One day in November, 1872, George Smith sat at his desk in the British Museum studying one of the thousands of clay cuneiform tablets stored in the basement of the museum. Smith was not your typical Victorian era scholar. Born to a working class family, he left school at the age of fourteen to apprentice as an engraver in a print shop. But Smith’s interests clearly lay elsewhere. He could often be found at the British Museum during lunch breaks studying the artifacts freshly deposited there through the efforts of Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam at Nineveh. The young Smith was particularly drawn to the cuneiform tablets, whose script— although deciphered a decade or so earlier by Sir Henry Rawlinson—still remained largely a closed book. Undaunted, Smith taught himself how to read cuneiform and then began to volunteer his services cleaning and sorting tablets. His abilities were quickly recognized by Rawlinson who gave the young man a full time position at the museum with an income sufficient to support a young family.

Thus George Smith could be found sitting at his desk one evening in November working on one particularly challenging tablet. It was not a contract for payment, or an obscure incantation, but an ancient Babylonian account of a world-destroying Flood. Known from the Bible and a few, much later, Greek accounts of the event; this was the first Babylonian reference to it. Smith was reportedly so thrilled that he began to “run around the room tearing off his clothes.” It was a truly epochal discovery and Smith had worked very hard for it.

ARC/Ancient List

Written down some three millennia prior to the King James Bible, the tablet describes a flood which “reduced every living thing to mud” except for Utnapishtim and those who entered the ark with him and were carried to safety. The story shares many elements in common with that which was recorded in the Bible: the construction of a boat coated with pitch, a world-destroying deluge, the release of birds in order to locate dry land, and the offering of a sacrifice upon departure from the ark. They also differ on many of the particulars: the cause of the Flood and its length, the design of the ark and the place where it settled, and the number of birds and their names. Most notably, the Babylonian account depicts the gods scheming and quarrelling, cowering in fear before fleeing to the highest heavens, and then angry with Enlil because they are hungry and there is no one left to offer them sacrifices. Such elements are absent from the Biblical account. The same is true for Noah, who is portrayed in the Bible as a mortal man, subject to temptation, and ultimately to death, whereas in all of the Babylonian traditions, the hero of the flood story is elevated to the status of an immortal god after the Flood.¹Heidel 1949, 267

There is also a moral aspect to the Biblical account of the Flood that is absent from Babylonian accounts. Thus Ea advises Utnapishtim to lie to everyone who asks him about the ark he is building in order to allay suspicions of an impending catastrophe. Enlil is depicted as a capricious and unhinged deity. In a shocking act of sacrilege, Utnapishtim excludes Enlil from his offering of thanksgiving upon emerging from the ark, “for he [Enlil], unreasoning, brought on the deluge and my people consigned to destruction.”²Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet X, Line 167 in Pritchard 1968, 70

According to another, related Babylonian flood account, known as the Atrahasis Epic, the reason Enlil destroyed the race of mankind was because they were making too much noise. On the face of it, this is a strange reason to bring a world destroying Flood but it is a theme repeated in other Babylonian texts, such as the Enuma Elish, except there it is the young generation of gods who made the old generation angry because they were making too much noise. This explanation belongs to a fatalistic conception of a world that is inhabited by elemental and impersonal forces (the old gods or Enlil) which lie hidden beneath the surface of civilization and are liable to erupt at any moment, wiping out all of the walking, talking, breathing, “noisy” things on the surface of the earth. The Biblical view of the Flood does not treat mankind as victim of a catastrophe, but morally responsible agents who chose to act wickedly, until “every one in his heart was intently brooding over evil continually” (Gen. 6:5 LXE). The two explanations for catastrophe are not mutually exclusive; the books of Job, Habakkuk and many of the Psalms address the problem of pain and suffering, and of course the gospels are all about the perfect man, the Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified by wicked men. But the moral perspective is mostly absent from Ancient Near Eastern texts.

The Paris Fragment

Subsequent to Smith’s discovery other fragmentary tablets were found which told the story of a catastrophic Flood, but none were older than the 7th century BC. There matters lay for a quarter of a century until a badly broken tablet showed up in Paris in the early 1900’s. Although it preserved just a few lines of legible text, one of the lines could be read as follows:

It wasn’t much, but here, at least, was a reference to the Flood on a tablet that could, by its ascription, be dated to the reign of Ammisaduqa (c. 1550-1530 BC). This made it approximately a millennia older than the tablet read by George Smith. Intriguingly, the scribe who produced the Paris fragment, inserted the word “broken” to indicate that he was copying an incomplete tablet. Thus the Paris Fragment, copied down down in the 16th century BC, is a broken copy of a much older text, also broken!

