Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

IMMORTALITY LOST—THE FLOOD 371Life," or of the " Water of Life," asked him, saying, " Come,Adapa, why dost thou neither eat nor drink ? " And Adapaanswered that he had refused to eat or drink, because Ea hislord had so commanded him.Whereon comes the conclusion of the whole matter, and theloss of immortality in the last words of Anu, " And now thoucanst not live !" ^Ea was regarded not only as the god of the sea, but of wisdom,somewhat perhaps on the lines of myths common to Greece,India, and elsewhere, which tell us that always by the way ofthe sea came civilisation. The great civilisations of the worldhave in fact been developed round the shores of the greatseas—the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic.The Assyrian legends credit Ea for the most part with goodwilland beneficent acts towards mankind. 2Prominent among these stands out his revelation, by meansof a dream, to Utnapishti of the all-destroying flood, whichthe gods, wroth at the sins of mankind, had ordained, and hiscommand forthwith to build a ship, whose size and shape, etc.,are given with much precision, e.g. it was coated inside andout with bitumen and divided into cells. On this Utnapishtiand his family and servants embarked, after bringing on boardall the gold and silver they could collect, and " seeds of hfeof all kinds," and beasts, both domestic and wild.^The Sumerian original of the Babylonian Deluge story,which has now been recovered, corresponds with the mainfeatures of the later version.1 Adapa stands out as a pathetic and cruelly-punished figure. In this,one of the prettiest of the clumsy legends by which mankind tried to explainthe loss of eternal life, Ea forbids for selfish reasons his eating or drinking ofthe Bread or Water of Life, while Anu's offer of immortality springs from hisdesire to deprive Ea, whom he suspects of having betrayed to Adapa thecelestial secrets of magical science, of his devotee and fish-gatherer.* Keller, op. cit., p. 347, is astray in stating that Ea was regarded " alsFischgott." As god of the' waters, he was the protector of the fish therein,but apart from this, there is no evidence that he was termed, even with a wideuse of the word, a Fish God.' For the omission of fish from the cargo of Noah's ark, Whiston in hisphilosophic A New Theory of the Deluge (London, 1737), accounts by the fact,that fish, living in a cooler, more equable element, were correcter in theirlives than beasts and birds, who from the heat or cold on land engendered bythe sun or its absence were prone to excesses of passion or exercises of sin, andso were saved !