JALAPRALAYA In all the Asiatic Purāṇas, reference to an ancient great flood, with slight changes occurs. According to Hindu Purāṇas this great flood took place before Mahāviṣṇu took the incarnation of Matsya. In the Holy Bible which is the scripture of the Christians, the story of the great flood is allied to the story of the Noah. (See under Avatāra). This story occurs in the Babylonian literature also. The book ‘Gilgamish’ which is as old as the Ṛgveda, is considered to be the oldest in the world. The theme of the Gilgamish is the travel of a man named Gilgamish. This story is written in twelve clay-tablets. After 1850, the scientists of England who carried on an archaeological research, found in the library of Ancient Nineveh, the most famous in the ancient world, these twelve tablets along with twentythousand other tablets, all of which were in good condition. This library was built by the King Aśurbānipāl in 7th century B.C., on a very high place on the bank of the river Tigris, in the ancient Nineveh. All these clay tablets have been removed to the British Museum. It took several decades to decipher them. When these clay tablets were discovered there was not a single man who could read and understand them, in the world. In spite of hard work, several years passed by without getting even a single tablet deciphered. They were written in ‘Accadean’, which was the language of the court of Aśurbānipāl and the national and the international language of the time. Another copy of this great work was discovered on the bank of the Euphrates, where the capital of the famous King Hāmurābi of Ancient Babylon stood. Later discoveries disclosed that this great work Gilgamish was part and parcel of the famous ancient civilization of the Oriental countries. The Hittites and the Egyptians tried to translate this book Gilgāmish into their own languages. In the tablets with letters in the form of arrow heads, found on the bank of the Nile, the portions which were difficult for them to translate, are given red marks. It was from a small piece of broken clay tablet that clues to the origin of this famous work were obtained. The world is indebted to the Sumerians, who had their capital in the place where the city Ur stands, for the original work of Gilgamish. Mention is made about a great flood in Gilgamish, as follows: Gilgamish set out on an adventurous journey to see his ancestor Utnāpiṣṭim to learn from him the means of obtaining eternal life. The gods had told this man about the secret of eternal life. At last Gilgamish reached an island and found out his ancestor and asked him about the secrets of eternal life. Utnāpiṣṭim said that he had lived in ‘Śhoorappak’ and that he had been an ardent devotee of ‘Iya’ God. When the gods decided to destroy mankind by a great flood the God Iya called his devotee Utnāpiṣṭim and said to him “You, man of shoorappak, the son of Ūrbārtūtū: Demolish your house and build a ship. Leave off your wealth and search for your life. Cast away your property and save your life. Bring the seeds of every living thing into the ship. The ship you build should be according to measurements.” The rest of the story is like the story of the “Ark of Noah”. The scientists are of opinion that in pre-historic times the three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa were one continent and that by earthquake or some other reason the south part of Europe had sunk down and water flowed in and thus the mediterranean sea came into existence. At a time when the far off regions of the earth were unknown, the people who escaped the flood imagined that the entire world had been submerged by the flood. It could be imagined that this story of the great flood passed on to posterity verbally and after so many generations it appeared in different regions in different languages in different forms.
Note: 1) In writing about Jalapralaya. I have dealt with Gilgamish a little elaborately. Details on Gilgamish were obtained from the English translation of a famous German work by Venar Keller. This book had not been received when I wrote about the work ‘Gilgamish’. So these details are included under this word “Jalapralaya”.]