Why We Can’t Explain the Missing 432,000 Years | History for Sleep

Imagine a room, not a grand room, a small one. A room that smells of damp earth and cedar oil. The walls are clay, thick clay, still holding the warmth of the day, even though the sun went down hours ago. There is a single lamp, a shallow bowl of sesame oil with a reed wick, and it throws a circle of amber light that barely reaches the corners. And in that light, someone is writing. Not with a pen, with a stylus. A sharpened read pressed carefully, deliberately into a soft clay tablet that fits in both hands. Each press makes a wedge shaped mark. Each mark is part of a sound. Each sound is part of a word. Each word is part of something so old that the person writing it does not know how old it is. They are copying. They are copying something that was already ancient when their grandfather was born. Something that was already ancient when their grandfather's grandfather was born. A list of names, a list of kings, a record of who ruled and for how long, and what happened at the end of the long, impossible time before everything changed. The tablet will dry. It will harden. It will be buried either deliberately in an archive or by accident under centuries of silt and sand and the slow accumulation of time. And then somewhere between 3 and 4,000 years later, someone will find it and they will not know what to do with what it says because what it says does not fit. What it says is that before the great flood came and swept everything away, before the waters rose and the world as it was ceased to exist, human beings had kings who ruled not for decades, not for centuries, but for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. One king, the tablets suggest, ruled for 28,800 years, another for 36,000 years. eight kings in total across five cities reigning for a combined total that some scholars calculate at 432,000 years and then the flood came and everything started over. My name is Arthur and tonight we are going to sit with that number 432,000 years and hold it for a while. Not as an embarrassment, not as a mistake, but as a question worth living inside. What if the people who wrote it down were remembering something? Before we go any further, and this journey is going to take us a long time, so there is no rush, I want to say something to whoever is listening right now. And I don't know where you are. I don't know what time it is for you. Maybe you're in bed in the dark with your phone face down on the pillow and my voice just sort of drifting in. Maybe you're on a night shift somewhere. Maybe you've put this on because the silence was too loud and you needed something quiet to fill it. Whatever the reason, I'm glad you're here. If you're new to this channel, welcome. Arthur's sleepy history is a place for the questions that don't have clean answers. The things history recorded but doesn't quite know what to do with. We go slowly here. There's no rush. Nothing is going to be resolved by the end of this video. And that's exactly the point. If you've been here before, hello again. Thank you for coming back. If you feel like it, leave me a comment. Tell me where you are in the world right now and what time it is. I find myself genuinely moved by those comments. All these people, all these different places, all sitting in the dark together, listening to a list of kings who may or may not have lived for 30,000 years each. There's something in that I don't have words for. And if you want to be here every time we do this, every time we sit with something old and strange and worth living inside, the subscribe button is just there. It costs nothing. It just means you'll know when I found something new to wonder about. All right, let's go back. In 1889, a man named Herman Hillprect was working at the University of Pennsylvania when a collection of clay tablets arrived from an excavation site in what is now southern Iraq, a place called Nepur, one of the oldest cities in the ancient world. The tablets were broken. Many of them were fragments. Pieces of a larger hole separated by time and accident. Hillreft and his colleagues began the slow, painstaking work of cataloging them, deciphering the wedge-shaped marks, trying to understand what they said. Among the thousands of tablets that eventually came out of Nippa and other Sumerian sites across what was then the Ottoman Empire, one category kept appearing. Variations of the same document, copies and partial copies of a text that scholars would eventually call the Sumerian king list. By the early 20th century, enough copies had been found and compared and cross-referenced that scholars could piece together a fairly complete picture of what the original text contained. And what it contained was, by any standard measure of historical scholarship, deeply strange. The Sumerian king list is exactly what it sounds like, a list of kings. It begins, and this is a feature of almost every version, with a phrase that translates roughly as when kingship descended from heaven, kingship was first in Eridu. Let that sit for a moment. Not when the first king was born. Not when the first city was founded, when kingship descended from heaven. The text then proceeds to name the kings of five cities. Eridu, Bad, Tibira, Larak, Cipper, and Shurupac. And beside each name, it records a rain. And those reigns are the thing that stops you. The first king listed is a Lulim of Eridu. His reign, the tablet suggests, lasted 28,800 years. The second king, Alalgar, also of Eridu, 36,000 years. The list continues. Dummazed the shepherd of Bad Tibara 36,000 years. Enman Luana 43,200 years. Enman Galana 28,800 years. 8 kings, five cities, and a total reign if you add all the numbers together of 432,000 years. And then the tablets record, "The flood swept over the earth, and kingship descended from heaven again, and everything began once more with much shorter reigns. The post flood kings rule for centuries, then decades, then as the list approaches what we might recognize as recorded history for normal human lifespans." The conventional response to all of this from mainstream archaeology and history has been fairly consistent for the past century or so. These numbers are mythological. They are not meant to be taken literally. The long reigns are a literary device, a way of expressing the great antiquity and divine authority of early kingship. The Sumerianss, the argument goes, were doing what many ancient cultures did, projecting their sense of a sacred primordial past onto a framework of rulers and dynasties. And that may be right. I want to be honest with you about that from the beginning. The conventional interpretation may be correct. The numbers may be symbolic, not chronological. The Sumerian king list may be a theological document as much as a historical one, but here is what I keep coming back to alone at night when I'm reading. The Sumerianss were not naive people. They were by any measure extraordinarily sophisticated. They built some of the first cities in human history. They developed one of the earliest writing systems. They had advanced mathematics, astronomy, agricultural management, complex legal codes. These are not people who confused myth and recordkeeping. They kept meticulous records of grain deliveries, labor hours, trade agreements, astronomical observations. So when they wrote down 432,000 years and called it history, even if we can't take that literally, we might at least ask what they were gesturing at. What did they believe had happened before the flood? And why does that number, 432,000, keep appearing in slightly different forms across multiple ancient cultures that had no known contact with each other? Let's stay with the number for a while. 432,000. Numbers in ancient texts are not random. When a culture records a specific number, especially one this large, this precise, there is almost always a reason. The question is whether we can find it. The scholar Giorgio Desantilana, a professor at MIT, spent much of his career studying what he called the astronomical subtext of ancient mythology. In 1969, he co-authored a book with Herther Vond, a German scholar of the history of science titled Hamlet's Mill. The book argued something that was and remains deeply controversial. That many ancient myths are not stories about gods and heroes in any straightforward sense, but rather encoded astronomical knowledge. Specifically, knowledge about a phenomenon called the procession of the equinoxes. Procession is a real measurable slow movement of the earth's axis. The earth wobbles very gradually like a spinning top that is beginning to slow. This wobble means that the point in the sky where the sun rises on the first day of spring, the spring equinox, moves slowly backwards through the zodiac constellations over a very long period. How long? One full cycle of procession takes approximately 25,920 Some ancient sources round this to 26,000 years. The number varies slightly depending on the era and the method of calculation. The zodiac has 12 constellations. So, the sun spends approximately 2,160 years, give or take, rising against each constellation before precessing backward into the next one. Now 432,000 divided by 2,160 equals 200. 432,000 is exactly 200 times the processional age of a single constellation. Desantana and Vondesend proposed that the number 432,000 embedded in the Sumerian king list was not a historical duration but an astronomical marker, a way of encoding in the form of a narrative about kings, a knowledge of the great cycle of the heavens. I want to be careful here. I am not saying the Sumerianss definitely knew about procession. I'm not saying the king list is definitely an astronomical code. What I am saying is that the number is suspicious in a way that is hard to dismiss entirely because the same number appears elsewhere. In Hindu cosmology, the smallest division of cosmic time, the Kali yuga, the current age of the world, is said to last 432,000 years. The next larger cycle, the dvapara yuga, lasts twice that, 864,000 years. The full cycle of four yugas, called a maha yuga, lasts 4,320,000 All of these numbers are multiples of 432. In the Norse tradition, the great hall of Valhalla is described in the pros Eder as having 540 doors through each of which 800 warriors could march ab breast giving a total of 432,000 warriors. The Babylonian priest Barosus writing in the 3rd century B.C.E. and drawing on much older Mesopotamian sources recorded the total reign of the antidolivian kings as 432,000 years. The same number as the Sumerian king list. The convergence is either coincidence or it is something else. And if it is something else, then we have to ask what it means that cultures separated by geography and seemingly by history all arrived at precisely the same number when they tried to describe the age of the world before the flood. Some researchers have proposed that 432,000 is simply a fundamental number in base 60 mathematics. The mathematical system the Sumerianss used and which we still use today when we divide hours into 60 minutes and minutes into 60 seconds. In base 60, 432,000 is an elegant round number. It is 120 * 60 * 60. A natural anchor point for any system built on multiples of 60. That explanation is plausible. It may well be correct. But it doesn't explain why the Hindus arrived at the same number or the Norse or why Barasus working from independent Babylonian sources produced the same total. And it doesn't answer the deeper question. What were they all trying to describe? Let's go back to the king list itself to the names and the places. Five cities are mentioned as the seats of antidoluvian kingship. Eridu, Badira, Larak, Cypar, Shurupac. All of them located in what is now southern Iraq in the flat aluvial plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. the region the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia, which simply means the land between the rivers. Of these five cities, at least four have been located by archaeologists. Erodu was excavated extensively in the 1940s and 1950s. Shurupac, known today as Far was excavated in the early 20th century. Sipper and Bad Tira have also been partially identified. What archaeology has found at these sites is interesting in ways that complicate the simple dismissal of the king list as pure mythology. Eridu in particular tells a strange story. When Iraqi archaeologists led by Fouad Safar and Satan Lloyd dug into the mound at Eridu between 1946 and 1949, they found something remarkable beneath the ruins of the historical city. layer upon layer of occupation going back to what their pottery analysis suggested was around 5,500 BCE and possibly earlier. At the very bottom of the excavation, beneath 17 successive layers of temples, built one on top of another, each generation constructing their place of worship. Directly over the ruins of the last, they found traces of the earliest occupation, a small shrine, a few fishbones. Eridu was near water and fish seemed to have been sacred offerings there from the very beginning and evidence of mudbrick construction at a date that would make it one of the oldest human structures ever found. Eridu, the Sumerian texts consistently say, was the first city, the place where kingship first descended from heaven. And archaeology so far has not found compelling evidence to contradict that claim. It has only found evidence that Eridu was indeed very very old. But here is the part that stays with me. The Samrians themselves believed that Eridu was not simply old. They believed it was the city before the flood. The original city, the place where human civilization in whatever form it took before the waters came first began. And the archaeologists at Eridu found something else beneath the temple layers. A thick layer of water deposited silt. A flood layer. Clean undifferentiated river silt with no human artifacts in it. The kind of deposit left when an area is submerged underwater for a long time. And below that flood layer, more evidence of human habitation. Now, this flood layer at Eridu is not unique. Leonard Woolly excavating the ancient city of in the 1920s found a similar layer, clean silt up to three and a half m thick beneath the historical layers of the city. He famously announced to the world that he had found evidence of Noah's flood, a claim that made headlines and was subsequently walked back by more cautious scholars. The consensus today is that these flood layers represent local or regional flooding events, not a global catastrophe. The Tigris Euphrates Valley is one of the most floodprone regions on Earth. The rivers overflow regularly. The land is flat and offers little resistance to rising water. But there is a tension in that explanation that I don't think has been fully resolved because the flood in the Sumerian texts is not described as a local event. It is described as total worldending. The kind of thing that requires a boat big enough to hold every living creature that drowns mountains that lasts for days or weeks or in some versions much longer. And that description or something very like it appears not just in the Sumerian texts. It appears in the epic of Gilgamesh, in the Atraasis myth, in the biblical book of Genesis, in Hindu texts, in Greek mythology, in Aztec and Maya cosmology, in the traditions of Aboriginal Australians who have oral histories of coastal flooding that some researchers now believe may preserve genuine memories of sea level rise at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 or more years ago. The question is not whether ancient people experienced floods. Of course they did. The question is whether all of these separate cultures spread across the globe independently invented the same story or whether they were all in their different ways describing the same event. Let's spend some time with the kings, the actual names on the list because they are not just numbers. They are characters. And some of them appear elsewhere in Sumerian literature in ways that add texture to the mystery. Alulim, the first king, Eridu, 28,800 years. That's all the king list tells us about him. A name, a city, a reign so long it defeats imagination. But Alolim appears in other Sumerian texts as a figure associated with the reception of knowledge. specifically the knowledge that came from the appcallu. The appcall are one of the stranger and more fascinating elements of Sumerian mythology. They are described as wise beings, sometimes depicted as fishmen, half human and half fish, sometimes as winged figures who emerged from the waters and brought civilization to humanity. They are associated with the Abzu, the freshwater ocean that the Sumerianss believe lay beneath the earth. and with the god Enki who was the patron of wisdom, water, crafts and creation. Seven Abcalu are described in the oldest texts each associated with one of the antidoluvian kings. They are said to have been present before the flood advising the kings transmitting knowledge of the arts, agriculture, writing, mathematics and the proper ordering of society. After the flood, the texts suggest the upcalloo changed. Post flood abcaloo are described differently, less purely divine, more mixed, as though something was diluted or lost in the catastrophe. What does it mean that the Sumerianss associated their oldest, longest ruling kings with these beings from the waters who brought all knowledge of civilization? I don't have a clean answer to that question. Some researchers in what might broadly be called the alternative history space have proposed that the Akcalu were memories of an actual advanced civilization. Perhaps survivors of a pre flood world who arrived in Mesopotamia and transmitted their knowledge to the indigenous population. Others have suggested the abcalu represent early contact with a nonhuman intelligence. Others still have proposed they are entirely mythological divine messengers in the tradition of angels or intermediary beings that appear in many religious systems. The mainstream view is that the abcalu are mythological figures representing the divine origin of wisdom and civilization. The Sumerian way of saying that knowledge came as a gift from the gods, not through human effort alone. All of these interpretations may contain something true. The question of what the upcallu were remembering, if anything, is one I find genuinely impossible to close. The second antidoluvian king is a lgar of Eridu, 36,000 years. Like Alolim, he is not extensively described in other texts. His name appears, his reign is recorded, and then the list moves on. The third dynasty moves to Bad Tira, the fortress of the copper workers, or possibly the fortified place where copper is worked, depending on the translation. Three kings rule here. The first two are Nmen Luana and Nmen Gal Anna with reigns of 43,228,800 years respectively. But the third king of Bad Tibira is someone whose name you may recognize from elsewhere. Dumuzid the shepherd. Dumuzid also written Dumuzi is one of the most important figures in all of Sumerian mythology. He is the god of shepherds and of the underworld. He is the husband of Inana, the goddess of love and war and the morning star. And his story, the story of how he died and descended to the underworld and was mourned and partially rescued is one of the most elaborate and emotionally complex narratives in all of ancient literature. The presence of Dumuzid on the king list as a historical ruler, as an actual king of Bad Tibira before the flood, raises fascinating questions about how the Sumerianss understood the boundary between history and myth, between human time and divine time. In Sumerian thought, that boundary may not have existed in the way we understand it. The gods were not separate from history. They were in history. They ruled. They intervened. They loved and grieved and sometimes failed. The king list may be operating in a conceptual space where what we call myth and what we call history are the same category. Or Dumuzid the shepherd may have been a real person, a ruler of such extraordinary charisma or longevity or achievement that he was eventually elevated to divine status as happened in many ancient cultures. Gilgamesh appears on the post flood portion of the king list as a historical king of Uruk. And yet he is also the hero of the most famous epic in ancient