The Caveman’s Corner

I had to read Book XI of The Epic of Gilgamesh tonight for my Western Lit class. What really struck me was the depiction of the Flood. For those who aren’t familiar with The Epic, it is a Sumerian myth about a semi-legendary king and his travels, culminating in a journey to visit Utnapishtim, an immortal man who survived a great Flood with destroyed the rest of humanity. The story was the inspiration for the Biblical one in Genesis.

Now this is how to depict a Flood

We, or I at least, tend to have this Sunday school image of the Flood, with Noah’s Ark and all the little animals, two-by-two, all of that, and we really forget the awe of the story. It’s a powerful notion; all that is in the scope of human experience is destroyed in a great catastrophe before the eyes of the passengers of a single ship entrusted with the future of all humanity. It’s a singular and striking narrative, and I think a lot of what keeps us from really appreciating it is how geographical we are in the modern age.

When we think of the world being covered by water, what do we see? A big blue-green sphere, with the blue parts gradually overtaking the green parts until it’s all blue. And then, when it’s over, the blue recedes and the green returns. It’s so literal, I think we miss the point. It’s because when we think of “the world,” we see a definite picture. It’s unavoidable.

When a Sumerian scribe thought of “the world,” he had no single reductionist image like that. He had no globes, no National Geographic wall maps, no NASA snapshots. The world simply was. If we had to find something analogous to the modern mind, I think it might be space. Space is. We’ve seen parts of space; we see it every night. But none of us have ever seen space. Now imagine energy waves or some such thing destroying all space, everything in the universe, with us sitting in a spaceship watching, and then try to actually believe it. That might be as close as we can come to appreciating a story like The Flood.

This reminded me of something I read about the Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite, too. When Holst wrote his suite, the planets weren’t the pretty pictures from the Hubble Telescope that adorn the walls of every high school physics classroom. They were mysterious, blurry dots that could be viewed only from land based telescopes at certain times of the year. When Holst thought of Uranus, he didn’t think of a big, dark blue sphere turned on it’s side with white poles and little rings. He thought of a blur in a telescope lens and a point in the night sky. We’ve lost that mystical sense of things now; everything is so literal and real. I don’t know if that’s something to lament or not, but it’s interesting to think about when considering our predecessors’ and some of our contemporaries’ mindsets.

If anyone was looking for a point in this, there really isn’t one. This is the sort of thing I would have paced around my room thinking about normally. But I have a blog now! So you get to share in my vacuous musing. Lucky you.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Archaeology, Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.