Gilgamesh would not be warned; he wanted to reach Utnapishtim, the father of men, no matter what the dangers. But Utnapishtim lived on the far side of the great sea; no road led to him and no ship flew across it except the sun god's. Braving all kinds of perils Gilgamesh crossed the sea. Then follows his encounter with Utnapishtim, which is described in the eleventh tablet.
Gilgamesh found the figure of the father of men neither bigger nor broader than his own and he said that they resembled each other like father and son. Then Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh about his past, strangely enough in the first person.
To our amazement we are given a detailed description of the Flood. He recounts that the 'gods' warned him of the great flood to come and gave him the task of building a boat on which he was to shelter women and children, his relations and craftsmen of every kind. The description of the violent storm, the darkness, the rising flood and the despair of the people he could not take with him has tremendous narrative power even today. We also hear—just as in Noah's account in the Bible—the story of the raven and the dove that were released and how finally, as the waters went down, the boat grounded on a mountain.
The parallel between the stories of the Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible is beyond doubt and there is not a single scholar who contests it. The fascinating thing about this parallelism is that we are dealing with different omens and different 'gods' in this case.
If the account of the Flood in the Bible is a second-hand one, the first person form of Utnapishtim's narrative shows that a survivor, an eye-witness, was speaking in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
It has been clearly proved that a catastrophic flood did take place in the ancient East some thousands of years ago. Ancient Babylonian cuneiform texts indicate very precisely where the remains of the boat ought to be. And on the south side of Mount Ararat investigators did in fact find three pieces of wood which possibly indicate the place where the ark grounded. Incidentally the chances of finding the remains of a ship that was mainly built of wood and survived a flood more than 6,000 years ago are extremely remote.
Besides being a first-hand report, the Epic of Gilgamesh also contains descriptions of extraordinary things that could not have been made up by any intelligence living at the time the tablets were written, any more than they could have been devised by the translators and copyists who manhandled the epic over the centuries. For there are facts buried among the descriptions that must have been known to the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh, if we look at them in the light of present-day knowledge.
Perhaps asking some new questions may throw a little light on the darkness. Is it possible that the Epic of Gilgamesh did not originate in the ancient East at all, but in the Tiahuanaco region? Is it conceivable that descendants of Gilgamesh came from South America and brought the Epic with them? An affirmative answer would at least explain the mention of the Gate of the Sun, the crossing of the sea and at the same time the sudden appearance of the Sumerians, for as is well known all the creations of Babylon, which came later, go back to the Sumerians. Undoubtedly the advanced Egyptian culture of the Pharaohs possessed libraries in which the old secrets were preserved, taught, learnt and written down. As has already been mentioned, Moses grew up at the Egyptian court and certainly had access to the venerable library rooms. Moses was a receptive and learned man; indeed he is supposed to have written five of his books himself, although it is still an unsolved puzzle in what language he could have written them.
If we work on the hypothesis that the Epic of Gilgamesh came to Egypt from the Sumerians by way of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and that the young Moses found it there and adapted it for his own ends, then the Sumerian story of the Flood, and not the biblical one, would be the genuine account.
Ought we not to ask such questions? It seems to me that the classical method of research into antiquity has got bogged down and so cannot come to the right unassailable kind of conclusions. It is far too attached to its stereotyped pattern of thought and leaves no scope for the imaginative ideas and speculations which alone could produce a creative impulse.
Many opportunities for research into the ancient East undoubtedly foundered on the inviolability and sacredness of the Books of the Bible. People did not dare to ask questions and voice their doubts aloud in the face of this taboo. Even the scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ostensibly so enlightened, were still caught in the mental fetters of the 1,000-year-old errors, because the way back would inevitably have called in question parts of the biblical story. But even very religious Christians must have realised that many of the events described in the Old Testament cannot really be reconciled with the character of a good, great and omnipresent God. The very man who wants to preserve the religious dogmas of the Bible intact ought to be interested in clarifying who actually educated men in antiquity, who gave them the first rules for a communal life, who handed down the first laws of hygiene and who annihilated the degenerate stock.
If we think in this way and ask questions like this, it need not mean that we are irreligious. I myself am quite convinced that when the last question about our past has been given a genuine and convincing answer SOMETHING, that I call GOD for want of a better name, will remain for eternity.
Yet the hypothesis that the unimaginable god needed vehicles with wheels and wings to move from place to place, mated with primitive people and dared not to let his mask fall remains an outrageous piece of presumption, as long as it is unsupported by proof. The theologians' answer that God is wise and that we cannot imagine in what way he shows himself and makes his people humble is really dodging our question and is unsatisfactory for that reason. People would like to close their eyes to new realities, too. But the future gnaws away at our past day after day. In about twelve years the first men will land on Mars. If there is a single, ancient, long abandoned edifice there, if there is a single object indicating earlier intelligence, if there is one still recognisable rock drawing to be found, then these finds will shake the foundations of our religions and throw our past into confusion. One single discovery of this kind will cause the greatest revolution and reformation in the history of mankind.
In view of the inevitable confrontation with the future, would it not be more intelligent to use new imaginative ideas when conjuring up our past? Without being unbelieving, we can no longer afford to be credulous. Every religion has an outline, a schema, of its god; it is constrained to think and believe within the framework of this outline. Meanwhile, with the space age, the intellectual Day of Judgment comes ever nearer. The theological clouds will evaporate, scattered like shreds of mist. With the decisive step into the universe we shall have to recognise that there are not two million gods, not twenty thousand sects or ten great religions, but only one.
But let us continue to build on to our hypothesis of the Utopian past of humanity. This is the picture so far:
Dim as yet undefinable ages ago an unknown space-ship discovered our planet. The crew of the space-ship soon found out that the earth had all the prerequisites for intelligent life to develop. Obviously the 'man' of those times was no homo sapiens, but something rather different. The space men artificially fertilised some female members of this species, put them into a deep sleep, so ancient legends say, and departed. Thousands of years later the space travellers returned and found scattered specimens of the genus homo sapiens. They repeated their breeding experiment several times until finally they produced a creature intelligent enough to have the rules of society imparted to it. The people of that age were still barbaric. Because there was a danger that they might retrogress and mate with animals again, the space travellers destroyed the unsuccessful specimens or took them with them to settle them on other continents. The first communities and the first skills came into being; rock faces and cave walls were painted, pottery was discovered and the first attempts at architecture made.