Middle East were familiar
with extremely advanced ship-building five thousand years ago
should no longer surprise us after the discovery of Pharaoh Cheops’
truly astonishing vessel, one that was much larger than any Viking
ship and had been built a thousand years before Abraham came to
Egypt. In fact, if Abraham and Sarah had seen it in its hidden crypt
at the foot of the Great Pyramid, it would have been as old to them
as the Viking ships are to tourists in Norway today.
The extensive Danish excavations on the gulf island of Bahrain
have a direct bearing on the original flood myths. The cities
uncovered were interpreted as the first concrete confirmation of
Bahrain being the Dilmun of the Sumerian merchant records and
the alleged land where the Sumerian ancestors settled after the
flood. The prominent Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob,7 in sum­
marising the results of the first fifteen years during which he led the
Bahrain excavations, supports a widely held view as to the origin of
the Sumerian flood legend. Beneath Ur, the royal city of the
Sumerians, Leonard Woolley found in 1929 a layer of homogene­
ous mud, ten to thirteen feet thick, of a type deposited by water.
Under this again were discovered the ruins of the first city which
was there when some gigantic flood wave had buried all lower
Mesopotamia under twenty-five feet of water until the flood
subsided. To the few survivors this would have seemed to be the
destruction of the world, and the memory of it would have
continued until recorded on Sumerian tablets. Glob assumed that
the few survivors might have saved their lives by climbing the
highest walls of the inner city. But why, I thought, why, when the
city was a port and probably full of reed-ships?
I looked around me. Reed-house, reed-house. Walls, walls. My
thoughts had wandered. Certainly Hagi could have made a nice
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