{"it":{"id":"TX056","kind":"text","sub":"Hindu (Vedic/Puranic)","name":"Manu and the flood: Shatapatha Brahmana 1.8.1; Matsya Purana","place":"Held in several collections","date":"Shatapatha c.8th-6th c. BCE; Matsya Purana c.3rd-10th c. CE","oldest":"mss. 2nd mill. CE","inst":"n/a","lang":"Sanskrit","src":[254,538],"tags":["Asia","Flood myths"],"sum":"A tiny fish asks Manu to save it, grows enormous, warns of a flood and tows his boat to a mountain.","why":"The oldest Indian flood story is told to explain a ritual, which changes how its fish and its survivor should be read.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Compare warning scenes.","rel":["TX003","TX008"],"hook":"A fish begged a man to raise it, then saved him from a flood that left him the only one alive."},"S":{"254":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Matsya"],"538":["Wikipedia: Manu (Hinduism)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manu_(Hinduism)"]},"rec":{"id":"TX056","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA152","a":"Global cataclysm memory.","who":"Hancock","main":"Independent Indian flood myth; possible Mesopotamian diffusion debated.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Matsya","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"SB 1.8.1.1 (Eggeling SBE 12 p.216)","q":"\"When he was washing himself, a fish came into his hands.\"","exact":"yes","tr":"J. Eggeling 1882 (PD)","url":"https://archive.org/details/satapathabrhma01eggeuoft","mo":"flood"}],"tr":[{"by":"J. Eggeling","yr":"1882","t":"Satapatha Brahmana (SBE 12)","lic":"public domain","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Shatapatha_Brahmana"},{"by":"J. Eggeling","yr":"1882","t":"Satapatha-Brahmana pt 1 (SBE 12)","lic":"public domain","url":"https://archive.org/details/satapathabrhma01eggeuoft"}],"mo":[{"v":"flood","ev":"Manu flood","n":"Mesopotamian diffusion debated","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Matsya"}],"tl":[{"comp":"c.800-600 BCE","old":"mss 2nd millennium CE","pub":"Weber ed. 1855; Eggeling 1882","b":"S","url":"https://archive.org/details/satapathabrhma01eggeuoft"}],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Independent Indian flood myth; possible Mesopotamian diffusion debated.","alternative_reading":"Global cataclysm memory.","alt_proponent":"Hancock","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Eggeling SBE 12 (1882) PD; ref 1.8.1 [unverified this session]","key_theme":"fish (later Matsya/Vishnu) warns Manu, ship survives flood","language":"Sanskrit","physical_object_institution":"n/a","composition_date":"Shatapatha c.8th-6th c. BCE; Matsya Purana c.3rd-10th c. CE","oldest_ms_date":"mss. 2nd mill. CE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0090","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Matsya"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Manu (Hinduism)","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manu_(Hinduism)"},{"id":"VTX056-3","t":"Satapatha Brahmana (Eggeling trans.), Wisdom Library","u":"https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/satapatha-brahmana-english/d/doc63144.html"}],"sum":"# Manu and the Fish: India's Oldest Flood Story\n\nIn the morning, as on any morning, they brought Manu water to wash his hands. As he washed, a fish came into his hands. \"Rear me,\" it said, \"I will save thee!\"\n\n\"Wherefrom wilt thou save me?\" he asked.\n\n\"A flood will carry away all these creatures: from that I will save thee!\"\n\nThis exchange opens the oldest account of the Indian flood, in the Shatapatha Brahmana, a long Vedic prose text on the meaning of sacrificial ritual. It survives in Julius Eggeling's translation for the Sacred Books of the East series, published in 1882. Arthur Berriedale Keith placed the language of the Shatapatha in the later Brahmana period, the 8th to 6th centuries BCE; Asko Parpola dates it to around 700 BCE. Eggeling himself dated the final written version to about 300 BCE, while noting that some elements were \"far older, transmitted orally from unknown antiquity.\"\n\n## The law of the fishes\n\nThe fish explains why it needs help first. \"As long as we are small, there is great destruction for us: fish devours fish.\" So Manu must keep it in a jar; when it outgrows the jar, in a pit he digs; and when it outgrows the pit, he must take it down to the sea, \"for then I shall be beyond destruction.\"\n\nIt soon became a jhaṣa, a great fish. Then it named the year the flood would come and told Manu to prepare a ship. He did as he was told. When the waters rose, he went on board, the fish swam up, and Manu tied the ship's rope to its horn. Eggeling wondered in a footnote whether jhaṣa meant some fabulous horned fish. By that rope Manu \"passed swiftly up to yonder northern mountain.\"\n\n\"I have saved thee,\" the fish said. \"Fasten the ship to a tree; but let not the water cut thee off, whilst thou art on the mountain. As the water subsides, thou mayest gradually descend!\" He came down slowly, and that slope of the northern mountain is named after his descent. Eggeling notes that the later Mahabharata version names the Himalayan peak where the ship was tied \"the tying of the ship.