Historical Memory and Conclusion

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I'm going to be joined by the fantastic Jeremy Armstrong, he's a professor of ancient history and an expert on early Rome, and together we'll follow the myth from divine origins to blood soaked founding legend, teasing apart what the Romans believed , what archaeology can actually tell us, and how a city built on stories became one of the greatest powers in history . Tickets are on sale now. We're coming to Canberra on the second of August and we're going to be in Auckland on the eighth. The tickets they are selling far, so book yours now at Fain. com . Au Can't wait to see you there Since the dawn of time, humanity has been at war. It has shaped the world around , and if it somehow feels like we've been here before, it's because we have. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian and on my new podcastostile, h history, I take us inside history's most defining wars and rebellions. From Gangas Khan to the war in Iran, find out how the past can explain the present. Search for and follow hostile history on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcast. When the gods were man , they bore the toile , carried the lo ad . The load of the gods was great . The toil was heavy , the misery too much Those are the opening lines to one of the greatest epics of antiquity . Performed to crowds of people in the streets of Babylon and beyond some four thousand years ago , a story about their creation , how humans came into existence , and how they were living in a world that had followed a divine Foodl . We know the epic today as the Atra Harsis , named after its central character, a man who survived this divine flood by building a great boat , taking some companions with him and two of every animal. Sound familiar ? This Babylonian epic has many striking similarities to the biblical flood of Noah and his ar k . And today we're going to shine a light on it . Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host , and this is the story of the oldest Flood myth known from anywhere in the world . Our guest is Dr. Sophis Hell , a writer, translator and expert on ancient Babylonian literature. Sofis , welcome back to the show . So great to be back. I really enjoyed being on the ancients the first two times and I'm so delighted to be here again. Well, we've done the Epic of Gilgamesh and Babylon's epic of creation . And this is another epic, isn't it? Can we say that this is the this is the original Flood Myth story ? Well, it's one of the oldest flood mymoves and in opinion the greatest . And we'll get to talking about why in a moment. But yeah, this is yet another Babylonian epoch. It's also one of the earliest Babylonian epochs. So we're actually long before the composition of the Enuma Elish, this epic of creation we talked about, and also before the standard Babylonian gilgamage that we talked about. So this is really one of the great first classics of Babylonian literature. And I think as we'll see as we explore key parts of the story , it can't be missed. You can't miss it. There are clear inspirations on the later the flood story from the Hebrew Bible ? Yes, exactly. And the flood story also appears in Gilgamesh as we talked about in that episode. But actually, recent research has shown that the flood story we see in Atrahasis that we're talking about today closer to the version we find in Genesis than the one in Gilgamesh is. There's still a lot of open questions about how exactly the transmission happened, but it's worth keeping in mind. Okay, so how far back in time are we going with this flood myth story? Yeah, so as I said like we're really at the beginning of Babylonian literature. So we are in a period known as the old Babylonian period and that basically means the beginning of the second millennium BC E , it's really hard to say when this poem that we're looking at today was first composed , but we have a set of manuscripts, so a set of clay tablets on which it was written down that are just like really high quality . So these are like, you know, there are other copies of this text, but we're especially reliant on these texts. They were copied by a man named Ibek Aya when he was sort of like at the equivalent of the end of his university education and he copied these tablets in the year sixteen hundred and thirty five BCE. So again, we can't exactly say when it was composed, but often when we sort of try to place this text in time , we use these manuscripts by Ibiya to give it a sort of specific context. And he lives in the city of Sipar, very close to what is today Bhakdad and yeah, as I said, sixteen thirty five. Sofas, this is what I love with Mesopotamian epics, with Mesopotamian literature is that you can have these copies surviving that are almost four thousand years old and look at the writing today because it's baked into clay. Yeah, you have those surviving rather than let's say later like the Iliad and the Odyssey or later text where it's kind of little bits of fragments of papyrius that have survived. You have the clay tablets surviving from when that figure wrote it down almost four thousand years ago. That just always blows my mind. Yeah, exactly. And I agree. Like it's part of what makes clay this wonderful material and I really feel like sometimes it gives us this sense of intimacy with these ancient people because not only do we have the Atrahaz epic by Ipic Aya, but we can actually follow him through his education. We can see the other text he was studying in his quote unquote university degree . And so we can sort of reconstruct what mindset he might have been in as he was copying this text, which is really exciting. Mindset as well. So you get indications into the manner, the nature , the mind of the copier, the writer down as well. Yeah, so we know that he was being taught by his father and we can sort of see the other text that his father is choosing for him. And a lot of them have to do with like the end of an era. A lot of them have to do with sort of like death and tragedy , but also with like words and what it means to be a good servant of the god Enki, this trickster creative god that we're going to talk about a lot today. And the name that they gave to this myth . Is it yet? They called it the Atrahasis, do they? So no, that's actually a modern title. Can we name it after its main human character? As we're going to see, there are three main characters in this text, two gods and one human and the