[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The “flood myth” has fascinated scholars for centuries, but the past dozen years have seen a new, promising programme of research emerge. In 2013, Y.S. Chen made the case that in Mesopotamia, flood stories evolved from the genre of City Laments, short compositions narrating the destruction of urban centres by warfare.[1] Chen showed that in the early stages of the “Deluge” tradition, floods were one element in a complex of martial and natural-disaster imagery associated with the end of primordial time. In the same year, Johannes Haubold argued for a structural equivalence between the Deluge in Mesopotamian myth and the Trojan War in Greek myth.[2] Each is the main hinge in a canon of narrative poetry organizing cosmic history: the chief god decides to thin the human population, and the resulting disaster separates the age of myth from historic time. Some Greek texts say Zeus might have used a storm or flood to the same effect; some Mesopotamian texts, that Enlil could have used a plague or war.
In the wake of these two books, it is attractive to think in terms of an Eastern Mediterranean literature of epoch-ending catastrophe, to which narratives of flood, war, storm, and plague may all be assigned. Indeed, this literature of disaster is exemplary of a current approach to the comparative study of ancient Afroeurasian literatures: on this view similarities of theme, plot, and genre in Greek and Near Eastern literature reflect an Eastern Mediterranean koinē, rather than direct interaction between texts or authors. This volume showcases the rich interpretations the approach can yield. It also raises methodological questions which the approach, at present, evades.
One might doubt the crucial equivalence of flood and war, and especially Chen’s association of the Deluge with the raiding narrated in the City Laments: the catastrophes in the Laments affect one city, not the whole world, and involve not the forces of nature, but historical groups of Gutians or Amorites. Lorenzo Verderame’s chapter, a structuralist analysis of the Laments, answers these doubts. In the Sumerian imaginary, the city is metonymic for the ordered cosmos: its creation is often presented in the language of cosmogony, and, when it falls, the entire natural and social order falls with it. The army that descends upon the city is not really conceived as human, “plutôt sous-humain puisqu’il vient de la péripherie chaotique en face de la ville” (32). It represents the primordial disorder the city walls hold back and so is easily assimilable to the Deluge.
Jérôme Pace further explores this association of ideas by reading the Sumerian Lugal-e as a destruction text. Building on observations from his dense, generative 2018 book Mythopoeïa, Pace shows that, while the Deluge is the central image for Ninurta’s triumph over Asag, it is figured as tidal flood, tempest, and river-inundation culminating in harvest; an image not merely of destruction, but of renewal and fecundity.[3] Lugal-e is roughly contemporary with the Laments, and Pace suggests that at this stage the Deluge motif is “not so much the expression of a primeval time … but … a time marker of the necessary (cyclic) renaissance of the world” (61): another reason to accept the link with the apparently local and historical destructions of the Laments.
Two authors deal with Biblical texts. Martina Weingärtner explores the best-known of all flood myths, Gen. 6–9, notoriously stitched together from two narratives: in one, a raging Yahweh takes, then repents of, revenge against his childen; in the other, a cerebral Elohim does away with his corrupted first draft of human society and replaces it with a better version. Weingärtner argues the composite Genesis tale exploits this tension between motives to explore the theological problem of “le Dieu qui change” (45). Stéphanie Anthonioz, for her part, contrasts Genesis with the Book of Amos’ sociohistorical interpretation of the fall of the northern kingdom to Assyria. Amos, she argues, takes little interest in the “primitive” Deluge myth: “peu de liens littéraires connectent ces deux fins d’un monde, mythologique et oraculaire” (147–148). I am no Bible scholar, but I wonder if this is overstated. Amos’ God “calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth” (5:8, 9:6), cries “let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (5:24), and will drown all Israel like the inundation of the Nile (9:5). These seem like uses of Deluge imagery for military conquest, and as Lionel Marti shows, the association was exploited by Assyrian kings themselves, who boast of leaving cities “like a mound after the Deluge.” Ashurbanipal even references Atra-ḫasīs: like Enlil, he silences the clamour of the populations he conquers (110). Marti’s interest is in how these allusions were understood in their own society, but imperial propaganda is a plausible mechanism for the dissemination of the literary association of war and flood throughout the Eastern Mediterranean in the early first millennium BCE.
