The flood, told again and again

A man opens a hatch in the side of a boat and lets a bird go. The water has covered everything. He waits to see if the bird comes back, because a bird that does not come back has found somewhere to land. Readers of the Bible know him as Noah. Some three thousand years ago, readers in Babylon and Nineveh knew the same man as Uta-napishti, and the story was already a thousand years old on their clay.

This page sets the tellings side by side, passage by passage. First Tablet XI of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, in Akkadian, beside chapters 6 to 9 of Genesis in the Greek of the Septuagint, the translation made in Alexandria for Greek-speaking Jews in the third century BC. Then the Greeks' own flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha in Apollodorus and Pindar; the Egyptian priest in Plato who told Solon there had been many floods; and Ovid's, the version European painters worked from for centuries. Every excerpt opens into its book.

It starts with a clerk at the British Museum.

A clerk finds a flood

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George Smith left school at fourteen to learn banknote engraving in London. He spent his lunch hours in the British Museum staring at the clay tablets dug up at Nineveh, taught himself to read cuneiform, and was taken on to sort the broken pieces. In 1872 he picked up a fragment that told of a ship coming to rest on a mountain and a dove sent out to look for land. Wallis Budge, who later worked in the same museum, told the story that Smith jumped up and ran about the room, and in his excitement began to take off his clothes.

Smith read his translation to the Society of Biblical Archaeology that December, with the prime minister, William Gladstone, in the audience. The Daily Telegraph paid to send him to Nineveh to look for the missing lines, and within days of starting work he found a fragment that filled part of the gap. The man of the flood had turned up on a tablet older than any manuscript of the Bible.

Uta-napishti tells the story himself, years after it happened, to Gilgamesh, a king who has come to the end of the world to ask how a man escapes death. He begins by saying it is a secret.

Why the gods sent it

The two tellings part ways at the first question. Genesis gives a reason, and gives it plainly: people had filled the earth with wrong, and God was sorry he had made them. The Greek word for what filled the earth is ἀδικία, injustice.

Tablet XI gives no reason at all. The great gods are in Shuruppak, an old city on the Euphrates, and their hearts move them to bring on a flood, and they swear an oath to keep it quiet. An older Babylonian poem, the Atrahasis, says what it was: people had grown so many and so loud that Enlil, the god of the air, could not sleep. Later in Tablet XI the gods themselves admit Enlil acted without taking counsel.

The warning

One god breaks ranks. Ea, the god of the fresh waters and of every craft, has sworn not to tell any human, so he tells a wall. He speaks to the reed hut where Uta-napishti sleeps, and the man inside overhears. It is a lawyer's trick, and Ea will use it later to defend himself.

In Genesis there is one God, so the warning and the flood come from the same voice. He picks Noah because Noah is righteous, and he tells him so to his face.

The boat

Both texts give the measurements, and they are not the same boat. Uta-napishti's is a cube. Its floor is one iku, a square of land about sixty metres on a side, and its walls rise ten nindan, about sixty metres again. It has six decks and nine rooms, and it is sealed with pitch by the šār, a unit of 3,600.

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Noah's ark is long and low, three hundred cubits by fifty by thirty, the proportions of a long barge. The Greek word for it is κιβωτός, a wooden chest or box, the same word the Septuagint uses for the ark of the covenant. A city in what is now Turkey took the word as its name and put Noah on its coins.

The Babylonian boat is a community job. The whole town comes to the gate with axes and rope, the rich man brings bitumen, and Uta-napishti slaughters oxen and pours beer for the builders as if it were the New Year. Genesis says nothing about helpers. Noah builds, and Noah does as he was told.

The storm

Uta-napishti's storm is a battle of gods. A black cloud rises with the storm god Adad thundering inside it, the gods of the underworld carry torches that set the land ablaze, and the flood comes over the people like an army. The gods are frightened of what they have done.

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In Genesis nobody fights. The water comes from below and from above at once, the springs of the deep broken open and the windows of heaven thrown back, as if the world were going back to the waters of the first chapter. In the Greek the rain starts on the twenty-seventh day of the second month. The Hebrew text has the seventeenth.

Then the timings diverge. Uta-napishti's storm lasts six days and seven nights. Noah's rain lasts forty days and forty nights, and the water stands over the earth for a hundred and fifty.

Everyone else

When it is over, the survivor in each story looks out, and there is no one left. Uta-napishti opens a vent, the light falls on his face, and he sits down and weeps.

The goddess who made people mourns them. Bēlet-ilī, the mother of the gods, cries out that she spoke for war in the assembly, and that her children now float on the sea like fish spawn. Genesis has no one in heaven to grieve. It counts the dead instead, every kind of animal and then every human being, and then it says who is left.