human is called Atrahasis. Their name for it, and this sort of launches us straight into the story because the Babylonians called their poems by the first line . And it's one of the best examples of this. It's Inuma Elu Awilum , which means when Gods were man. Which is just a fantastic opening title to be honest . And it then goes on to explain what it means with this rather puzzling sentence when Gods were man , which is that in the beginning, Gods were like men are today in that they were burdened with work. So if I can just read like opening lines of the text , it goes When gods were men weighed down by work, they bore the burden. The burden of the gods was great, their work was heavy, their torment long . And it then goes on to explain that it's not all the gods that are working. There are two classes of gods. There's the Anuna and the Igigi. Now the Anuna and the Igigi, those words mean different things in different Babylonian texts so it's easy to get confused. But in this text, the Anuna are the gods of heaven and the gi are the working gods. And it literally tells us that the Anuna gods are idol. It uses that word. So they're quite literally an idol class. They are the powerholders. And the Yig i are the working class of a god s. And so the text begins with setting up this class conflict that is actually going to power the rest of the myth , because the first thing that happens, the first episode is a labor strike. A labor strike that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, where the Igigi rise up in rebellion against the Anuna, they put down their tools and they say, We are being mistreated. Our working conditions are awful . Genesis is really hard work because the geek have to dig out the riverbeds and they have to build the mountains. And centuries of doing this, they're exhausted. And so they launch this labour structure, which is just a crazy thing. The work that those lesser gods are doing in this story, it isn't constructing a great building or anything like that. It is literally building geography, creating the world as we know it. Yeah, exactly right. And I think it's, you know, you had a lot of other creation myths, including inuma Elish that we talked about, but I'm sure you've talked about all sorts of other creation myths on the podcast where like creation often seems this very sort of like magical or perhaps sometimes instantaneous thing and this is a myth that really looks at like what is what is the labor involved in creation , what, you know, what physical work does it take to make the world? I just find that fascinating. And before we go on with the story, you read out that lovely part right at the beginning there. And I mean, straight away , the wording itself sounded very quite beautif ul, quite poetic. And is there a particular style in which this epic should be delivered? Yeah , so again, just to flag this fact that we're at the beginning of the literary history of Babylonian literature . And in the early periods, it's quite paired down. The lines are very short, the words tend to be very simple, but at the same time, it's very musical . There's a lot of like alliteration and play on words and that kind of thing, but you know, the lines of later texts can be almost twice as long and actually sometimes three times as long as those naturas. So it's a very sort of like yeah cond,ensed liter ary form, I find it very, very beautiful to be honest, which is also why I pushed myself to convey it as well as I could in the translation. And can you imagine it being spoken aloud in Acadian or whatever the language was at the time to a room full of people by someone who knew the text or who could read the text. Yeah, absolutely. And so I think Athro is actually a really good example of how these ancient texts in the Babylonian culture would have circulated. And we tend, I think, in part based on the Greek model, to assume that there is sort of this duality that either texts are circulating in written form or they're circulating in a spoken for m, but Atrahaz makes it quite clear that it has a dual form. So the very last line , and we'll get to the context for that later, but the very last line is just the word listen, which is being spoken to the audience. Listen. And so that makes it very clear that this and the text actually calls itself a song as well as Zamaru, which means song. Yeah. And at the same time, this is also an object made of clay, you know, our Epic Aya copying his manuscripts in sixteen thirty five, you know, he's working with clay . And as we'll see, this is a text that sort of brings clay and sound together in interesting ways. So you can you should imagine it like circulating in two forms at once. So we have, as you've highlighted at the beginning, these two levels of gods and the lesser gods, should we say, or they're the workforce, they're the lab or, building the world , creating. And as you say, there's a strike. So how does this strike go? Lesser gods against the higher gods. It feels like it doesn't feel like it's going to be very fortunate for the strikers Yeah, but it actually is, which is again one of the crazy things about it. Like the revolution works . So the Gigi are being led by a god called Wei. just to quote another bit , Wei says to his brothers the striking Yigi, he says, Now cry war, let us stir battle and strife The gods heard his words, they set fire to their tools, they set fire to their spades, they burned their burden, which I think is also very dramatic . And then they marched to the house of the leader of the heavenly gods, a god called Enlil, the King of thes, gu andard they sort of sur round his house. And yeah, they demand better working conditions . And it literally says, you know, the workers revolted, which is, you know, I don't know. That's part of why the text feels so bizarrely modern, even though so very very, old. I'm guessing Enlil he's not too pleased to be risen by these people who he expected to be working. Nope, not at all . And Enlil is like famously angry. It's like one of his main character traits and Atrahas is no exception. I actually think it really was one of the texts that helped establish this perception of Endless a god who's just very triggered happy. He's, you know, yeah, easy easily angered, especially when he's being woken up and that's exactly what happens. He's woken up and he , you know , is furious . He first wants to isolate who the leader of the rebellion is so that he can sort of quite ditch cut off the head of the