The Flood Tablet: Gilgamesh, Tablet XI

A slab of baked clay about 15 by 13 centimetres, written on both faces in dense cuneiform, came out of the ruins of Nineveh in the 1850s and sat in the British Museum for years before anyone read it. It carries the flood story of the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The tablet is a copy made in the 7th century BCE for the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. In 1872 a museum assistant named George Smith read it and saw that it told a story he knew from Genesis: a god warns a man, the man builds a boat, the waters rise, and birds are sent out over a drowned world. It showed that the flood story was older than the Bible's telling of it.

The man who read it

• George Smith (1840–1876) was apprenticed at fourteen to learn banknote engraving. He taught himself cuneiform in his spare hours at the British Museum and was taken on there as an assistant.
• In 1872, sorting fragments from Kuyunjik, the mound of ancient Nineveh across the river from modern Mosul, he worked on a large tablet that Hormuzd Rassam had excavated for the museum in 1853. Part of its surface had to be cleaned before it could be read. When it was, Smith read the flood.
• A story that is told, not a verified fact. Smith's colleague E. A. Wallis Budge, writing in 1925, more than fifty years later, says Smith was so excited that he jumped up and began to take off his clothes. This archive's chapter on the Flood repeats the story with the same warning. Budge names no witness, and the anecdote cannot be checked.
• The public sequel is documented. On 3 December 1872 Smith read his paper, The Chaldean Account of the Deluge, to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, with the Prime Minister, Gladstone, in the audience. He published it in the Society's Transactions the next year.
• The missing lines. The Daily Telegraph paid for Smith to go to Nineveh to look for the missing parts of the story. In May 1873, within days of starting, he found a fragment of seventeen lines, catalogued as DT 42, that seemed to fill the story's main gap: the order to build and load the boat. The British Museum now catalogues DT 42 as part of the older Atrahasis epic, not of Gilgamesh. Smith had filled the gap in the story, but from a different poem.
• Smith went back to Mesopotamia twice more. He fell ill with dysentery on the way home and died at Aleppo on 19 August 1876, aged thirty-six, leaving a wife and young family. He knew the hero of the epic as Izdubar; the reading "Gilgamesh" was established in 1890.

What the tablet says

Tablet XI is a story told inside the epic. Gilgamesh, grieving for his friend Enkidu and looking for a way not to die, finds Utnapishtim, the one man the gods made immortal. Utnapishtim tells him how it happened. The flood takes up roughly the first two hundred of the tablet's three hundred or so lines. The text as read today is pieced together from this tablet and other copies; Andrew George's edition is the standard modern one.

• The warning. The great gods, led by Enlil, decide to drown the world and swear to keep it secret. The god Ea does not break his oath. Instead he speaks the plan aloud to the reed wall of Utnapishtim's house at Shuruppak: pull down the house, build a boat, give up possessions, save life. Utnapishtim hears what the wall is told.
• The boat. The vessel is a cube: its length, breadth and height are equal, and its walls rise 120 cubits. It has six decks, dividing it into seven levels, with nine sections inside. The poem describes the building like a work account: bitumen melted in the kiln, oil by the thousand measures, oxen and sheep slaughtered and beer and wine given to the workmen as at a New Year's festival. The family, the craftsmen, gold and silver and the animals of the field go aboard.
• The storm. It comes at dawn in a black cloud with the storm god Adad thundering inside it. The gods are frightened by what they have started. They flee up to the heaven of Anu and cower like dogs against its wall, and the goddess Ishtar cries out that she agreed to the destruction of her own people. The storm lasts six days and seven nights, and all the people turn to clay.
• The mountain and the birds. The boat comes to rest on Mount Nimush (older translations read Nisir). On the seventh day Utnapishtim sends out a dove, which finds nowhere to land and comes back; then a swallow, which does the same; then a raven, which finds the water going down, eats, and does not come back. Genesis keeps the birds: a raven, then a dove.
• The sacrifice and the reckoning. Utnapishtim makes an offering on the mountain top. The gods, who have had no offerings since the world drowned, smell it and gather like flies. Enlil arrives and is furious that anyone survived. Ea answers him: punish the one who does wrong for his own wrong, and do not send a flood without thinking. Enlil then blesses Utnapishtim and his wife and makes them like the gods, to live far away at the mouth of the rivers.

An older story in a younger epic

Scholars generally hold that the flood was added to the epic when its standard version was put together, traditionally credited to the scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni around 1300–1000 BCE. It was adapted, in places almost line for line, from the Old Babylonian Atrahasis epic of about the 18th century BCE, in which the survivor is Atrahasis, "exceedingly wise". The join still shows: in Tablet XI, Ea calls the flood hero Atrahasis. Behind Atrahasis stands a Sumerian telling, the flood of Ziusudra. K.3375 is a 7th-century Assyrian copy of a Babylonian adaptation of a story already more than a thousand years old. That makes it a well-preserved link in a documented chain of written flood stories: Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim, and later Noah.

Symbology and sacred encoding

A secret told to a wall. Ea keeps the letter of his oath by speaking to a reed wall within the hero's hearing. The warning is overheard, not given. In the later Greek-language account of the Babylonian priest Berossus, the warning comes in a dream. In Genesis, God speaks to Noah directly.

The cube. Utnapishtim's boat is not shaped like a boat. It is a measured cube with decks and compartments, a small ordered world sealed against the flood outside. Genesis gives an oblong vessel, and the older Ark Tablet (V90) a round one: three ancient answers to the question of what shape safety takes.

Six days and seven nights. The storm lasts six days and seven nights. After the flood story, Utnapishtim challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights, and Gilgamesh falls asleep at once. The hero cannot pass a test of the same length the flood survivor came through. Many readers take this as the point of the tablet: the flood hero's immortality cannot be repeated.

Connections

The Flood (ch01) and Mesopotamia (ch03). Compare the Ark Tablet (V90), an older Babylonian telling of the same story that gives the boat's building instructions, and the Cyrus Cylinder (V35), another inscribed clay object in the British Museum found by Hormuzd Rassam, at Babylon in 1879.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/flood-tablet.html