The mountain and the birds

Both boats run aground on a mountain. Uta-napishti's comes to rest on Mount Nimuš, usually placed east of the Tigris in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. Noah's comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, the old kingdom of Urartu, north of Assyria. The Greek again has the twenty-seventh of the month.

Then come the birds, the detail that made George Smith shout. Uta-napishti sends a dove, then a swallow, and both come back with nowhere to land. Then he sends a raven, and the raven eats and scratches in the mud and does not return.

Noah's birds go in the opposite order. The raven goes first and never returns, which tells him nothing, so he tries a dove. The first time she finds no rest for her feet. The second time she comes back at evening with something in her beak.

The smell of the offering

The first thing each man does on dry ground is make a burnt offering, and the gods smell it. With every human drowned, nobody has fed the gods for a week; in the older Atrahasis they sit through the flood hungry and thirsty. They come down to the smoke like this.

Genesis keeps the smell and drops the flies. The Lord smells the pleasing aroma and makes up his mind never to curse the earth again, and the reason he gives is the same reason he gave for the flood: the human heart is set on evil from youth.

Something to remember it by

Each telling ends with a sign in the sky or at the throat. Bēlet-ilī lifts up a necklace of lapis flies, the blue of the sky, and swears by it never to forget these days. In Genesis God sets his bow in the cloud. He says the bow is there so that he will remember.

The two men end differently. Enlil arrives furious that anyone got out alive, Ea talks him round, and Enlil takes Uta-napishti and his wife by the hand and makes them like gods, living for ever far away at the mouth of the rivers. That is why Gilgamesh came to find him. Noah gets a covenant, a blessing to fill the earth, and a vineyard. He lives three hundred and fifty years after the flood, and then he dies.

The Greeks had a flood too, and a survivor of their own.

Deucalion and the stones

Deucalion was the son of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire for mankind, and he was married to Pyrrha, the daughter of Pandora. The fullest Greek telling of their flood is in the Library, a handbook of myths written in the first or second century AD under the name of Apollodorus. Zeus decides to wipe out the men of the bronze age. Prometheus warns his son, and Deucalion builds a chest, a λάρναξ, stocks it and climbs in with his wife.

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There are no birds in the Greek story and no covenant. What the Greeks cared about was what came after: how the earth was peopled again. The answer is a pun. The Greek for a people is λαός, and the Greek for a stone is λᾶας. Pindar made the joke in 468 BC, in an ode for a wrestler from Opus in Locris, the town where Deucalion and Pyrrha were said to have settled when they came down from Parnassus.

Pindar knew the flood too, and says it in a sentence: the water drowned the black earth, and Zeus drew it off again.

One flood among many

Plato turned the whole question round. In the Timaeus, written around 360 BC, Critias tells a story he says came down from Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, who visited the priests of the goddess Neith at Saïs in the Nile Delta. Solon tried to impress them with the oldest stories the Greeks had, and Deucalion and Pyrrha came up at once.

The priest's point is that there was no single flood. Fire and water have wiped people out over and over. A flood drowns the cities on the plains and spares the herdsmen in the hills, and the hill people who survive start again without writing, remembering one flood out of many. Egypt, watered from below by the Nile, kept its temple records through all of them.

The same priest goes on to tell Solon about Atlantis, the island empire that fought ancient Athens and sank into the sea in a single day and night. It is Plato's invention, as far as anyone can tell, and it is one more flood.

Ovid paints the water

Ovid finished the Metamorphoses in Rome around AD 8, and his flood borrows from everyone. Jupiter calls a council of the gods, as in Babylon. He floods the world for a crime, the cannibal feast of King Lycaon, as in Genesis. The survivors are Deucalion and Pyrrha, as in Greece. What Ovid adds is the water itself, painted line by line.

And then a bird, as in Babylon and in Genesis. This one finds nowhere to land and never comes back.

Ovid goes on to the rest: the chest grounds on Parnassus, Deucalion and Pyrrha are the only two left, and an oracle tells them to throw the bones of their great mother behind them. Pyrrha is horrified until Deucalion works out that the mother is the earth and the bones are stones.

Who borrowed from whom

The Babylonian story is older on the clay. The Sumerian flood story of Ziusudra survives on a tablet from Nippur from about 1600 BC, the Atrahasis in copies from the seventeenth century BC, and Tablet XI took its flood from the Atrahasis, so closely that the hero's old name slips through twice. In line 49 the townspeople gather at the gate of Atra-hasis, and in line 197 Ea says he let Atra-hasis see a dream.