literature, performing superhuman feats and seeking immortality. The line between the man and the god in these texts is drawn very lightly. After Dumuzid comes Enmanurana of Sipar. His reign, the tablets suggest, lasted 21,000 years. He is particularly interesting because in some ancient Jewish texts, texts that appear to draw on Mesopotamian traditions, a figure like Enmenora appears under a different name. The name is Enoch. Enoch in the book of Genesis lived 365 years, one year for each day of the solar calendar, which is probably significant, and then was not, for God took him. He did not die. He was taken. In later Jewish tradition, Enoch became associated with heavenly wisdom, with astronomical knowledge, with the secrets of the cosmos. Enmanura of Cypar is specifically associated in Sumerian texts with the city of Cipar which was a major center of sun worship. The temple of the sun god Shamash was located there. He is described as someone to whom divine knowledge was revealed. Someone who stood before the gods and received their secrets. The parallel between Enmenura and Enoch has been noted by several scholars including the Assyria WG Lambert who wrote about it in the 1960s. The parallel is not proof of anything. But it is the kind of connection that suggests the king list was not an isolated Sumerian document. It was part of a broader ancient neareastern tradition of remembering a specific set of figures from the world before the flood. The last antidoluvian king is Ubara Tutu of Shurupac. His reign 18,600 years. and he is the father in the Sumerian tradition of the flood hero. His son is Zusudra, the man who survived. There is a tablet in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum that is called by scholars the Aridu Genesis. It is fragmentaryary. Significant portions are missing, lost to time or damage. But what survives is extraordinary. It tells the story of Zusudra. Zudra is described as a king and as a man who is pious and god-fearing in the extreme. Someone who stands before the gods in a posture of humility and devotion. And one day, the text suggests he receives a vision or a message. The gods or at least a divine voice warn him of what is coming. The flood. A great flood. a decision by the assembly of the gods to destroy humanity. The reasons given for this decision vary across the different versions of the flood myth that survive from ancient Mesopotamia. In the Atrahasis epic, an older and in some ways more detailed version of the same story. The gods decide to send the flood because humanity has become too numerous, too noisy. The noise disturbs the sleep of the great god Enlil. It is by any modern standard a strange motivation, but it is consistent across multiple versions of the text, which suggests it was a genuine element of the tradition rather than a later edition. In the better known version of the flood story, the one embedded in the epic of Gilgamesh, discovered on tablets in the library of the Assyrian king Ashabanipol at Nineveh, the flood hero is called Utnapishtim. He tells Gilgamesh his story directly and it is remarkably close in its structure to both the Sumerian Zeosudra story and the biblical account of Noah. He is warned. He is told to build a boat. He is given precise dimensions. Dimensions that in the Gilgamesh version describe a vessel of almost perfectly cubic proportions, roughly 60 m on each side. He loads the boat with his family, with animals, with craftsmen, with the seeds of all living things. The flood comes. It lasts for days. The waters recede. He sends out birds, a dove, a swallow, a raven. To test whether the land has dried, the raven does not return, which means it has found dry ground. He lands on a mountain. He sacrifices to the gods and then he is granted immortality or in the Zeosudra version, eternal life in a place called Dilman, which is described as paradise. The parallels with the biblical account of Noah are not subtle. They are so close that when George Smith of the British Museum first translated the Gilgamesh flood tablet in 1872 and read his translation aloud to an audience in London, a clergyman in the room fainted. The biblical account of Noah, which most of the Western world grew up with, was written down in something like its current form sometime between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE, though it draws on much older oral traditions. The Sumerian and Babylonian flood texts predate the written form of the Genesis account by at least a thousand years. This does not necessarily mean one story copied the other. It may mean both are drawing on a shared older tradition. A memory so fundamental that it persisted across cultures and centuries and survived the transition from oral tradition to written record. But what was that memory? Zeusra, the last pre flood king, the son of the last antidoluvian ruler. What did he actually survive? Let's stay with that question. Let's not answer it too quickly. I want to take a step back from the tablets now. I want to look at the ground. Because if there was a great flood, not a local river flood, but something genuinely catastrophic, something capable of reshaping coastlines and drowning entire landscapes, the Earth itself should have recorded it. And according to some researchers, it has. The end of the last ice age somewhere between 15,000 and 11,000 years ago was accompanied by a period of dramatic and rapid sea level rise. The great ice sheets that had covered much of North America, Europe, and Asia were melting. The water had to go somewhere, and it went into the oceans. The scale of this rise is difficult to fully comprehend. At the peak of the last glacial maximum roughly 21,000 years ago, global sea levels were approximately 120 m lower than they are today. 120 m. The coastlines of the world looked completely different. Vast areas of land that are now underwater were then dry. The shallow seas between Australia and Indonesia were dry land. The British Isles were connected to continental Europe. There was no English channel, only a broad rivercrossed plane that some researchers have called Doggerand. The Persian Gulf, where Mesopotamia's rivers flow, was largely dry, a fertile valley, rather than a body of water. The Black Sea may have been a freshwater lake, considerably smaller than it is today. As the ice melted, all of this land drowned. The process was not uniform for most of the transition. Sea level rise was gradual, measurable in meters per century rather than meters per day. But there appear to have been episodes of much more rapid flooding. These episodes are called meltwater pulses and they are recorded in the geological and oceanographic data as sudden jumps in sea level. Meltwater pulse 1A, which occurred roughly 14,600 years ago, saw sea levels rise by approximately 20 m in less than 500 years. That is a remarkable rate, far faster than anything being projected even in the most alarming modern climate models. For coastal dwelling humans and coastal areas are exactly where early settled communities tend to form because of access to water and fish and trade routes. A meltwater pulse would have been devastating. The kind of event that would reshape the world within a human lifetime, possibly within a generation. The younger dryus, a sudden dramatic cold snap that occurred roughly 12,900 years ago and lasted for about 1,200 years, adds another layer of complexity. During the younger dus, temperatures in the northern hemisphere dropped dramatically in some areas by as much as 10° within a matter of decades. Then about 11,700 years ago, temperatures rose again, almost as suddenly. The cause of the younger dus is debated. One hypothesis is that it was triggered by a cosmic impact event, a comet or asteroid fragmenting in the Earth's atmosphere and sending massive amounts of material into the stratosphere, triggering sudden cooling. Evidence for this hypothesis includes a thin layer of material at sites around the world. Platinum, iridium, spherules, and nano diamonds consistent with an impact dating to the younger dus boundary approximately 12,900 years ago. The younger dus boundary corresponds very roughly to the end of what the Sumerianss called the anti-deluvian age. I want to be careful here. I am not saying the Sumerian flood myth is a record of the younger Dus. I'm not saying the 432,000year reign of the antidoluvian kings corresponds to the actual geological timeline. The numbers don't line up in any straightforward way. What I am saying is that the geological record confirms that the world at the end of the last ice age was genuinely different from the world after it. that coastal civilizations, if any, existed, would have experienced catastrophic flooding. That a great flood, or more accurately, a series of great floods over millennia, is not mythological in its basic structure. It happened. The sea rose, coastlines drowned, the world changed. Whether any of that is what the Sumerianss were remembering when they wrote down their list of ancient kings is a question we may never be able to answer with certainty. But the question feels less strange when you know what the geology says. Let's return to the king list itself because there are structural features of the document that are worth dwelling on. The list exists in multiple versions. Archaeologists and scholars have identified at least 18 significant manuscript copies dating from various periods of Mesopotamian history. The oldest fragmentaryary versions date to somewhere around 2,100 BCE, though the tradition they record is clearly much older. The most complete single copy known as the Weld Blundle Prism, now in the Asholian Museum in Oxford, dates to around 1,800 BCE. The Weld Blundle Prism is a four-sided clay column about 20 cm tall with the text of the King list inscribed on all four faces. It is a beautiful object sitting in its display case. It looks almost like a piece of abstract sculpture. A dense regular pattern of tiny wedge marks covering every available surface. The fact that so many copies of the king list exist, spanning several centuries and produced in different cities, suggests that this was an important document, not a curiosity, not a single scribe's private speculation, a text that was considered worth preserving, worth copying, worth transmitting. The transition from antid-doluvian to post diluvian kingship is marked with a very specific phrase in almost every version. Then the flood swept over the earth. This is not a mythological digression. It is a historical marker, a dividing line. The flood is treated as an event that separates two eras of human history. before when kings ruled for impossibly long periods and after when they did not. The post flood reigns are also initially very long, but they decrease progressively. The first post flood king, a figure called Jusha of Kish, is said to have ruled for 1,200 years. The next king 900 years, then 500, then 400, and so on, declining toward normal human lifespans over the course of many dynasties. This pattern, extremely long lifespans decreasing gradually after the flood appears in another famous ancient text, the book of Genesis. In Genesis, the antidolivian patriarchs, Adam, Seth, Enoch, Methuselah, and the others are said to have lived for hundreds of years. Methuselah's 969 years is the most famous, but several others exceed 900 After the flood, the lifespans in Genesis also decrease progressively generation by generation toward normal human lengths. The pattern is identical in its logic, even if the specific numbers are different. Long lives before the flood, a catastrophe, then gradually shortening lives after the catastrophe. Why would two independent literary traditions, Sumerian and Hebrew, use the same structural pattern? The conventional answer is that they are not entirely independent. that the Hebrew tradition drew on Mesopotamian sources during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE when large numbers of Jewish people lived in Babylon and had direct access to Babylonian texts and traditions. That's plausible, but but it raises its own questions. If the Hebrews borrowed the structure from the Sumerianss or Babylonians, what were the Sumerianss and Babylonians describing in the first place? What I find compelling and compelling is different from proven is that the Sumerianss clearly had a sophisticated understanding of astronomy. Ununiform tablets from later periods of Mesopotamian history record detailed astronomical observations, the movements of the planets, the prediction of eclipses, the correlation of celestial events with historical ones. The Babylonians, who inherited much of Sumerian astronomical knowledge, developed mathematical models of planetary motion that were not surpassed in accuracy until the 16th century. If this tradition of astronomical precision had deep roots, if Sumerian astronomy was not invented in the historical period, but inherited from an earlier tradition, then the astronomical encoding of the king list reigns might represent a very old form of recordkeeping, a way of transmitting knowledge about the cycles of the heavens in a form that would survive the loss of the observational records themselves. We don't know if that is what happened. It might be a pleasing story I am telling myself, but the mathematical structure of the reigns is real. The correspondence with processional numbers is real. These are facts about the text that deserve more attention than they usually receive. Let me tell you how the Sumerian king list came to be known to the modern world because that story has its own texture. The rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamia is one of the great intellectual dramas of the 19th century. For most of recorded western history, the civilizations of ancient Iraq, Suma, Akad, Babylon, Assyria were known only through references in the Bible and in the works of Greek historians like Heroditus. The actual physical remains of those civilizations had been buried under the flat plains of what was then the Ottoman Empire, hidden under mounds called tells that the local population had lived with for centuries without knowing what lay beneath them. The decipherment of cuniform, the wedge-shaped writing system used by the Sumerianss and their successors, was one of the great intellectual achievements of the 19th century. comparable in its way to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. It was accomplished by a remarkable cast of characters. Henry Rollinsson, a British army officer stationed in Persia, copied an enormous triilingual inscription carved into a cliff face at Behiston in the 1830s and 1840s, suspending himself on ropes hundreds of feet above the ground to reach the more difficult sections. The Behistan inscription, like the Rosetta Stone, provided a key. The same text written in three scripts, one of which was old Persian, which scholars could already partially read. George Smith of the British Museum, a self-educated man who had taught himself uniform by studying tablets in his spare time while working as an engraver was cataloging the Nineveh tablets in 1872 when he recognized the story of the flood. He immediately understood what he was looking at. A flood story that predated the biblical account, that shared its essential structure, that complicated everything the Western world thought it knew about the origin of the Genesis narratives. His announcement caused a sensation. The Daily Telegraph funded an expedition for him to go to Nineveh and find the missing pieces of the tablet. And he did improbably on his second day of digging. But the king list itself took longer to assemble. Fragments of it were identified and published over the course of several decades. The full picture of what the list contained, all eight antidoluvian kings, their reigns, their cities, the flood transition, and the long descent toward normal human history only became clear as more tablets were found and more copies identified and compared. Thorill Jacobson, a Danish American scholar who spent most of his career at Harvard and the Oriental Institute in Chicago, produced in 1939 what remains one of the foundational studies of the Sumerian King list, a careful, meticulous comparison of all the available manuscript versions, noting where they agreed and where they differed. Jacobson's conclusion was that the king list was a sophisticated literary and political document that it was used by successive Mesopotamian rulers to legitimize their own authority by connecting their dynasty to the unbroken chain of kingship stretching back to the anti-duovian age. To rule was to be part of a tradition that began when kingship itself descended from heaven. That is almost certainly part of what the list was. Political legitimation is a function of historical recordkeeping in virtually every culture. But the political function of a document does not mean the document is entirely invented. Real history can be mobilized for political purposes. The fact that the king list was used to legitimate authority does not mean it contains no genuine historical memory. The question is how much? I want to go back to Eridu. I keep being drawn back to Eridu. It is the first city named in the king list. In Sumerian tradition, it is the first city. Period. The place where civilization began. The word Eridu itself may mean something like the good city or the mighty city or possibly the city of creation. The ethmology is uncertain as so much of ancient Sumerian is uncertain. What we know from archaeology is that Eridu was occupied for an extraordinarily long time. The excavations of the 1940s revealed 18 successive levels of temple construction at the site, each built directly on top of the previous one. The oldest level contains what may be the earliest purpose-built religious structure ever found. A small room roughly 3 m by 3 m with a raised platform that appears to have served as an altar. The pottery found at the lowest levels of Eridu is so distinctive and so unlike anything found elsewhere in the region at a comparable date that archaeologists have named it Eridu Wear. This pottery represents one of the earliest phases of the Ubade culture. The cultural tradition that preceded and in many ways gave rise to the full flowering of Sumerian civilization. The Eubade culture is interesting in its own right. It spread across Mesopotamia and beyond. Ubade style pottery has been found as far north as Turkey, as far east as Kuwait, as far south as the coasts of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Something about the Ubide cultural tradition was compelling enough or powerful enough to spread across a vast geographic area over a period of several thousand years. And at the base of Ubide culture, at least in the archaeological record, is Eridu. The location of Eridu in the deep south of Mesopotamia near the ancient shoreline of the Persian Gulf is significant because at the peak of the last glacial maximum roughly 20,000 years ago, the Persian Gulf was largely dry land, a broad fertile valley through which the Tigris and Euphrates and two other rivers flowed before emptying into the Indian Ocean far to the south. Some researchers, including the oceanographer Jeffrey Rose, who has done extensive work on the archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula, have proposed that this ancient Persian Gulf Valley was densely settled by humans during the period when it was dry. Rose calls this hypothetical lost world the Gulf Oasis. And he argues that as the sea level rose at the end of the ice age and the waters of the Indian Ocean flowed northward to fill the Persian Gulf basin, the populations of this oasis would have been displaced, forced to migrate to the river valleys and higher ground of what is now Iraq and Iran. If that hypothesis is correct, Eridu, sitting at what would have been the northern edge of the Gulf Oasis as the waters rose, might represent one of the earliest settlements of these displaced populations. A new city built by people whose old world was drowning. That is a very speculative interpretation. The archaeological evidence for the Gulf Oasis hypothesis is indirect. Underwater archaeology in the Persian Gulf is extremely difficult and not yet extensive enough to confirm or deny the existence of major preflood settlements there. But it fits. It fits