rebellion . But the geeky, they have a real Spartacus moment and they say all of us called for this strike . And they actually say something very interesting when they have their spart at this moment . They say every one of us called for this war, we formed our assembly in the ditch . And the reason that that's important is that there is this concept in Babylonian mythology of the assembly of the gods. So all major decisions in Babylonian mythology are taken in this assembly . Like it's a polytheistic system. There's many gods and the gods meet in their council in their pujur , as it's called the Puhur Ili and then they make decisions . And this is, according to Atrahasis, the first of these assemblies takes place in the ditch and its first decision is a labor strike. So the use of that phrase we formed our assembly in the ditch, it might not mean much to a modern audience, but in its original context, it's actually quite a striking phrase. But yeah, so Enlil , you know, he can't isolate the leader . And so instead he says, well, let's scrap this universe and start another one. Like he literally says N,ew, let's just rewrite the rules of the cosmos because he's sort of that angry . But that's when we get the intervention of the god Enki, also called Ea. And I think we've talked about Enki before on the podcast. We almost certainly have so Enlil we should be thinking almost kind of this king of the gods maybe Zeus or Jupiter like should we think just as a comparison ? Yes, but somewhat less powerful okay much less omnipotent than Zooms. And Denki, Morva Trixer, Morva. I'm just trying to think it like more Athena like or I don't know. Or a direct comparison. But another important goal, but known for their cunning, is it? Yeah, like Athena in that he's known for his cunning by the god of the water . So he has this underground lake that he lives in. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, like I feel like Athena is often doing Zeus's bidding, but I guess you'll know more about that than it's difficult to cross compare, yeah, of course. But like Inki is more often subverting Enlil's rule than helping Enlil's rule. And yeah, I think that's the again the Afrohas is a great example of that because just when Enlil is about to say, well, you know , scrap this cosmos, Enki intervenes, and he intervenes on the side of the strike. And he says, well, we've heard them complain for a long time, and we should take that seriously. And so Enki proposes a solution to the strike, and that's us. We are the solution. We are the compromise. He says, let's create a new creature, humanity, and they will then take on the labor of the gods. And you know, our work, our daily work is sort of presented as an extension of Genesis, right? So like in the same way that the gods dug the rivers , we dig canals to, you know, sort of perfect where the water is going, right? To guide it the rest of the way. And in the same way that they build mountains, we build cities , you know, and we build temples in those c ities . And so I think there is no clear cut line between nature culture in Babylonian mythology, but you can sort of have the equivalent of that be, you know, that the go ds they made what we would call nature and humans. We sort of continue that creation , but we make, you know, the human environment in a sense. And it's not completely random to pick out canals because I guess we should remind us that in Mesopotamia, that the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, these great cities of Mesopotamia, yeah, they were renown for their management of water and the creation of these beautiful canals, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, people should really stick a pin in that point because this idea of the management of water is going to come back later in a major way . But also this idea that humans, they are created to work. So this idea , I think you also see with Adam and Eve as well and the like with the creation stories, humans right from the get go, you've got to go out and toil, you've got to go out and be a labor force. Yeah. And as I said, I think part of what I find interesting here is that it's really se our work as an extension of Dubine Creation. And you know, I think I think the text has a point because like the way that I put it in my book about Ataras is that all work is world making. And I think that's also true today. You know, the way that we make the human world, the world that we live in is through labor. You know, whether that's delivering packages or making podcasts or building buildings or whatever it might be, you know, like we make the world that we know through labor. And I think Athrahaz sees that with a lot of charity . But I think it's also important to emphasize that on the one hand, it does make us into what I call holy robots . Like we have to feed the gods, we have to bring them offerings, we have to, you know, give them grain and beer and incense and song, you know . But on the other hand, like the text doesn't only give us burden of labor from the gods, it also gives us something else. And this is where things become a bit technical , but there's a lot of puns in this passage that sort of describe what also happens . And so for example, the name of this rebel leader, Wei is written with a sign that also means ear and ear also means intelligence . And Enki explains that he will have to sacrifice one of the gods and that God will beware and use his blood to create humankind . And when Enki says this, he says that we will sacrifice the god who had the idea , meaning the idea for the rebellion. But the word for idea in that context, Pemu, another beautiful Babylonian word, Taimu , not to be confused with modern tamo as he were . But this idea of tamo doesn't mean just the idea specifically for the rebellion, it can also mean something like consciousness. And so the rebel leader is sacrificed and his blood is then used to create humankind , but also we inherit his sort of rebellious instinct and his idea for the rebellion becomes our consciousness. Like that's sort of the divine blood in us. The spirit of way lives on inside us, that idea, is it? Yeah, exactly right. And the text expresses this rather beautifully here. It says forever after , let us hear the drum. From the flesh of the gods, let a spirit remain, and let it make the living know its sign so as not to forget let a spirit remain . And it is then shown that the spirit is Wai sp'irsit living on inside us. But I particularly like