The Oldest Connected Mesopotamian Flood Account

The Atrahasis poem is known chiefly from a set of tablets copied by the scribe Ku-Aya in the reign of Ammi-saduqa of Babylon, in the seventeenth century BCE, with further Middle Babylonian, Assyrian and Late Babylonian recensions showing that the text was still being copied more than a thousand years later. The standard critical edition, by W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, gathered and joined those manuscripts and made the connected narrative available. What distinguishes Atrahasis is that its flood is not a free-standing wonder but the last term in an argument: the poem asks why humankind exists, why it dies, and why its numbers are limited, and answers with a myth of divine labour, human noise, and a settlement in which the gods accept humanity on condition of mortality and a curbed birth rate.

The flood in Gilgamesh Tablet XI is drawn from this tradition rather than the reverse, a point set out in Andrew George's critical edition of the Gilgamesh epic; behind both stands an older Sumerian account whose survivor is Ziusudra. Reading the flood section apart from the rest of the poem loses precisely the argument that gave it its point.