Two contributions investigate Greek material within the new paradigm, and in so doing test its limits. François de Polignac reassesses Poseidon’s earth-shaking as a creative force, focusing especially on the opening of straits and gorges in local myths. The Vale of Tempe, through which the river Peneus flows out to the Aegean, was carved by Poseidon to drain the Thessalian plain for human habitation. This is a structural match for the epoch-ending flood and tempest tales: the present state of human life is the outcome of a natural disaster brought on by the gods in the deep past. But here, the topos is not identified by a parallel narrative sequence (e.g., building an ark, landing on a mountaintop, offering sacrifice), nor even by intertextual allusion: the only resemblance is that a god establishes a social order by manipulating the natural environment. Is this best understood as within the Eastern Mediterranean tradition?
Renaud Gagné’s beautifully-written chapter on Pausanias raises similar questions. The Periegesis is full of earthquakes, wars, and floods, but they are tied to the ruins of one city, necessarily local and historical. Pausanias presents urban decline as inevitable (“chaque ville puissante cache une ruine qui vient,” 140), but attributes it to divine will, and highlights the survival of cult sites. Thus historical disasters are comprehensible within the continuity of ritual, and their repetition shows that no human catastrophe can upset the gods’ world-order. This is a plausible development of the epoch-ending catastrophe motif in response to an accumulating historical record and life under empire. But empires rose, and historical records accrued, outside the Eastern Mediterranean. One wonders if Pausanias’ vision calls for typological (rather than regional) comparison.
Three chapters follow that are directly addressing the comparative aspect of the inquiry. Despite oft-noted similarities between Cypria fr. 1 and Atra-ḫasīs, Bernardo Ballesteros reminds us the Cypria bears a much closer resemblance to the Sanskrit Mahābhārata: both narrate a war brought on at Earth’s request to reduce the weight of mortals sinking her into the sea. This complicates theories that the Cypria is cribbing from Mesopotamian literature, but Ballesteros is skeptical of Indo-Europeanist models, too: the Mahābhārata, he argues, combines several mythemes that are widespread in world mythology and appear separately in earlier Indic texts. The prudent course is to read all three poems together, as explorations of the justice of the gods and the continuity of the present with the age of heroes, without making genealogical claims. Ballesteros is a leading exponent of the comparative approach based on parallel developments within a cultural continuum.[4] This chapter shows the continuum extends to South Asia—at least.
The editor, Ilaria Calini, contributes an innovative study of the Works and Days alongside the first-millennium Akkadian epic Erra and Išum. In this poem, the war-god Erra carries out an indiscriminate slaughter of the mortal population, which he narrates in the first person. Calini finds resonances with the age of iron in Op. 176–201: each poem charts a decay of social relations; each revises the cosmic vision of an earlier epic (Marduk’s rule in Enūma eliš and Zeus’ in the Theogony) to account for the continued presence of violence in human life. Each presents the terrible events of the new order as occurring in the present or still to come, by a marked shift in tense: “l’idée de renversement et de déchirement social portée par les contenus s’exprime également comme renversement et déchirement sur le plan temporel” (180).
Haubold’s concluding chapter also looks at Erra. In Atra-ḫasīs and Gen. 8:21, the Deluge is acknowledged as a mistake, never to be repeated. But Erra’s disaster repeats forever, with worshippers of Erra simply spared its worst effects. Unlike earlier Deluge texts, Erra’s audience is not mortals defined against the gods, but a human in-group defined against an out-group. Haubold traces a similar movement in fifth-century Greek culture: Aeschylus’ Persians figures Xerxes’ campaign as a replay of the Trojan War. This time, however, the catastrophe does not divide the age of heroes from the present, but rather some mortals from others: “both poems break up a communicative and affective order that, in principle at least, unites all humankind” (203). From now the historical framework is one of culturally-delineated human groups: Homer sang the klea andrōn; Herodotus recounts the deeds of Greeks and barbarians.