with what the Sumerians said about Eridu. It fits with what the geology says about sea level rise. It fits with the sudden appearance of the ube culture at a specific moment in Mesopotamian prehistory, emerging apparently fully formed from somewhere that is no longer accessible to archaeologists. Where did the Ubide people come from? That question, even in mainstream archaeology, does not have a fully satisfying answer. While we're sitting with the question of origins, I want to spend a moment on the Sumerian language itself because the language is one of the most enduring mysteries of ancient history and it connects to everything else we have been discussing. Sumerian is a language isolate. That means it has no known relatives, no language family it belongs to, no ancestor language that scholars have been able to identify. It appeared in the archaeological record in the form of the earliest written tablets dating to around 3,400 to 3,200 BCE as a fully developed complex language with a sophisticated grammatical structure. Compare this to say Latin which scholars can trace back through prototitalic to protoindo-uropean which can in turn be related to Sanskrit, Greek, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic and many other language families or to Arabic which belongs to the Semitic family with clear relatives in Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic and others. Sumerian has no such family. It stands alone. The languages spoken around it, Aadian, which eventually replaced Sumerian as the dominant language of Mesopotamia, were Semitic, structurally and genetically distinct from Sumerian. The two coexisted for centuries, influencing each other in vocabulary while remaining fundamentally different in grammar and structure. Where did Sumerian come from? The honest answer from mainstream linguistics is we don't know. Sumerian appears to have arrived in Mesopotamia as a complete sophisticated functional language and then after several thousand years of use to have died out as a spoken language while continuing to be used as a lurggical and scholarly language not unlike Latin in medieval Europe for another 2,000 years. The people who spoke Sumerian at its earliest attested period were already producing advanced pottery, constructing large buildings, managing complex agricultural systems, and engaging in longd distanceance trade. They were not by any measure linguistically or culturally primitive. The mystery of Sumerian's origins is directly relevant to the King List because the King List is a document in Sumerian, a record in a language that came from nowhere, describing a civilization that the text itself says began before the flood. If the Sumerianss were, as some researchers have proposed, the survivors or inheritors of an older preflood civilization, whether that civilization was in the Persian Gulf Valley on the now submerged continental shelves of the Indian Ocean or somewhere else entirely, then the isolation of their language might make sense. It would be a language that developed separately in a place that is now underwater and that arrived in Mesopotamia already complete when its speakers were displaced by rising seas. Or Sumerian could simply be a language whose relatives happen to go extinct, leaving no surviving documentation, which happens. Languages disappear. Language families disappear. The absence of known relatives does not necessarily mean there were no relatives. But the mystery remains and it sits alongside all the other mysteries of this civilization in a way that feels to me like it is pointing at something. I just cannot see clearly enough to say what the Sumerianss invented or at least extensively developed the base 60 mathematical system that we still use today. When you look at a clock and see that an hour has 60 minutes, you are using a Sumerian invention. When you calculate degrees of a circle and find there are 360 of them, 6 * 60, you are working within a framework the Sumerians established. Why 60? The conventional answer is that 60 has many divisor. It is divisible by 1 2 3 4 5 6 10 12 15 20 and 30 which makes it extremely useful for practical calculations involving fractions. In a world without calculators, a number with many divis makes arithmetic easier. But there may be another part to that answer. 60 * 6 is 360. The number of degrees in a circle and close to the number of days in a year. 60 * 60 is 3,600. Assar, the Sumerian unit of measurement used in the king list reigns. The antidoluvian king Enmanlu Anna's reign of 43,200 years is exactly 12 SARS. Enmenda's 21,600 years is exactly six SARS. The king list reigns are not arbitrary large numbers. They are constructed from the fundamental units of Sumerian mathematics and astronomy. They are in a technical sense elegant. Whatever they represent, they were not chosen randomly. This returns us to the possibility that the numbers encode astronomical or cosmological information rather than or in addition to historical duration. If each year in the antidoluvian reigns is actually a different unit of time, a cycle, a period, a processional age, then the numbers might be legible in a way they are not if we insist on reading them as literal years of human rulership. In 2003, a researcher named Andrew George published a new edition and translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh that has become the standard scholarly reference. Gilgamesh appears in the post flood section of the king list as the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk. His reign is listed as 126 years. Still long by modern standards, but nothing like the antidoluvian reigns. And the epic of Gilgamesh begins with a description of him that is even in the conventional scholarly translation remarkable. He is described as 2/3 god and onethird man. He is described as someone who saw the deep, the foundation of the country, knew the secret things. He who knew the totality of wisdom about all things. He returned from a long journey and engraved on a tablet of stone all the toil. The epic strongly implies that the story of Gilgamesh's journeys and discoveries is itself a record of something important, something that needed to be preserved. What was it that Gilgamesh knew? What were the secret things? The epic is partly the story of his friendship with Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods and civilized by a woman named Shamhat. It is partly the story of their heroic adventures together. It is partly the story of grief when Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh is confronted with his own mortality and cannot accept it. And it is partly the story of his search for immortality which leads him eventually to Utnapishtim, the flood survivor, the only human being to have been granted eternal life. Gilgamesh travels to the ends of the earth to find him. He crosses the waters of death. He asks the question that is at the heart of the entire epic. How do I escape death? Napishim tells him the story of the flood and then he tells him about a plant at the bottom of the sea that can restore youth. Not immortality but renewal. Gilgamesh dives for it. He finds it. He begins the long journey home carrying it. And while he sleeps beside a pool on the journey home, a serpent emerges from the water and eats the plant. Gilgamesh weeps. He has come so far. He has endured so much. And the answer, the one thing that might have helped him is gone. He returns to Uruk empty-handed. The epic ends with him looking at the walls of his city. Great walls. Walls that will endure for centuries and finding in them finally something like peace. Not immortality. Not the secret of eternal life. just the walls, the thing he built, the city, the record. I find this ending devastating in a way that I don't think is accidental. The oldest story in the world ends with a man looking at the thing he made and deciding that it is enough, that it has to be enough. But what does it mean that Gilgamesh, historical king of Uruk, post flood ruler listed on the king list, is described as someone who knew the secrets of the time before the flood, who had spoken to the flood survivor himself, who brought back from that conversation some kind of knowledge that he then engraved on a tablet of stone. The Epic of Gilgamesh is, among many other things, a story about the relationship between pre flood knowledge and post flood humanity, about what survived and what was lost, about the grief of knowing that something immense had been destroyed and could not be fully recovered. Whether that is purely metaphorical or whether it is gesturing at something the Sumerianss believed was historically real is a question that the text itself refuses to answer. We need to talk about the Anunnaki because they are central to the antid-deluvian tradition and because they have been so thoroughly colonized by a particular interpretive framework that it is hard to discuss them without first clearing some space. Zechariah Sitchin, a Soviet-born American author, published a series of books beginning in 1976, The 12th Planet and Its Sequels, that argued the Anunnaki were extraterrestrial beings from a planet called Nibiru, who came to Earth, genetically engineered Homo sapiens as a slave race to mine gold, and are the beings described in the antid-doluvian sections of the Sumerian king list. These books were enormously popular. They continue to be read widely and they have profoundly shaped how many people think about the Anunnaki. But mainstream Assyria are almost uniform in saying that Sitchin's translations of the ununiform texts are seriously mistaken. that he misread key terms, invented connections that aren't there, and constructed an interpretation that requires ignoring or distorting large amounts of what the texts actually say. So, what do the texts actually say? The Anunnaki, the name appears to mean something like those of princely blood or those who came from heaven to earth depending on the text and the interpretation are described in Sumerian mythology as a group of major deities. They are the great gods as opposed to the Igi who are a different class of divine beings. In the Atraasis epic, the Anunnaki are the higher gods who sit and deliberate while the Igi do the work, the labor of digging canals, building temples, maintaining the world. When the Igi rebel against this arrangement and refuse to work, the Anunnaki create humans to take over the labor. This is in outline the Sumerian creation myth. In the decision to send the flood, the Anunnaki are again the deliberating gods. The god Enlil, chief of the Anunnaki, proposes the flood. The god Enki, also of the Anunnaki, disagrees, or at least finds a way around the decision by warning the flood hero through a dream or through the wall of his reed house. It is Enki who saves humanity. The Anunnaki are not in the actual ununiform texts described as aliens. They are not described as coming from another planet. They are described as gods, which in Sumerian theology is a specific and meaningful category. They are powerful beings who exist in a different realm from humans, but who interact with the human world constantly. When the Sumerians described the Anunnaki as gods, they meant something specific by that word. What they meant is hard for us to reconstruct fully. It may have been purely theological, beings who existed in the spiritual realm and communicated through dreams and omens. It may have been something more literal. Beings who were physically present in the world in some way that later generations could no longer directly experience. The antidoluvian world, as the Sumerians described it, is one in which the divine human boundary is more permeable than it later became. The gods were more directly involved. The Akcalu, those fishmen who transmitted wisdom, are understood as intermediaries who belong to both worlds. After the flood, this changed. The gods became more distant. Kingship still descended from heaven, but it was a thinner, more attenuated version. What happened to the Anunnaki? The texts do not say clearly. Some later Mesopotamian traditions describe the great gods as having withdrawn to a higher realm. Some suggest they are still present but no longer accessible in the same way. The relationship between gods and humans became more formal, more mediated, conducted through priests and rituals rather than through direct communication. Is this a memory of something real? of a time when some category of being where like whether divine, human or something else was present in the world in a way it no longer is. Or is it simply the universal human experience of living in a world where the transcendent feels absent? The longing for a direct connection to something larger that most religious traditions express in one way or another. I cannot answer that. I'm not sure anyone can. At the heart of everything we have been discussing is a question about human memory, about what human beings are capable of remembering across very long spans of time. We tend to underestimate this. We think of oral tradition as unreliable, a game of telephone distorting everything it touches. But there is a growing body of evidence that challenges that assumption. In 2015, a group of researchers published a paper in the Australian Journal of Linguistics, examining Aboriginal Australian oral traditions about sea level rise. Aboriginal Australians are the oldest continuously surviving culture on Earth. Their traditions may extend back 60,000 years or more. And some of their stories describe geographical features that are now underwater. coastal features, islands, specific landforms that geology confirms were above sea level at specific points during the postglacial period. The researchers led by Patrick Nun and Nicholas Reed argued that these oral traditions were genuine memories of coastal flooding events that occurred between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. The stories had been preserved, intact enough to contain verifiable geographical information across hundreds of generations. This is remarkable. It suggests that human oral tradition is capable of preserving accurate geographical information for at least 10,000 years under the right conditions. What are the right conditions? Regular ritual repetition, strong taboss against modification, embedding the information in narrative form, which is far more memorable than abstract data, and a stable, continuous culture without major disruptions. The Sumerian tradition was not an oral tradition by the time it was written down. It had the advantage of written records. But the events it describes, if real, would have occurred long before writing existed. They would have been preserved orally for many thousands of years before being committed to clay. Could genuine memories of a pre flood world have survived in oral tradition for 10,000 years and then been written down in the early historical period as the Sumerian king list. The Aboriginal Australian evidence suggests it is at least possible. The cities are real. The flood layer is real. The sea level change is real. The question is how much of the narrative that surrounds these facts is memory. And how much is elaboration? And that question, I think, is genuinely open. After the flood, the king list continues. The waters recede. Kingship descends from heaven again, and the list resumes, but the numbers are different now. The impossible reigns of the antid-doluvian age are over. What replaces them are still long by our standards, centuries in some cases, but they are diminishing. The list is counting down toward us. The first post flood dynasty is centered at Kish, a city in central Mesopotamia. The first king of Kish is Jusha whose reign is given as 1,200 years. The second king Kulasinabel is said to have ruled for 960 years. After him, Nangish Lishma for 670 years, then Enangana for 420 years. The numbers are still large, but they are shrinking. And as the Kish dynasty progresses, the reigns continue to shorten. By the time we reach the end of the first dynasty of Kish, dozens of kings later, reigns are being recorded in the hundreds of years rather than the thousands. By the second and third dynasties, centuries become decades. By the time the list reaches figures we can cross reference with other historical sources, the reigns are human length. This gradient, this slow descent from mythological time scales toward recognizable human ones is one of the most structurally interesting features of the king list. It is not a sharp break between myth and history. It is a gradual transition. The list treats the antid-doluvian age and the historical age as parts of the same continuum connected by the event of the flood. One interpretation, the decreasing reigns are a literary device encoding the idea of gradual decline. The world was once more divine, more longived, more connected to heaven. It has been declining ever since. The list is a record of that decline expressed in the language of rulership. Another interpretation, the post flood reigns represent a genuine oral or documentary tradition that was progressively elaborated backward in time. Real king lists existed for the historical period. Earlier periods were extrapolated or mythologized. The further back you go, the less reliable the numbers. and the Sumerian scribes perhaps unconsciously encoded this unreliability in the form of decreasing plausibility. A third interpretation, the one that stays with me, is that the structure reflects a genuine folk memory of changing human circumstances over a very long period. Not that individual kings literally lived for thousands of years, but that's something about human life in the deepest past. The way communities organized themselves, the way authority was held, the relationship between human time and cosmic time was genuinely different. And the king list is trying to express that difference in the only language available to it, the language of dynastic succession and reign length. Among the post flood kings on the list, several are particularly notable. Itana of Kish is described as a shepherd who ascended to heaven. A figure associated in Sumerian mythology with the story of a man who rode an eagle into the sky in search of a plant that would allow him to have a son. The myth is preserved in several versions and is one of the more elaborately described narratives associated with a king on the list. Enma Baraji of Kish is the earliest king on the list whose name has been independently confirmed by archaeology. A stone vessel inscribed with his name was found in excavations suggesting he was a historical figure. This is significant because it implies the list at least from a certain point is tracking real rulers. And then there is Gilgamesh, the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk, listed with a reign of 126 years. The man whose epic we have already been living inside. The man who spoke to the flood survivor and came home empty-handed but wiser. Gilgamesh on the king list is a bridge figure. He is historical enough to be the hero of an epic composed by people who believe they were writing about a real man. He is mythological enough to be 2/3 god. He is post flood a king of the new world but he has access to the old world through utnapishtim who survived it. He is in some ways the figure through whom the pre flood world is transmitted into the post flood age. the one who went back, who asked the questions, who heard the story of the flood from someone who lived through it and then presumably told it. Without Gilgamesh, we might not have Utnap Pishtim's account of the flood. Without Utnapishtim's account, we might not have had the traditions that fed into the Atraasis epic and the Genesis narrative and all the other flood stories that have come down to us. the man who went back and asked. In 1998, a researcher named John Anthony West and a geologist named Robert Shock proposed something that caused significant controversy in Egyptological circles. That the water erosion patterns on the body of the great Sphinx of Giza indicated that the monument was far older than the conventional dating of around 2,500 BCE. Shock's argument, which was and remains contested, was that the erosion pattern on the Sphinx enclosure was consistent with prolonged rainfall weathering rather than wind and sand erosion. This would