this line of let us hear the drum because that's our heartbeat, you know? And it's that drum inside us that is constantly reminding us of this rebel god who lives on in our blood in our minds . That's quite something. Okay, weighs the heartbeat. Okay, weighs out the picture, ways sacrificed to himself for us for humans . And then Sophus, how do we get to these first humans? What does the story tell us about the earliest humans? Well, it actually has a very long and detailed description of them and that brings us to our second main character. So our first main character is Enki. He's going to be really a plot engine throughout the story and he's this trickster god, but he needs a collaborator. He says, I cannot create humanity alone. And so he brings in the Mother Goddess. The Mother Goddess has roughly fifteen different names, but today we're going to use the name Mami and Mami then takes the sort of living flesh, this living clay blood mixture that Enki has made and actually shapes it into humanity . And Mami lays the design of the people , as the poem puts it. And what she designs in that moment is the system of procreation . She designs the system of reproduction. And so the mother goddess has a very extended description of first making the genders and then making mutual attraction and then she invents sex . And she invents consent also, which is quite interesting. Like it's actually repeatedly emphasized that these people who have sex must consciously choose one , which is a great Acadian word . And then they have sex and then she designs the process of pregnancy and childbirth and delivery and nursing. And like it's a very long speech . I think it goes on for almost a hundred lines in which the mother goddess sort of lays out her vision for yeah motherhood with each and every step that that entails. And so she's, you know, created essentially a perfect system where the gods can just get free labor forever and ever and ever and ever. But no death at this point, it's just birth and creation, okay? Exactly right, because the mother goddess 's perfect system has one big flaw in it, which is that she creates life and she creates the means for creating new life , but she does not create death . And that's that's the big problem here . Because then twelve hundred years pass and there's been no death. It seems to be that you can still sort of die of like premature causes. I think the best way to think about this is that you can still die if the god era kills you. An era can kill you with sickness and with war and like with murder and that kind of thing. But you don't die of like old age. You can die in like Era coming and snatching you in the various ways he does. But you don't sort of, you know, there's no limits to your lifespan. It just goes on and on and on. And after twelve hundred years this has become a problem and then it's become a problem in the way that we've already met because what it does is that it keeps Enlil awake. Is this the thing with Enlil? I'm the King of the Gods, but at the end of the day , like the thing that really matters to him is getting his good night's sleep . Yeah , exactly right . And like, to be fair, it seems that he's not been able to sleep for centuries at this point, but still , the way that he puts it is as follows . Enlil heard their noise and said to the great gods, humanity's noise is too heavy for me. I cannot sleep for their roar . And you know, I think like this is often the passage that people most remark on when I tell them the story of Acclahaz because it just seems sillier than the Bible . Whereas this question of sin and all of that. But I honestly, I like this better, you know, I think in part because like sound plays such a role throughout the story , you know, we heard that when Wei is created he becomes a strum beat inside of us and then the lead up to the flood is sort of this yeah this sense of humanity's noise becoming louder and louder and louder and then Enlil being kept awake by it. And then as we're going to see, the flood itself is an explosion of sound . And since we heard that this text is a song , I actually think it's quite clever of it that it lets the prime engine of the plot be sound, right? It's working with its own medium. And you can just sort of imagine this epic being performed and just becoming louder and louder itself, you know ? So I think even though it's a bit silly at first, I actually think it would have been very effective. I think you're quite right. And actually the more I think of it, I think I think it's on like almost a pantomime or you know kind of I say a live performance where you have the person reading it out but, maybe assisted by one or two people who are helping with the sound effects for those key parts of the story. And then all of a sudden you can get more of a sense how this performance could well have what it could have looked like when it was being performed in a street in Babylon almost four thousand years ago. That's cool. Yeah, exactly. And the drums resounding in the background when we hear that way becomes a drum. So Enlil can't get some sleep. Does that lead to him directly thinking it's time for a genocide quite frankly or what's the next step ? No, not yet. We're not at the genocide yet. And I think it's actually like this is a really interesting this is actually a really interesting aspect of a lot of these ancient ep ochs is that a lot of them do depict a genocide, but often they show us sort of the way there . So if you think of the Iliad, this is mounting tension between the Greeks and the Trojans. And in book six of the Iliad, you reach a tipping point and that's when the Greeks begin to talk about killing all of them, not killing their warriors, but literally killing the women and the children and the elders, right? And you see the same in the Sanskrit epic Mahabarata that there's a sort of sense of tensions mounting before you get to the full genocidal attack . And in the case of Atrahasis, Enlil makes three failed attempts at culling humanity before eventually resorting on the sort of final solution, which is the flood, right? But yeah, so and in between each of these three attempts, twelve hundred years pass and there's a lot more humans and a lot more sound said these early attempts they fail because humans they have the spirit of way, the spirit of resistance, the spirit of kind of fighting back against even by what enl ighten to try and get rid of them, humans prove incredibly resilient to it . Yeah, exactly. And