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Since Smith’s discovery many more clay tablets of the Babylonian flood story have come to light and academics are still analysing the meaning of stories in the ancient language that has not been spoken for 2000 years.īut why would a god lie in the Gilgamesh Flood story?ĭr Worthington explained: “Babylonian gods only survive because people feed them. Although there were more gods involved than in Genesis, and the Babylonian hero had a different name, the two stories were recognisably the same, with animals taken aboard the ark before the flood and birds sent out at the end once the rain stopped. Smith realised this tablet told the same story as Noah and the Ark in the Biblical book of Genesis. The Flood Tablet in the British Museum, which bears part of the Gilgamesh Flood story, is probably the world’s most famous clay tablet, and caused a global sensation when its significance was first discovered by Assyriologist George Smith in 1872. Ea is clearly a master wordsmith who is able to compress multiple simultaneous meanings into one duplicitous utterance.” Besides the obvious positive reading promising food, I found multiple negative ones which warn of the impending catastrophe. Worthington explains: “Ea’s lines are a verbal trick which can be understood in different ways which are phonetically identical. This research focuses on nine lines in the 3000-year-old story which can be interpreted in contradictory ways. In his new book launched todaytitled Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood story, he explores the tricks of ‘wily Ea’, who is also known as the ‘crafty god’ and the ‘trickster god’. The Gilgamesh Flood story is known from clay tablets that date back around three thousand years.ĭr Worthington is an Assyriologist who specialises in Babylonian, Assyrian and Sumerian grammar, literature and medicine. It may be the earliest ever example of fake news.” With this early episode, set in mythological time, the manipulation of information and language has begun. “While Ea’s message seems to promise a rain of food, its hidden meaning warns of the Flood. Once the ark is built, Uta–napishti and his family clamber aboard and survive with a menagerie of animals. What the people don’t realise is that Ea’s nine-line message is a trick: it is a sequence of sounds that can be understood in radically different ways, like English ‘ice cream’ and ‘I scream’. He tells the Babylonian Noah, known as Uta–napishti, to promise his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark. Analysis by Dr Martin Worthington on nine lines of the Gilgamesh Flood story show duplicitous language and word play by the Babylonian god Ea.ĭr Martin Worthington, senior lecturer in Assyriology and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, said: “Ea tricks humanity by spreading fake news.