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She nodded like a little girl dying to tell a secret.
“This I’ve gotta hear.”
Thirty minutes later, his meal gone, the sourness in Juan’s stomach had been replaced with a contented glow, and he felt he had just enough energy to listen to Julia’s report.
He looked to Eric first, since he had done the translation. “Okay, from the top.”
“I won’t bore you with the details of enhancing the pictures or finding an online archive of cuneiform, but I did. The writing you found is particularly old, according to what I was able to learn.”
Cabrillo recalled thinking the same thing. He motioned for Stone to continue.
“I turned the problem over to the computer. It took about five hours of tweaking the programs to start producing anything coherent. The algorithms were pretty intense, and I was bending the rules of fuzzy logic to the breaking point. Once the computer started to learn the nuances, it got a little easier, and after passing it through a few times, adjusting here and there, it spat out the entire story.”
“The story of Noah’s ark?”
“You may not know this, but the epic story of Gilgamesh, which was translated from cuneiform by an English amateur in the nineteenth century, chronicles a flood scenario a thousand years before it appeared in Hebrew texts. Many cultures around the globe also have flood myths as part of their ancient traditions. Anthropologists believe that because human civilization sprang up in coastal areas or along rivers, the very real threat of catastrophic flooding was used by kings and priests in cautionary tales to keep people in line.” Eric adjusted his steel-framed glasses. “As for myself, I can see tsunami events being the genesis for many of these stories. Without written language, stories were passed down orally, usually with added embellishments, so, after one or two generations of retelling, it wasn’t just a giant wave that wiped out your village, it was the whole world that had become inundated. In fact—”
Cabrillo cut him off. “Save the lecture for later and stick to what you’ve discovered.”
“Oh, sure. Sorry. The story starts out with a flood, but not a sudden swell of water or a heavy rain. The people who wrote the tablets describe how the water of the sea they lived by rose. I believe it rose about a foot a day. While nearby villages simply moved to higher ground, our folks believed the rising would never stop and decided the only way to survive was to build a large boat. It was in no way as large as
the boat described in the Bible. They didn’t have that kind of technology.”
“So we aren’t really talking about Noah and his ark?”
“No, although the parallels are striking, and it is possible that the people who remained behind and described what happened laid the foundation for Gilgamesh and the biblical story.”
“Is there a time frame for this?”
“Fifty-five hundred B.C.”
“That seems pretty precise.”
“That’s because there is physical evidence of a flood just as it’s described on the tablets. It occurred when the earthen dike at what is now the Bosporus collapsed and flooded what had been, up until that time, an inland sea that was some five hundred feet lower than the Mediterranean. We now call this area the Black Sea. Using underwater ROVs, marine archaeologists have confirmed that there were humans living along the ancient shoreline. It took more than a year for the basin to fill, and they estimate the falls at the Bosporus would make Niagara look like a babbling brook.”
Cabrillo was amazed. “I had no idea.”
“This has only been confirmed in the last few years. At the time, there was a lot of talk that this catastrophic event could be the origin of the biblical flood, but scientists and theologians both agreed that it wasn’t.”
“Seems, with what we’ve discovered, that the debate isn’t over yet. Hold on a second,” Juan said as a thought struck him. “These tablets were written in cuneiform. That comes from Mesopotamia and Samaria. Not the Black Sea region.”
“Like I said, this is a very early form of the writing style, and it was most likely brought southward by people leaving the Black Sea region and taken up by those other civilizations. Trust me on this, Chairman: the tablets you found are going to fundamentally alter our understanding of ancient history.”
“I believe you. Go on.”
“Okay, so this one seaside village thought the rising waters would never stop. Like I said, it took a year of flooding to match the sea level, so I can imagine how they came to that conclusion. They also write that with so many refugees there was a great deal of sickness.”
Dr. Huxley interrupted. “It would have been the same stuff we see today in refugee populations. Things like dysentery, typhus, and cholera.”
Eric picked up the thread of his story again, “Instead of joining the mass exodus, they cannibalized the buildings in their town to build a boat that was large enough to take all four hundred of them. They don’t mention the dimensions but did say the timber hull was caulked with bitumen and then sheathed in copper.
“Now, this was the very beginning of the Copper Age, so it must have been a prosperous area to have enough of the metal to cover the hull of a ship that size. They brought livestock, like cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, as well as chickens, and enough silage to last them a month.”
“I’d estimate the boat was at least three hundred feet long, for all of that.”
“The computer agrees. It came up with three hundred and eighteen feet, with a beam of forty-three feet. She probably would have had three decks, with the animals on the bottom, supplies in the middle, and the villagers on top.”
“What about propulsion?”