there is one man who possesses intelligence , you know, this arguably artificial intelligence this created intelligence more than any of the other humans. And that's our third main character and that's Atrahas. Atrahas okay. Right. And his name literally means super intelligent . And he uses that intelligence. I think the intelligence in question, which is expressed with the word has as, is very much the intelligence not sort of of internal meditation, but very much the intelligence of being able to listen to others and being able to speak himself. And in Atrahaz 's case, that is especially his conversation with his god, Enki, the trickster god that we already met. And Atrahaz 's skill is that he can he can talk with Inki and Inki talks with him, right? And it is by talking with the God of creativity that he again and again comes up with these creative solutions to foil Inki's plans. And often involve manipul ating the one tool that humanity has at their disposal because they God have given the humans control over their food supply , right? Which might not have been the best idea because now the humans can withhold the food and they can also decide to give all their food offerings to one specific god. So when Enki tries to send a disease, a pandemic, again, there are too many way too relatable , way too relatable things about Athrassis, right? But Endl attempts a pandemic. And so the humans bring all of their offerings only to the god of disease . So nobody else gets any, all the other gods are starving, and suddenly the god of disease is sitting there with all of these offerings and he literally feels ashamed, right? He feels embarrassed. And so he lets the disease leave the land . And that's the first round of plague . But eventually sort of Enlil catches on to what Enki and Atrahaz are doing. So he makes it still more difficult for them to communicate with each other. I do have the idea of that that god and that clever person with that extra ordinary human figure the conversations because I mean you do think of things like Odysseus and Athena or Tilema because you know these extraordinary figures from Greek mythology, these so called heroes, you know, who are because they are a bit better as they're portrayed or a bit different to everyday figures. They have that connection with the gods and you have that similar theme here in this epic in Babylon, you know, with the figure of Atrohns and the golden key as well. It's funny how you can see parallels there. Yeah, absolutely. There are various culture heroes in Babylonian mythology. You know, we've also looked at Gilgimej of course . But what's I think interesting about the Ratahas is that he's such an empty character. Like he is his intellect and nothing more. Like we learn almost nothing else about him, his personality or, you know, even like his condition in life is unclear what his profession is . Is he a king? Is he a priest? Is he just a commoner? It's not fully certain . But you know, I like to call him the exceptional every man because I think we can really project ourselves into him because he is this empty character , but the one thing that he is is he is atrajaz, he is super smart, right? He's extra intelligent . So let's get to the flood. I know there are a few other things that happen, but you cover them in detail in your book. So I don't want to give everything away. But how do we get then to Enlil deciding right ? I need to do something different. We need a flood . Yeah, unfortunately the answer to that question is not fully cle ar because the text is fragmentary, but I think we can sort of reasonably extrapolate from what we know so far that it gets to a point where Endl has again and again tried to foil , first of all, he's tried to cull humanity, he's tried to foil Enkis and Atlas 's schemes. And then he just has enough. And he says, okay, this is it. No more humans. You know, I'm sick of this cycle. It's been going on for three thousand six hundred years. Enough of this. And so he decides on yeah, there's this final solution. And you know, the text gives us like a lengthy treatment of the meeting of the gods, the assembly of the gods in which they decide to call the flood. To another assembly. Okay, interesting. Another assembly, exactly. And I think that's also really worth worth noting that Atrahaz has a lot of reversals between the first and the second part. So first we get the creation of human in the first assembly and then we get the destruction of humanity in the second assembly and there are specific lines that are repeated from the first part and the second where they flip meaning and you know really tying the two parts together and establishing this sense of contrast . But yeah, so I mean, unfortunately the minutes of this meeting are lost because that is the description of that assembly is very fragmentary. But that's what happens. The gods decide to call the flood. And I think it's also very interesting that the text will repeatedly insist that Enlil subverted the what we could call the sort of in quote unquote democratic process of the Assembly, right? Like he doesn't listen to everybody else in the assembly and he really sort of forces his own agenda through and it said that he confused the assembly. He subverted the assembly . So I think it's also a reminder that and this is really a widespread trope in Babylonian literature that if a leader stops listening to his assembly, pretty terrible things happen almost immediately . And Atrahazis in the story of the flood is a great example of that. Like the reason that the flood happened is that Endvil stop listening to the other gods, stop listening to his assembly and his advisors. So that could be a reflection on Babylonian kingship and the council and the priests and all the people that would have been around to miss his court . Yeah, exactly . And you know, it's a story that's particularly appealing to the people like Ipigaya, our scribe who is copying out this text as part of his university education because what is his job going to be? Well, it's going to be a professional advisor, right? So like, here is a myth , which is the crowning moment of his education that tells him, you know, there was once a time where universal disaster could have been avoided if the king of the gods had just listened to a person like you, you know? Like that's that's that's a sort of what an ego boost. There you go. Yeah So how is Atrahas how does he get word of this destruction decision? Well, at first it's very