The Flood Tablet is inscribed

The flood narrative that would become the ancestor of every later deluge story was set down in something like its present form in the 7th century BCE, copied onto clay in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The tablet, later catalogued as K.3375 in the British Museum, carries Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh: the hero crosses the Waters of Death to question Utnapishtim, the one man who survived the gods' decision to drown the earth.

The story on the tablet is a reset, not a finale. The gods, led by Enlil, resolve to destroy humanity; Ea leaks the plan through a reed wall; Utnapishtim builds a caulked cube of a boat, loads his family and "the seed of every living thing," rides out the storm, and grounds on a mountain. A dove, a swallow, and a raven test the water; he sacrifices; the frightened gods gather over the offering "like flies."

What the tablet does not show is where the tale first ended. Scholars hold that the flood was added to Tablet XI by a later editor who lifted it from the older Atra-Hasis epic, itself drawing on the Sumerian flood of Ziusudra. Three Mesopotamian accounts survive, each sharing the same bone while differing in the detail that matters: in the oldest telling the end of the world began, improbably, as a noise complaint, because the god Enlil could not sleep for the clamor of human beings. This is the earliest complete end-of-the-world story we have, and it is a complaint about the volume of creation.

The tablet that shocked the world is treated under Mesopotamian Flood.

The tablet belongs to a twelve-tablet series copied for Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE, but its story is older than its copy by a millennium: the Old Babylonian Atrahasis epic had told the flood around 1700 BCE and the Sumerian Ziusudra text earlier still, all within the same flood tradition, and the Sumerian Ziusudra text earlier still. The Nineveh scribes were transmitting a classic, the way medieval monks transmitted Virgil, and the copyist's hand is known: the colophon credits a scribe trained in the House of Exorcists, the institution that kept incantation literature.

The library itself fell with the city in 612 BCE, when the Babylonians and Medes sacked Nineveh, burying the tablets in the burning palace. The destruction preserved them: unfired clay baked hard in the fire, lying in rubble until Layard's excavators reached the site in the 1840s. Every reader since has read the flood through a tablet that survived its own city's end.