The Nippur Archive

Besides the Paris Fragment, published by Professor Scheil, no flood tablets of similar antiquity were known to exist. However the discovery in 1900 of a large archive at Nippur brought renewed hopes of finding more such tablets. Although never a political capital, Nippur was the religious center of Sumer, where Enlil’s temple the E-Kur (“House of the Mountain”) was located. The temple also housed a school where gifted boys were sent to learn the scribal trade. The main archive connected to the temple was finally discovered by an American expedition in a small mound known as “Tablet Hill” at the foot of Enlil’s temple.

Already in 1889, during the first season of excavations at Nippur, 2000 tablets had been found in Tablet Hill. The next season produced 2000 more. However, it was during the fourth and last season of excavations at Nippur that the greatest number of tablets were discovered, numbering 17,500 in total. The director of the dig during that final season, Herman Hilprecht, thought that the tablets must have belonged to a library attached to the E-kur. This meant that the archive was much older than any other that had been discovered until then. Many of the tablets were of a literary, scientific, and mathematical nature, rather than economic, and most were written in Sumerian. Their discovery was the Sumerian equivalent to finding the Library of Alexandria.

The great antiquity of the archive may be gauged by the 20 to 24 feet of earth that covered it. These overlying layers only produced around 1000 tablets, all of them dating to the Old Babylonian period.³According to Hilprecht, the earliest tablets found in the layers of earth overlying the main archive date to the reigns of Rim-Sin of Larsa, Hammurabi, and Samsu-iluna, rulers of the First Babylonian dynasty (Hilprecht 1910, 8-9). The archive itself was found in a single, deeply buried stratum, one to four feet thick. Most of the tablets were written in Sumerian although Akkadian was also present. Hilprecht dated the majority of the tablets to the First Dynasty of Isin, whilst he thought that “a considerable number” could date even earlier, to the Ur III and Akkadian periods.⁴Hilprecht 1910, 7

The Akkadian Nippur Flood Tablet

Nine years later, in 1909, Hilprecht opened two cases of tablets housed at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. The cases contained 433 whole tablets or large fragments, all of them written in Sumerian except for 3 whole tablets and 27 fragments, which were written in Akkadian. All of them were from the Nippur archive. One of the Akkadian tablets was ascribed to a certain “Erridu-pizir, the powerful one, king of (the) Guti and of the four quarters of the world.”⁵Hilprecht 1910, 22 The Guti, as you may recall, controlled parts of Sumer after the collapse of the Akkadian kingdom. This was an important discovery since it proved that some of the tablets could actually predate the Ur III period.

However, it was another fragment, written in Akkadian, which captured all of Hilprecht’s attention. Although in need of cleaning, he was able to make out the word ab-u-bi, the Akkadian word for “the Flood.” The fragment was not very large, only about 2 1/2 inches in each direction, but Hilprecht was intrigued by the possibilities it presented. He would spend an hour or two each day for the next three weeks cleaning the tablet and translating it.

The following is Hilprecht’s translation (without his glosses):

Although badly broken, the contours of the story can still be discerned. It is a more concise telling of the Flood story than the one recorded in the Gilgamesh epic and seems also to lack the latter’s mythological embellishments. The Nippur fragment was written in the first person, a small detail but significant, for as Hilprecht would later point out, all other known Babylonian accounts of the Flood have Ea warning Utnapishtim of a Flood that was about to be unleashed on the world by Enlil. Thus the flood warning was always written in the third person (“Enlil is about to bring a flood…”). However, in this fragment from Nippur, the deity who warns Utnapishtim about the flood (whose name is not preserved) is also the one who intends to bring the Flood. This is a totally different story. Overall, Hilprecht judged the Akkadian Nippur Flood tablet to have more in common with the Biblical account than with the Gilgamesh Flood Tablet.

The Sumerian Flood Tablet

A few years later, in 1914, the Swedish scholar, Arno Poebel, published another flood tablet from the Nippur archive, this one written in Sumerian. It is the only known copy of the Flood story written in this language. Kramer thought the original composition likely dated to the Ur III period. The hero of the flood story in the Sumerian version is named Ziudsura. Although key portions of it are missing (only the lower third of the tablet was preserved), we have the conclusion of the story (Black 2006):

Other versions of the Flood account have been found over the years, most notably the Atrahasis Epic, but the fragment published by Poebel—heretofore the Sumerian Flood Tablet—remains the only known version written in Sumerian.

