The Blood of the Ancient World

On Natural Explanations, Ancient Narratives, and the Perils of Premature Certainty

An ancient Sumerian tale, Inanna and Šu-kale-tuda, tells of a goddess who, after suffering sexual violence at the hands of a gardener, unleashes her fury upon the land. Wells fill with blood, irrigation waters become undrinkable, and the people find blood where they once drew the water upon which their lives depend. Centuries of tradition later, we encounter a strikingly familiar image in the Book of Exodus: the waters of Egypt turned to blood at the hand of Moses.

Are these merely parallel mythologies, echoes of an older tradition, or distant recollections of events whose original meaning has long since escaped us? I confess that such questions have a habit of following me home, where a comfortable chair, a pot of tea, and an open Bible seldom succeed in putting them entirely to rest. But I find myself wondering: when two ancient peoples tell of the same extraordinary calamity, is it the resemblance that requires explanation—or our readiness to dismiss both accounts as myth?

I have always admired the confidence with which modern man explains the ancient world.Give him a river turned red, a quantity of dead fish, a few distressed frogs, and a population suddenly deprived of potable water, and he will produce, before luncheon, a perfectly respectable account involving microorganisms, oxygen depletion, sedimentary deposits, and the unfortunate consequences of excessive nutrients. He will then lean back, with the satisfied air of a man who has successfully dismissed both Pharaoh and Providence, and declare the matter settled.

I should not wish to spoil his luncheon. I merely wonder whether the matter is quite so settled as he supposes.

Consider, first, the Sumerian tale of Inanna and Šu-kale-tuda. In this ancient narrative, Inanna, having suffered an assault at the hands of a gardener, searches for the culprit and fills wells and irrigation channels with blood as a curse. The story belongs to the mythological world of ancient Mesopotamia, not to the sober register of an agricultural inspector's annual report. Its blood is an instrument of divine vengeance, and its purpose within the narrative is rather more immediate than the explanation of a curious chemical reaction.

Then we encounter the first plague of Egypt, in which the Nile is turned to blood, the fish die, and the Egyptians find themselves unable to drink from the river. The resemblance is certainly interesting. Water, the indispensable foundation of settled civilisation, becomes an agent of distress; the familiar source of life becomes a source of death. One need not be a philologist to recognise the force of the image.

But resemblance is not proof of a common historical event, still less proof that the two accounts describe the same ecological catastrophe. Ancient peoples shared motifs, exchanged stories, and understood their worlds through religious and symbolic language. Anyhow, one should ponder that peoples who lived in close contact with nature, and whose lives had historically involved the necessities of survival - including slaughter of animals and, oftentimes, human beings - would have likely been able to distinguish blood from algae with relative ease.

The presence of blood in two narratives may tell us something about the imagination of the ancient Near East without establishing that two particular rivers once suffered the same biological misfortune.

Here, however, our modern natural philosopher enters the room, carrying his microscope like a clergyman carrying the keys to the vestry.

He informs us that certain algae and cyanobacteria can turn water red, brown, or purple. Under suitable conditions, organisms such as Planktothrix rubescens may produce striking reddish discolouration. Other blooms can generate toxins, foul the water, kill aquatic life, or contribute to oxygen depletion. There are, indeed, entirely natural processes capable of producing spectacles which our ancestors might reasonably have regarded with alarm.

And why not? The natural world is sufficiently extraordinary without our needing to improve it by exaggeration. A lake can acquire the appearance of blood; a river can become dangerous to drink; fish can die in great numbers. Nature, that old and somewhat eccentric housekeeper, has never been particularly solicitous of our convenience.

Yet there is a small distinction which I should be reluctant to see lost in the enthusiasm of the explanation.

To demonstrate that nature can produce red water is not to demonstrate that a particular ancient account was caused by red water.

The first proposition is scientific. The second is historical, and requires evidence of its own.

We may also consider other possibilities. Rivers carry sediment; iron-rich material can colour water; volcanic deposits can alter its appearance. Red rain, too, has been documented, including the celebrated events in Kerala in 2001, when coloured rainfall was investigated and associated with biological particles. These phenomena are real. But their existence does not establish that any one of them explains the Egyptian plague, much less Inanna's supernatural curse.

