Utnapishtim

Mesopotamian literature tells the flood three times under three names, and the versions differ in what they think it was for.

The Sumerian account gives the survivor as Ziusudra, a pious king who is warned at the wall of his reed house by a god who will not break an oath directly and therefore speaks to the building. The Old Babylonian poem of Atrahasis supplies the motive: humanity has multiplied and its noise keeps the god Enlil from sleeping, and after plague and drought fail to reduce it he sends the flood. The standard Babylonian Gilgamesh takes the story over into its eleventh tablet and puts it in Utnapishtim's own mouth.

The details in that version are specific and physical. The vessel is not a ship but a cube, six decks dividing it into seven levels, sealed with bitumen inside and out; the craftsmen who built it are shut in with the animals and the family. The storm runs for six days and seven nights and the gods themselves are terrified by it, cowering at the wall of heaven like dogs, and the goddess who agreed to it cries out that she has destroyed her own people. When it stops, the boat has grounded and the silence is total. Utnapishtim releases a dove, which returns, a swallow, which returns, and a raven, which does not.

He offers sacrifice, and the gods gather around the smoke like flies. Enlil, finding that someone escaped, is furious until Ea points out that he punished the guilty and the innocent together, and Utnapishtim and his wife are set apart to live at the mouth of the rivers.

Gilgamesh crosses the waters of death to ask one question: how did you obtain the eternal life you have. Utnapishtim's answer is the whole point of the episode. The gods held an assembly, made a single decision about one man, and will not be holding it again. Immortality was not achieved and cannot be repeated.

He then offers a test that is deliberately unfair. If Gilgamesh cannot conquer death, let him first conquer sleep, and stay awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh sits down and is asleep almost at once. His wife bakes a loaf for each day and lines them up beside him, so that when he wakes and insists he only dozed, the row of loaves in every stage from fresh to mouldy is the evidence against him.

As a parting gift he is told of a thorny plant on the sea floor that restores an old man to youth. He ties stones to his feet, takes it, and carries it back to share with the elders of his city. Bathing at a pool on the way, he leaves it on the bank, and a snake takes it and sheds its skin as it goes. He sits down and weeps, and then goes home and shows the ferryman the walls of Uruk, which is where the epic began.

The eleventh tablet re-entered the modern world in 1872, when George Smith, working on fragments in the British Museum, read the flood account and announced it. The similarity to Genesis was immediately obvious to everyone, and the relationship between the accounts has been argued ever since, without anyone disputing that a relationship exists.