Flood texts from Mesopotamia

The text may be found at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, produced by Oxford University. Sumer is the land of Lower Mesopotamia (southern Iraq).

The SKL gives the names and reign lengths of Sumer’s kings from the beginning of kingship down to Damiq-ilisu (1720-1698 BC). Since it is a compilation of dynastic lists from many cities, some of its sources will have been much older than Damiq-ilisu. In its final form the document began with a list of 8 priest-kings, the last of whom was Ubartutu, ruler of Shuruppak. Then ‘the Flood swept over’ the land and there followed 134 more kings, one after the other.

The compilation as a whole requires a large amount of interpretation. Many of the reign lengths, hundreds, even thousands, of years long, are greatly exaggerated. Archaeological finds have shown that, contrary to the impression given, certain of the dynasties reigned at the same time rather than consecutively. And the kings who first ruled Sumer were not the antediluvian kings mentioned at the beginning of the list but the dynasties of Uruk and Kish, which appear in the list immediately after the flood.

The flood of the SKL was an event which took place in historical times and interrupted the sequence of Sumerian kings. As such, while it may have had a major impact on some cities, notably Shuruppak, the catastrophe cannot have been a global one. There is some evidence to associate it with the end of the Jemdet Nasr period (Brückner 2003).

Does that mean that there was no tradition of a global flood in Sumer, and that the much later Genesis account, with which the Sumerian account has many elements in common, must have borrowed from it and universalised it?

Not necessarily, for there are elements in the Sumerian traditions which make no sense in relation to a purely local inundation (see The tradition in ancient Sumer). As exemplified in the exaggerated reign lengths, the SKL reflects an ideology which glorified Sumerian kingship. Sumer was portrayed as the primeval Eden, the land through which the primeval rivers Tigris and Euphrates flowed and where human kingship was an institution ordained by the Creator himself. As the SKL maintains in its opening words, kingship came down from heaven.

People knew about such an Eden, and of a devastating cataclysm that had once destroyed the whole earth, because of an oral tradition that long predated the earliest Sumerian kings. The flood which devastated much of Sumer in the third millennium was conflated with this earlier, global cataclysm, and represented as though it were the same event, so that the kings who came afterwards could be seen as restorers of divinely appointed rule on earth. It was this more ancient tradition that was the basis for dividing time into before and after the flood.

This text consists of five fragments, all of which are damaged. It was found in the city of Nippur and dates to the mid second millennium BC. An, Enlil (or Ellil) and Enki are the “high gods” of Mesopotamia, with jurisdiction respectively over heaven, earth and the watery abyss (the Apsu) under the earth. Ziusudra, a godly priest-king of the city of Shuruppak, son of the SKL’s Ubartutu, is the Sumerian equivalent of Noah, being warned in a dream that An and Enlil are determined to destroy “the seed of mankind” in a flood.

Translation from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

Like the Sumerian flood story, the Atrahasis epic dates to c. 1600 BC, and like Genesis chapters 2-8, it describes the creation of man, the world before the flood, and the flood itself. The genre, however, is dramatic poetry rather than historical prose.

Probably dating to the second half of the 2nd millennium, this epic, commonly regarded as ancient Mesopotamia’s greatest work of literature, comprises eleven tablets, the last of which includes an account of the flood as told to the hero by Utnapishtim (= Ziusudra). Gilgamesh was a historical king of Uruk who reigned in the Early Dynastic I period. The first tablet introduces him as the one who (re)built the city’s walls and restored the cult centres which the flood destroyed. He is therefore unlikely to have reigned more than a generation after the Sumerian flood.

In this version Ziusudra lives not in Dilmun (modern Bahrein) but at ‘the mouth of the rivers’, i.e. where the Tigris and Euphrates enter the Persian Gulf.

For a translation click on http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab11.htm

The translation by Andrew George (Penguin Books, 1999) is also recommended.

This is another of the works translated by Stephanie Dalley. Extant texts date no earlier than the 8th century BC, but the original may have been composed in the 9th. In the house of the gods at Babylon the god Erra, lord of the Underworld, addresses the king of the gods, Marduk, and in reply Marduk recalls the time when he brought a great flood upon the earth. This version of the tradition is noteworthy for two elements that do not occur in other versions: (1) the reference to disorder in the heavens (cf Gen 7:11) that causes the positions of the stars/planets to be permanently changed, and (2) the statement that as a result of the deluge the “Craftsmen”, i.e. the legendary ‘Seven Sages’, who represented all the inhabitants of the old world (cf Gen 4:20-22), went down into the Apsu. ‘Erkalla’ is the city of the dead under the Apsu.