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In 1931 the Penn Museum sent a team to Fara in southern Iraq to settle whether Shuruppak, the last city named before the flood in the Sumerian King List, was a real place or a story. They found it, thirteen feet down, under more than five feet of sterile flood deposit with no human occupation in it at all.Seventy percent of the team had already gone home, because nothing was supposed to be under that layer.Matthew LaCroix is joined by Mesopotamian archaeologist Jenn Deyo, who went with him to the Penn Museum archive to read the records that were never published. What sits in those boxes is not a discovery. It is an argument. Erich Schmidt and Samuel Noah Kramer had pulled a city out from beneath a flood layer, and the German and American teams could not agree in print about where it belonged. After 1931 nobody worked the site again. The head of the archive told them the field notes had not been pulled for a researcher since the 1990s.The argument Matt makes is about what we are calling things. The layer being credited to the Sumerians, the world of Uruk and Gilgamesh, is Neo-Akkadian. The Sumerians are the layer underneath it: Shuruppak and the cities named before the flood, thousands of years earlier. Archaeology has lumped two separate time periods together under one name, and the chapter belonging to the actual Sumerians is unaccounted for. That is why the chronology at Fara did not work, and why the paper never came out.The episode works outward from there. Why cuneiform is a writing system and not a language. George Smith cracking the Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872. The damage Zecharia Sitchin did to everyone after him. The Eridu Genesis tablet sitting in Philadelphia labelled as a flood narrative. The ziggurat at Eridu, the largest ever built, still unexcavated and being looted now. The mes of Sumer, and what Kramer may have mistranslated. And the flood read out from Atrahasis, where every craftsman in the city turns up at dawn to help build the boat.Ziusudra, the king of Shuruppak who survives it, is the figure the biblical Noah comes from.Jenn tells her own version of the same story. A cave site in the Ruby Mountains, a cultural layer beneath the Younger Dryas black mat, radiocarbon dates of 11,500 and 12,500 years, and a paper that was never published.Where they differ is on how much time. Penn assigns that lower stratum at Fara to the Jemdet Nasr period, in the first half of the fourth millennium BC. Matt argues for something far older, and he makes that case at the end.GUESTJenn Deyo is an archaeologist with a master's in arid landscape archaeology. She has worked in the field for more than a decade in Sardinia, Jordan and across the desert southwest, and she is the resident archaeologist on the Earth Ancients podcast with Cliff Dunning.MATTHEW LACROIXhttps://thestageoftime.comBOOKShttps://thestageoftime.com/booksTHE ANCIENT CODE DATABASEhttps://thestageoftime.com/acd-iTHE LOST CIVILIZATIONS PODCASThttps://thestageoftime.com/podcastRECORDS AND TEXTS REFERENCEDErich Schmidt, Excavations at Fara, 1931, Penn Museum Journal 22The unpublished Fara field notes, Penn Museum archiveThe Sumerian King List, translated by Samuel Noah KramerThe Epic of Gilgamesh, the Death of Gilgamesh, Atrahasis and the Legend of EtanaThe Babylonian Map of the World, British Museum