push the construction of the Sphinx back to a period when the Sahara was significantly wetter, the African humid period, which ended roughly 5,000 years ago, or even earlier. The controversy around the Sphinx is ongoing and unresolved. What I find interesting about it in the context of everything we have been discussing is what it implies. If the Sphinx or any other major ancient monument turns out to be significantly older than the conventional date, older than the historical civilizations we can trace through written records, then we are dealing with evidence of human organizational capacity, engineering skill, and large scale coordinated labor at a period we currently associate with hunter gatherer societies and the earliest farming villages. that would be by any measure remarkable and it connects to the king list in a specific way. The king list places the beginning of organized kingship, the beginning of the social structures capable of coordinating large projects in the antid-doluvian period, before the flood in the deep past. I am not claiming the Sphinx was built by antidoluvian kings. I am not claiming the pyramids encode Sumerian astronomical data. These are assertions that require evidence I do not have. What I am saying is that the question of how old human civilization actually is, whether the conventional timeline is complete is genuinely open. And the king list with its insistence on a deep pre flood history of organized society is one of the texts that keeps that question alive. Around 278 BCE a Babylonian priest named Barasus wrote a history of Babylon in Greek. A work he called Babyloniac. He wrote it for the court of the Seucid King Antiochus I as part of the effort to make Babylonian knowledge accessible to the Greekeaking world that had taken over the near east following Alexander's conquests. The original text of Barasus is lost. We know it only through quotations and summaries preserved by later Greek and Roman writers particularly Apollodoris, Alexander Polyhista and Ucius of Caesaria. This chain of transmission means we cannot be entirely certain how accurately the surviving fragments reflect what Barasus actually wrote. But what survives is extraordinarily interesting. Barasus described the antidoluvian kings of Babylon, his version of the same tradition recorded in the Sumerian king list, and gave them reigns that total in the most commonly cited calculations, years, the same number, the same total derived, he claimed, from records in the temple archives at Babylon. Records that he said went back to before the flood. He also described 10 antid-doluvian kings rather than the eight of the Sumerian king list. The number 10 corresponds to the 10 antidolivian patriarchs of Genesis from Adam to Noah which has led many scholars to note the parallel and to propose that both the Babylonian and Hebrew traditions are drawing on the same underlying source. Barasus also described the Oans, beings very similar to the Sumerian Appcallu. The Owans in his account were fishmen who emerged from the sea and taught humanity all the arts of civilization. He was explicit that they appeared before the flood and that the knowledge they transmitted was the foundation of all Babylonian science and learning. He described them with a specificity that is striking. He said the first oans appeared during the reign of the first antidoluvian king. That it looked like a fish but had a human head beneath its fish head and human feet beneath its fish tail. That during the day it lived among humans and taught them but at night it returned to the sea. And then he said something that stays with me. He said that after the first Oans, others appeared at intervals associated with specific kings and that the knowledge transmitted by the Oans was so complete and so perfect that nothing significant had been added to it since. Nothing significant has been added since. Barasus writing in the 3rd century BCE looking back at the entire history of Babylonian science and mathematics and astronomy said that all of it the complete intellectual inheritance of his civilization came from the fishmen who appeared before the flood. He was not saying it modestly. He was saying it as a historical claim. Whether we believe him is a different question. But the consistency of this tradition across multiple sources, the Sumerian Abcalu, the Babylonian Owans, the knowledgebearers from the waters suggests it was not an idle story. It was a specific persistent belief about the origin of civilization. And it always locates that origin in the world before the flood. Anthropologists and folklorists have cataloged flood myths from virtually every corner of the inhabited world. The numbers vary depending on how you count and how broadly you define a flood myth, but estimates typically range from 200 to over 2,000 distinct traditions involving a great flood, a survivor, a boat or high ground, and a world renewed afterward. In Meso America, the Maya popp Vu describes a flood sent by the gods to destroy a failed creation of humanity after which a new and better humanity was made. The Aztec tradition has a similar story with a man and woman surviving the flood in a hollow log. The Inca tradition has a flood that covered even the highest mountains with a single couple surviving on a peak. In South Asia, the Hindu tradition has Manu, whose name is ethmologically related to the word for human, warned by a fish of an approaching flood and instructed to build a boat. The fish grows as Manu feeds it, eventually becoming the largest creature in the ocean, and it towes Manu's boat to safety on a northern mountain. The fish is later identified as an avatar of Vishnu or sometimes as Brahma. The Manu story is in its structure almost identical to the Sumerian and biblical accounts. A pious man, a divine warning, a boat, animals saved, a mountain, a new beginning. The parallels are so close that scholars have debated whether the Hindu tradition borrowed from Mesopotamian sources or whether both are drawing on a shared older tradition. In China, the mythology of Gun and U, the great flood taming heroes, involves a catastrophic flood that covered the world for generations, which the culture hero Yu eventually brought under control by channeling the waters. The Chinese tradition is distinctive in that its flood hero does not ride out the flood in a boat, but instead tames and redirects it. A different relationship to the catastrophe, but a catastrophe of the same kind. Among the indigenous peoples of North America, flood traditions are widespread. The Ojiway tell of a great flood from which a man escaped on a raft with the animals. The Lakota have a flood myth. The Haida of the Pacific Northwest have stories of a time when the waters rose. The Navajo have a world flood narrative involving the emergence from a flooded lower world into the present world. In Australia, Aboriginal traditions preserve memories of flooding events that geology confirms occurred at the end of the last ice age. These are not stories of a single global flood. They are localized accounts of specific coastlines being drowned, of islands being created as hilltops disappeared beneath rising water, of landmarks vanishing beneath the sea. In Europe, the Greek tradition has the flood of Ducalon, son of Prometheus, righteous man, survivor who built a chest and floated to the top of a mountain. Ducalon and his wife Pira repopulate the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders which become people. Now what do we make of all this? The conventional anthropological explanation is that floods are universal human experiences. Every culture lives near water. Every culture has experienced flooding. The flood myth is a narrative response to a universal physical threat. elaborated into a story of divine judgment and human survival. This is certainly part of the explanation. Floods are universal. The fear of drowning is primal. The imagery of water as both lifegiving and deadly is a natural source of myth. But the explanatory power of that account diminishes as the specifics of the traditions are examined more closely. The remarkable thing about the major flood traditions is not just that they involve water. It is that they share specific structural elements. The righteous survivor, the divine warning, the preservation of animals, the mountain, the birds sent to test the waters, the sacrifice and divine covenant afterward that are not obviously required by the basic concept of a flood. A generic flood story does not need a righteous survivor chosen by a god. It does not need the specific motif of birds sent to find dry land. It does not need the post flood sacrifice and the divine covenant. These elements are specific and they recur across traditions that should not by conventional accounts have influenced each other. The most plausible explanation for this convergence is that many of these traditions share a common source. Not that one culture invented the story and its spread around the world. The distribution is too wide and too ancient for simple diffusion to account for it, but that many of these traditions are independently preserving memories of the same or similar events. events that affected human populations across a wide geographic range. The end of the last ice age with its rising seas, its meltwater pulses, its dramatic climate shifts, its inundation of coastal lowlands is the best candidate for those events that current science offers us. Let me go back to the Mesopotamian flood narrative one more time because there are details in it I have not yet mentioned. The Atraas's epic, which is probably the oldest complete version of the Mesopotamian flood tradition, dating in its written form to around 1700 BCE, but drawing on much older material is a remarkable text. It is not just a flood story. It is a story about the relationship between gods and humans across three distinct catastrophes. First, a plague, then a drought. Then the flood. In each case, the disaster is sent because human beings have become too numerous and too noisy. In each case, the god Enki finds a way to mitigate or warn against the coming catastrophe. And in each case, humanity survives, diminished, but continuing. The sequence of plague, drought, and flood is interesting because it maps loosely onto what the geological and paleoclimatological record suggests about the end of the last ice age. The transition from glacial to interglacial conditions was not smooth. It involves significant climate instability, periods of cold and drought interrupting the general warming trend, dramatic shifts in rainfall patterns, episodes of rapid sea level rise. Could the three catastrophes of the Atrais epic be a memory of this unstable transition period? Not three separate divine decisions, but three distinct phases of a single extended crisis that lasted for millennia. Several scholars have noted that the Sumerian and Aadian words used for the noise or clamor of humanity in the Atrahesis epic are the same words used elsewhere in Mesopotamian literature to describe the sounds of a large complex urban civilization. The sounds of markets, workshops, construction, celebration, the noise that disturbs the sleep of the gods is the noise of civilization itself. What if the Atrahesis epic is remembering a time when human civilization, wherever it was located, whatever form it took, had grown large enough and complex enough that it was in some sense disturbing the natural order, and that the floods that ended it were not a divine punishment, but simply a natural consequence of the end of the ice age. interpreted after the fact as divine judgment. The survivors would not have understood the cause of what happened to them. They would have experienced a world that seemed to be ending, a flood that seemed to be sent by the gods, a catastrophe of a scale they had no framework to explain except in terms of divine will. They would have told the story the only way they knew how and they would have told it forever. This is the question that keeps me awake, not whether the flood happened. The geology is clear that seas rose dramatically at the end of the last ice age, drowning vast areas of coastal land that had been inhabited by human beings. Something very like a great flood did happen, or rather a series of them over millennia that may have been experienced by any given generation as a single catastrophic event. What keeps me awake is the question of what was lost. Modern archaeology has given us a picture of human prehistory that is, I think, probably incomplete in ways we cannot fully appreciate. We find what survives. Stone tools survive well. Bones survive under the right conditions. Cave art survives in protected locations. But organic materials, wood, plant fiber, leather, most textiles decay. Cities built from mudbrick in unprotected locations erode back into the earth over millennia. Coastal cities drowned by rising seas are now inaccessible to standard archaeological methods. The period between roughly 40,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans with fully developed cognitive and linguistic capacity were well established and roughly 10,000 years ago when the first clearly identifiable permanent settlements appear in the archaeological record is in the words of the archaeologist Colin Renfruit the dark period. We can see that fully modern humans were present were making tools and art and jewelry. But we have very little of what they built if they built anything substantial and almost nothing of what they knew. That 30,000year gap is not, I think, a gap in human activity. It is a gap in the surviving record. Homo sapiens in that period had the same brains we have. The same capacity for language, for abstract thought, for social organization, for the transmission of complex knowledge, the same ability to observe the sky, to notice patterns, to develop mathematics, to build things. Did they did any human community in that long period develop something we would recognize as civilization organized agriculture complex social hierarchies writing or protoriting large scale construction? The conventional answer is almost certainly no. The archaeological record, fragmentaryary as it is, shows us huntergatherer groups with sophisticated tool use and rich symbolic cultures, but without the hallmarks of what we call civilization, cities, writing, largecale agriculture, complex political organization. But the conventional answer is based on what survives. And most of what might have survived from coastal civilizations during the ice age is now underwater. The researcher Graham Hancock has made this argument at length that the evidence for pre flood civilization is primarily missing because it is on the continental shelves under the ocean and we have barely begun to look for it. Mainstream archaeology has responded with varying degrees of dismissal and engagement. The dismissive response notes that there is no confirmed underwater site showing evidence of a sophisticated pre flood civilization. The more engaged response notes that underwater archaeology is genuinely difficult and genuinely underfunded and that the continental shelves are vast and largely unexplored. I find myself somewhere in the middle. I think it is very likely that coastal communities of considerable sophistication existed during the ice age in areas that are now underwater. I think the end of the ice age with its dramatic sea level rise would have destroyed most of the material evidence of those communities. I think the oral traditions of flood myths around the world including the Sumerian king list may preserve genuine memories of that destruction. What I do not think is that we can currently claim to know what those communities looked like, how sophisticated they were, or whether they developed anything resembling writing or complex technology. The evidence as yet does not support those claims. What the evidence does support is the possibility, and possibility in the face of genuine uncertainty is worth taking seriously. Let me be more specific about the cross-cultural parallels to the king list tradition because I think they deserve more attention than the general observation that flood myths are everywhere. The specific element that interests me most is not the flood itself but the anti-deluvian rulers. The idea shared across several traditions that before the flood, there was an age of extraordinarily long-lived or powerful beings who held authority over the world. In the book of Genesis, the pre flood patriarchs live for extraordinary lengths of time. Adam lives for 930 years, Seth for 912, Jared for 962, Methuselah for 969, the oldest person in the biblical record. These numbers are long by human standards, though nowhere near the tens of thousands of years of the Sumerian king list. But the pattern is the same. extreme longevity in the anti-dolivian period, declining after the flood. The book of Jubilees, a Jewish text probably composed in the 2n century B.CE and drawing on much older traditions, expands on the Genesis account and describes beings called watchers who descended to Earth and taught humans various arts and crafts. The parallel to the Sumerian abcalu is striking divine or semi- divine beings present in the pre flood world transmitting knowledge to humans. The book of Enoch elaborates this further. Enoch who shares so much with enmenora of the king list is taken up to heaven and shown the secrets of the cosmos. He witnesses the judgment of the watchers. He is told of the coming flood and he writes it all down in books that are then preserved for future generations. The idea that Enoch wrote things down, that he created a record of pre flood knowledge, is very similar to the Gilgamesh tradition of a hero who returned from the edge of the antidoluvian world and engraved his discoveries on a stone tablet. Both traditions are stories about the preservation of pre flood knowledge, about the deliberate effort to transmit what was known before the catastrophe across the catastrophe itself. In the Egyptian tradition, the god Thoth, associated with wisdom, writing, mathematics, and the moon, is sometimes described as having lived before the flood, and as having preserved the knowledge of the antidoluvian world in hidden or encoded form. The hermetic texts speak of Thoth, hiding the knowledge of the ancients in underground books before the great catastrophe so that it would survive. In Plato's account of Atlantis, which we should approach carefully given how much has been built on it, Egyptian priests tell Solon that the Greeks are like children because they have no memory of a great catastrophe that destroyed the world. The Egyptians, they say, have preserved records of a civilization destroyed by the sea, a great island that sank beneath the waves in a single day and night. Plato may have invented Atlantis as a literary device. That is probably the majority scholarly view. But the frame story, Egyptian priests possessing records of a pre-c catastrophe civilization that the Greeks have forgotten is structurally identical to the Sumerian tradition of antidoluvian kings and the Babylonian claim that all knowledge came from the abcalu before the flood. Each tradition in its own way is saying the same thing. There was something before. Something was lost. Some of it was preserved, but not all of it. The world we live in is a diminished version of the world that came before the catastrophe. Whether that is a universal human psychological narrative or a memory of something real, I cannot say with certainty. But when I read these traditions in sequence, in the small hours, in the quiet, they don't feel like independent inventions. They feel like different languages trying to describe the same thing. When glacias melt, the water they release flows into the ocean. But the loss of the glaciers weight also does something else. It allows the land beneath them to slowly rise, a process called isostatic rebound. The land that was pressed down by the weight of the ice gradually lifts back up over thousands of years as the ice retreats. At the same time, the weight of the new water added to the oceans presses down on the ocean floor, causing what is called oceanic loading. This can in some areas actually cause land to sink slightly. Land that was at the margins of the oceans far from the glaciers can subside as the ocean floor is loaded with water. The Persian Gulf region, the area where Sumerian civilization developed, is in a part of the world that experienced significant oceanic loading at the end of the last ice age. The land here did not rebound upward as the ice retreated because there were no glaciers nearby. Instead, as the Indian Ocean filled with meltwater and its waters flowed northward into the newly forming Persian Gulf, the land at the margins may have experienced additional subsidance. The combination of rising sea level and sinking land means that the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin, the region Jeffrey Rose calls the Gulf Oasis, may have been faster and more dramatic than the global average sea level rise alone would suggest. No, for people living in that valley, the flooding would have felt catastrophic. The sea coming in from the south, the rivers flooding from the north, the land sinking beneath their feet. Within a few generations, or possibly within a single lifetime during a meltwater pulse, a world that had been habitable for thousands of years would have become the sea floor. And they would have had to go somewhere. The places they would have gone are exactly the places where the earliest Sumerian cities appeared. the river valleys of what is now Iraq, the higher ground of the Zagros mountains to the east, the margins of the Arabian Peninsula. They would have arrived in these places carrying everything they could carry, their knowledge, their stories, their languages, their gods, and they would have begun again. Is this what happened? Is this the memory encoded in the Sumerian king list? not a mythological prehistory, but a genuine recollection of the world that the earliest Sumerianss or their immediate ancestors had been forced to leave behind. We cannot prove it. The evidence that would confirm or deny this hypothesis, the ruins of whatever communities existed in the Persian Gulf basin before the flooding, is under 60 m of salt water spread across an area the size of Germany. But the weight of the water is real. The flooding was real. The migration of populations was real. And the stories they told about what they left behind, those too may be real. I want to spend one more moment with the number 432,000 because I don't think we have exhausted what it might be telling us. We have discussed the processional interpretation that the number is a multiple of the processional cycle suggesting astronomical encoding. We have discussed the base 60 interpretation that it is a mathematically elegant number in the Sumerian mathematical system. We have discussed the possibility that it is simply the canonical way of expressing an unimaginably long time in a culture that thought in multiples of 60. But there is another possibility I find quietly fascinating. The human heartbeat. At rest, the average human heart beats approximately 60 times per minute. 