THE STORY OF THE FLOOD
Just half a century ago[2] the proprietors of _The Daily Telegraph_
arranged with the Trustees of the British Museum to send Mr George
Smith to Mesopotamia to search in the ruins of the library of
Ashur-bani-pal at Nineveh for missing fragments of inscribed tablets to
fill the gaps in the _Chaldean Account of the Deluge_. The announcement
of the discovery (in December 1872) aroused an intense and world-wide
interest, and _The Daily Telegraph_ provided the funds for the new
expedition. Although this version of the Story of the Flood was
discovered in an Assyrian library no older than the seventh century
B.C., Mr George Smith predicted that the future would reveal it to
be the survival of a more ancient version that had also indirectly
been the inspiration of that recorded in the Book of Genesis. The
recent discovery of the Sumerian prototype of this story, which
was put into writing more than twenty centuries before the record
in Ashur-bani-pal’s library, is a remarkable confirmation of George
Smith’s prediction.
It will come as a surprise to most people to learn that the Valley of
the Tombs in Egypt has provided the information which is destined in
time to afford the explanation of the early history of the Story of the
Flood, before it began to exert a strange fascination upon the minds of
men that led to its diffusion throughout the world.
Inscribed upon the walls of the tomb of Seti I in the Theban
necropolis—less than seventy years after the burial of Tutankhamen—is
the remarkable story of the Destruction of Mankind. In spite of the
fact that it was inscribed in this tomb as recently—in comparison
with the Sumerian story—as 1300 B.C., the strange confusion of
archaic references which has made it so unintelligible to most modern
scholars reveals the fact that its origin must be referred back to the
fourth millennium. Although in the narrative found in Seti’s tomb the
destruction is not brought about by the Flood, it is clear that the
Egyptian and the Mesopotamian stories have a common origin and a common
motive. For the essential incident in the latter is not the Flood, but
the Destruction of Mankind which it brought to pass.
If it be asked why this venerable story should be inscribed in the
tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, the answer is that its aim was to secure
for the dead king those boons the attainment of which was the central
motive of the tale. It records how old age began to affect the king,
upon whose strength and virility the welfare of the whole community
depended (see Chapter IV), and he became very sorely troubled when his
subjects began to murmur about the failure of his powers, because in
olden days the only way of safeguarding the prosperity of the kingdom,
which was supposed to be wholly dependent upon the strength of its
ruler, was to slay him when he began to fail and put in his place one
whose vigour was at its prime.
The essence of the story, which made it potent as a charm to secure the
continued existence of the king (and it was for this reason that it
was inscribed upon the walls of the king’s tomb) was that it describes
how the ageing king circumvented fate (and the conventions of archaic
society) by rejuvenating himself. The elixir of life was the blood
of his slaughtered subjects; and the crime that was charged against
them—the impiety and disloyalty, the original sin—was that they were
murmuring among themselves about the king’s failing health. But when
they had been slaughtered and the king had attained a renewal of his
youth, he was overcome by the boredom of too prolonged an existence
upon earth. So he mounted upon the back of the Celestial Cow and thus
reached heaven and attained immortality.
This remarkable story, which was intended as a magical device for
securing the same fate for the pharaoh of the fourteenth century B.C.
as his remote prototype is said to have attained, also contains the
germs of most of the mythology that has lasted longest and spread most
widely in the early history of civilization. Although, so far as we
are aware, this story is not found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, there is no
doubt that it was current at his time, because it was inscribed upon
the walls of one of his successor’s tombs little more than half a
century later, and the narrative is obviously very old, being packed
with archaic allusions and forms of expression. I have referred to it
here because the symbolism expressed in some of the funerary furniture
in Tutankhamen’s tomb is explained by this mythical story recorded
in those of Seti I and Rameses III. The question of interpretation I
have discussed in another chapter, dealing with the funerary couches,
and I have mentioned the Destruction of Mankind to call attention
to the dominant motive—the Giving of Life and the Attainment of
Immortality—which inspires every feature of the funerary ritual
with tiresome persistence. For in the myth mankind was destroyed to
provide the elixir of life for the king so that he might attain to the
immortality, which was the distinctive prerogative of a god. The blood
of the slaughtered saints was the elixir by which the mortal dweller on
earth put on the immortality of a celestial being. The motive assigned
in the story for destroying mankind was their sinfulness or disloyalty,
which was more exactly defined by accusing them of spreading rumours of
the king’s increasing age and weakness, a form of report to which the
ruler was peculiarly sensitive, because the admission that his strength
and virility were failing was tantamount to a capital sentence. In the
remotely distant age, from which the germs of this story came down to
the time of Seti I, the ageing king had to be killed to make way for
a more youthful and vigorous ruler. Hence one cannot marvel at the
king’s sensitiveness when his people murmured about his failing powers.
I have already referred to the fact that this accusation of disloyalty
was the earliest version of what theologians call “original sin,” and
the story itself the prototype of that which under a modified form
appears in the Book of Genesis. The primitive account of the slaying
of mankind became confused with the inundation of the Nile, and the
blood of the slaughtered human race and the blood-red inundation of the
river became identified the one with the other. Though originally both
events were regarded as beneficent and identical in their results, that
is renewing the king’s strength and the country’s prosperity, when the
story spread abroad to foreign countries a certain element of confusion
crept into the narrative, and the destruction of mankind was attributed
to the Flood. But it found a place in religious literature, not because
it exemplified the wrath of the gods against sinful man, but because it
explained how the king rejuvenated himself and attained the status of a
god. The evidence provided by these Egyptian tombs gives us an insight
into the motives underlying the religious beliefs of every people who
came into relationship, directly or indirectly, with the arbitrary
system of explaining the means of attaining immortality devised by the
ancient priesthood of Egypt. It illustrates one of the ways in which
these investigations in Egypt can illuminate ancient Jewish literature.
One of the peculiarities of Egyptian customs and beliefs is due to the
fact that what the concrete-minded Egyptian naïvely did and said is
to be interpreted in the literal and obvious sense that he attached
to these acts. Among no other people can we similarly detect all the
stages in the logical development of the practices and beliefs of
civilization—and not only are the various stages preserved in Egypt,
but in so crudely childlike a guise that he who overcomes the impulse
to seek for some recondite or cryptic meaning in things which are
really simple can read their plain story as their inventors intended it.
It is this fundamental fact that gives the study of Egyptian customs
and beliefs its tremendous importance. The essential elements of
civilization were originally invented by the Egyptians, who gave them
simpler and more obvious expression than other peoples, who borrowed
them ready-made without acquiring the connecting stages in their
development or the naïve explanation of their meaning.
I have introduced this subject for consideration as an introduction to
the study of the funerary equipment of Tutankhamen’s tomb, to which the
next chapter will be devoted.