Irving Finkel

So the function of stories to tell the young about what happened and about famous battles, or when the flood came, or how people learned to make fire, or, you know...

how we invented the wheel, all those sorts of things everybody puts down.

But that's presumably what absolutely happened.

And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect, among their own kind, people of astounding ability.

There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestled with polar bears and all that kind of thing.

And all this stuff would be grist to the narrators today.

And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come out of them unintentionally.

Because if you tell a story without a moral, it is usually a moral if you think about it.

Yeah, that was a challenge because it's really hard to read.

So the full story is like this.

Visitors used to come to the museum.

to ask questions of the experts who work there and one would be on duty periodically and sometimes people would bring objects sometimes they'd ask questions and somebody once came in with a whole load of objects including this tablet which to cut a long story short i identified pretty much straight away as being part of the flood story it was a tablet about eight inches by three inches

Not the whole flood story, which is a complex narrative, which ended up in the Gilgamesh narrative much, much later.

But this one was an early narrative in which the point was taken up where the gods in heaven had decided that the population of Mesopotamia needed to be wiped out because they were so noisy.

This was the expression.

And the gods couldn't sleep after lunch sort of thing.

So they decided they would write them out and create something quieter that worked harder.

So this was the basic mechanism, and they had different ways of doing it.

The most effective one was they were going to send a flood to wipe them all out.

And one of the gods, the number three in the triumvirate, thought this was a deplorable idea, so he took it upon himself to warn this person called Atrahasis, who lived in Mesopotamia.