60 beats per minute. 3,600 beats per hour and 60 * 60 is 3,600. Assar the Sumerian unit used in the king list reigns. There is a school of thought associated with scholars like Ernest Mlan that argues ancient sacred numbers were often derived from or at least resonant with the fundamental rhythms of the human body and the cosmos. the heartbeat, the breath, the day, the year, the processional cycle. In this view, 432,000 is not arbitrary, and it is not purely astronomical. It is a number that sits at the intersection of several different natural cycles, biological, astronomical, mathematical. And that resonance is precisely why it was chosen as the duration of the antidolivian age. The antidoluvian age in this interpretation was not 432,000 years long. It was one full cycle, one complete resonance of the cosmic order before the catastrophe reset everything. I find that beautiful. I am not certain it is correct, but it is the kind of interpretation that makes me want to sit with the number longer rather than explaining it away. In the 7th century BCE, the Assyrian king Ashabanipal undertook a remarkable project. He assembled at his palace in Nineveh a collection of cuniform tablets that represented the accumulated literary, scientific, magical, and historical knowledge of the ancient near east. This library contained tens of thousands of tablets. And when Nineveh was destroyed by the Babylonians and Mes in 612 B.CEE, the library was buried under the ruins of the palace. The clay tablets fired by the blaze that destroyed the building were actually preserved by the destruction. When Austin Henry Leard and his colleagues excavated the site in the 1840s and 1850s, they found the library. Thousands of tablets, many intact, many fragmentaryary, representing an incomparable window into the intellectual world of ancient But Ashabanipal's library was not just a collection of literature. It was a deliberate preservation project. Ashabanipol himself in inscriptions described his efforts to gather tablets from temples and private collections across Mesopotamia to collect and copy texts that might otherwise be lost. He was in other words worried about forgetting. And this raises a question that I find quietly devastating. If Ashabanipal in the 7th century BCE was already worried about the loss of ancient knowledge already making deliberate efforts to preserve texts that were becoming rare, what had already been lost by his time? The Sumerian king list mentions five cities of the antidoluvian world. We have found traces of four of them archaeologically. But the king list also implies that there were libraries, archives, records, that the antidoluvian kings ruled organized, documented civilizations. If any of those records survived into the historical period, they would have been the oldest documents in human history. Were there such records? Were they lost in the flood or floods that the texts themselves describe? Were they preserved somewhere? and eventually copied and transmitted into the ununiform tradition. We know Ashabanipal was copying old texts in the 7th century B.CE. The scribes who wrote the Weld Blundle prism were copying older texts in 1800 B.CE. The scribes who produced the oldest king list fragments were already working from something older in 2100 B.CE. Each copying is an act of preservation. And each act of preservation implies that the original source was in danger of being lost. What was the original source of the king list? Who first wrote down the names and the reigns and the cities and the flood? We don't know. The text presents itself as very old, older than writing, older than the cities it describes, going back to the moment when kingship descended from heaven. Or but where did the information come from? Who remembered it before it was written down? Perhaps no one. Perhaps the list is in its oldest form a literary composition rather than a transcribed oral tradition. Perhaps the antid-doluvian kings are mythological constructions from the beginning, not memories of real rulers. But then, why are the cities real? Why does the flood layer exist? Why does the appear in multiple independent traditions? These are not questions I can answer sitting here, but they are questions worth sitting inside. We should spend more time with Ubaratutu, the last antidoluvian king, the father of Zeusra, the man who ruled Shurupac for 18,600 years according to the king list and then presumably did not survive what came next. We know very little about Ubara Tutu from the Kunai form sources. His name appears on the king list. He is identified as the father of Zeusra in the Eridu Genesis. And Shuropac, his city, appears in the Atraasis epic as the city where the gods held their council and decided to send the flood and where the flood hero received his warning. Shurupac is interesting in another context. It is also the setting of a famous piece of Sumerian literature known as the instructions of Shurupac. A collection of proverbs and moral guidance said to have been composed by a man named Shurupac and addressed to his son whose name is given as Zeusra. The instructions of Shuropac is one of the oldest literary texts known with some manuscripts dating to around 2500 B.CEE E and its framing, a wise father instructing his son before some unspecified crisis has led some scholars to suggest it is connected to the flood narrative. Shurupac giving his son guidance before the catastrophe that will end the world they know. There is something moving about that. A father in the world before the flood writing down advice for his son, trying to transmit something important across the coming catastrophe, making sure that something of what he knew would survive, even if the world he lived in did not. And Zeusra survives. He builds the boat. He rides out the flood. He lands on a mountain. He sacrifices. He is given eternal life. and translated to Dilman, a paradise, a place of perfect peace where he lives forever, or at least for a very long time. But he cannot go back. The world he came from is gone. The cities are underwater or under silt or simply changed beyond recognition. The antid-deluvian world with its long lived kings and its divine intermediaries and its closer connection to heaven is over. Zosudra is the last person who remembers what it was like before and eventually he too will be gone. What do you do when you are the last person who remembers? You tell someone. You write it down. You put it on a tablet and you hope the tablet survives. Let me try to be honest with you about the state of the evidence. The Sumerian King list is a real document. Multiple copies of it exist. It records eight antidoluvian kings ruling in five cities with combined reigns totaling 432,000 years. The cities it names are archaeologically real. The flood it describes as ending the antidolivian age is treated in the text as a historical event rather than a purely mythological one. The number 432,000 is not arbitrary. It is mathematically structured appearing as a precise multiple of units from the Sumerian base 60 system and resonating with astronomical cycles particularly the procession of the equinoxes. The same number appears independently in Hindu, Norse and Babylonian tradition. A great flood or rather a dramatic and extended episode of sea level rise did occur at the end of the last ice age. Sea levels rose by over 100 meters over a period of roughly 15,000 years, drowning vast coastal areas. The Persian Gulf basin in particular was flooded relatively rapidly, perhaps between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago. The earliest human settlements we can identify in Mesopotamia, including Eridu, the first city named in the King list, date to a period consistent with the aftermath of this flooding. The Ubide culture which produced these earliest settlements appeared with a sophistication that suggests its roots may lie somewhere not yet accessible to archaeology. Flood myths are global and remarkably consistent in their structural details. The specific elements they share, the chosen survivor, the divine warning, the boat, the animals, the birds, the mountain, the sacrifice, go beyond what simple diffusion or universal experience can easily account for. And here is what I do not think we can say with confidence. We cannot say that the antid-doluvian kings were historical individuals who ruled for the periods the king list records. We cannot say that the Abcalu or the Anunnaki were physical beings in any sense beyond the theological and mythological framework the Sumerianss operated within. We cannot say that there was a single global flood at a specific moment that destroyed a single advanced civilization. We cannot say that any currently submerged site will prove to contain evidence of a pre flood civilization comparable to historical sumer. The gap between what we know and what we want to know is large. It may always be large. The evidence we would need to close it is literally at the bottom of the ocean. But the questions are real. They deserve to be taken seriously. And the people who recorded the king list, whoever they were, however far back the tradition goes, were trying to tell us something. We may not be able to hear it clearly yet, but we are listening. There is a particular kind of melancholy that comes from standing at the edge of something you can almost see. Not quite grief, not quite wonder, something in between. The feeling of recognizing that something important happened just before memory begins and that you are one of the people trying to hear the echo of it. The Sumerian King list is, among many other things, a document written by people who felt that melancholy, who believed that the world they lived in was a diminished version of something that had come before, who wanted to record as accurately as they could the names and the cities and the impossible reigns of those who had lived in the other world, the world before the waters came. I do not know if they were right. I do not know if the antid-doluvian world was real in the way they believed it was or whether it was a story their culture told itself about a more golden past. The kind of story every culture tells, projecting backward onto time the longing for something better than the present. What I know is that they tried. They pressed the marks into the clay. They copied the tablets. They taught the copies to scribes who made more copies. Across 3,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization, the king list survived. The names, the cities, the number years. And when the clay tablets were finally buried under the silt of rivers, under the ruins of palaces, under the slow accumulation of everything that came after, they did not disappear. They waited. There is something almost unbearably patient about a clay tablet. It does not decay. It does not burn in most fires. It simply waits in the dark in the ground for someone to find it and look at it and try to understand what it says. The tablet waited 4,000 years for Herman Hillrect. It waited for the scholars who came after him, who read it and argued about it and tried to fit it into everything else they knew about the ancient world. And now it waits for whatever understanding we might eventually bring to it. Whatever questions we might eventually be able to ask that the evidence can answer. Eight kings, five cities, 432,000 years, and then the flood swept over the earth and everything began again. I want to go back to a phrase we have been living alongside without fully sitting inside it. when kingship descended from heaven. We have been using it as a marker as the opening line of the king list as a way of locating the beginning of the antidoluvian age. But I don't think we have asked what the Sumerianss actually meant by heaven what they understood that word to describe because it is not obvious and the answer matters. In Sumerian, the word translated as heaven is an sometimes written dingir an divine sky. It is one of the oldest words in the language appearing in the earliest written tablets. And it refers not to an abstract spiritual realm, but to the physical sky, the dome of stars and planets overhead, the place where the great celestial bodies move according to their own inscrable logic. The Sumerian sky was populated by beings. The great gods had celestial correspondences. Inana was the planet we call Venus. The morning star and the evening star, dazzling and changeable. The moon god Nana held particular importance. The sun god U traversed the sky each day and descended into the underworld each night. The sky was not empty. It was inhabited. And so when the king list says that kingship descended from heaven, it is saying something specific. Kingship came from the sky. From the place where the gods live, where the stars move, where the great cycles of time are written in the movements of planets. This is not metaphor in the way we tend to use that word. The Sumerians were not saying poetically that kingship has a divine quality to it. They were making a claim about origin, the institution of kingship, the right to rule, the specific kind of authority that organizes cities and manages resources and enacts justice. This thing came from outside the human world. It was given. It arrived. From where exactly? Some researchers have taken this very literally. the ancient astronaut interpretation which we have already touched on and which I find unpersuasive in its specific claims, whatever interesting questions it raises. But there is a more careful and I think more rewarding way to read the phrase. The Sumerians understood the sky as the realm of order. The celestial bodies moved in patterns, predictable, measurable, cyclical. The planets returned to their positions. The stars rose and set in their seasons. The moon waxed and waned with perfect reliability. In a world where so much was uncertain, floods, droughts, disease, the unpredictable behavior of other people. The sky was the one place where order was absolute. Kingship descended from heaven then might mean the organizing principle of human society is the same organizing principle that governs the cosmos. The king is not just a strong man with an army. The king is the point where cosmic order touches human life. The king mediates between the regularity of the heavens and the chaos of the earth. This is a profoundly different understanding of political authority from anything we are used to. And it explains something that has always puzzled me about the king list's impossible reigns. If the antidoluvian kings are expressions of cosmic order, if their reigns are measured not in human lifetimes but in celestial cycles, then the numbers make a different kind of sense. They are not saying Alolim lived for 28,800 years. They are saying Alolim's reign corresponded to 28,800 years of cosmic time, to 8 processional ages, to an astronomical epoch. The king does not age. The cosmic cycle does. And when the flood came, what ended was not just a dynasty. What ended was an entire cosmic age. The cycle completed. The waters came and a new cycle began. One in which the sky's order was further from the earth, harder to maintain, requiring more human effort and more human institution to approximate. The decreasing rains after the flood in this reading are not a record of shorter human lives. They are a record of increasing cosmic distance. the world becoming more human, less divine with every generation. I find that reading genuinely moving. I hold it loosely, but it is consistent with what the texts say, and it is the kind of interpretation that makes the King list feel less like a confused historical document and more like a sophisticated cosmological one. There is a text I have not yet mentioned that deserves careful attention. The Kesh Temple hymn. It is one of the oldest literary compositions known. Some scholars date its earliest forms to around 2,600 BCE, which would make it among the first pieces of deliberate literature ever written. It is a hymn in praise of the temple of Kesh, a city whose exact location has not been identified with certainty and of the goddess Ninhersag who was associated with birth with the earth and with the original creation of human beings. The Kesh temple hymn is interesting for our purposes because of what it says about the antidoluvian world. Embedded in its praises of the temple and the goddess is a reference to creation, to the original making of humans and cities that places the act of creation in a time before the flood, in a world that is described as fundamentally different from the present one. The hymn speaks of the first cities as sacred places, as locations where heaven and earth were in closer contact than they later became. where the gods were present in a way they are no longer present where the boundary between the divine and the human was thinner more permeable more alive this is the same picture we get from the king list and from the atraasis epic and from the eridu genesis the antidoluvian world across every Sumerian source that touches it is described in the same terms closer to heaven more ordered, more divine, more complete. The hymn also contains a passage that has fascinated scholars for decades. A description of the Kesh temple itself as a structure that existed before the flood, or at least whose spiritual essence predated the flood, as though the temple in some form was one of the things that