ARC / Penn Museum

“Babel und Bibel”

George Smith was the first to call the public’s attention to the striking similarities between the Babylonian and Biblical accounts of the Flood. His discovery naturally raised questions as to how these similarities should be understood. Smith did not attempt at an answer these questions except to suggest that both accounts bore witness to a flood catastrophe.⁸Smith 1876, 289  Several other British Assyriologists, including Sir Henry Rawlinson, arrived at similar conclusions.  But there were other influential voices who argued that the similarities between the Biblical and Babylonian accounts of the Flood were not the product of a shared tradition, but were the result of Biblical authors copying from Babylonian originals, at a much later date.  This arguments reflected what was at that time a growing consensus among scholars that a considerable portion of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible) had been composed during the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Wellhausen was the first to write a detailed treatise on the subject in his Prolegomena to the History of Israel published just a few years after George Smith’s discovery of the Flood Tablet. Another well-known scholar, Friedrich Delitzsch, carried Wellhausen’s ideas to a much broader audience through a series of influential lectures delivered across several years (1902-1903). The first was given in the beautiful Singacademie in Berlin with many important personages present, including Kaiser Wilhelm II. Published in 1903 in a pamphlet titled Babel und Bibel (“Babel and Bible”), the lectures lit a firestorm of controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was not an accident that “Babel” preceded “Bible” in Delitzsch’s lecture title since he clearly gave priority to the Babylonian material. Delitzsch began his first lecture series by arguing that ancient Palestine was steeped in Babylonian though. This is proven by the Biblical narratives themselves, which were derived from earlier, more original, Babylonian myths, including the Biblical story of the Flood.⁹Delitzsch 1906, 39ff.

Hilprecht was well acquainted with Delitzsch’s ideas; both had entered the field of Assyriology at around the same time, and studied in the same program at the University in Leipzig. One of the reasons Hilprecht deemed the Akkadian Nippur Flood tablet worthy of immediate publication was that it shed some light on the questions Delitzsch was raising about the Babylonian background to the Biblical Flood account. Hilprecht argued that the Akkadian Nippur Flood tablet proved that there was more than one account of the Flood in circulation. Furthermore, although the tablet was badly broken, enough survived to prove that it differed significantly from the Gilgamesh Epic, and actually shared more in common with the Biblical account. There was no reason, therefore, why the Biblical account could not represent a separate early tradition, like the Akkadian Nippur Flood tablet. Whatever similarities they may have shared with other Babylonian accounts of the event were the product of a shared tradition rather than copying.

What about the Flood?

Ultimately, how we interpret these stories has a lot to do with how we interpret the event itself. Was the Flood a global catastrophe, a local event, or purely mythological? In his Babel und Bibel lectures, Delitzsch argued that the Babylonian Flood myth must have been inspired by a local catastrophe which resulted in extensive flooding in Sumer. Delitzsch thought this flood was probably created by a stray monsoon which entered the Persian Gulf and pushed a wall of water across the low-lying plain of Sumer. As proof of the destructive capacity of cyclones, Delitzsch pointed to one which swept across the Ganges delta of India in 1876 and took the lives of 215,000 people.¹⁰Delitzsch 1906, 39

In a similar vein, Sir Leonard Woolley thought he found evidence of a catastrophic flood in the layers of pure clay, eight feet thick, which interrupted the Ubaid strata of Ur. Labelled the “Flood Deposit” in his excavation reports, further probes at Ur proved that it was uniform, and in some places disappeared altogether. Woolley attributed this anomaly to the random eddies and swirls produced by the floodwaters.¹¹Woolley 1930, 329

Of course, floods were not rare events on flood plains; nor are flood deposits. Others have been found in the strata of other tells in Mesopotamia, although they do not belong to the same time period. These deposits were undoubtedly produced by floods, but probably not catastrophic ones. This much was admitted by Woolley who notes that the pottery found above and below the flood deposit belongs to a continuous sequence of Ubaid pottery.

In any case, as Alexander Heidel pointed out, the Babylonian story of the Flood rules out a catastrophic bursting of the rivers banks, since the boat was not swept downstream as one would expect in such an event, but settled on a mountain located 250 miles north of Shurrupak.¹²Heidel 1949, 244 The immediate cause of the Flood in the Babylonian account is the raging storm, which makes sense since it is Enlil, the storm god, who was responsible for bringing the Flood. Noticeably absent is any reference to the breaking up of the deep (the Abzu) such as might have caused the river to burst it banks. This too is understandable since the springs of the deep are the domain of Ea, who was opposed to Enlil’s plan to bring a world destroying Flood.¹³Heidel 1949, 244-245 The Bible diverges on this point, for according to it the Flood was produced when “the fountains of the great deep” burst forth and the “windows of the heavens” opened. (Gen. 7:11 ESV) Clearly a unique event is portrayed here.

In the modern uniformitarian versus catastrophist debate, the ancient Babylonian scribes would undoubtedly have sided with the catastrophists. For they divided all of human history into an age which preceded the Flood and another that followed. The Biblical authors also clearly understood it to be an event of epochal proportions. On this point, at least, they agree.