Neither chapter argues that Erra actually influenced its Greek comparata. Calini gestures instead to an Eastern Mediterranean cultural continuum, rooted in regional connectivity dating from the Late Bronze Age. This “produit des discours qui permettent les mêmes types de permutations conceptuelles et qui sont réciproquement compréhensibles,” variegated by “des exigences de contextes socio-économiques, politiques et religieux spécifiques” (190). This must be right, so far as it goes. But how far is that?
Cultural cross-pollination is presumed, since it justifies the regional selection of comparanda. But Ballesteros’ chapter shows we must range farther east of the Mediterranean than expected, and appeals to shared historical and socioeconomic factors, as well as to world mythology, put in doubt the need for contact-based explanation at all. Meanwhile, the relation between epoch-ending catastrophe literature and its cultural environment is ambiguous. The Trojan War, the Deluge, and the Mahābhārata war are myths of foundational importance, dividing cosmic history and explaining the present nature of human society. If they represent a common Weltanschauung, they were its primary vehicles of transmission—cause, as much as effect. Our interpretations must alter depending on whether they are myths of independent origin, whose coincidental similarity resulted in compatible worldviews in their cultures; independent myths whose similarity reflects an anterior cultural compatibility (with causes of its own); or descendants of a myth whose transmission produced resemblances between Greek, Near Eastern, and South Asian visions of cosmic history. To refer similarities between them to a cultural continuum is less explanation than evasion.
All three comparative chapters are excellent—that they do not answer this particular question of cross-cultural contact or shared historical factors does not diminish their insight into the texts. But as this subfield moves away from Burkert-style models of interaction in the “Orientalizing” period, we need a clearer account of this Eastern Mediterranean (or is it Eurasian? Afroeurasian?) cultural sphere and of the historical circumstances in which it took shape.
Authors and titles
- Il était une fois, un monde détruit… En guise d’introduction, Ilaria Calini
- La destruction d’une ville mésopotamienne. Une étude des Lamentations sumériennes Verderame, Lorenzo Verderame
- La double reconfiguration du monde. Les récites bibliques du déluge, Martina Weingärtner
- Deluge and royal ideology: on the edge of imagination. An alternative reading of Asag’s death, Jérôme Pace
- The relieved earth in Greek, Babylonian and Sanskrit myths of destruction, Bernardo Ballesteros
- Poséidon, les séismes et la mise en mouvement du monde, François de Polignac
- Les Assyriens de « l’apocalypse ». Les récits de destruction assyriens dans leur contexte culturel, Lionel Marti
- La fortune de Mégalopolis. Quelques cités détruites chez Pausanias, Renaud Gagné
- Le livre d’Amos. La fin du royaume d’Israël ou la narration d’une autodestruction, Stéphanie Anthonioz
- L’envers de l’endroit. La destruction comme déchirement de la trame sociale dans le poème d’Erra et les Travaux et les jours d’Hésiode, Ilaria Calini
- Catastrophe, repeated. On Reworking Foundational Catastrophes in Greek and Mesopotamian Literature, Johannes Haubold
Notes
[1] Y.S. Chen, The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions (Oxford, 2013).
[2] J. Haubold, Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature (Cambridge, 2013). Haubold repeats the point in the present volume (198).
[3] J. Pace, Mythopoeïa, ou l’art de forger les “mythes” dans l’“aire culturelle” syro-mésopotamienne, méditerranéenne et indo-européenne (Helsinki, 2018).
[4] See “On Gilgamesh and Homer: Ishtar, Aphrodite and the meaning of a parallel,” CQ 71 (2021), 1–21, and now Divine Assemblies in Early Greek and Babylonian Epic (Oxford, 2024).