Food for Thought

3,800 years ago, an Egyptian described the complete collapse of civilization. The details are disturbing. There's an ancient Egyptian document that reads like someone describing the aftermath of a civilization falling apart. It's called The Admonitions of Ipuwer, and the surviving papyrus is roughly 3,200 years old, although the composition itself is believed to be considerably older. It describes the Nile is filled with blood. Bodies are thrown into the river. People are starving. Children are dying. Wealthy families have lost everything, while servants have taken possession of their masters' property. Government buildings have been broken into. Official records are destroyed. Scribes are murdered. Laws are discarded, and the authority of the king has effectively collapsed. Even international trade has stopped. The text complains that ships are no longer travelling to Byblos to obtain the cedarwood Egypt depended upon. Agricultural production is disrupted. Granaries are empty. People are turning against one another. This is an extraordinarily detailed description of what happens when an entire civilization stops functioning. And then there's one particular line that caught my attention. "Indeed, the river is blood, yet people drink from it." Sound familiar? The biblical account of Exodus describes the Nile turning to blood during the plagues of Egypt. Around 2200 BCE, Egypt experienced a major period of political fragmentation following the collapse of centralized Old Kingdom authority. There is also evidence of climatic disruption around this period, commonly associated with the 4.2-kiloyear event, which may have affected Nile flooding and agricultural production. Most Egyptologists favour the literary interpretation. Fair enough. But that doesn't mean the author couldn't have drawn upon real experiences of famine, violence, and political collapse. Ipuwer doesn't blame humanity. He questions why the divine or royal authority responsible for maintaining order has allowed everything to fall apart. Thousands of years ago, an Egyptian writer was already describing a society losing faith in its institutions, its leaders, and the powers supposedly protecting it. We've discussed ancient traditions describing gods destroying humanity through floods and other catastrophes. Here we see a description of civilization collapsing from within. No supernatural monsters required. No divine army descending from heaven. Just famine, violence, corruption, political breakdown, and the destruction of everything holding society together. Was this ancient literature warning future generations what could happen? Or was it preserving memories of what had already happened?

The oldest advice ever written down came from the father of the man who survived the Great Flood. Around 4,600 years ago, the Sumerians were writing something extraordinary on clay tablets. It's called The Instructions of Shuruppak, one of the oldest surviving works of wisdom literature in human history. In the later version of this ancient text, a man named Shuruppak sits down to give his son advice about life. His son is Ziusudra. The very same Ziusudra who, according to Sumerian mythology, survived the Great Flood. The man who would later become known through the stories of Atrahasis, Utnapishtim, and eventually Noah. One of humanity's oldest surviving wisdom traditions was eventually presented as advice passed from a father to the man who would survive the destruction of civilization. He was teaching him how to live in a functioning society. Don't steal. Don't lie. Don't get involved in other people's fights. Be careful who you trust. Protect your property. Don't abuse the people working for you. The text discusses farming, irrigation, labourers, slavery, property, debts, marriage, and the behaviour of powerful institutions. There's even a passage comparing the palace to a mighty river that can never be filled, no matter how much flows into it. Sound familiar? These were people dealing with corrupt authority, dishonest neighbours, financial problems, and the same bullshit humanity still struggles with today. Shuruppak wasn't an imaginary city. We've excavated it. The ancient settlement, now called Tell Fara in Iraq, was a real Sumerian city. And archaeologists discovered evidence of significant flooding there, generally dated to around 2900 BCE. Now, does that prove the Sumerian Great Flood happened exactly as described?No. But it establishes something interesting. We have an actual ancient city associated with the flood tradition, archaeological evidence of flooding, and a literary tradition that eventually places its wisdom in the hands of the flood survivor. The oldest surviving version, dating to approximately 2600 2500 BCE, doesn't identify the son as Ziusudra. That connection appears in the later Old Babylonian version. In other words, we can actually watch an ancient wisdom tradition become attached to the story of the world before the Flood. Later civilizations, including the Hebrews, developed wisdom literature containing many of the same concerns. The biblical Book of Proverbs shares the familiar structure of an elder teaching the next generation how to navigate life. We cant prove Proverbs directly copied Shuruppak, but the older Mesopotamian tradition was already well established long before the biblical texts were composed. When we hear about civilizations existing before the Great Flood, we tend to imagine some primitive world of scattered tribes barely surviving. That's not true. They imagined cities, kings, workers, farmers, property, organized institutions, and generations of accumulated knowledge. Was it simply their way of projecting their own society into a legendary past? What fascinates me is that the Sumerians didn't describe the Flood as the beginning of civilization. They described it as a catastrophe that interrupted an already existing world. And one of the oldest pieces of literature humanity ever wrote was eventually connected to the man who supposedly lived through that destruction.