difficult because Enlil has ensured that Enki can't just do the same trick again, so he has imposed an oath of silence on all the gods. They've all been sworn to secrecy . And this seems and this is a bit my interpretation, but I'll present it and then you'll see whether you agree. But so it seems to be a Babylonian explanation of why we can't talk with the gods directly, right? And the Babylonians had a solution to their problem, which is to interpret the omens that the gods sent to them. And this story explains how that system came about because Enki can't just say to Atrahaz, this is what's about to happen . So he sends to him a series of omens first in the form of a dream, but then Atrahaz as can't understand that dream . And then in the form of these reeds , so you know, Enki is living in this underground lake. So the reeds are like tiny pipes that he's sort of like, you know, piping up through Atrahaz's house, which is also made of reeds, right? So it's like the whole house is talking to him . But this thing of communicating through objects, that's that's an omen, you know? Like that's what an omen is. And the Babylonians, you know, they were obsessed with omens, they saw omens absolutely everywhere. And the story of the flood may have been an explanation of why the gods communicated in this rather bizarre way rather than just talking to us. Right . And so Enki manages to get word tatroys through this manner and what is he told to do? Well, let me read you the passage. Okay so Enki speaks through the wall and says Wall, listen to me, fence, heed my every word. Flee the house, build a boat, leave your stuff, save your life. And then he goes into a sort of lengthy description what this arc , this boat is supposed to look like , how it is to be shaped, what his measurements are. And Atrahaz is told to take on board the seed of every living things , meaning at least in the Bible's rendition, two of every kind of animals , and also the craftsmen of every kind of craft so that humanity doesn't lose the crafts that are the bedrock of our society. And Athro Hass isis also allowed to take his family . So slightly roomier boat than in the Bible, but that's the same basic idea. I remember between Irving Thinkling about this a couple of years ago and is it actually this idea that the boat was supposed to be round? Well, that's actually not as clear in Atlrahas, so Irving found another text that has a more detailed description of the boat than what we see in Atlrahas. It's a little harder to sort of mentally reconst ruct the boat if you're just going by the Atrahasis description. But it sounds like so Atrohassis is allowed to save a few more people in the biblical story, but he can't save everyone. Is that true? Yeah, and he's clearly heartbroken about it. So he, you know, gets all the people of his city to build this boat because he only has a week before the flood is coming . It has to be a very big boat. And so he's truly opening the treasury , he's holding a big feast for all of his workers, but he knows that they're all going to die. And that is a pretty terrible psychological situation . And so at this feast he's just overcome by emotions. And so the text says they were eating, they were drinking. But he went in and he went out, could not sit and could not crouch. His heart was broken . He vomited gaul Yeah, I don't know if it's a tragedy. That's like a last supper of beer and barley. And that's the that's the kind of the drink in the food, isn't it? That you should think of as well. Yeah, exactly right. And so the workers build the boat, they're not allowed on it. Yeah . And then the flood comes. In the story, the flood comes straight away. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly right. Literally right after the lines I read right now, the next lines are then the face of the weather changed and Adad began to roar in the clouds, Adad being the storm god . And what happens? Take it away, Sofis . Yeah, so we get this very traumatic description of the flood . Again, sort of really emphasizes how loud the flood is , which again, you know, I can very easily imagine a skilled performer having a field day recreating Right, exactly right, with recreating the sound of the flood . But yeah, let me just read you a passage . Like battle, disaster spread over the people . Brothers looked in vain for each other, men all looked the same in the slaughter . The flood was bellowing like a bull , the winds wailed like an eagle's cry, the darkness was dense, the sun had gone, and the children of men became like flies . The gods grew afraid of the noise of the flood, they hid in heaven and took refuge. In the open they sat and wept. It's very uncontrolled. This is just sheer destruction at its maximum. Exactly right. And that's one of the big differences from the biblical account, right? Like when in the Bible , you know, think would you will of the God of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament , but you know, he at least knows what he's doing, right? He has control over the operation of the flood . In the Babylonian version, they lose control over it immediately, you know? And I think it's partly also interesting to think about this in class terms. And you know, I'm sorry to be sounding very sort of barxist in my analysis here, but it does sort of reflect the structure of the text, you know, that the revolt of the gigi in the beginning of the poem was these workers rising up against their masters and story of the flood is the inverse of that . And so it is the masters kill ing their workers. It's the gods killing humanity. And again, there's one of these lines sort of making that link. So earlier we heard that the geeky were described as the workers revolted. And here we describe we hear the flood being described as the waters revolted . And so this is, you know, it sort of has , again, an eerily modern resonance because it sort of describes catastrophic climate change as class warfare from above. And again, I know that that sounds very Marxist, but I'm so trying to present the poem in terms that makes sense to this day. And I think it's kind of crazy how much Atrahas allows for those modern paradels. It's part of why I'm so obsessed with the story What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere ? