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TITLE: Hasisadra's Adventure 
AUTHOR: THOMAS H. HUXLEY
EBOOK: E00828 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

Hasisadra's Adventure 
by Thomas Henry Huxley 
This is Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" 
 
Some thousands of years ago there was a city in Mesopotamia 
called Surippak. One night a strange dream came to a dweller 
therein, whose name, if rightly reported, was Hasisadra. 
The dream foretold the speedy coming of a great flood; and it 
warned Hasisadra to lose no time in building a ship, in which, 
when notice was given, he, his family and friends, with their 
domestic animals and a collection of wild creatures and seed of 
plants of the land, might take refuge and be rescued from 
destruction. Hasisadra awoke, and at once acted upon the 
warning. A strong decked ship was built, and her sides were 
paid, inside and out, with the mineral pitch, or bitumen, with 
which the country abounded; the vessel's seaworthiness was 
tested, the cargo was stowed away, and a trusty pilot or 
steersman appointed. 
 
The promised signal arrived. Wife and friends embarked; 
Hasisadra, following, prudently "shut the door," or, as we 
should say, put on the hatches; and Nes-Hea, the pilot, was left 
alone on deck to do his best for the ship. Thereupon a hurricane 
began to rage; rain fell in torrents; the subterranean waters 
burst forth; a deluge swept over the land, and the wind lashed 
it into waves sky high; heaven and earth became mingled in 
chaotic gloom. For six days and seven nights the gale raged, but 
the good ship held out until, on the seventh day, the storm 
lulled. Hasisadra ventured on deck; and, seeing nothing but a 
waste of waters strewed with floating corpses and wreck, wept 
over the destruction of his land and people. Far away, the 
mountains of Nizir were visible; the ship was steered for them 
and ran aground upon the higher land. Yet another seven days 
passed by. On the seventh, Hasisadra sent forth a dove, which 
found no resting place and returned; then he liberated a 
swallow, which also came back; finally, a raven was let loose, 
and that sagacious bird, when it found that the water had 
abated, came near the ship, but refused to return to it. 
Upon this, Hasisadra liberated the rest of the wild animals, 
which immediately dispersed in all directions, while he, with 
his family and friends, ascending a mountain hard by, offered 
sacrifice upon its summit to the gods. 
 
The story thus given in summary abstract, told in an ancient 
Semitic dialect, is inscribed in cuneiform characters upon a 
tablet of burnt clay. Many thousands of such tablets, collected 
by Assurbanipal, King of Assyria in the middle of the seventh 
century B.C., were stored in the library of his palace at 
Nineveh; and, though in a sadly broken and mutilated condition, 
they have yielded a marvellous amount of information to the 
patient and sagacious labour which modern scholars have bestowed 
upon them. Among the multitude of documents of various kinds, 
this narrative of Hasisadra's adventure has been found in a 
tolerably complete state. But Assyriologists agree that it is 
only a copy of a much more ancient work; and there are weighty 
reasons for believing that the story of Hasisadra's flood was 
well known in Mesopotamia before the year 2000 B.C. 
 
No doubt, then, we are in presence of a narrative which has all 
the authority which antiquity can confer; and it is proper to 
deal respectfully with it, even though it is quite as proper, 
and indeed necessary, to act no less respectfully towards 
ourselves; and, before professing to put implicit faith in it, 
to inquire what claim it has to be regarded as a serious account 
of an historical event. 
 
It is of no use to appeal to contemporary history, although the 
annals of Babylonia, no less than those of Egypt, go much 
further back than 2000 B.C. All that can be said is, that the 
former are hardly consistent with the supposition that any 
catastrophe, competent to destroy all the population, has 
befallen the land since civilisation began, and that the latter 
are notoriously silent about deluges. In such a case as this, 
however, the silence of history does not leave the inquirer 
wholly at fault. Natural science has something to say when the 
phenomena of nature are in question. Natural science may be able 
to show, from the nature of the country, either that such an 
event as that described in the story is impossible, or at any 
rate highly improbable; or, on the other hand, that it is 
consonant with probability. In the former case, the narrative 
must be suspected or rejected; in the latter, no such summary 
verdict can be given: on the contrary, it must be admitted that 
the story may be true. And then, if certain strangely prevalent 
canons of criticism are accepted, and if the evidence that an 
event might have happened is to be accepted as proof that it did 
happen, Assyriologists will be at liberty to congratulate one 
another on the "confirmation by modern science" of the authority 
of their ancient books. 
 
It will be interesting, therefore, to inquire how far the 
physical structure and the other conditions of the region in 
which Surippak was situated are compatible with such a flood as 
is described in the Assyrian record. 
 
