A great-flood story appears in cultures around the world
From Mesopotamia to India to Mexico, many peoples tell of a deluge and a lone survivor in a boat.
Long before the Book of Genesis, Mesopotamian scribes told of a world-drowning flood. The oldest surviving version, on Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, describes how Utnapishtim is warned by a god, builds a great boat, and rides out the waters while humankind perishes - releasing birds to test whether the flood has receded.
The motif recurs widely. In Hebrew scripture it is Noah; in Hindu tradition a fish warns Manu to build a vessel; in Greek myth Deucalion, son of Prometheus, survives Zeus’s flood; Aztec accounts tell of a world ended by water.
Like Noah in the Hebrew Bible, Utnapishtim had been forewarned of a plan by the gods to send a great flood.
The shared pattern - divine warning, a righteous survivor, a boat, renewal afterward - is one of the most widespread in world mythology. When the British Museum’s George Smith deciphered the Gilgamesh flood in 1872, the parallels caused a sensation.
Sources & references
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