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Weldman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America . We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was for med, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch , and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week where,ver you get your podcasts . American History Head , a podcast from History Head . Since the dawn of time, humanity has been at war, it has shaped the world around us. And if it somehow feels like we've been here before, it's because we have. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian, and on my new podcast, Hostile History, I take us inside History's Most Defining Wars and rebellions, from Genghis Khan to the war in Iran, find out how the past can explain the present. Search for and follow hostile history on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcast How long does the chaos last then that you if these very quickly almost instantly the waters, the floods they can't be controlled by the gods as soon as they've issued it in. I mean how long, does this kind of uncontrolled chaos last ? So it lasts for seven days and seven nights. Okay, so it lasts for this very dramatic week. And then at the end of it, the guards they gather on a mountain and they sort of begin to take stock of what's happened. And there's another very beautiful mirroring here because we heard earlier about how the heartbeat is created. The heartbeat is created to be this regular reminder of the moment in which humanity was created . And likewise, the mother goddess, who is absolutely devastated at seeing humanity being destroyed , she creates a regular reminder to herself so that she can remember what happened in the flood. And that's again what we see in the Bible where it's the rainbow . But strangely in Atlas , the rainbow is created by the mother goddess taking jewelled flies . So you know how flies have these shimmering wings and she makes this cosmic necklace of jeweled flies and hangs it around her neck and that becomes the rainbow. So yeah, the heartbeat and the rainbow are respect ively these regular rhythmical reminders of humanity's creation and our near total destruction. God's like goddesses, are they mourning the complete destruction of humanity at that time? Do they know that Atrahas and his select few have actually survived aboard this boat? So they find out after the flood is over because Atrahas does the Noah trick of sending out a series of birds. And then finally in this case, the crow finds the peak that is Mount Ardarat in the Bible. And here it's at least in the later Babylonian tradition, it's Mount Nijirtu . But either way, the crow finds land and Athrahas sets up an offering. And you know, the offering really reveals the idiocy of the endless quote unquote clan because you know he, hadn't fought its throw. Like now that he had obliterated humanity, the gods starve. And because again, the gods had given their servants humanity, control over their food supply. And so the gods also revealed themselves to be dependent on humanity because it's said that they had shrunk to the size of flies and they're sort of swarming to Athrassis's sacrifice because they've not eaten for a week . And so I think that's what the flood ultimately illustrates. It ultimately illustrates this bizarre balance of power in Babylonian cosmology between the gods and humanity , that the gods are dependent on us, but we're also very dependent on them because they can just wipe us out, right? And so I think that's part of what the myth reveals . And as I said, it began with the sentence , Inuma Ilu um when Gods were men at a moment in time in which the gods are very much like humans , and now they have become very unlike each other. They're so powerful and we're not . But at the same time, much as we've become also very different, we remain very profoundly linked. They depend on us and we depend on them. That's what this sort of final meeting on the mountain reveals. So is this the context for us getting to that? That third and final meeting, the post flood decision as to what is going to happen to humans. Right, exactly right. And what is going to happen to humans is the creation of death and that is a sort of final supplement that brings the story to a close because we've had this sort of very dynamic story where each problem was resolved, but then the solution became the occasion for the new problem, right? So like there was this labor strike that was solved with the creation of humanity. But that then became a problem because there were too many of us, and that led to these famines and diseases and so on and so forth. And they were resolved, but that only made the problem worse . And then that led to the quote unquote final solution, which is the flood, which then turned into a huge problem, right ? And then out of this sort of rhythm of problems and solutions and problems and solutions emerges the final problem slash solution, which is death, right? And it's a solution because it brings this whole thing to a sort of stable endpoint where humanity now won't sort of explode in population numbers , we won't bother End Lil and we can just sort of keep providing these regular offerings of food, but it's a problem for us , right? Like it might not be a problem for the gods, but it's a problem for us because we have to die. And the one person who is accepted from that is Atrahas. So Atrahas kind of receives he's allowed to maintain his immortality then, is that the idea or Right. And in later Babylonian tradition, he is then given a new title and that new title is The One Who Found Life or in Acadian Utah Napishi , which is the name of the character that we meet in Gilgamesh. And that's in the epic of Gilgamesh where Gilgamesh goes searching for immortality and that's why he goes to meet Utna Piston. Exactly right. Exactly. Okay, so that's how they linked together. Okay. We won't go down the episode of Gilgamesh because we've got two great episodes of the on that. We'll put a link to that in there in the episode notes. And that's the end of the epic. So humans . The family of Atrohissis and the other people who are allowed on the boat , the idea is that they will slowly expand, they will slowly populate repopulate the earth from then on . Yeah, exactly right. And just as the mother goddess was earlier being tasked with creating humanity and she set up this system of like reproduction and procreation, she then is tasked with the opposite. She becomes the creator of death , but she also creates a number of other sort of like measures that are like anti reproduction, anti procreation. So she creates women who don't give birth , which includes a series of