Noah's Doves

In standard texts on history, it's accepted that the ancient sailors on the Mediterranean stayed close to their coasts, because they had little way to tell where they were save when in sight of land. There were no instruments to navigate by in those days, and if a ship sailed under cloudy skies, how could they stay on course? If they steered wrong, they might never find shore again, or wander lost as long as Odysseus. Only by keeping near their landmarks, could they be sure of their way.

However, there is evidence that, in the Indian Ocean / Persian Gulf / Red Sea area, the sailors of India and Arabia and Persia did otherwise. They ventured out on the high seas long before the Helenistic or the Roman periods. True, they too had no instruments to navigate with. But they did have a means of finding shore again:

The Kavaddha Sutta (translations by Rhys Davis, Dialogues of the Buddha, p 1283), a work not younger than the fifth century B.C., tells: 'Long, long ago, sea-faring traders were wont, when they were setting sail on an ocean voyage, to take with them a land-sighting bird. And when the ship got out of sight of the shore, they would let the land-sighting bird free. Such a bird would fly to the East, and to the South and to the West, and to the North, to the zenith, and to the intermediate points of the compass. And if anywhere on the horizon it caught sight of land, thither it would fly. But if no land, all round about, were visible, it would come back to the ship.' In the sixth century A.D. Cosmas Indicopleustes spoke of such land-sighting birds, and Chinese books of the ninth century called this custom Persian.

The release of the pigeons in the story of the Flood has the same meaning: the ark of Noah is a ship on the high sea. The Gilgamesh epic, tabl. II, tells another very early Flood story: 'When the seventh day was breaking, I released a pigeon, the pigeon went off, it came back. Because there is no place to sit, it comes back.' The second time, the flood survivors released a swallow, which likewise came back, at the third time a raven: 'it saw the falling off of the waters, burrowed <?>, did not come back.'

Even if this motif did not appear as far back as pre-Biblical times, it would attest the custom long before the era of Buddha and of Zoroaster . . . On the Persian Gulf and on the India Ocean there was not only timid coasting.

All this is taken from Ernst Herzfeld, Zoroaster and His World, vol II, 1947. The research and conclusions are his. They are quoted with great respect, without permission, but without hope of gain.

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