\"\n\nThen comes the line on which everything else turns. \"The flood then swept away all these creatures, and Manu alone remained here.\"\n\n## A daughter made of butter\n\nWhat follows is the real subject of the chapter. Wanting offspring, Manu worshipped and practised austerities. He made an offering into the waters of clarified butter, sour milk, whey and curds. Within a year a woman rose from it, so solid that butter gathered in her footprint.\n\nThe gods Mitra and Varuṇa met her and asked who she was. \"Manu's daughter,\" she said. They told her to say she was theirs. She refused, \"I am the daughter of him who begat me,\" and went on to Manu. When he asked how she could be his daughter, she answered that he had begotten her through those offerings. \"I am the blessing: make use of me at the sacrifice! If thou wilt make use of me at the sacrifice, thou wilt become rich in offspring and cattle.\"\n\nHe did, placing her in the middle of the sacrifice. Through her he generated \"this race, which is this race of Manu.\" The text then reveals its purpose: this daughter \"is essentially the same as the Iḍā,\" the portion of the offering at the heart of the rite the chapter describes. Whoever performs that rite, knowing this, \"propagates this race which Manu generated.\" The chapter then sets out how the Iḍā is cut in five portions, handed to the priest, smeared on his lips and called in a low voice, so that demons cannot harm the weakest part of the sacrifice.\n\nThe flood, in other words, is told to explain a ceremony. And in this telling, the fish belongs to no named god.\n\n## The fish becomes a god\n\nLater texts changed that. The Matsya story grew and shifted from one Hindu text to the next. In the Mahabharata's third book, the fish asks Manu to take the seven sages and all kinds of seeds into the ship, steers it through a storm to the Himalayas, and then reveals itself as Brahma, giving Manu the power of creation. That version also spells out more clearly the \"law of the fishes,\" in which the weak need protection from the strong.\n\nThe Matsya Purana takes its name from the fish. Here the fish is Vishnu. King Manu renounces the world and practises austerities on the Malaya mountains, and Brahma grants his wish to rescue the world at the pralaya, the dissolution at the end of a cosmic age. Manu moves the growing fish to the Ganges and then to the ocean, and recognises it as Vishnu. The gods give him a ship, he takes on board every kind of living creature and seed, and when the flood begins he ties the cosmic serpent Shesha to the fish's horn as a rope. During the voyage Manu asks questions and Matsya answers, and that dialogue makes up the rest of the Purana. The ship is called the ship of the Vedas.\n\nIn the Bhagavata Purana, a demon named Hayagriva steals the Vedas as they slip from the yawning mouth of a sleepy Brahma, and Vishnu becomes a little fish to recover them. A king of the south named Satyavrata finds it in his cupped hands while making a libation in the Kritamala river. After the flood, Satyavrata becomes Vaivasvata Manu, the Manu of the present age.\n\nAcross these versions the fish moves from no god to Brahma to Vishnu, the first of his ten principal avatars. In the Puranas, the flood is a cosmogonic myth: the deluge stands for the dissolution of the universe, and the fish for the god who makes it again.\n\n## Shared memory or shared idea\n\nFlood stories with a single survivor turn up in Sumer and Babylon, in Genesis, in Greece, among the Maya and the Yoruba. In the Babylonian version, the god Ea warns a king in a dream and tells him to build a boat. Some scholars think the idea reached India through migration or along trade routes to the Indus Valley; others argue it was home-grown, pointing to the fish and horned beasts common on Indus seals or to the southern setting of the Puranic Manu. Some modern alternative writers read the story as a memory of a real global cataclysm. That is interpretation; there is no measurable data behind it. The Shatapatha text itself makes no such claim and attaches the flood to a rite.\n\nThe picture it leaves is small and exact: a man at his morning washing, water cupped in his palms, and in it a small fish, already speaking of a flood.","qs":["The flood story serves a ritual here. Does knowing that change what it means?","A small fish asks for protection before it offers any. What is the story teaching?","Why might so many cultures tell of one survivor?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX056-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Manu and the flood: Shatapatha Brahmana 1.8.1; Matsya Purana, Held in several collections — \"Painting of Matsya, the fish-incarnation of Viṣṇu. The upper body of Viṣṇu emerges from the body of the fish. A silk…","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Matsya_avatar.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"mss. 2nd mill. CE","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[333]},{"v":"Sanskrit","h":"Language","s":[333]}],"hs":{"333":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Matsya"]}}