Iraq

The oldest written destruction of the world is Mesopotamian, and it survives because it was copied. Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh epic, recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and edited by Andrew George from the full manuscript tradition, has Utnapishtim recount how the gods resolved on a flood, how he was warned to build a vessel, and how the waters left him the only surviving line. The account was already old when Ashurbanipal's scribes copied it.

The Atra-hasis epic, edited by Lambert and Millard from Old Babylonian tablets, supplies the motive that later traditions dropped. Humanity is created to relieve the gods of labour, multiplies, and becomes unbearably loud. Enlil answers the noise with plague, then drought, then famine, and only at the fourth attempt with water. Three destructions precede the flood, and the grievance in the first two is not wickedness but volume. No later eschatology retains anything so unflattering about the reasons a god might end a world.

The same corpus frames creation itself as combat. Enuma Elish, recited at the Babylonian new year, sets Marduk against Tiamat and builds the ordered cosmos out of her divided body, which makes order a victory that has to be re-established rather than a settled fact. The three strands together, told in The Flood of Utnapishtim, Atra-hasis and Marduk and Tiamat: the Battle Before the World, are collected as Mesopotamian Flood Tradition. Their transmission history matters as much as their content: these are the texts a nineteenth-century decipherment placed underneath the Hebrew flood, and the discovery reset the question of where the end of the world came from.