priestesses who were barred from having children. The Naditu women is one example. The N priestesses is another example. So for example, the first known author in Hiduana, she was an end priestess, so she was not allowed to have children. The mother goddess also creates this demon called Lamashtu which would snatch newbedorn babies and sort of was the Babylon ian explanation for infant mortality. And all of these measures are made here at the end of the poem. And that's the end of the epic. I mean, so if just how long we've covered the main themes there, really grateful to go through them. Just how long was this epic? Could we imagine that people would have been listening to a performance of this epic and they'd be able to watch the whole thing in one sitting, so to speak? Yeah, I do think so, so it.' Sos about fifty p ages in a modern translation . So I do think you could listen to all of it in one sitting. In the original Acadian , we don't have the whole thing preserved , but it comes out to what we have comes out to around five hundred lines. So yeah, much shorter than something like the Iliad the Odyssey, also much shorter than Gilgamesh shorter than Beowulf. And I just think like it's so amazing how much this poem packs into its story. Like this it's a history of humanity that in the last lines it seems to be revealed that this is being told by the mother goddess. So this is her account of the history of humanity. And you know, we've touched on a lot of themes that are relevant for today, like class conflict and labor disputes, climate disaster, arguably artificial intelligence, you know, and we've seen the invention of sex and we've seen the invention of the opposite of sex, you know, like we've we've had all of these themes being explored in as I said, not a not long, not a long poem. Well, I was you kind of preempted my next question, which was kind of what would have been the main themes for someone listening to this performance and watching it almost four thousand years ago? I mean, how would they have interpreted it? What do you think would have been the key takeaways for them? That's a really good quest ion and I think our only chance of answering that is by looking at a specific individual which in this case is Ipigaya. So as I said, like Ipig a is being taught by his father the scribe who created the copy that we talked through, okay Exactly right, exactly right . We know that he would have been, yeah, let's say give or take nineteen when he's doing this . We know that his family are he comes from a family of scribes and the family was devoted to the god Enki . So most people in his city were devoted to other gods, including Ishtar and Shamash, but his family is sort of pro Enki and this is very much a myth about Enki. So I think that would have been to him. But as I mentioned earlier, his father had recently in his education, been teaching him text that had to do with the end of an age. So he had been studying text that had to do with the end of the older Cadian Empire , where according to myth, the sort of vainglorious King Naram Sin brought this great empire crashing down. He had been studying some texts related to the fall of the Or three Empire, which is a couple of centuries after the fall of the Old Arcadian Empire , where the great Sumerian speaking empire was toppled by an invasion from Iran . And so he's studying texts that have to do with one period giving way to another. And I think he would have seen the floodmath in those times because this is sort of quite literally about the end of an ancient age and the beginning of new age, about the end of an age in which we could talk directly to the gods and which we were without death to what was broadly conceived for the Babylonians the present, right? Like our age . And so I think that's one way in which you would quite likely have understood it. Do you think work is a big thing at all or kind of this idea that we are to work? Absolutely, yeah, sorry to cut you off there. Yeah, sorry. Like the reason I was so enthusiastic in answering is that the book that I've written about Athrazis is literally called for its subtitle Babylonian reflections on labor, because I think that's what this is, right? Like Athrazis sees human life as being shaped by labor both in the sort of obvious sense that we are created to serve the gods and to labor for the gods and to extend the labor of the gods . But labor also becomes many other things in the poem as well, including it becomes cru cially linked to inequality . And this sort of dynamic of labor and inequality and how they shape each other really propels the entire poem. So yes, I absolutely think that labor is central not just to this poem but to the entire sort of period of cultural history that Ibigaya lived in the Obabylonian. There are many stories about labor in different ways at that time. What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam ? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America . I'm Don Weldman and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America . We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, weet the characters who have altered it with their touch , and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership . Find American History Hit twice a week every week wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit a podcast from History Hit Since the dawn of time, humanity has been at war. It has shaped the world around us, and if it somehow feels like we've been here before , it's because we have. I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian and on my new podcast Hostile History, I take us inside history's most defining wars and rebellions. From Gangas Khan to the war in Iran, find out how the past can explain the present. Search for and follow hostile history on Spotify , Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. That's Sofis I must ask because you highlighted this earlier like the strength of natural disasters like the floods and of course how the flood gets out of control of the gods almost instantly . Could there be any elements of truth behind this story of the flood? Could there be any harkening back of like historical memory of Babylon ians that could there have been a memory of a very terrible flood that occurred at the Tigris of the Euphrates from long before , from which, you know, the story of this myth could have been loosely or at least slightly based on. Yeah, so it's a really good question. And when we think about