The Fertile Crescent and Attempts to Destroy Mankind

Over three thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean seaboard to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, legends about horrific floods sent by the Gods to destroy humankind became prominent. For instance, in the literary works _Atrahasis_, the Bible, and _The Epic of Gilgamesh_, a single hero and his family escape the cataclysmic deluge after building a boat on the advice of a deity. You can see one of those heroes here: Utnapishtem and his wife build a massive arc and gain immortality from the Gods as a congratulations offering in _Gilgamesh_. Historians have been comparing and analyzing these Mestopotamian myths for centuries, but a recent rendering of Tablet XI – the flood myth – of _Gilgamesh_ argues that careful linguistic analysis yields new information. Dr. Martin Worthington of Cambridge University has translated the Babylonian cuneiform tablet (see second photo) and observes that the God Ea who warned Utnapishtem about the upcoming flood (it was going to be sent by a powerful storm God) wasn’t just being merciful, but was motivated by self-interest: if all of humanity were to drown, Ea wouldn’t be able to get any more sacrifices. So Ea tricked Utnapishtem into making the boat with words that had a double-entendre. Some lines promise the boat-builder that “at dawn there will be kukko-cakes. In the evening he will rain down upon you a shower of wheat:” food will drop out of the sky — boat-building incentivized! But one could have also understood those lines to mean “at dawn, he will rain down upon you darkness . . . . He will rain down upon you rain as thick as grains of wheat.” Ea had to be sneaky when he warned Utnapishtem, since the big flood was being sent by an extremely powerful storm God. Worthington’s book, _Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story_ was published this November 2019 by Routledge.