survived. Whether this is literal, whether some physical structure at Kesh actually predated the flood layer, or whether it is theological, claiming that the sanctity of the temple goes back to the original divine order, is unclear. The Sumerianss may not have distinguished between those two readings as sharply as we do, but the implication is consistent. The sacred places of the Sumerian world were not new. They were the continuation of something much older. The temples built in the historical period were the inheritors of a tradition that went back to before the catastrophe to the world when the gods were here. Let's spend some time with Itana. Itana is the 13th king of the first dynasty of Kish in the post flood section of the king list. His reign is listed at 1,500 years. still long though diminished from the antid-deluvian scale. And beside his name, the king list adds something unusual. It does not just record his reign. It records something about him. A shepherd, it says, who ascended to heaven. That phrase, a shepherd who ascended to heaven, is the seed of one of the most elaborate and fascinating myths in all of Sumerian literature. The myth of Itana. The story, as it survives in Aadian versions from later periods, begins with a problem. Itana is king, but he has no son, no heir. And without an heir, the city of Kish is vulnerable. Dynasties end power fragments. The order that kingship is supposed to maintain begins to fray. The plant of birth, the plant that ensures safe delivery of children, that makes conception possible, is somewhere beyond the reach of ordinary humans. The gods have it or know where it is, and it needs it. Meanwhile, in the same story, an eagle and a serpent have made a pact. They live in a great tree, a cosmic tree rooted in the earth and reaching toward heaven. And they have sworn to share their hunting grounds, to respect each other, to live in cooperation. But the eagle betrays the serpent. It eats the serpent's young while the serpent is away hunting. And when the serpent returns, it cries out to the son, god utu, for justice. Utu listens. He tells the serpent how to get revenge. The serpent hides inside the body of a dead ox. When the eagle descends to eat from the ox's carcass, the serpent seizes it, tears out its feathers, breaks its wings, and throws it into a pit. And there the eagle lies, broken and helpless, crying out to Utu for rescue. Utu does not rescue the eagle directly. Instead, he sends Itana, the king who needs the plant of birth, to find the eagle in its pit and help it recover. There is something in this that feels almost too neat, too structured to be accidental. The king needs something only the sky can provide. The eagle needs a human's help to fly again. The solution to both problems is the same. They need each other. It feeds the eagle, nurses it back to health. And when the eagle's wings are restored, it offers Itana a gift. It will carry him to heaven, to the place where the plant of birth is kept. What follows is one of the most vivid passages in all of ancient literature. Itana climbs onto the eagle's back. They begin to rise. The earth falls away beneath them. First, the earth looks like a garden from above. Then like a field. Then the great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates look like irrigation ditches. Then they are high enough that the land itself looks like a hill. Then the sea looks like a water trough. Then everything below is obscured by cloud and distance and itana is afraid. He asks the eagle to take him back down. The eagle descends. In some versions of the myth, this is where the story ends. Ambiguously, inconclusively, with itana back on the ground and the plant of birth still out of reach. In others, the story continues. Itana makes the ascent again or he dreams the journey or his son somehow conceived despite everything eventually completes what his father began. The ending is fragmentaryary. The tablets are broken. We don't know and may never know how the myth was meant to conclude. But what I find extraordinary about the Atana myth, what makes it relevant to the moment of the ascent. The description of looking down at the earth from an impossible height of watching the world shrink to the scale of a garden, then a field, then a distant smudge. The Sumerianss did not have aircraft. They had not been to space. And yet this passage describes with remarkable accuracy what the world looks like from a great altitude. The rivers shrinking to ditches. The sea becoming a pool. The progressive miniaturization of everything human. How did they know what to write? The conventional answer is imagination. that the image of a great height is achievable by any mind that has stood on a mountain and extrapolated. You don't need to have been to the stratosphere to imagine what the world would look like if you kept going up from the summit of a mountain. That is almost certainly the correct answer. But it doesn't quite account for the specificity of the description. The sequence garden, field, rivers as ditches, sea as water trough feels like it was written by someone who had either seen this or been told very precisely what it looks like by someone who had. Or perhaps the Sumerians were simply better at extrapolation than we give them credit for. Or perhaps the myth of Itana preserves something, some older story, some account transmitted across generations in ways we cannot reconstruct, of what it was like to look down at the earth from a place no ordinary human could reach. The city of Nepur sits in the center of the Sumerian world, both geographically and spiritually. It was not the oldest city. Eridu holds that claim in the tradition. It was not the largest or most powerful. Uruk and later Babylon eclipsed it in political terms. But Nepur was the sacred center. The city of Enlil, the chief of the gods, the lord of the wind and the storm and the divine assembly. And Nepur's importance was not just religious in a vague sense. It was constitutional. In Sumerian political theology, a king was not truly legitimate unless he had the blessing of Enlil at Nepur. Armies marched, cities rose and fell, dynasties succeeded each other. But the king who controlled Nepur and held the favor of Enlil's temple held something that no military victory could fully provide, cosmic authorization. This is reflected directly in the king list. The text does not just record who ruled. It records implicitly who was legitimate. And legitimacy in Sumerian understanding flowed from heaven, specifically from the divine assembly that met in mythology at Nepor. The Echor, the temple of Enlil at Nepur, was understood as the mountain of heaven and earth, as the place where the divine world and the human world intersected, where the gods could be consulted, where their will could be known, where the orderly governance of the world was anchored. And Nippor's excavations have been some of the richest in Mesopotamian archaeology. It was at Nippour that Hillpre's team found the tablets. we discussed at the beginning of this video. It was at Nippour that some of the oldest copies of the king list were found. It was at Nepor that thousands of tablets from the temple school, the Eduba, the tablet house, were recovered, giving us an incomparable window into Sumerian education, literature and intellectual life. Among those tablets from Nepur are some of the most important literary texts we have. hymns to Enlil, laments over the destruction of cities, wisdom literature, and fragments of texts that seem to preserve something older than the scribal tradition that copied them. Texts that refer to a time before the flood, to the divine instruction that shaped the world, before the catastrophe. There is a text sometimes called the instructions of Shurupac, which we touched on earlier. the father speaking to his son before the flood. But there are other Nippor texts that extend this tradition of antidoluvian wisdom literature. Fragments that claim to preserve knowledge transmitted before the waters came. The voice of someone who was there or who knew someone who was there speaking across the vast distance of the flood into the world that came after it. These texts are fragmentaryary. They are difficult to date with precision. Their claims of antidoluvian origin may be rhetorical rather than literal. The ancient equivalent of beginning a document with once upon a time in order to invoke authority and antiquity. But the impulse behind them is clear. The Sumerianss believed that certain kinds of knowledge were so old, so fundamental, so connected to the original ordering of the world that they predated the flood itself. And preserving that knowledge, transmitting it intact across the catastrophe was understood as one of the most important things a culture could do. This is I think what the King list is ultimately about. Not a historical record in our sense, not a political document in only a cynical sense, but a preservation project, an attempt to maintain continuity between the world before and the world after. To say we remember. We have not forgotten where kingship came from. We have not forgotten that there was something before the flood. and that it matters. The descent of Inana is not at first glance a story about the antid-deluvian world. It is a story about the goddess of love and war. Inana, the most important female deity in the Sumerian pantheon, descending into the underworld, dying there, and being rescued and returned to the living world through a complex series of negotiations and substitutions. The story is one of the most beautiful and disturbing things ever written. Inana prepares herself for the descent. She gathers her queenly garments, her crown, her lapis lazuli beads, her golden ring, the lapis lazuli measuring rod that is also a staff of power. She descends through seven gates. At each gate, she is stripped of one of her garments, one of her attributes, until she arrives in the underworld naked and bowed low. Her sister, Ereshigal, queen of the underworld, kills her. Her corpse hangs on a hook. Her servant waiting above, sends for help. Eventually, through the intervention of Enki, always Enki, always the god of wisdom who finds the way around impossible situations. Two small beings are created from the dirt beneath Enki's fingernails. Sent to the underworld with a special food and a special water, and Inana is restored. But there is a rule in the underworld. No one leaves without providing a substitute. Inana must find someone to take her place. She returns to the living world accompanied by demons. Searching for her substitute. She finds in the city of Uruk her husband Dumuzid, the shepherd king from the antidolivian section of the king list, sitting on a throne dressed in splendor, not mourning her absence at all. she gives him to the demons. The story of Demuzid's subsequent attempt to escape, his partial rescue by his sister Gestinana, and the eventual compromise by which he and his sister each spend half the year in the underworld. This story is, among other things, a myth about the seasons, about death and rebirth, about the annual disappearance and return of vegetation. But it is also, I think, a story about the anti-deluvian world and the post flood world. Dumuzid sits on his throne in Uruk, not in Bad Tira where he ruled as an antidoluvian king, not in the world before the flood, in post flood Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh, the city that is in Sumerian tradition the great city of the new world. Something has changed. Dumuzid, who was once a king before the flood, who reigned for 36,000 years, who was associated with the divine order of the antidolivian age, is now a mortal king in a post flood city, subject to the demands of the underworld, subject to death, or at least to its seasonal equivalent. The descent of Inana, read this way, is a story about the transition between worlds. about what happens to divine beings when the divine age ends. About the compromises the gods must make in a world that is more human, more mortal, more subject to the rhythms of death and rebirth that the antid-doluvian age perhaps had transcended. Dumised goes to the underworld, but he comes back. Every 6 months he returns, and every time he returns, it is spring. There is something in that pattern. The ancient king, the divine shepherd coming back from the dark place every year that feels like it is trying to preserve something. Not just a myth about seasons, but a memory of a world in which the divine was present and the hope that it might come back. I want to talk about writing. Specifically, I want to ask a question that the Sumerian king list implies but never quite addresses directly. Did the Sumerianss believe that written records existed from before the flood? The answer, it seems, is yes. Or at least some of them did. Barasus, the Babylonian priest we discussed earlier, was explicit about this. He claimed that the antidoluvian kings had preserved their knowledge in written form. that before the flood, Ceutra, was instructed to bury all the books in Cippar, the city of the sun god, so that they would survive the catastrophe. After the flood, Cissros and his companions were directed to go back to Sipar and dig up the books and to share their contents with humanity. This is a remarkable claim. Verosus is saying not just that oral tradition bridged the gap between the pre flood and post flood worlds but that actual written records, books, tablets, documents of some kind were deliberately preserved through the There is a version of this story in other traditions too. The Egyptian Thoth, as I mentioned earlier, hides his books before the flood. Enoch in the Jewish tradition writes his revelations in books that are preserved. The idea of a library surviving the flood of written knowledge being deliberately buried or hidden and then recovered is remarkably consistent across cultures that should not by each other. What are we to make of this? One possibility is that it is simply a narrative device. A way of explaining how knowledge that seems too old and too complete to have been newly invented was actually transmitted from an earlier age. If you want to claim that your mathematical or astronomical tradition goes back to before the flood, the easiest way to do it is to say it was written down before the flood and recovered afterward. That is almost certainly part of the explanation. But there is a more interesting possibility lurking inside it. If a pre flood community, whatever it looked like, wherever it was, had developed some form of writing or protoriting. And if some members of that community survived the catastrophe carrying that knowledge, then the tradition of antid-deluvian books is not just a narrative device. It is a memory of an actual attempt to preserve information across a Not necessarily clay tablets in the Sumerian style. Not necessarily anything we would recognize as writing, but some form of encoding. Marks on clay, patterns on stone, structures in the landscape that carried information from the world before into the world after. The king list itself might be exactly that. Not a historical record in any straightforward sense, but a carrying forward, an encoding of knowledge, astronomical, geographical, political, cosmological, in the form of a list of kings and their reigns. because that was the format that had the best chance of surviving intact, of being copied and recopied across centuries, of arriving in the historical period still legible. If you wanted to encode the processional cycle in a form that illiterate shepherds could memorize and transmit, you might choose to do it as a story about kings. You would give each king a reign whose length corresponds to an astronomical period. You would make the kings memorable. You would give them divine wives and sacred cities and connections to the great gods. You would embed the numbers in a narrative that had social and political importance so that people would have strong reasons to preserve it accurately. You would make it a king list. I don't know if that is what happened. It may be a story I am telling myself because it is pleasing. But the structure is consistent with the possibility and the possibility I think is worth holding. Dilman is the paradise to which Zeusra was sent after the flood. In the Sumerian tradition, it is a place of perfect peace. A land where there is no sickness, no old age, no death. Where the raven does not croak, where the lion does not kill, where the wolf does not snatch the lamb, where everything is clean and bright and the waters are sweet. Scholars have argued about where Dilman was for as long as they have been studying Sumerian texts. The main candidates are Bahrain, the island nation in the Persian Gulf, which has extensive ancient remains, including a remarkable field of thousands of burial mounds, and possibly the Indis Valley, which had trading contacts with Mesopotamia and was known to the Sumerianss as a source of distant goods. The Bahrain hypothesis is supported by several things. Ancient Sumerian texts describe Dilman as a trading partner, a source of copper and other goods, a place accessible by sea from the southern Mesopotamian ports. And archaeological work on Bahrain has revealed that the island was a major Bronze Age trading hub. The ancient city of Kalat al-Bahrain has been excavated and found to contain remains going back to the 3rd millennium B.CE. But the paradise Dilman of the flood myth is not quite the same as the trading partner Dilman of the commercial texts. The paradise is more distant, more ideal, more outside ordinary geography. It is the place at the edge of the world where the sun rises, where the waters are fresh and life is unending. Dilman as a mythological concept represents a memory of the world before the flood. Not a specific place, but the idea of the world when it was still whole, still connected to heaven, still partaking of the original divine order. Zeusra in this reading is not translated to a geographical location. He is translated to the memory of the world before. He is preserved in the state that the antidoluvian world existed in complete divine undying as a kind of living record. The last witness. The one who remembers what it was like. And he lives there forever or close enough. Unable to return, unable to bring what he knows back to the world that needs it. There is something unbearably lonely about that image. The man who survived the end of the world. Who knows what it was like before everything changed. Who has been given the gift of unending life in a perfect place and who cannot go home because home does not exist anymore. Gilgamesh finds him there. Gilgamesh makes the journey through the mountains across the waters of death and he finds the last witness. And the last witness tells him the story of the flood and the story of the plant at the bottom of the sea. And Gilgamesh almost brings the plant back. Almost. There is a moment in the epic of Gilgamesh that I have been thinking about for a long time. After the serpent steals the plant of youth, after Gilgamesh's last chance at transcendence is taken from him while he sleeps, he does something unexpected. He weeps. He sits down on the ground beside the pool from which the serpent emerged. And he weeps and then he says something to his boatman Ursa Nabi who has accompanied him on the journey. He says, "For whom have my arms grown weary? For whom has my heart's blood been spent? It is a question without an answer." He toiled for himself ultimately. He wanted immortality for himself and the universe or the serpent or the gods or chance gave him nothing. But then he stands up and he walks back to Uruk. And when he gets there, he shows Ushanabi the walls. Look at the walls, he says. Look at the brick work. Look at the foundation platform. Is it not the finest? Seven sages laid its foundation. Seven sages. the Akcalu, the wise beings from before the flood who transmitted all knowledge to humanity. Even in his grief, even in the aftermath of his failure, Gilgamesh points to the thing the antidoluvian sages built and says, "This is still here. This survived. Whatever was lost, this remained." I find that among the most moving things in all of ancient literature, the man who went looking for what was lost and came home to what was left, the walls, the