CAPÍTULO I DESARROLLO SOCIAL EN LA
1.2.1. La familia y el desarrollo social
I
n 1853, while digging in ancient Nineveh (in what is today Iraq), the archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam came upon the library of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king of the seventh century BC. Here Rassam found thousands of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform symbols. Neither Rassam nor anyone else knew how to deci-pher the ancient script. The tablets were shipped off to the British Museum where they sat, unread, for nineteen years. In 1872, George Smith, a museum cataloguer who knew how to read cuneiform, was the first person–—at least since two thousand years before–—to read the tablets.The tablets told the story of a flood strikingly similar to that in Genesis. Here, too, a god becomes fed up with humankind but decides to spare the life of one pious man. The god tells Utnapishtim, the Sumerian Noah, to build an ark and take aboard “the seed of all living things.” Then comes the deluge, which lasts seven days instead of the biblical forty. Finally, Utnapishtim sends out a dove, a swallow, and a raven (in the Bible, it’s a raven and a dove) to find land, and offers a sacrifice to the god who has spared him.
This flood story turned out to be a part of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, wants to be immortal, so after many adventures he goes to visit Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh asks Utnapishtim his secret, and Utnapishtim responds by telling him the story of the flood. Utnapishtim also tells Gilgamesh that he might attain eternal life by staying awake for a week. Gilgamesh promptly falls asleep. As a consolation gift, Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh a “plant of rejuvenation” that will let him live his life over again. Gilgamesh loses the plant to a snake.
Gilgamesh is a remarkably sophisticated work of literature, but it was the similarity to the flood story that excited not just Smith but the world. Were the authors of Gilgamesh and Genesis describing the same event? And if so, did that mean the flood really happened?
3
In 1929 archaeologist Leonard Woolley thought he found the answer. Woolley was excavating the Sumerian city of Ur, now in Iraq and traditionally thought to be the hometown of Abraham. Woolley found two layers of artifacts separated by a ten-foot layer of alluvium–—sediment deposited by flowing water. He dated this layer to about 3500BC.
Woolley cabled London: “We have found the Flood.”
Other archaeologists soon found similar alluvial layers, though at varying levels. Max Mallowan, an archaeologist and the husband of mystery writer Agatha Christie, inter-preted this to mean that various rivers had overflowed at various times, and that a couple
15
of these floods, rather than a single great deluge, were behind the stories of Gilgamesh and Genesis.
Even so, the discovery that there may have been some historical event or events behind the flood excited biblical archaeologists. Other exciting discoveries followed, among them an engraved Egyptian stone celebrating the pharaoh’s victories over his ene-mies and naming “Israel” as one of those eneene-mies, and a stone in Palestine that men-tioned the “House of David.” By the middle of the twentieth century, the prominent bib-lical archaeologist William Albright could confidently proclaim: “Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition of the Bible as a source of history.”
Since then, the consensus among archaeologists has gradually become more sober. It was not so much that they discovered anything that disproved the Bible as that they failed to turn up much new evidence related to it. The “Israel” of the Egyptian stone was pretty much all that indicated Israel may have been an enemy of Egypt, and translators argued about whether it was the same Israel. There was little to indicate an Egyptian influence in Palestine, and no sign whatsoever of a people wandering about the Sinai Peninsula. The “House of David” inscription was also challenged, and even those who accepted it had to concede there was little else to connect the David of the stone with the David of the Bible.
The flood receded even further from history, with fewer and fewer archaeologists willing to link the alluvial silt with the biblical story. Some scientists speculated that the deposits might have been left by wind, not water. Others dug elsewhere and found the silt at very different levels than Woolley did. Still others failed to find it at all, even when, like Woolley, they dug near Ur. Journalist Werner Keller, whose best-selling book The Bible As History generally found the Bible historically reliable, considered the flood “archaeologi-cally not demonstrated.”
The credibility of a historical flood was further eroded by various adventurers who claimed they’d found remnants of the ark itself. According to Genesis, the ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat,” which referred to a region, possibly in present-day Armenia. That sent explorers–—or as they were sometimes called, arkeologists–—up various mountains around the Middle East. As early as the first century BC, the Greek his-torian Nicolaus of Damascus claimed to have located the boat on Mount Baris. In 1887 John Joseph, whose titles included prince of Nouri, grand archdeacon of Babylon, and Episcopal head of the Nestorian Church of Malabar, reported finding the ark on Mount Agri Dagi, near the borders of Russia, Turkey, and Iran. John Joseph was later reported to be a mental patient from Napa, California. In 1917 a Russian aviator photographed the ark from the air; alas, the photos were lost during the Russian Revolution. Among the most publicized expeditions were those of French industrialist Fernand Navarra in 1952 and 1969. Navarra reported seeing the outlines of the ark beneath the ice on Mount Agri Dagi, and he returned with some sample wood. Carbon dating, however, placed the frag-ments between 300 and 800 AD. Such expeditions continued into the twenty-first
cen-tury, but well before the twentieth was past, most scientists dismissed the flood as a mat-ter of faith, not history.
