Ziusudra: The Sumerian Flood

The Sumerian flood is the oldest end-of-the-world story in writing. The tablet, recovered from Nippur and dated to the Old Babylonian period (c. 1600 BCE), preserves the Eridu Genesis, a text that already shows the structure its Akkadian descendants, Atra-hasis and Gilgamesh Tablet XI, would inherit and expand. But the Sumerian version is spare, fragmentary, and strange in ways the later versions are not.

The opening is lost. When the text resumes, the gods have already decided to destroy mankind. The reason is not given; the lacuna swallows the motive. Enki, god of wisdom and fresh water, cannot oppose the assembly directly, so he speaks to a wall of reeds. Wall, listen to me. Reed wall, attend to my words. The wall is a fiction; the listener is Ziusudra, a king and priest of Shuruppak. Enki tells him to build a boat, abandon possessions, take the seed of all living things.

The storm lasts seven days and seven nights. The boat tosses on the flood. Then Utu, the sun god, appears. Ziusudra opens a window, prostrates himself, sacrifices an ox and a sheep. The gods smell the savour, except Enlil, who is furious that anyone survived. But Enki intervenes. Who but Enlil could have done this? You granted him life, now grant him immortality. Ziusudra and his wife are taken to Dilmun, the land where the sun rises, and granted eternal life.

Three differences matter. First, the motive for the flood is missing; the tablet breaks before it. The Akkadian versions supply it, noise, overpopulation, sin, but the Sumerian original may never have given one. The destruction could be arbitrary, a divine whim. Second, Ziusudra does not send out birds. The Gilgamesh version has Utnapishtim release a dove, a swallow, a raven; the biblical version has Noah send a raven, then doves. The Sumerian text ends with Utu's appearance. The land dries by divine fiat, not avian reconnaissance. Third, the survivor is not a new father of mankind. Ziusudra and his wife are translated to Dilmun, removed from the human story entirely. The human race continues, but how? The text does not say. The later versions make the survivor the progenitor; the Sumerian version makes him an exception.

The Eridu Genesis is not a complete text. It is a fragment of a fragment, preserved by scribes who copied it for curriculum, not reverence. But it is the ancestor: every flood story that follows, Atra-hasis, Gilgamesh, Noah, Deucalion, Manu, descends from this moment when a god whispered to a wall and a king built a boat.

What we know

• Primary source: Eridu Genesis (Sumerian), Old Babylonian tablet (c. 1600 BCE), Nippur; Berossus, Babyloniaca Book 2 (Greek fragments, 3rd c. BCE).
• Manuscript: CBS 10673 (University of Pennsylvania Museum), published by Poebel in 1914; supplemented by later duplicates.
• Key translations: Jacobsen (1987), Lambert and Millard (1969), Black and Green (1992).
• Relationship to Atra-hasis: The Eridu Genesis is earlier and shorter; Atra-hasis expands the motive, noise, the bird episode, and the post-flood settlement.

What we don't

• whether the Sumerian version ever contained a flood motive; the lacuna may be original silence or physical loss.
• how Ziusudra's translation to Dilmun relates to the human continuation; the text implies mankind survives, but not through him.
• whether the wall of reeds device is a literary convention or reflects an actual ritual practice.
• how the Eridu Genesis relates to the even earlier Flood Myth from Ur (UET 6/2, 252); too fragmentary to compare.

The earliest flood survivor is described under Iraq.