First fake news inspired Noah to build his ark in original Babylonian story, says Cambridge academic

One of the earliest examples of fake news has been found by a Cambridge academic in a 3,000-year old clay tablet telling the Babylonian story of Noah and the Ark.

Cambridge University researcher Dr Martin Worthington has discovered that the words of the Babylonian god Ea written on the tablet may have been a duplicitous attempt by him to persuade his people to build the Ark by giving them fake news.

The script, translated by Dr Worthington, one of Britain’s leading experts on the extinct Babylonian language, has a double meaning which can be read as the God predicting food raining down from the sky rather than torrents of water - if they agree to build the Ark.

“Ea tricks humanity by spreading fake news,” said Dr Worthington, a fellow of St John’s College. “He tells the Babylonian Noah, known as Uta–napishti, to promise his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark.

“What the people don’t realise is that Ea’s nine-line message is a trick: it is a sequence of sounds that can be understood in radically different ways, like English ‘ice cream’ and ‘I scream’.

“While Ea’s message seems to promise a rain of food, its hidden meaning warns of the Flood. Once the Ark is built, Uta–napishti and his family clamber aboard and survive with a menagerie of animals. Everyone else drowns.

“With this early episode, set in mythological time, the manipulation of information and language has begun. It may be the earliest ever example of fake news.”

In Babylonian, one line reads as “ina lilâti ušaznanakkunūši šamūt kibāti”, which translates as either “at dawn there will be kukku cakes” or “at dawn, he will rain down upon you darkness.”

Another can be translated as ““he will rain down on you abundance” but also carries an alternative meaning “he will rain down on you abundantly.”

The motives behind Ea’s apparent duplicity is less clear. “He might want to retain deniability,” said Dr Worthington. “If asked why didn’t you warn the people, he could say they decided to interpret it that way. That’s nothing to do with me.”

Why he has to do it is more evident. “Babylonian gods only survive because people feed them. If humanity had been wiped out, the gods would have starved. The god Ea manipulates language and misleads people into doing his will because it serves his self-interest.”

The lines are contained on the 11th tablet of Gilgamesh, which tells the flood story and dates from 700 BC. It is kept in the British Museum and is the world’s most famous clay tablet.

It caused a global sensation when its significance was first discovered by Assyriologist George Smith in 1872. He realised it told the same story as Noah and the Ark in the Biblical book of Genesis.

Although there were more gods involved than in Genesis, and the Babylonian hero had a different name, the two stories were recognisably the same, with animals taken aboard the ark before the flood and birds sent out at the end once the rain stopped.

Dr Worthington said it was thought to have been authored by the scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni, but this was hard to verify. “The suspicion is that the ‘standard’ version of the poem came into being around 1,200 BC,” he added.