The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (the Flood Tablet)

7th century BC (this copy)

A clay tablet from the royal library at Nineveh carrying the eleventh tablet of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Ut-napishtim tells how he survived a flood sent by the gods. It is the best-known flood story outside the Bible.

The tablet was copied in Assyria in the seventh century BC and comes from the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The poem is older than this copy: the standard version of the epic was composed in Babylonia about 1100 BC, and its flood story follows the older Babylonian poem of Atrahasis closely. When the tablet was first read in the nineteenth century it caused a sensation because of its likeness to the flood story in Genesis.

In tablet XI the hero Gilgamesh, searching for a way to escape death, meets Ut-napishtim, who tells him how the gods resolved on a flood, how the god Ea warned him, and how he built a boat, rode out the storm, sent out three birds and sacrificed on a mountain. The text is evidence for the flood tradition of Mesopotamia. It does not mention Noah, and readers differ on how it is related to the Flood and the Covenant with Noah in Genesis.

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