city, the record. Let me say something about the scholars who worked on these texts, the people who actually did the work of reading and translating and arguing about what they mean. because I don't want to leave the impression that the questions we have been sitting with are only the province of alternative historians and late night wonder. Samuel Noah Kramer spent most of the 20th century working on Sumerian texts. He was born in Ukraine in 1897, came to the United States as a child, and ended up at the University of Pennsylvania, where he devoted decades to reading and translating and cataloging Sumerian tablets. He wrote a book in 1956 called History Begins at Suma that laid out 27 historical firsts he had found recorded in Sumerian texts. the first schools, the first legal codes, the first love songs, the first agricultural almanac. Kramer was not an alternative historian. He was a rigorous, meticulous philologist, and his work consistently conveyed a sense of genuine wonder at what the Sumerianss had preserved. Not wonder in a credulous sense. He was careful to distinguish what the texts said from what we could verify, but wonder in the sense of recognizing that these people had recorded something important and that paying close attention to what they recorded was worth a lifetime of effort. He wrote near the end of his life that the study of Sumerian literature had convinced him that the origins of human civilization were far more complex and far more interesting than the conventional picture of a simple progressive development. From primitive hunting to agriculture to cities, the Sumerians themselves believed their world had a history that went beyond what they could verify. that there was a depth to human time that their texts gestured at without fully illuminating. Kramer did not endorse the idea of a pre flood civilization in any strong sense. He was too careful a scholar to make claims the evidence couldn't support. But he was honest about the limits of the evidence and he took seriously the Sumerian tradition's own sense of its deep past. That seems right to me. That seems like the honest position. There is a concept in Sumerian thought that I want to spend a moment with before we begin to move toward the close. The concept is called MI, pronounced me. The Mi are the divine laws, the fundamental principles of civilization. They are a list in the texts. They appear as an actual enumerated list of the things that make human society possible. Kingship, the descent into the underworld, the ascent from the underworld, musical instruments, truth, the art of the smith, the craft of the scribe, the priestly offices, the shepherd's crook, dissent and ascent, the standard and the quiver, sexual intercourse, the kiss, prostitution, forthright speech, liel, art, the musical instrument, wisdom, silence, Descent to the underworld. Ascent from the underworld. The list goes on. It is a strange list by any standard. It mixes what we would call practical skills with what we would call moral concepts, and then with things that seem neither prostitution alongside wisdom, liel alongside art, the kiss alongside the smithy. What are the me? They are not laws in the sense of rules. They are more like modes of being, the fundamental forms that human activity takes, the shapes that human life fills when it is organized and purposeful and connected to the divine order. And the mi in Sumerian mythology are things that can be stolen, given, transported. They are objects kept in the Abzu, the freshwater deep that Enki rules, accessible to those with divine favor. There is a myth, the myth of Inana and Enki, in which Inana travels to the Abzu, gets Enki drunk on beer and persuades him to give her the Mi one by one. She loads them onto the boat of heaven and transports them from the Abzu from the deep primordial source to the city of Uruk. She brings the me to humanity. The myth is comic in its texture. Enki drunk giving away treasures he will regret giving. Sending messengers to try to retrieve them failing. But its theological content is serious. The mi are the inheritance of the divine world transmitted to the human world through the goddess of love and civilization. They are what makes cities possible. What makes the post flood world something more than a collection of survivors starting over. And they come from the deep from the world beneath the water. from the Abzu which the Sumerianss located under the earth under the ocean in the primordial depths where things began from before the me I want to suggest are one way of answering the question we have been circling all night what was lost in the flood and what survived what survived were the me the fundamental forms of civilized life not the specific things not the tablets of the antid-doluvian kings Not the architecture of the cities before the flood, not whatever writing or technology or knowledge had been accumulated, but the principles, the shapes, the modes of being that make human life more than mere survival. Kingship survived because kingship descended from heaven again. The crafts survived, the smith's art, the scribes art, the musicians art because they are me and the me are indestructible. The sexual kiss survived because it is me. The forthright speech survived. The wisdom survived. What was lost was the particular form those things had taken in the anti-deluvian world. the specific reigns of the specific kings, the specific knowledge of the abcalu, the particular closeness to heaven that the antidoluvian age had enjoyed, the forms survived, the fullness was lost, and every civilization since, every culture that has built cities, written laws, crafted songs, organized trade, loved and grieved and wondered about the sky, has been working with the forms that survived the flood, trying to fill them as fully as possible, trying to recover something of the completeness that was once in some form present. We are still doing that. I want to close tonight with something that surprised me when I first encountered it and has not stopped surprising me since. The Sumerian king list, as we have discussed, ends its antidoluvian section with the phrase, "Then the flood swept over the earth." And then it continues. Kingship descends again. New cities, new kings, the slow unwinding of reigns toward normal human length. But there is a detail in some versions of the list that I have not mentioned, and it In some copies of the king list after the flood section, there is an additional note, not part of the list itself, a comment written in the margin or appended at the end that appears to be the voice of the scribe, the person doing the copying, speaking directly about the act of copying. The note says approximately the scribal art descended from heaven, not kingship this time. Writing, the scribal art, the ability to record, to transmit, to preserve, descended from heaven, came from the place of divine order, was given to humanity as a gift in the same way and from the same source as the right to rule. This seems to me the most important thing the king list tells us and it is the thing it tells us most quietly. The act of writing this down matters. The act of preservation of pressing the marks into the clay of making the copy of teaching the copy to someone who will make more copies. This act is as sacred as the kingship it records. Maybe more sacred because kings die and dynasties end and cities fall. But the tablet waits. The Sumerians understood this. They built schools, the Eduba, the tablet houses, where scribes were trained for years, learning the thousands of kunai form signs, learning the hymns and the king lists and the astronomical tables and the legal codes. The training was rigorous, the standards were high. And the purpose was exactly what we have been discussing to maintain the thread. To keep the connection between the world before and the world after the scribe who copied the Sumerian king list sitting in that small room with the lamp burning low, pressing the marks into the clay. That scribe understood what they were doing. They were holding the thread. And now you know what they wrote. Now you have held it too for a little while in whatever part of the world you're in at whatever hour it is. That seems worth something. Everything we have been talking about tonight is a question about memory, about what survives and what doesn't, about the difference between what we know and what we have lost and what we might still find. The Sumerian king list asks us to believe that before the flood, eight kings ruled five cities for years. We cannot take those numbers literally. We probably shouldn't. They are doing something else, encoding something, gesturing at something, pointing towards something that we have not yet fully understood. But the gesture is real. The pointing is real. And the thing they are pointing at, the deep human past, the world before the catastrophe, the question of what was there and what it was like, that is as real as the ground beneath you. The earth is old. Human beings have been on it for a long time. The coastlines look different. The seas were lower. There were people living where the ocean is now. people who watched the water rise and understood that their world was ending and who tried in whatever way they could to tell someone. They told someone and someone told someone else and eventually after a very long time a scribe in a small room pressed the marks into the clay and the clay waited. And here we are. I find that in the quiet of the night genuinely beautiful. Not comforting in any simple sense, there is something melancholy about it, something that aches, but beautiful in the way that very old things are beautiful. In the way that continuity is beautiful, in the way that the fact of being here now, knowing this is beautiful. You are at the end of a very long chain. Whatever was lost in the flood and something was lost. We can feel it in every tradition that speaks of a golden age before the Something also came through. The forms, the me, the scribal art that descended from heaven. The impulse to write it down, to press the marks, to make the copy, to pass it on. You are part of that passing on just by listening. I want to return to Shurupac, not because we haven't visited it already. We have briefly in the person of Ubarat Tutu and his son Zeusra, but because Shurupac deserves more time than we gave it. Because of all the cities named in the antidolivian section of the king list, Shurupac is the one that archaeology has been able to say the most about. And what archaeology says is quietly remarkable. Shurupac today is a mound in the middle of the Iraqi desert called Tel Far. It was first excavated by German archaeologists in 1902 and 1903 and then more extensively by an American team from the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s. What they found was a city, a real city with streets and houses and temples and workshops that had been occupied continuously for a very long time before being abruptly abandoned. And beneath one of the occupation layers, they found something the Sumerianss had told them to expect. A flood layer, a stratum of clean, water deposited silt separating the earlier city from the later one. not a thin layer, a substantial deposit representing a significant flood event. The kind of flooding that would have forced the population to leave that would have covered the lower parts of the city for an extended period. When the archaeologists dated this layer using the pottery sequences above and below it, they placed it at approximately 2,900 which is interesting for several reasons. first because it places a major flood event at Shurupac, the city named in the Antidoluvian tradition as the last city before the flood at a date consistent with the transition period that some scholars identify as the boundary between the mythological and historical portions of the king list. And second, because flood layers of approximately the same date have been found at several other Sumerian sites, including and Kish, this does not prove that there was a single catastrophic flood affecting the entire region at 2900 BCE. It might represent a particularly severe episode in the recurring cycle of Mesopotamian flooding. The Tigris and Euphrates in flood plane have always been capable of extraordinary destruction. But it is the kind of convergent evidence that makes the flood tradition feel less like pure invention and more like an amplified memory of something that genuinely happened. There is a phrase the Sumerian texts use for the flood that I want to sit with for a moment. The word is amaru. It is usually translated simply as flood. But its more literal meaning is something closer to the storm that overwhelms or the wave that crushes everything in its path. It is not the word for ordinary river flooding, for the annual inundation that Mesopotamian farmers depended on and planned for. It is a word for catastrophe, for something outside the normal order. The Armaroo that swept over the earth at the end of the king list's anti-delivian section is not just a big flood. It is an event that breaks the pattern that ends one world and begins another separates the age when kings lived for tens of thousands of years from the age when they did not. Whatever actually happened, whether it was the regional flooding evidenced at Shurupac and Ur and Kish around 2900 BCE or a much older and more catastrophic sea level rise or some combination of events that merged in the oral tradition into a single defining catastrophe. The Sumerianss understood it as the hinge of history. The moment when everything changed. And they named the city where it began. Shurupac. The city of Ubaratutu. The city where the gods held their assembly and made the decision. The city where the flood hero received his warning and built his boat. The city that archaeology has confirmed was actually there and actually flooded. I want to spend some time with the god Enki because he is the figure in Sumerian mythology who most directly connects the antid-deluvian world to the post flood one and we have not fully done him justice. Enki sometimes called Ia in the Aardian tradition is the god of the absu the freshwater deep. He is the god of wisdom of magic of crafts of creation of water in all its forms. He is the cleverest of the gods, the most inventive, the most sympathetic to humanity. And he is in virtually every Sumerian myth that involves a crisis, the one who finds a way. When the gods create humans to do their labor, it is Enki who shapes them from clay and blood. When the gods send plague and drought to reduce the human population, it is Enki who finds ways to mitigate the catastrophe. When the gods decide to send the flood, it is Enki who warns the flood hero. Technically, not by telling him directly, which would violate the divine assembly's decision, but by speaking to the wall of his reed house, as the myth carefully specifies, so that the flood hero can overhear. This is a remarkable detail. The gods have made a collective decision. Enki is bound by that decision as a member of the divine assembly. But he finds a way to honor both the decision and his own character. His sympathy for the humans he helped create. He does not break the rule. He speaks to the wall. The wall listens and Zeusra hears. There is something almost unbearably human about that moment. The god who cannot quite bring himself to let humanity be destroyed. Who finds a technical loophole. Who speaks to a wall so that a man can overhear. The cleverness of it. The compassion dressed up as technicality. Enki is associated with the absu with the deep fresh water that the Sumerianss believed lay beneath the earth beneath the ocean at the foundations of the world. This underground ocean fed the rivers and the springs and the marshes. It was the source of fresh water in a world where water was life. But the Abzu is also in Sumerian mythology something more than a geological feature. It is the place where the mi are kept. The divine laws of civilization, the fundamental principles that make human society possible. The Abzu is the source not just of water but of knowledge of craft of the organizational forms that allow cities to exist. Enki guards it and Enki shares it with Inana who steals the MI in the myth we discussed with Zeusra who is given the knowledge to survive. With the Abcalu who emerge from the Abzu to teach humanity before the flood. The upcalloo come from the deep. The mi come from the deep. The fresh water that sustains all life comes from the deep. What is in the deep? In Sumerian cosmology, the answer seems to be everything that matters. Everything that is fundamental, everything that existed before the surface world, before the human world, before the historical world. The deep is the place of origins, the place of the things that came before. And after the flood, the deep is still there. The Abzu is still there. Enki is still there in his underwater temple, still guarding the Mi, still capable of intervention, still present, but more distant, more difficult to reach. The upcallus still emerge occasionally in the post flood age, but they are weaker, more mixed with human nature, less purely themselves. The connection to the deep is not severed by the flood, but it is attenuated, made thinner, made harder. This is, I think, what the Sumerianss meant when they described the post flood world as diminished. Not that material conditions were worse. In many ways, the historical period of Sumerian civilization was extraordinarily prosperous, producing art and literature and technology of real sophistication. But the connection to the source, the direct line to the deep, to the origin, to the place where the Mi live, that connection had been stretched almost to breaking. The rituals of the Sumerian temples were in this sense attempts to maintain the connection to reach back toward the Abzu to keep the line open. Every temple was built over running water where possible or with a symbolic water basin representing the Abzu. The god's statue was understood to be connected to the divine original, a living extension of the deity into the human world, maintaining the presence of the deep in the surface world. The rituals were not symbolic in our sense. They were functional. They were the technology by which the connection was maintained. And the king list was part of that technology. by naming the antid-deluvian kings, by recording their impossible reigns, by placing the origins of kingship in the time before the flood. The list was reaching back, touching the deep, maintaining the claim that what exists now is connected to what existed then, that the thread has not been broken, that the source is still there, even if it is harder to reach. The Acadian royal inscriptions are a later development. They date from roughly 2300 BCE onward when the Acadian Empire of Sargon the Great unified Mesopotamia for the first time under a single nonsumerian ruler. And they do something interesting with the antid-doluvian tradition. They use it. Sargon's successors and many of the rulers who came after them through the subsequent millennia of Mesopotamian history included in their royal inscriptions references to the antidoluvian age. They claimed descent from the antidoluvian kings or claimed that their wisdom and authority had been granted by the gods who had also granted wisdom and authority to those first rulers. They invoked the appaloo. They cited the MI. Why? Because the antid-deluvian tradition was by this point one of the most powerful legitimating narratives in the ancient world. To claim connection to the world before the flood was to claim connection to the source, to the original divine order, to the time when heaven and earth were in closer contact, to the age when kingship was not a human institution but a divine gift. This is the political function of the king list that Jacobson identified. But it is more than cynical politics. The kings who made these claims believed them or at least operated within a tradition that took them seriously. The antidolivian age was not a fictional past invented for purposes of manipulation. It was a real belief about the deep structure of time and authority. And that belief shaped how they ruled. The Mesopotamian king was not just an administrator or a military commander. He was