Content area
Full Text
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 FlNKEL. London: HODDER AND Stoughton, 2014. Pp. x + 421,16 pits. £19.99.
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 UrNinurta, 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-flood 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 abübu 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...