The proposed chain of Egyptian disasters deserves similar caution. If aquatic life dies and decomposition reduces the available oxygen, conditions may indeed become favourable for certain animals to leave the water. Changes in insect populations may follow. But to arrange several natural mechanisms in the same order as a biblical narrative is not, by itself, to establish that the entire sequence occurred in this manner. A plausible mechanism is not a demonstrated reconstruction.

There is, moreover, an important difference between saying that the Nile became red and saying that it became blood. The biblical text describes the event in the language of blood, death, and judgment. Whether that language records a physical transformation, interprets a natural catastrophe theologically, or communicates the event through the conventions of sacred narrative is a question which cannot be settled merely by identifying a red-coloured microorganism.

I should be equally cautious about the Ipuwer Papyrus, which is sometimes recruited into these discussions as though an ancient Egyptian document mentioning calamity must be a reluctant witness to Exodus. The text describes a world in disorder, but its date, literary character, and relationship to the biblical narrative do not permit us to treat it as independent confirmation of the plagues. I fear that ancient documents, like elderly gentlemen at a club, are too often expected to testify to matters about which they have never been properly questioned.

And what of the Egyptian myth of Sekhmet, in which red liquid is used to deceive the goddess and avert destruction? Such parallels are worthy of study. They may illuminate the symbolic importance of red liquid, divine anger, and the preservation of life in Egyptian religious thought. They do not, without further evidence, establish that the biblical narrative was borrowed from that particular tradition, or that either account originated in a specific ecological event.

I do not object to scientific investigation. Quite the contrary. I should be delighted to learn precisely which organisms can redden a river, what conditions encourage their growth, and whether a particular geographical region could have experienced such a phenomenon in antiquity. The study of nature is no enemy of intellectual honesty; it is one of its most demanding exercises.

What I object to is the curious modern tendency to confuse the discovery of a possible mechanism with the discovery of an actual cause. We find that nature can do something, and almost immediately congratulate ourselves on having established that nature did do it.

There is a further irony here. The natural explanation is sometimes offered as though it has disposed of the religious one. But identifying a possible physical mechanism does not, in itself, settle the theological question. A believer may understand a natural process as the means through which Providence operates; a sceptic may regard the same process as sufficient without invoking Providence at all. The scientific description, where well established, need not differ between them. What differs is the interpretation placed upon it.

Of course, neither interpretation should be smuggled into the evidence. The existence of a natural mechanism does not prove divine intervention, and the existence of a natural mechanism does not prove that divine intervention is impossible. Those are larger claims than the observation itself can bear.

As for the Sumerian gardener, I rather doubt that he would have been much comforted by a lecture on cyanobacteria. His difficulty was not principally ecological. It was moral, mythological, and, one suspects, rather more personal than any agricultural authority would have cared to investigate.

And Pharaoh, if we are to believe the biblical narrative, had troubles of a somewhat greater national scale.

I therefore propose that we keep our conclusions proportionate to our evidence. Red water is a genuine natural phenomenon. Harmful blooms, sediments, and other processes can make water discoloured and dangerous. Ancient authors may have interpreted environmental disasters through the religious language of their cultures. All of these are reasonable propositions.

But we have not thereby proved that the Exodus plague was an algal bloom, that Inanna's curse preserves the memory of the same event, or that the sacred narratives are merely primitive environmental reports awaiting the arrival of a modern laboratory.

The ancient world was not populated exclusively by fools who mistook every unusual puddle for a miracle. Nor is the modern world populated exclusively by investigators who can distinguish a well-supported explanation from an ingenious conjecture.

I remain, as ever, suspicious of intellectual certainty when it arrives too promptly dressed for dinner.

Nature may turn water red. Whether that explains the blood of the ancient narratives is another question entirely. And I should prefer to leave that question open until the evidence, rather than our appetite for a satisfying explanation, has had its proper say.