Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
rising above the floodwaters and offering a beacon of hope to anyone adrift on the sub-
merged lowlands.
After returning to England from his second expedition in 1874, Smith focused on comb-
ing through the thousands of fragmented tablets to reconstruct those that told the history of
the world from the creation to the flood. He found tales of the building of the Tower of Ba-
bel and of the Confusion of Tongues. In their account of the world's creation, the cuneiform
tablets told of the initial chaos from which the universe was made and how, after each step
along the way, the gods pronounced their creation good. Smith even found a tablet telling
of the fall of a celestial being corresponding to Satan.
His luck eventually ran out on his third expedition. He ignored the advice of locals at his
dig and set off for Syria during the hottest part of the summer. After contracting dysentery,
he died along the way, in August 1876.
Smith's astounding discovery upended conventional thinking about the origin of flood
stories. His conclusion was revolutionary: key parts of the Old Testament were adapted
from older pagan tales. Until then, Christians generally argued that pagan flood stories from
other cultures were rooted in the biblical story. After Smith's revelation, even conservat-
ive theologians began to concede that the story of Noah's Flood lay rooted in an historical
Mesopotamian flood rather than a global disaster.
Smith's startling proof that the biblical account of the Flood originated in older Babylo-
nian stories set off a scramble among archaeologists to find Mesopotamian flood deposits.
Everyone believed that evidence for a civilization-ending flood could be found there. This
soon became a nagging problem, as archaeologists were not able to find evidence for such
an enormous flood and fell into arguing over which of their local flood deposits recorded
the biblical flood. Like geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-cen-
tury archaeologists faithfully searched for evidence of the Flood.
In 1922 British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began excavations at the biblical patri-
arch Abraham's hometown, the ancient city of Ur, along the Euphrates River near the mod-
ern town of Nasiriya in southern Iraq. Convinced only a combination of unusual circum-
stances could turn typical delta flooding into the biblical flood, Woolley dug for evidence
of a catastrophic flood. He eventually found what he was looking for in more than ten feet
of well-sorted, water-laid silt that buried a ruined city. Three additional feet below layers of
