CHAPTER VI

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.