The scene of Hasisadra's adventure is laid in the broad valley, 
six or seven hundred miles long, and hardly anywhere less than a 
hundred miles in width, which is traversed by the lower courses 
of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and which is commonly known 
as the "Euphrates valley." Rising, at the one end, into a hill 
country, which gradually passes into the Alpine heights of 
Armenia; and, at the other, dipping beneath the shallow waters 
of the head of the Persian Gulf, which continues in the same 
direction, from north-west to south-east, for some eight hundred 
miles farther, the floor of the valley presents a gradual slope, 
from eight hundred feet above the sea level to the depths of the 
southern end of the Persian Gulf. The boundary between sea and 
land, formed by the extremest mudflats of the delta of the two 
rivers, is but vaguely defined; and, year by year, it advances 
seaward. On the north-eastern side, the western frontier ranges 
of Persia rise abruptly to great heights; on the south-western 
side, a more gradual ascent leads to a table-land of less 
elevation, which, very broad in the south, where it is occupied 
by the deserts of Arabia and of Southern Syria, narrows, 
northwards, into the highlands of Palestine, and is continued by 
the ranges of the Lebanon, the Antilebanon, and the Taurus, into 
the highlands of Armenia. 
 
The wide and gently inclined plain, thus inclosed between the 
gulf and the highlands, on each side and at its upper extremity, 
is distinguishable into two regions of very different character, 
one of which lies north, and the other south of the parallel of 
Hit, on the Euphrates. Except in the immediate vicinity of the 
river, the northern division is stony and scantily covered with 
vegetation, except in spring. Over the southern division, on the 
contrary, spreads a deep alluvial soil, in which even a pebble 
is rare; and which, though, under the existing misrule, mainly a 
waste of marsh and wilderness, needs only intelligent attention 
to become, as it was of old, the granary of western Asia. 
Except in the extreme south, the rainfall is small and the air 
dry. The heat in summer is intense, while bitterly cold northern 
blasts sweep the plain in winter. Whirlwinds are not uncommon; 
and, in the intervals of the periodical inundations, the fine, 
dry, powdery soil is swept, even by moderate breezes, into 
stifling clouds, or rather fogs, of dust. Low inequalities, 
elevations here and depressions there, diversify the surface of 
the alluvial region. The latter are occupied by enormous 
marshes, while the former support the permanent dwellings of the 
present scanty and miserable population. 
 
In antiquity, so long as the canalisation of the country was 
properly carried out, the fertility of the alluvial plain 
enabled great and prosperous nations to have their home in the 
Euphrates valley. Its abundant clay furnished the materials for 
the masses of sun-dried and burnt bricks, the remains of which, 
in the shape of huge artificial mounds, still testify to both 
the magnitude and the industry of the population, thousands of 
years ago. Good cement is plentiful, while the bitumen, which 
wells from the rocks at Hit and elsewhere, not only answers the 
same purpose, but is used to this day, as it was in Hasisadra's 
time, to pay the inside and the outside of boats. 
 
In the broad lower course of the Euphrates, the stream rarely 
acquires a velocity of more than three miles an hour, while the 
lower Tigris attains double that rate in times of flood. The 
water of both great rivers is mainly derived from the northern 
and eastern highlands in Armenia and in Kurdistan, and stands at 
its lowest level in early autumn and in January. But when the 
snows accumulated in the upper basins of the great rivers, 
during the winter, melt under the hot sunshine of spring, they 
rapidly rise,<1> and at length overflow their banks, covering 
the alluvial plain with a vast inland sea, interrupted only by 
the higher ridges and hummocks which form islands in a seemingly 
boundless expanse of water. 
 
In the occurrence of these annual inundations lies one of 
several resemblances between the valley of the Euphrates and 
that of the Nile. But there are important differences. The time 
of the annual flood is reversed, the Nile being highest in 
autumn and winter, and lowest in spring and early summer. The 
periodical overflows of the Nile, regulated by the great lake 
basins in the south, are usually punctual in arrival, gradual in 
growth, and beneficial in operation. No lakes are interposed 
between the mountain torrents of the upper basis of the Tigris 
and the Euphrates and their lower courses. Hence, heavy rain, or 
an unusually rapid thaw in the uplands, gives rise to the sudden 
irruption of a vast volume of water which not even the rapid 
Tigris, still less its more sluggish companion, can carry off in 
time to prevent violent and dangerous overflows. Without an 
elaborate system of canalisation, providing an escape for such 
sudden excesses of the supply of water, the annual floods of the 
Euphrates, and especially of the Tigris, must always be attended 
with risk, and often prove harmful. 
 
There are other peculiarities of the Euphrates valley which may 
occasionally tend to exacerbate the evils attendant on the 
inundations. It is very subject to seismic disturbances; and the 
ordinary consequences of a sharp earthquake shock might be 
seriously complicated by its effect on a broad sheet of water. 
Moreover the Indian Ocean lies within the region of typhoons; 
and if, at the height of an inundation, a hurricane from the 
south-east swept up the Persian Gulf, driving its shallow waters 
upon the delta and damming back the outflow, perhaps for 
hundreds of miles up-stream, a diluvial catastrophe, fairly up 
to the mark of Hasisadra's, might easily result.<2> 
 
Thus there seems to be no valid reason for rejecting Hasisadra's 
story on physical grounds. I do not gather from the narrative 

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