Atra-hasis

Atra-hasis ("exceedingly wise") is the hero of an Akkadian epic, written around 1700 BCE (with older material behind it), that tells the fullest early version of the great flood. It is the direct source of the flood episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the ancestor of the biblical flood narrative. The epic is named for its survivor, Atra-hasis, and it is as much a story about the gods' troubled relationship with humanity as it is about the flood itself.

The setup

The epic opens before the flood, with the lesser gods forced to do the manual labor of digging the rivers and canals. They rebel, and the god Enki (the clever one) solves the labor problem by creating humanity from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slain god, to do the work instead. Humanity multiplies, and here the trouble begins: the noise of human beings keeps the chief god Enlil awake. "The land was bellowing like a bull," the text says; Enlil cannot sleep.

The plagues and the flood

Enlil's first responses are not the flood but population controls: plague, then famine, then drought. Each time, the birth goddess intervenes and the humans recover. Finally Enlil proposes total destruction by flood, and the other gods swear an oath to it. But Enki, who had created humanity, warns his favored man Atra-hasis, speaking to him through a reed wall in a dream, hiding the warning from the other gods who had sworn secrecy. Atra-hasis builds a boat, loads it with his family, craftsmen, and "the seed of all living things," and rides out the seven-day storm.

The aftermath

When the flood ends and the boat grounds on a mountain, Atra-hasis sacrifices, and the smell reaches the hungry gods, who swarm "like flies" over the offering. Enlil is furious that anyone survived, but the other gods overrule him. To prevent a repeat of the overpopulation that caused the flood, they institute measures to cap humanity: stillbirth, the demons of infertility, and certain women who will not bear children (the qadishtu and related figures). The flood is, in effect, a failed population-control policy, and the peace that follows is one in which humanity is deliberately kept in check.

The tablets themselves are a reminder of how close this text came to not existing at all. W. G. Lambert and Alan Millard's reconstruction was stitched together from fragments scattered across three museums, some found in drawers where they had sat unread for decades. The third tablet, which contains the flood, survives only in a late Assyrian copy. What is read today is a text assembled like a broken pot, and the scholars who assembled it are honest about the joins.

Why it matters

Atra-hasis is precious because it gives the flood a cause and a consequence no other early version does. The gods are not punishing sin; they are annoyed by noise and trying (badly) to manage a creation that got out of hand. The story is thus one of the oldest documents of the human attempt to explain why the world is the way it is, full of suffering and limits. And as the trunk of the flood tradition, Atra-hasis is the link that connects the Mesopotamian Flood to the remnant motif and, ultimately, to Noah.