When the gods still behaved like humans, begins the myth of Atrahasis, there were two types of gods: rulers and workers. One day, the worker gods instigated a rebellion against the ruler gods. To prevent a war between the gods, humankind was created to do the hard work and carry out whatever tasks the gods demanded of them.

But that first generation of humans only brought forth more; they covered the land, and the sound of their weeping and wailing disturbed the divine peace. So as a punishment, the gods sent a pandemic, giving people headaches and fevers. To retaliate, humans stopped making sacrifices and refrained from meeting in public. The pandemic came to an end.

Then it happened again. Humanity got louder, and the gods sent a drought. Even this didn’t shut those noisy humans up. Finally, the gods decided to try sending a flood to wash them all away. Everyone died. Except for Atrahasis and his family. They built an ark and thus secured humanity’s future.

“Floods, droughts, and epidemics have always been part of human history”

“The story of Atrahasis reminds us of the biblical myth of Noah’s ark and the great flood. But the Atrahasis myth is much older. It first appeared around 2000 BCE, long before the Hebrew Bible, which was begun over a thousand years later,” says Professor Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, a researcher at Freie Universität’s Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

The story of Atrahasis was first discovered in the Middle East. It was set down on clay tablets in cuneiform, one of the oldest known forms of writing in the world. “Floods, droughts, and epidemics have always been part of human history,” explains Cancik-Kirschbaum. “How we respond to crises is decisive in ensuring humanity’s survival.”

Researchers have been able to trace texts from Mesopotamia – the “Land Between Two Rivers,” as its name literally means – as far back as the fourth millennium BCE. This cultural landscape was dominated by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, in a geographical region that now mainly belongs to modern-day Syria and Iraq. It was here, in the region of the Fertile Crescent nearly eight thousand years ago, that the first cities emerged.

Writing for Crisis Management

These cities depended on water for their survival, yet it was also a constant threat. The rivers could suddenly rise up and drown the fields, flushing salt out of the earth and destroying the crops. These regular floods forced the cities’ inhabitants to learn to understand the laws that governed the weather and the height of the rivers. They observed their environment and gathered information.

To systematize these data, they needed a new form of communication. “Writing is, among other things, a response to a crisis – in this case, a growing population,” says Professor Cancik-Kirschbaum. “Writing in Mesopotamia wasn’t invented in order to record prayers, but emerged in a society that was growing ever more complex.”

With the help of writing, knowledge about natural events could be stored, systematized, and interpreted. The problem could then be dealt with systematically: how can we predict epidemics and other natural disasters? Who or what causes them? How can people stop them or at least manage to cope with them?

The Evidence of Clay Tablets

The first evidence of writing dates from around 3300 BCE. The people who lived in Mesopotamia pressed wedge-shaped signs into flat tablets made of moist clay. These signs worked a bit like emojis do today. Around 300-400 years later, writing was able to represent speech far more precisely. “It’s then that literacy just explodes,” says Cancik-Kirschbaum.

Recipes, legislation, the state accounts, personal correspondence, epic tales, medical texts – writing was a way of recording and preserving all these things, just as modern computers do for us. “It is a form of Western arrogance to think that people in the East relied on astrology for their knowledge – a typically Eurocentric narrative that ignores the expertise of the past,” says Cancik-Kirschbaum. On the contrary, she says, “People in Mesopotamia sought to understand the laws of nature, and often succeeded.”

Writing is the most important source of evidence for researchers like Professor Cancik-Kirschbaum who specialize in the ancient history of the Near East. Currently, Cancik-Kirschbaum is investigating the central archive of the city of Dur-Katlimmu that once stood on one of the rivers that flows into the Euphrates in northern Syria. It was recently excavated by archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin, and its archive provides fascinating insights into the history of the city and its inhabitants.

There is even evidence of people showing solidarity in a crisis. Around 1220 BCE, there was a drought that went on for many years. When, eventually, the rains came, they brought another catastrophe with them: a plague of locusts that devoured the carefully nurtured crops. Famine drove the people from the cities in search of help. At this time, the harvested grain was held in official grain stores in each city, and the regional administration decided that they would redistribute barley from the cities that were not directly affected by the plague to the people that needed it most. This continued for four years. Writing made it much easier to carry out the redistribution. “But the decision to provide help was also motivated by the fear that if people left their homes and began to wander across the country at will, there would be no real way of checking up on what they were doing,” adds Cancik-Kirschbaum. “So, the rulers tried to make them stay put by ensuring that they had clothing and food.”

Spending a lot of time on ancient history can lead to a pessimistic outlook, Cancik-Kirschbaum says. “We humans think rationally, but act irrationally. Even in ancient Mesopotamia, people knew that cutting down trees was bad for the land.”

On the other hand, knowing more about people and societies can also make you optimistic: “As long as we can agree on a course of constructive action, we’re good at dealing with crises. We’re able to avoid the mistakes of the past.”

The story of Atrahasis, says Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, reminds us that we need to take more care of the environment and of each other. “Four thousand years ago, the author was already telling us: Watch out for floods, droughts, and disease – they’re warning signs!”

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This text originally appeared in German on July 3, 2021, in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin.