The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions.

• Author: George, A.R.
• Position: The Ark before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood - Book review

The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions. By Y. S. Chen. Oxford Oriental Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 314, 16 pits. $175.

The Ark before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. By IRVING FINKEL. London: HODDER AND Stoughton, 2014. Pp. x + 421, 16 pits. 19.99 [pounds sterling].

These are two very different books, but with much in common. They are both concerned with the ancient Mesopotamian legend of the Flood. Many sources in Sumerian and Babylonian (Akkadian) are extant that either mention or give narrative accounts of a great deluge that was believed to have swept the earth early in human history. Chen's book offers new analysis of these Mesopotamian sources; Finkel's presents an important new source for the legend.

Chen's book is a redaction of the first volume of his Ph.D. dissertation, submitted to the University of Oxford in 2009. The thesis arose in response to Miguel Civil's observation in 1969 that the flood theme was not an old-established topos in Sumerian literature but only became popular in the early second millennium. This idea rested on the quotation, in texts associated with Isme-Dagan and Ur-Ninurta, nineteenth-century kings of Isin, of a temporal clause that is otherwise known from another post-third-millennium text, the Sumerian king list, where the amaru-ftood marks a historical watershed that divides the present world from the primeval era of the earliest men and first civilization.

Chen's exploration of this hypothesis begins by collecting the terminology relating to the flood, not only amaru and the various other words that convey the idea in Sumerian and Akkadian, but also the imagery of destruction in which context the flood often appears. He finds that flood terminology has two applications: a) to flooding that took place "in history or in a mythical realm" (flood) and b) to a legendary "primeval flood catastrophe which by its cosmic scale wiped out the entire antediluvian world" (Flood). And he maintains that "on orthographic and semantic grounds, it was discovered ... that the Sumerian term a-ma-ru and the Akkadian term abubu did not gain their specialized meaning 'the primeval flood catastrophe' until the Old Babylonian period." This is difficult to prove objectively while the same word amaru has both the applications attributed to it and the contexts are not easily disambiguated. It could be countered that the power of the many flood metaphors in inscriptions of Ur III kings and Gudea in the late third millennium very plausibly resided in allusion to a Flood that was already legendary.

The second chapter moves from words to motifs. It collects passages of thirty-one literary compositions, all but one in Sumerian, that give accounts of primeval time. Not all of them feature a flood or the Flood. Chen draws a distinction between narratives that represent primeval time...