At the dawn of civilisation, towards the end of the Neolithic period, religious myths were invented by man to try to explain the unexplainable. The oldest surviving of these is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is in fact the oldest surviving complete literary work known today. It was discovered by an Englishman called George Smith.’
‘Never heard of him,’ said O’Connelly, ‘though that’s not a reference.’’
‘Where did he discover them?’ asked Laura.
‘Strangely enough in London!’
‘London!’
‘Yes, in London.’
‘Where?’
‘In the British Museum.’
‘Oh!’
‘Smith was a bank note engraver, but also a self-trained Assyriologist.’
‘Were they on papyrus?’
‘No, the texts came written on cuneiform tablets, which had had been discovered by different archaeological expeditions on the banks of the Tigris in Mesopotamia, or modern day Iraq, since 1854. These tablets were shipped to the British Museum where Smith set about trying to decipher them. The problem was that the story was incomplete, some tablets were evidently missing, so when the news of Smith’s work with the mystery of the missing tablets reached The Daily Telegraph it had all the makings of a good story. At that time the informed public was greatly in interested in any news concerning discoveries from the Middle East, especially those related to the Bible.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s an interesting point, because it was the interest of the British public in particular and Europeans in general, as Egyptomania developed in the 19th century, which was to influence not only archaeology, but many of the future events to come in the Middle East over the next one and a half centuries. At that time the British upper and middle classes were good Christian church goers – remember that the Anglican religions base is the Bible – and had started to develop a notion of social justice. Therefore, anything that gave added weight to the bible was of great news.’
‘So what happened then?’
‘As often happened in the 19th century a newspaper sponsored an expedition to find the missing tablets, the object of which was to complete the story of the flood, and in 1873, Smith after only five days of excavation found the missing texts.’
‘Sounds too good to be true,’ said O’Connelly. ‘So what about Gilgamesh?’
‘Once back in London at the British Museum, George Smith deciphered what were the remains of a great epic poem about a legendary king by the name of Gilgamesh. Then Smith made a parallel between the Babylonian Flood mentioned in the epic that dates to about 1750BC and the story of Noah in the bible.’
‘So based on biblical chronology the Babylonian legend of the Flood could have been that which was referred to in Genesis.’
‘Absolutely, the epic of Gilgamesh was written in Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets. These tablets were discovered by archaeologists in the 1850s, in the ruins of the royal library of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian King Ashurabanipal, where they had lain buried since 612BC. The library was destroyed by the Persians in that year, the tablets abandoned under the debris.’
‘Who wrote the epic?’
‘We don’t know, all we can is that it was the work of a Babylonian poet or poets, who lived in Mesopotamia more than 3,700 years ago.’
‘Are there any other similitude with the Bible?’
‘Yes, the epic describes the creation of man in an astonishing garden, how evil was born into an innocent world, and the story of a deluge, caused by the iniquity of man.’
‘So what was the link between the Bible and Mesopotamia?’
‘Remember Mesopotamia was one of the cradles of civilization, part of the Fertile Crescent, and it was from there that Abraham led his people out of the city of Ur to the Promised Land, Canaan, according to the Bible. No doubt bringing certain beliefs and legends with them.’
‘I thought the Bible was a legend?’
‘It is the chronology and lack of corroborative evidence that is questioned and confounding events that took place centuries apart, but the legend of a charismatic tribal chief leading his people in search of a home is possible, and it is possible he came from the north. Between the 19th and 18th centuries BC the Chaldean Empire is supposed to united several different tribes, one of which was Abraham’s; but there is no archaeological evidence to confirm his existence.’
‘Look at your King Arthur, that was just a thousand or so years ago, and there is no certitude he every existed, here were talking of four thousand years ago!’
O’Connelly concurred.
‘Very little archaeological evidence exists in southern highlands of Canaan where Abraham is said to have settled. As Finkelstein said it was practically empty apart from nomadic pastoralists and at the very best perhaps a few miserable tiny villages.’
‘What about the Exodus?’
‘According to the Bible that took place around 1200BC. The problem is that we have an extremely detailed knowledge of Egypt at that time.’
‘…and?’
‘And I’m sorry to say again there is no evidence showing an exodus of Jews from Egypt. In fact there is nothing about the Jews, All the stories of plagues, the flight and the parting of the Red Sea described in the Bible as great events would have surely been recorded.
‘At that time Egypt ruled Canaan, sparsely populated desert region, with many military outposts along the Mediterranean coast of Sinai, protecting them from the ever present threat from the northern powers.
‘Remember that Egypt was a vast and powerful superpower that weighed on the region for three thousand years, the Nile delta was just a few days sailing or weeks march from the main ports of ancient Israel, so it possible that the Egyptians who mastered writing skills long before the Jews could have overlooked the presence of powerful kings in the region, when they knew and fought with the peoples of the north; Assyrians, Persians and Babylonians, and traded with Crete and the Sea Peoples over almost three millennia.’
‘You say that it was an almost desertic region, perhaps when there was drought famine forced the desert tribes south?’
‘Quite so, changing climatic conditions would have forced the tribes to seek refuge in the Nile Delta region, which was not that far away. In fact this is what happened when the Hyksos arrived in Egypt around 1670BC finally founding their own dynasty and ruling the country.’
‘So Egypt was not the power you described.’
‘That’s not quite right. The Hyksos blended into the country as is often the case with lesser developed invaders, becoming Egyptians, accepting the advantages of a great civilisation. Though in the end the Egyptian people revolted and drove out the Hyksos, sacking and burning Canaanite cities as far as Syria. There are theories about some of the Hyksos who fled Egypt settling in Jerusalem, where they are said to have built a temple, but up to now there is no archaeological evidence to support this.
44
Manipulation