The Flood of Utnapishtim

In the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero of Uruk crosses the Waters of Death to ask the one man who escaped mortality how he did it. Utnapishtim, the survivor, tells him a story that begins as a divine decision and ends as a receipt.

The gods, led by Enlil, resolved to destroy humanity. The god Ea, who had no part in the decision, leaked the plan through the reed wall of Utnapishtim's house and told him to tear it down and build a boat: a cube, ten dozen cubits on each side, caulked with bitumen and roofed against the sun. Utnapishtim loaded his family, his silver, his gold, and "the seed of every living thing." Then the storm came. The gods themselves were terrified by it. Ishtar, who had demanded the destruction, wept for the people she had helped kill. The flood covered the mountains; the boat grounded on Mount Nimush; six days passed, and on the seventh Utnapishtim released a dove, which returned, then a swallow, which returned, then a raven, which found land and did not. He offered sacrifice on the mountain, and the starving gods gathered over the offering "like flies."

The flood narrative was not part of the oldest Gilgamesh poems. Many scholars hold that it was added to Tablet XI of the standard version by a later editor who lifted the story directly from the Atra-Hasis Epic, the flood episode older than Gilgamesh by roughly half a millennium. A shorter reference to the flood also survives in the much older Sumerian Gilgamesh poems, from which the epic as a whole grew. The borrowings are why the three Mesopotamian flood accounts, the Eridu Genesis, Atra-hasis, and Gilgamesh, share so much bone and muscle while differing in the details that matter.

The flood is a reset, not a finale. The world does not end; it is returned to the gods for refurbishment, and one man is kept as the seed of the next attempt. Ea's defence before Enlil is the oldest argument in apocalyptic literature: the punishment was excessive, the survivor was innocent, and the gods should have sent a lion, a wolf, a famine, a plague, anything but a flood that wiped out the innocent with the guilty.

What the tablet does not tell us is how the story first ended. The Sumerian original, the tale of Ziusudra, breaks off mid-scene. The Old Babylonian Atra-hasis gives the flood as the last of three failed attempts to quiet humanity, and it is that version, older than Gilgamesh by half a millennium, that carries the strangest detail in the whole tradition: the gods destroyed the world three times, and the first two times were because human beings were too loud. Enlil could not sleep. The end of the world, in its oldest surviving telling, began as a noise complaint.

The tablet that records the flood is described under Iraq.