A Babylonian Epic of Creation and Flood

The Atrahasis epic is preserved chiefly in a three-tablet Old Babylonian recension copied about the eighteenth century BCE, with later Assyrian and Babylonian copies. It opens on a striking scene: "when the gods were man", the lesser gods (Igigi) labor at digging the rivers and canals until they revolt. To spare them, humankind is created, from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slain god, to take up the toil. But people multiply and their noise (rigmu) grows until it robs the god Enlil of sleep. He answers with plague, then drought, then famine, each time frustrated by the cleverness of the god Enki (Ea) working through his devotee Atrahasis, "the exceeding wise". At last Enlil resolves on a flood to end humanity altogether. The name of the flood hero is itself an epithet meaning "exceeding wise".

Enki's method of warning Atrahasis while technically honouring an oath not to warn humanity directly, speaking to the wall of a reed hut rather than to the man himself, so Atrahasis merely happens to overhear his own house's wall, became something close to a stock device across ancient Near Eastern flood literature, reappearing in the Gilgamesh flood account and read by scholars as evidence of a shared narrative toolkit passed between Mesopotamian scribal traditions rather than one text simply translating another. One Old Babylonian tablet colophon names the scribe Ku-Aya as responsible for a surviving copy, giving Atrahasis one of the relatively rare instances among Mesopotamian literary works of a named individual connected to a specific physical copy, though this identifies a copyist rather than an original author.