#eridugenesis

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Eridu: The Divine Birthplace of Kingship and Order

Eridu (present-day Abu Shahrein, Iraq) was considered the first city in the world by the ancient Sumerians and is among the most ancient of the ruins from Mesopotamia. Founded circa 5400 BCE, Eridu was thought to have been created by the gods, who established order upon the earth with Eridu as the starting point.

The city was home to the god Enki (also known as Ea by the Akkadians), who would develop from a local god of fresh water into the god of wisdom and magic (among other attributes) and stand with other deities such as Anu, Enlil, and Inanna as the most important in the Mesopotamian pantheon. As Enki's home, it became associated with many of the most vital myths of Mesopotamia, including those concerning an early paradise on earth.

The Sumerian King List cites Eridu as the "city of the first kings", stating, "After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu," and the city was looked back upon by the various city-states of Mesopotamia as the initial home of human beings of a "golden age" of peace and order in the same way the writers of the biblical narrative of Genesis created a Garden of Eden as their mythical paradise, most likely modeled on tales of Eridu. The city was abandoned circa 600 BCE, probably due to overuse of the land, and fell into ruin.

The First City

The city of Eridu features prominently in Sumerian mythology, not only as the first city and home of the gods, but as the locale to which the goddess Inanna traveled in order to receive the gifts of civilization, which she then bestowed upon humanity from her home city of Uruk.

The ancient Sumerians certainly believed Eridu to be the first city in the world, established long before recognized human lifespans were set, and the Sumerian King List gives impossibly long reigns (between 28,000 and 36,000 years) for their kings, while Sumerian scribes maintained that kingship in the land (and, therefore, order) first came from heaven to be established at Eridu. Scholar Stephen Bertman writes:

Tradition made it the earliest city to have a king before the days of the mythical Great Flood. Eridu's archaeological story can be traced back to at least the sixth millennium BCE. If the tradition of its antiquity is true, Eridu may well have been the first city on earth.

(19)

If not the first, the city was among the oldest. The ancient Mesopotamians frequently built their cities on top of the ruins of older settlements (as is also true of other cultures). Excavations at Eridu have revealed a sequence of construction dating back to the Ubaid period (circa 6500-4000 BCE) and continuing on from there to reach its height during the Ur III period (circa 2112-2004 BCE) under rulers such as Ur-Nammu (reign 2112-2094 BCE) and Shulgi of Ur (reign 2094-2046 BCE) both of whom encouraged trade from the city, both long-distance and local. Glass from Eridu has been found in the ruins of the cities of Egypt.

At the same time, however, the city was never a powerful political site. Scholar Gwendolyn Leick notes:

Eridu was never the seat of a dynasty. Its importance was religious rather than political, as the site of the main sanctuary of Enki.

(62)

Enki, the god of wisdom, featured prominently in many Mesopotamian texts and especially in the tale of the Great Flood as told in the Eridu Genesis and the Atrahasis.

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⇒ Eridu: The Divine Birthplace of Kingship and Order

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Eridu Genesis: The Oldest Mesopotamian Text on the Great Flood

The Eridu Genesis (also known as the Sumerian Flood Story, The Flood Story, Sumerian creation myth, Sumerian deluge myth) is the oldest Mesopotamian text relating the tale of the Great Flood that would appear in later works such as the Atrahasis (17th century BCE) and The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2150-1400 BCE). The title of the work comes from the modern era, coined in 1981 by the scholar Thorkild Jacobsen; the original name for the piece is unknown.

The story given in the Eridu Genesis is also – most famously – told as the story of Noah and his ark from the biblical book of Genesis (earliest possible date circa 1450 BCE, latest circa 800-600 BCE). The Eridu Genesis is dated to circa 1600 BCE in its written form but is thought to be much older (circa 2300 BCE), preserved by oral tradition until committed to writing.

The extant work is badly damaged, with a number of significant lines missing, but can still be read and easily understood as an early Great Flood story. Scholars who have studied the text generally rely on the later Akkadian/Babylonian Atrahasis – which tells the same tale – to fill in the blanks of missing text from the broken tablet.

The story most likely influenced the Egyptian "flood story" known as The Book of the Heavenly Cow (dated, in part, to the First Intermediate Period of Egypt, 2181-2040 BCE) but certainly was the inspiration for the later Mesopotamian works as well as the biblical narrative of Noah.

