Tablet XI: The Flood

The eleventh tablet of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh contains the great Mesopotamian Flood narrative. Gilgamesh, broken by the death of his friend Enkidu and desperate to escape death himself, has journeyed to the ends of the earth to find Uta-napishti (Utnapishtim), the one man to whom the gods granted everlasting life. Asked how he gained it, Uta-napishti tells his story. The great gods resolved to destroy humankind by a flood, but the god Ea, sworn to secrecy, warned Uta-napishti by speaking to the reed wall of his house, telling him to tear down his dwelling and build a great boat.

Into it he took his family, craftsmen, and the seed of living creatures. For days the storm raged until all humanity had turned to clay; the boat grounded on Mount Nimush, and Uta-napishti sent out a dove, a swallow, and finally a raven, which did not return. Coming forth, he made a sacrifice, over which the hungry gods gathered, and was granted immortality, a gift he tells Gilgamesh cannot be repeated for him.

The flood story in Tablet XI was not composed for Gilgamesh; it was imported into the epic from older Mesopotamian tradition. As the scholar Andrew George shows in his critical edition, the Babylonian Gilgamesh incorporated a version of a flood legend already told in the earlier Akkadian poem of Atra-hasis, where the flood is the climax of a story about the gods reducing an overpopulous and noisy humankind, and the flood-hero bears that name.

Behind these Akkadian poems stands a still older Sumerian flood account, in which the pious king Ziusudra is the survivor. The names differ, Ziusudra, Atra-hasis, Uta-napishti, but the pattern is shared: a divine decision to destroy humanity, a warning to one favoured man, a great vessel, survival, and a sacrifice. The compiler of the Standard Babylonian epic drew this material in to serve Gilgamesh's search for immortality, so that the flood, once a story in its own right, became the proof that eternal life was a unique and unrepeatable gift.

The resemblance between this tablet and the flood of Noah in Genesis 6 to 9 is close and much studied: a divine resolve to destroy humankind, a single righteous man warned to build a great vessel, the saving of his family and of living creatures, the grounding of the ark on a mountain, the sending out of birds to test the waters, and a sacrifice on emerging that pleases the deity. When George Smith first read the Babylonian flood aloud to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in 1872, the announcement caused a sensation precisely because the parallel was so exact.

Scholars generally understand the relationship as a literary and cultural one: both narratives belong to a common ancient Near Eastern flood tradition, and the biblical writers gave the shared story their own distinctive theological shape, one God rather than many, a moral cause in human wickedness, and a covenant sealed by the rainbow. This is best presented as a matter of comparative scholarship, illuminating each text, rather than as a claim of simple dependence in either direction.