the point of contact between the divine order and the human world. He was responsible for maintaining the connection for performing the rituals for maintaining the temples for ensuring that the mi were properly honored. When a king failed in this, when he neglected the temples, when the rituals fell into disorder, when the mi were not properly maintained, the consequences were understood as cosmic rather than merely political. The crops would fail, the rivers would flood or dry up, the divine protection would withdraw. The city would become vulnerable. The antid-doluvian tradition was not nostalgia. It was theology. It was a working model of how the universe operated and what human beings, especially kings, were required to do to keep it functioning. There is a lament, one of the most beautiful genres of Sumerian literature that I want to spend time with. The lament for the destruction of Er was one of the great Sumerian cities, the city of the moon god Nana, the city where Leonard Woolly found his flood layer, a major center of Sumerian civilization for centuries. And around 2000 BCE, it was destroyed. Sacked by a people called the Amorites from the west and the Elommites from the east, the city was burned, its temples looted, its population killed or scattered. The lament for the destruction of Ur was composed shortly afterward. It is a long poem, hundreds of lines, in which the goddess of Ur, Ningal, pleads with the divine assembly to spare the city, fails, and then mourns what has been lost. It is devastating in the way that genuine grief is devastating, specific, physical, full of details that feel like they could only have been written by someone who was there. The temple has been turned to ruins. The lapis lazuli decorations have been carried off. The rituals have ceased. The sacred storehouse has been ransacked. The winds blow through the empty throne room. But what interests me most about the lament in the context of its theological framework. The destruction of is not described as a military defeat. It is described as a divine decision. The gods the divine assembly led by Enlil decided that the time of was over that the divine protection would be withdrawn. that the city's moment in the cosmic order had passed. This is the same framework as the anti-deluvian flood. The gods decide, the catastrophe comes. The world changes. But there is a difference. After the flood, the king list continues. New cities, new kings, a new order descending from heaven. After the destruction of the lament ends with a prayer for restoration. Not just a new king, but a return. A hope that the goddess will come back, that the divine presence will reinhabit the ruins, that what was destroyed will be rebuilt. The Sumerianss understood history as cyclical in this way. Not linear, not progressive, cyclical. Ages of divine presence and divine withdrawal, catastrophes and renewals, the armaroo that sweeps everything away, and the slow emergence of the new city from the mud. The antid-deluvian age was the most complete expression of divine presence. The flood was the most complete withdrawal. Everything since has been somewhere in between, more divine than the worst moments of destruction, less divine than the age before the waters came. And somewhere in the deep, in the absu, in the place where the mi are kept, the original fullness is still there, still present, still accessible if you know how to reach it. I want to say something about time, about the specific way the Sumerianss experienced it, which is so different from the way we experience it that it is difficult to fully translate. We live in linear time. The past is behind us, fixed and unchangeable. The future is ahead, open and uncertain. The present is the thin moving edge between them. Time moves in one direction and it does not repeat. The Sumerianss did not quite think this way. They lived in what scholars sometimes call mythological time. A framework in which the past is not simply behind you, but is also in a sense present. The antid-doluvian age is not finished. It is still happening in the absu in the deep in the rituals that connect the present world to the original order. The flood happened but the world before the flood did not disappear. It went deep. It became the source from which the present world draws its meaning. This is why the king list can include both the impossible antidoluvian reigns and the historical post flood dynasties in the same document as though they are parts of the same continuous sequence. Because in Sumerian understanding they are the antidoluvian age and the historical age are not separated by an absolute break. They are separated by the flood, by a transition, a thinning, a withdrawal of divine presence. But the thread continues. The king who reads the list and finds his dynasty recorded in it is not reading about the past. He is reading about the structure of time itself, about his place in a sequence that began when kingship descended from heaven and has not yet concluded. This is very different from how we relate to history. We read about ancient Sa and feel the distance. Thousands of years, a completely foreign culture, a language no one speaks anymore, a religion no one practices. The Sumerian scribe who copied the king list felt something closer to the opposite. The antidoluvian kings were not distant. They were the foundation. They were the reason the scribes world was organized the way it was. They were closer to the source and therefore in some sense more real, more present, more authoritative than anything in the scribes own time. I find this way of experiencing time genuinely beautiful. Not because I think it is correct. I am a modern person. I think in linear time I believe the past is over. but because it reveals something about what history can be. Not just a record of what happened, a living presence, a source, a depth. The Sumerian king list is an attempt to maintain access to that depth to keep the antidolivian world present even after the flood to say this is where we came from and the connection has not been entirely severed. There is a question I have been circling for a long time tonight and I want to finally bring it to the surface. Why does it matter? Why does it matter whether the antidoluvian kings were historical or mythological? Why does it matter whether the flood was a regional event at 2900 BCE or a catastrophic sea level rise at the end of the ice age? Why does it matter whether 432,000 is an astronomical code or a base 60 mathematical unit or simply a way of saying a very long time ago? I think it matters for two reasons. The first is the reason of historical truth. If there were civilizations in the world before the ones we know about. If the conventional picture of human prehistory is incomplete in important ways, then knowing that changes our understanding of who we are and where we came from. It changes the story we tell ourselves about human capacity, human achievement, human possibility. The second reason is harder to articulate. It has to do with something I have been feeling throughout this whole conversation. A kind of melancholy that is also a kind of wonder. The sense that something was lost and that the traces of it are everywhere if you know how to look and that we are still thousands of years later trying to recover it. I don't think that thing is technological. I don't think it is a lost super civilization with advanced technology that we need to rediscover. I think it is something more fundamental than that. Something about the relationship between human beings and the world they live in. Something about the sense that the world is meaningful. That it is not just a collection of physical processes but a coherent order. Something you can be in right relationship with or wrong relationship with. something that has an inside as well as an outside. The Sumerianss had that sense. The antidoluvian world in their tradition was the world in which that sense was most complete. The flood damaged it. The distance from the Abzu increased. The Mi became harder to access. The gods withdrew. And every civilization since has been trying in its own way to find its way back. not to the specific form the antid-deluvian world took. We cannot go back any more than Zeusra could go back to Shurupac from Dilman. But to the sense of coherence it represented the sense that the world makes sense, that human life is not arbitrary, that the sky overhead is not indifferent. The religions of the world are among other things attempts to maintain that sense. The sciences of the world are among other things attempts to find the order that the Sumerianss believed was written in the movements of the stars. The arts of the world are among other things attempts to touch the MI, the fundamental forms of human experience in their fullest possible expression. We are all still working from the inheritance that survived the flood. Whether that flood was historical or mythological or something in between, the inheritance is real. And the impulse to trace it back, to follow the thread as far as it goes, to sit with the question of what was there before. That impulse is one of the most distinctly human things there is. I want to tell you about one more tablet. It is a very small tablet about the size of a hand. It was found at Nepor in the same great collection that has given us so many of the texts we have been discussing tonight. It is not as famous as the king list or the epic of Gilgamesh or the descent of Inana. It is a school tablet, a practice tablet, the kind that student scribes used when they were learning. On one side, a teacher has written out a passage, a few lines from a longer composition. On the other side, the student has copied it, not perfectly. There are errors. Some signs are malformed. One line seems to have been written with a heavier hand than the others, as if the student was pressing too hard, trying to get the marks right. The text the student was copying is a fragment of an antidoluvian hymn, a praise song for one of the pre flood cities, not a famous text. Scholars disagree about exactly which composition it comes from. And the fragment is too short to resolve the question. But here is what I keep thinking about. the student who made those errors, who pressed too hard on that one line, who was sitting in a nipper school around 4,000 years ago trying to get the signs right. That student was already copying something ancient. The hymn they were practicing was already old, already reaching back toward a world before the flood, already participating in the project of preservation. That is the deepest impulse of Sumerian literary culture. A student making mistakes, trying again, and the tablet survived. The imperfect copy, the errors and the heavy pressed line, the evidence of effort and imperfection and the ordinary difficulty of learning something that matters. It survived 4,000 years in the ground at Nipper and then ended up in a museum and then a scholar looked at it and recognized what it was. There is something in that I find almost unbearably moving. The enormous ambitions of the Sumerian king list, the project of connecting the present world to the antid-doluvian age, of maintaining the thread across the catastrophe, reduced to a student in a schoolroom making mistakes while trying to copy an old hymn. The thread held not because it was maintained by kings and priests and great scholars, though it was. It held also because of students who pressed too hard, who made errors, who tried again. History is like that. The grand projects and the small moments, the impossible reigns and the imperfect copies, the armaroo that swept everything away, and the hand that picked up the stylus the next day and pressed the marks again. We are very close to the end now. But before we arrive there, I want to say something about uncertainty, about not knowing. Everything I have said tonight has been offered carefully, I hope, with the appropriate qualifications, the honest acknowledgements of what we can and cannot say. The distinction between what the evidence supports and what is speculation or interpretation, or the particular story I find myself drawn to. But I want to go further than that. I want to say that the uncertainty itself is something worth sitting with. Not as a frustration, not as a gap to be filled by confident alternative theories or by equally confident dismissals, but as a genuine feature of the question. We do not know what the antidoluvian world was. We do not know whether there were civilizations before the ones we can trace. We do not know whether the Sumerian king list is encoding astronomical knowledge or historical memory or theological assertion or some combination of all three. We do not know who the Akcallu were or whether the Mi are memories of a real transmission or mythological expressions of the divine origin of wisdom. We do not know. And there is something important in that. something that I think the Sumerianss themselves understood in their way. The antidoluvian world was not recoverable, not fully. Zeusra lived in Dilman and could not go back. Gilgamesh went to the edge of the world and came home with nothing but the story. The scribes copied the king list and knew that what they were preserving was the gesture towards something they could not directly see. The not knowing is built into the tradition. It is not a failure of the tradition. It is part of what the tradition is doing. Maintaining the question, keeping it open, refusing to let it be resolved into either a confident yes or a confident no. 432,000 years. We do not know what that number means. We hold it. We turn it over. We notice that it appears in other traditions, in other cultures, encoded in other forms. We notice that it is mathematically elegant, astronomically resonant, built from the units of a system that still governs how we divide time. We notice that it marks the duration of a world the Sumerians believed was real and important and worth remembering. And we notice that we are still here thousands of years later turning it over in the dark. That is not nothing. That is in its quiet way. Everything the king list was hoping for. The night is very late now or very early. The hour when the distinction starts to lose its meaning. The hour when the mind loosens its grip on the day's certainties and becomes permeable to older things. This is the hour the Sumerianss would have recognized. The hour of the temple rituals. The hour of the astronomical observations. The hour when the sky is most fully itself. When the planets are visible and the stars are clear and the great cycles of heaven can be traced with the naked eye. Look up if you can, or if you're lying in the dark, imagine it. The sky as the Sumerianss saw it, not obscured by city light, not domesticated by maps and names, and the comfortable knowledge that we know what everything is. Just the sky itself, the planets moving through the constellations, the slow westward drift of the stars through the night, the moon if it is there, or the particular quality of darkness when it is not. The Sumerianss looked at that sky and saw the divine assembly, saw the gods in their courses, saw the record of time written in the movements of light. They also saw the precession. They may have understood that the point where the sun rises on the first day of spring was moving slowly, imperceptibly over any single human lifetime, but measurably over centuries backward through the constellations. That the sky itself was turning over a cycle so long that no individual human could observe more than a fraction of it. 25,920 years for one full cycle. years for something larger. For the number of cosmic ages before the flood, for the duration of the world before the catastrophe, for the span of time encoded in the reigns of eight kings across five cities. Whatever it means, it was written under that sky by people who knew the sky was doing something important, something vast, something that dwarfed human history and contained it. They wrote it down. They pressed the marks into the clay. They sent it forward into the future they could not see, trusting that someone would find it and try to understand. You found it. You tried. That is enough. That is exactly enough. Let the sky go now. Let it turn without you watching. Let the procession continue its vast, slow revolution through the centuries and the millennia. The equinox point sliding backward through Pisces into Aquarius and on and on through the zodiac, indifferent to any individual human life. And yet somehow the very thing the Sumerianss encoded in their list of impossible kings. Let it go. Let the five cities go. Eridu, Badira, Larak, Zippar, Shurupak, back into the earth. Back under the silt. Back under the flat Iraqi plain where the archaeologists found them. Let the tablets go back to their museum cases. their wedge marks patient and silent in the climate controlled dark. Let Zeusra rest in Dilman. Let Gilgamesh stand at his walls, finally at peace with what he built and what he couldn't keep. Let the student at Nippur put down the stylus, the practice tablet finished, the errors made and accepted, the day's work done. Let Enki return to the Abzu, to the deep fresh water that runs beneath everything. still guarding the Mi, still present, still the cleverest of the gods and the most sympathetic to the creature he helped make from clay and blood. Let the flood recede one last time. Let the waters pull back from the plains and the cities and the coastlines. Let the river find its channel. Let the reeds grow back at the edge of the marsh. Let the first bird land on the first dry ground and not fly away. The world is still here. It has been through the flood and come out the other side. Diminished in some ways and unchanged in others. Still turning under the same sky. Still generating the same questions. Still producing every generation. People who lie awake in the small hours wondering what was there before the beginning of memory. You are one of those people. And this you are not alone. The Sumerianss were those people. Whoever was in the world before the Sumerianss and whoever lived in the Persian Gulf Valley before the sea covered it. Whoever told the first version of the story of the flood, they were those people too. The wondering is the oldest thing. older than the cities, older than the writing, older than the king list and the epic of Gilgamesh and the Aduba at Nippur where students pressed too hard and made their errors and tried again. The wondering has always been here and tonight it is here in you. Rest now. You have wondered enough for one night. The questions will still be there in the morning, patient as clay tablets, waiting for you to come back to them. Let your body be heavy. Let the surface beneath you take your weight completely. Let the small sounds of the night, whatever sounds the night makes where you are in your particular place, at your particular hour, let them become the background of something slower and deeper than thought. Somewhere under the Persian Gulf, under 60 m of salt water, the ruins of whatever was there before the sea came are still resting in the dark, patient, undisturbed, waiting for the technology or the will or the simple chance that will eventually bring them to light. Maybe in your lifetime, maybe not. But they are there. And the king list knew they were there, even if it couldn't say so directly. Even if all it could do was name the cities and the kings and the impossible rains and the flood that ended everything and trust that someone someday would read it and understand that it was pointing at something real. It was pointing at you. Not you specifically, not your name, not your face, not the particular hour you're lying in the dark in the particular place you are, but the kind of person you are. The one who stays up late wondering. The one who can't quite let go of the question of what was there before. The one who finds in the most ancient things something that feels almost like recognition. The Samrians wrote for you. Sleep now. The thread holds. The deep is still deep. And the morning will come as it always has. As it has come every morning since Zosudra stepped off his boat onto the mountain and breathed the air of a world that was changed but still there, still here. Sleep well.