In 1872 a self-taught Assyriologist named George Smith was reading broken clay tablets at the British Museum, pieces dug up from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. On one of them he found a story about a man warned by a god, a boat, a flood that drowned the world and birds sent out to look for dry land. It was the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it made the poem famous almost overnight, because it read so much like the story of Noah.
Who tells the flood story
By Tablet XI, Gilgamesh has lost his friend Enkidu and crossed the world to find Utnapishtim, the one human the gods ever made immortal. Gilgamesh wants to know how he did it. Utnapishtim answers with a story.
The story, as Utnapishtim tells it
- The gods decide to flood the world. The council of the great gods, led by Enlil, resolves to wipe out humanity.
- One god warns him anyway. Ea, the god of wisdom, is sworn to secrecy, so he speaks to the reed wall of Utnapishtim's house instead of to the man himself, and tells it to tear down the house and build a boat.
- He builds the boat. It is a huge cube, as wide as it is tall, with several decks. He loads it with his family, his craftsmen, his silver and gold and the animals of the field.
- The storm. It rages for six days and seven nights. The poem says even the gods were frightened and cowered like dogs, and the goddess Ishtar cried out over the people she had helped create.
- The birds. The boat grounds on Mount Nimush. After seven days Utnapishtim releases a dove, which comes back, then a swallow, which comes back, then a raven, which finds land and does not return.
- The sacrifice and the verdict. He makes an offering, and the gods gather around its smell. Enlil is furious that anyone survived, Ea defends what he did, and in the end Enlil makes Utnapishtim and his wife immortal and sends them to live far away, at the mouth of the rivers.
How it compares to Noah
The parallels with Genesis 6 to 9 are hard to miss: a divine decision to destroy humanity, one man warned in advance, a boat built to exact instructions, animals taken aboard, the boat coming to rest on a mountain, birds sent out to test for land, and an offering whose pleasing smell reaches heaven.
The differences matter just as much.
- One God or many. In Gilgamesh the flood comes out of a council of gods who argue, hide things from each other and regret what they did. In Genesis a single God acts because of human wickedness and makes a covenant afterward, marked by the rainbow.
- The boat. Utnapishtim's boat is a cube. Noah's ark is long and narrow, 300 by 50 by 30 cubits.
- The birds. Utnapishtim sends a dove, a swallow and a raven. Noah sends a raven and then a dove three times, the second time coming back with an olive leaf.
- The ending. Utnapishtim is made immortal. Noah lives a long life, 950 years in the text, and then dies.
The Gilgamesh version is not the oldest Mesopotamian flood story either. An earlier Babylonian poem, the Atrahasis epic, tells the same story with a hero named Atrahasis, and a Sumerian account names him Ziusudra. Most scholars think the Genesis account and the Mesopotamian ones draw on a shared flood tradition that is older than any of the surviving texts.
Why the flood is in Gilgamesh at all
Inside the epic, the flood story is an answer, and it is a hard one. Gilgamesh asked how to live forever. Utnapishtim tells him that his own immortality came from a single event that will never happen again, granted by gods who will not hold another council for one man. In other words: not like this. Utnapishtim then asks Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights, and he falls asleep almost immediately. If he cannot beat sleep, he will not beat death.
What Gilgamesh gets instead is a parting gift, a thorny plant at the bottom of the sea that makes the old young again, which he dives for, wins and loses to a snake. You can read about that dive in He Who Saw the Deep, and about where the poem finally leaves him in The Walls of Uruk.
Designs from the poem
The flood is on the eleventh tablet, and the poem itself tells its readers to find the tablet and read it. We drew that invitation as the Read the Tablet poster and mug, and the dive from the same tablet as He Who Saw the Deep. See the whole Epic of Gilgamesh collection.