THE FLOOD MYTHS OF DEUCALION, NOAH, GILGAMESH, ATRAHASIS AND HATHOR
In the Greek tradition, Apollodorus says that Prometheus had a son called Deucalion who married Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. In this version, rather than letting the Bronze Race men destroy themselves, as they do in Hesiod, Zeus decides to eradicate them by means of a deluge. Deucalion takes his father’s advice, builds a chest, stocks it with provisions, and embarks in it with Pyrrha. Zeus’ torrential rain floods most of Greece and overwhelms everywhere outside the Isthmus of Corinth and the Peloponnese, destroying everyone except the few who fled to the mountains. Deucalion floated in his chest for nine days and nights, and when the rain finally abated he made landfall on Mount Parnassus. He sacrificed to Zeus, who sent Hermes to grant him whatever he wished. Deucalion chose to make humans, which he and Pyrrha did by taking stones and tossing them over their heads: his stones became men; hers became women.
This is both similar to, and very different from, the account of Noah’s Flood in Genesis: God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually; but Noah (aged 600) ‘found grace in the eyes of the LORD’, and on His instructions,he built an ark measuring 300 x 50 x 60 cubits and along with his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, his wife, and the three wives of his sons, went into the ark, accompanied by ‘every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort […] two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life’, went into the ark; the flood was forty days upon the earth; all the mountains were covered, and ‘all that was in the dry land, died’; ‘the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days’ after which the waters abated, ‘And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat’, after which the waters decreased continually until the dove that Noah kept sending out came back with an olive leaf in her mouth; seven days later, when the dove did not return, Noah stepped onto dry land and disembarked his family and the animals; Noah offered burnt offerings on the altar; the Lord promised never to ‘smite any more every thing living, as I have done’, blessed Noah and his sons, told them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth’, and reaffirmed that ‘the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh’; Noah lived for a further 350 years.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet XI, composed c.1100 BC, a survivor of the Great Flood called Ut-napishtim, tells Gilgamesh about it: from the city of Shuruppak on the Euphrates, the Great Gods decided to inflict the Flood; Ea, the Prince, repeated their talk to the reed house: 'Reed house, reed house! Wall, wall! O [Ut-napishtim], tear down the house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek living beings! Spurn possessions and keep alive living beings! Make [the seed of] all living beings go up into the boat’; boat’s length had to correspond to its width, and its roof was to be like the firmament in the primordial waters, and ultimately it was a cube with sides of 120 cubits, with six decks dividing it into seven levels; the inside of it, says Ut-napishtim, was divided into nine compartments; the boat was finished by sunset; the launching was very difficult; Ut-napishtimsaid, ‘whatever silver I had I loaded on it, whatever gold I had I loaded on it. All the living beings that I had I loaded on it, I had all my kith and kin go up into the boat, all the beasts and animals of the field and the craftsmen I had go up’; after the sun god Shamas sent a shower of loaves of bread and a rain of wheat, the weather deteriorated and Ut-napishtimwent into the boat and sealed the entry; the storm god Adad rumbled, preceded by Sack and Suppression as heralds, Erragal the god of destruction pulled out the mooring poles, the war god Ninurta made the dikes overflow, the gods set the land ablaze with torches, light turned to darkness, Adadbroke the land into pieces like a pot, the South Wind blew, and ‘then the Flood came, overwhelming the people like an attack’; even the gods were frightened by the Flood, and retreated to heaven where they cowered like dogs and humbly sat weeping; when the seventh day arrived, the whirlwind fell still and theflood stopped; Ut-napishtim saw that all the human beings had turned to clay; his boat lodged firm on Mt. Nimush; when a seventh day arrivedUt-napishtim released a dove and then a swallow, both of which returned, followed by a raven which did not; he sacrificed; Enlil was enraged that anyone had survived the annihilation, but the other deities were more compassionate; Enlil softened his attitude and he blessed Ut-napishtim and his wife, saying, ‘Previously Ut-napishtim was a human being. But now let Ut-napishtim and his wife become like us, the gods!’; and finally the gods settled Ut-napishtim and his wife at the Mouth of the Rivers.
The Epic of Gilgamesh tale sometimes quotes almost word-for-word from the account of the Great Flood at the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis, whose text comes down to us in two versions written by Assyrian scribes (one in the Assyrian, one in the Babylonian dialect), and another written during the reign of king Ammi-saduqa of Babylonia (1647-1626 BC).In this version, men are making so much noise that the gods decide to eradicate them with a flood. However, their plan revealed to Atrahasis by the god Enki, who tell him, ‘Wall, listen to me! Reed wall, pay attention to all my words!Flee the house, build a boat, forsake possessions, and save life’; this boat must ‘be equal’ [the text is uncertain, but presumably in its dimensions], with a roof like the firmament in the primordial watersEnki says he will shower down a windfall of birds and a spate of fishes, and then primes a water clock and tells it of the coming of the seven-day deluge; Atrahasis builds his boat and brings various animals on board, as well as his family; the storm god Adad began to roar; the boat was released from its moorings; Anzu rent the sky with his talons; there is a fragmentary reference to ‘the land and broke its clamour like a pot [sic]; the flood came forth upon the peoples like a battle; people could not see one another in the dense darkness; the deluge bellowed like a bull and the wind resounded like a screaming eagle; and the gist of the highly fragmentary text that follows seems to be that the gods become hungry because there are no surviving farmers and no sacrifices taking place, and when they find out that Atrahasis has survived, they decide that the noise will remain within limits, invent childbirth and infant mortality, and establish celibate priestesses and high priestesses in order to cut down childbirth.
In Egypt, we encounter a rather different tradition. Their ‘equivalent’ flood myth has significant differences to the ones above, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the that flooding of the Nile is of great benefit to the country. The tale starts with Ra, the sun god, fearing that the mortals were going to overthrow him. So he dispatched the goddess Hathor, who was his eye, to punish the human race. She, however, was over-zealous in carrying out the task, which was to chastise, not annihilate, and her frenzy of killing threatened the total destruction of mankind: so many were slaughtered that their blood flowed into the Nile River and the ocean, causing a flood. Ra put a stop to this by ordering the creation of a lake of beer, dyed red to look like blood, and brewed from the sleep-inducing mandrake root. When Hathor looked down upon the flooded land of Egypt, rather like the Greek Narcissus, she saw herself reflected in the beer, bent down to kiss her own lovely image, and started to drink. She ended up so drunk and sleepy that she was incapable of finishing her orgy of destruction, which in turn allowed the survivors to resume their normal existence. In essence, in the Egyptian tradition, a benign flood rescues the human race.