For anthropologists, though, flood stories were more than just stories. They found similar stories in many ancient cultures besides that of the Hebrews and Sumerians.
Indeed, the story in Genesis was, according to most biblical scholars, itself made up of two tales that were later combined. Native Americans, too, told a variety of flood tales.
Clearly these were more than old weather reports. Regardless of whether there really was some huge flood, the stories provided insights into these cultures. Some of these insights may have been a bit far-fetched; the Freudian Otto Rank, for example, traced flood sto-ries back to dreams resulting from bladder troubles. But the flood tales presented, as theologian J. David Pleins put it, “mythical variations on an enduring medley of psychic questions and social challenges faced by the peoples of that region over the centuries.”
The themes of the stories defined what was divine and what was human, what was just and what was unjust.
“Let us continue, then, to dig for the flood,” wrote Pleins, “but let us also continue to let the flood story dig away at our deepest selves.”
3
In 1993 two geoscientists went looking for evidence of Noah’s flood under water instead of land. With the Cold War over, geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman joined a Russian team on a converted fishing trawler called the Aquanaut. The boat was tracking radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, but Ryan and Pitman used their own sophisticated sonar equipment to survey the northern part of the Black Sea. Nearly five hundred feet below the surface, they spotted beaches, river gorges, and sand dunes. They also brought up the remains of some freshwater shellfish, and some freshwater trapped in the sea’s lower clays. The fossils dated back about 7,500 years. Ryan and Pitman concluded that about that long ago, the Black Sea must have been a freshwater lake.
Under the northern mouth of the Bosporus Strait, which connects the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, is a deep gorge apparently carved with tremendous speed and pres-sure. Ryan and Pitman believed saltwater from the rising Mediterranean Sea had cas-caded through the strait, inundating the once freshwater of the Black Sea as well as about sixty thousand square miles of surrounding land. Unlike the river floods posited by Woolley and Mallowan, the Ryan-Pitman flood would have been a catastrophe of biblical proportions, one that could have displaced Hebrews and Sumerians alike. And the grad-ual rise of the Mediterranean, unlike a sudden river flood, would have given some Noahs and some Utnapishtims ample warning of the approaching cataclysm.
In 1999 the Ryan-Pitman team received a boost from Robert Ballard, locator of the sunken Titanic and the Bismarck. On the south side of the Black Sea, this time more than five hundred feet below the surface, Ballard also found a mix of fresh- and saltwater mol-lusks, also dating back 7,500 years or more.
Did Noah’s Ark Exist? 3 17
“The extinction date of these freshwater species coincided with the arrival of the marine shellfish species that Ryan and Pitman had collected on the Black Sea’s northern coast,” Ballard wrote. “We had closed the circle. No one could dispute that a Great Flood had occurred approximately 7,500 years ago.”
Actually, many did dispute it. Ballard made much of the remains of a wooden struc-ture he found on the underwater coast, but this turned out to be just two hundred years old. And there were plenty of other questions about the Ryan-Pitman theory. Some geol-ogists placed the Mediterranean’s rise much earlier, too early to have imprinted itself on the memory of the people of the Bible or the Gilgamesh. Others thought the transition from fresh- to saltwater was gradual—too gradual to have created an earth-shattering event. Still others accepted that a great flood had occurred, but they doubted its connec-tion to ancient myths. Even if water from the Mediterranean poured through the Bosporus, the Black Sea would still have risen gradually, leaving people years to flee. And a rising sea could hardly be mistaken for rain, even forty days of it.
Still, Ryan and Pitman had changed the terms of the debate. The flood of Noah and Utnapishtim was again a subject debated by those interested in history, as well as those interested in mythology.
To Investigate Further
Keller, Werner. The Bible As History. New York: William Morrow, 1981.
Originally published in 1955, Keller’s book has since sold more than ten million copies.
Kovacs, Maureen. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Kovacs provides an introduction as well as the translation.
Bailey, Lloyd. Noah. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
How Noah has been interpreted through the ages.
Ryan, William, and Walter Pitman. Noah’s Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Though archaeologists remained skeptical, many of Ryan and Pitman’s fellow geologists found their theory plausible.
Ballard, Robert, with Malcolm McConnell. Adventures in Ocean Exploration. Washington, DC:
National Geographic, 2001.
A lavish celebration of explorers from Columbus and Cook to Cousteau and Ballard.
Friedman, Richard Elliott. The Bible with Sources Revealed. San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 2003.
Different colors and type styles identify the different sources of the Bible. In the “J” version of the story, an angry God becomes disgusted with humanity and floods the world; in the “P”
version, the flood is part of a more orderly plan.
Pleins, J. David. When the Great Abyss Opened. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2003.
How religion and science have interpreted the flood.