纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 016洪水纪念碑（6）

What the ancient texts that tell flood stories do, is they talk essentially of the great forces of nature being controlled by deities who don't like human beings very much, and for whom 'might makes right'. Now the Bible comes along and retells the story, but does so in a unique way - God brings the flood because the world was filled with violence, and the result is that the story becomes moralised, and that is part of the Bible's programme.

This is a radical leap from polytheism to monotheism - to a world in which people worshipped power, to the Bible's insistence that power must be just and sometimes compassionate.

And from a world in which there are many forces, many gods, fighting with one another, to this world in which the whole universe is the result of a single rational creative will. So the more we understand what the Bible is arguing against, the deeper we understand the Bible."

But the Flood Tablet was important not just for the history of religion, it's also a key document in the history of literature. Smith's tablet comes from the seventh century BC, but we now know that other versions of the Flood story had originally been written down a thousand years before that. It was only later that the Flood story was woven by storytellers into the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great epic of world literature. Smith's tablet forms the eleventh chapter of that story. Gilgamesh is a hero who sets off on a grand quest for immortality and self-knowledge. He confronts demons and monsters, he survives all kinds of perils and, eventually, like all subsequent epic heroes, he has to confront the greatest challenge of them all: his own nature and his own mortality. The Epic of Gilgamesh has all the elements of a cracking good tale, but it's also a turning-point in the story of 'writing'. Writing in the Middle East had begun as little more than bean-counting - created essentially for bureaucrats to keep records. It had been used above all for the practical tasks of the state. Stories, on the other hand, were usually told or sung - and they were learnt by heart.