The story was discovered in 1893, during the period of widespread expeditions and excavations throughout Mesopotamia funded by Western institutions. The good man in this version of the tale, chosen to survive the flood and preserve life on earth, is the Priest-King Ziudsura of the city of Suruppak (whose name means "life of long days"). This same figure appears in The Instructions of Shuruppag (circa 2500/2000 BCE) and as Atrahasis ("exceedingly wise") in the later work that bears his name, as Utnapishtim ("he found life") in The Epic of Gilgamesh, and as Noah ("rest" or "peace") in the book of Genesis.

Expeditions & Discovery

In the 19th century, Western institutions, including museums and universities, funded expeditions to Mesopotamia in hopes of finding physical evidence that would corroborate the historicity of biblical narratives. The 19th century saw the unprecedented practice of increasingly critical readings of the Bible, which questioned long-held beliefs regarding its divine origin and supposed infallibility.

This age of skepticism would see the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, suggesting that human beings, rather than being created by God as "a little lower than the angels" (Psalm 8:5), evolved from primates.

In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche published his work The Gay Science, containing the famous line, "God is dead and we have killed him", alluding to the seeming triumph of technology and secularism over traditional religious belief. Prior to the rise of secular skepticism, and even during the period when Darwin and Nietzsche were writing, the Bible was considered the oldest book in the world, completely original, and of divine origin.

This view was encouraged by the work of the archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), creator of the Ussher Chronology, which, relying primarily on the book of Genesis and referencing other biblical narratives, dates the creation of the world to 22 October 4004 BCE at 6:00 p.m. Since the Bible was believed to have been written by God, it was infallible and could be trusted not only in dating the age of the Earth but for any other aspect of human existence.

The expeditions sent to Mesopotamia were supposed to find evidence supporting this view but found the exact opposite. Cuneiform tablets, deciphered from the mid-19th century onwards, challenged the traditional view of the Bible directly in that they contained a number of stories, motifs, and symbols which appeared in the biblical narratives and pre-dated them; among these was the Sumerian Flood Story, the first known account of the tale people of the time knew as Noah's Ark.

The badly damaged tablet was discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Nippur by an expedition funded by the University of Pennsylvania in 1893. It was left untranslated until 1912, when the German Assyriologist Arno Poebel (1881-1958) deciphered it as part of his job for the University of Pennsylvania.

The existence of a pre-biblical account of Noah's flood – already made clear by George Smith's translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1876 – suggested to some that the traditional interpretation of the Bible needed to be rethought, while, to others, it meant that a Mesopotamian account of a great flood corroborated the biblical story, just from another point of view.

The British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley (1880-1960) challenged this latter claim through his excavations at the ruins of ancient Ur in the 1920s. During the 1928-1929 excavation season, Wooley sank a series of shafts into the soil and determined there had been significant flooding in the region but that this was a local, not a global, event and, further, was not a singular incident but had happened a number of times when the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowed their banks.

Woolley's excavations were mirrored elsewhere in Mesopotamia by other archaeologists who came to the same conclusion. The historicity and originality of the biblical narrative of the Great Flood could no longer be maintained, and Ussher's chronology was challenged and dismissed by scholars (although both are still maintained by Christians in the present day who maintain the so-called Young Earth View). Scholar Stephanie Dalley, commenting on further excavations in Mesopotamia throughout the 20th century, writes:

No flood deposits are found in third-millennium strata, and Archbishop Ussher's date for the Flood of 2349 BC, which was calculated using numbers in Genesis at face value and which did not recognize how highly schematic Biblical chronology is for such early times, is now out of the question. (5)

The small tablet of the Eridu Genesis story found at Nippur, missing much of its narrative, had provided Woolley with the academic freedom to make the kind of assertions concerning the flood in the 1920s that would have been unthinkable a mere century before.

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⇒ Eridu Genesis: The Oldest Mesopotamian Text on the Great Flood

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The Instructions of Shuruppag

The Instructions of Shuruppag (c. 2000 BCE) is the most famous work of the genre of Sumerian wisdom literature whose purpose was to encourage proper behavior in conformity with cultural values and standards. It is among the oldest works of philosophical literature extant.

The Instructions of Shuruppag

Daderot (Public Domain)

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