Epic of Gilgamesh

Also called Gilgamesh Epic

The great Mesopotamian poem about a king's search for immortality — whose eleventh tablet tells a flood story so close to Genesis 6-9 that its decipherment in 1872 caused a public sensation.

Object: Baked clay tablets in Akkadian cuneiform; the flood account is Tablet XI
Found at: Kuyunjik (Nineveh), in the library of Ashurbanipal
Found in: Excavated from 1850 onward; the flood account recognised among the fragments in 1872
Found by: Austen Henry Layard, who found the first large group of library tablets in spring 1850, and Hormuzd Rassam, who found a second group in late 1853. George Smith identified and translated the flood account in London in 1872 — he did not excavate it
Dates from: The Nineveh copies were written in the seventh century BC; the standard version was compiled c. 1200 BC Traditional dating
Now held at: British Museum, London (the flood tablet is K.3375, from the Kuyunjik collection)

George Smith's Announcement

The tablets came from the library Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh in the seventh century BC. Austen Henry Layard dug the first large group out of the South-West Palace at Kuyunjik in the spring of 1850, and Hormuzd Rassam found a second group in the North Palace in late 1853; both were shipped in fragments to the British Museum, where some thirty thousand of them still are. In 1872 George Smith, a former banknote engraver who had taught himself cuneiform while working as a museum assistant, was sorting fragments when he read an account of a flood, a ship, and a bird sent out to find land. He is said to have run about the room in his excitement. His lecture announcing it, to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872, made the front pages.

The poem itself is much larger than the flood episode. It follows Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and his friend Enkidu through adventure and then through Enkidu's death, after which Gilgamesh — undone by the fact of mortality — sets out to find the one man who survived the flood and was granted unending life. The standard twelve-tablet version was compiled around 1200 BC from older Sumerian and Akkadian material going back centuries further.

Tablet XI and Genesis

In Tablet XI, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how the gods decided to destroy humanity, how the god Ea warned him, how he built and sealed a great vessel and loaded it with his family, craftsmen, and animals, how the storm raged for days, how the boat grounded on a mountain, how he released birds — a dove, a swallow, a raven — until one did not return, and how he then offered a sacrifice on the mountaintop around which the gods gathered.

The overlap with Genesis 6-9 is not vague, and it is not honest to minimise it. The warning, the vessel, the animals, the duration, the mountain landing, the birds, the sacrifice on emerging, and even a rainbow-like token all appear in both. Anyone who has read the two will notice, and a reader who is told there is no resemblance will rightly stop trusting whoever told them.

What the Resemblance Means

Here scholars and Christians divide, and the divisions do not fall neatly along belief. Some hold that both accounts remember a real catastrophic flood, preserved in two traditions from a common source. Some hold that Israel knew the Mesopotamian story — Abraham came from Ur, after all — and retold it deliberately. Some hold that the Genesis account was composed in conscious argument with a story its first readers already knew, especially during the Babylonian exile. Each position has serious defenders, and the evidence does not force a choice.

What the comparison does show plainly is how differently the two tell it. In Gilgamesh, the gods send the flood because humanity has grown too numerous and too noisy for them to sleep; they quarrel about it; when it comes they are terrified of their own storm and cower like dogs against a wall; and when the sacrifice is offered they swarm around it like flies, because they have not eaten. In Genesis, one God acts alone, for a stated moral reason, grieved rather than annoyed, and afterward binds himself by a covenant never to do it again. The shared furniture makes the difference in the theology impossible to miss — which may be exactly the point.

Scripture references

Genesis 6:5-8 — The flood as a moral judgment, and Noah finding favour
Genesis 7:11-24 — The flood itself
Genesis 8:6-12 — The raven and the dove
Genesis 8:20-22 — The sacrifice on leaving the ark
Genesis 9:8-17 — The covenant and the bow in the cloud

Sources

Holding institutionThe Ashurbanipal Library Project: excavating the library — The British Museum's Ashurbanipal Library Project, published on Oracc (University of Pennsylvania) · Dates Layard's find of the first large tablet group to March-May 1850 and Rassam's second group to late 1853; puts the library at around 32,000 tablets and fragmentsSupports: Who excavated the tablets, when, and how they reached London
Primary textGeorge Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis (first edition, 1876) — George Smith · Public domain, read in full at the Internet Archive. Smith's own first-person account of the announcement: "I now had the account of the Deluge in the state in which I published it at the meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, December 3rd, 1872." The widely circulated Gutenberg text of this book is A. H. Sayce's revision of 1880, which recasts that sentence in the third person and at "a meeting" — so Smith's own words are taken from the edition he wroteSupports: The date and venue of Smith's announcement, and his own description of the flood text
ReferenceBible Odyssey (SBL): Gilgamesh and the Bible — Society of Biblical Literature
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Epic of Gilgamesh