The Flood Tablet (Gilgamesh Tablet XI, K.3375)

A corner of a clay tablet, two columns of cuneiform on either face, Neo-Assyrian, seventh century BCE, catalogued as K.3375 in the British Museum. It is Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh: the gods resolve to drown the earth; Ea warns Utnapishtim in a dream; he builds a boat, loads it with living things, and survives the seven-day flood; the boat grounds on Mount Nimush; he sends the dove, the swallow, and the raven; the gods repent too late.

This is the oldest complete flood narrative in the world, and therefore the oldest complete end-of-the-world story, older than the biblical account by more than a millennium. The tablet measures roughly fifteen by twenty centimetres, complete in twelve columns of tight two-line-per-case cuneiform. It was copied for the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh by the scribe Sin-leqi-unninni's successors and buried with the city when Babylon fell, lying in the rubble for twenty-six centuries until George Smith read it out in London on 3 December 1872, identifying the Babylonian deluge and stunning the room. The reading itself is recorded under George Smith reads the Flood Tablet. The tablet is the physical proof that the flood was not originally Hebrew, and that the world's first recorded ending was a complaint about the noise of humanity.

Smith's reading was itself an event in the history of scholarship. A bank-note engraver who taught himself cuneiform while sorting fragments for the British Museum, he recognised the raven episode on this piece and, by his own account, began to undress on the spot from excitement. The Daily Telegraph funded a expedition to find the missing portions; Smith found them, read his paper, and died five years later on a further expedition to Nineveh. The tablet has been in London since the 1850s, one of perhaps thirty thousand fragments from the library, and scholars still join new pieces to its edges.

The tablet is the source artifact. Every later flood, the biblical, the Quranic, the Deucalion, descends from or parallels this tablet, and the Utnapishtim story it carries is the template the Mesopotamian Flood tradition set for the whole West. The hero who seeks him out, and the poem the tablet closes, belong to Gilgamesh; the tradition as a whole is treated under Mesopotamian Flood Tradition.