Great flood myths: why so many cultures have one

What the original texts say

Flood myths around the world survive as texts that can still be read. The Sumerian version was unknown until 1914, the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer recalled in 1967, when Arno Poebel published a tablet excavated at Nippur between 1889 and 1900. In it a flood sweeps over the land for seven days and seven nights while a huge boat is tossed by windstorms; afterwards the gods An and Enlil grant its hero, Ziusudra, "life like a god".

The version that made the story famous in modern times is the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 7th-century BC tablet from Nineveh now in the British Museum. In the museum's summary, the god Ea warns Utnapishtim of the gods' plan and tells him to build a boat for birds and beasts of all kinds. When the ship grounds, a first bird and then a swallow come back, but a raven does not, a sign the waters are falling. Utnapishtim sacrifices to the gods and is granted divine honours.

Genesis 6-9 tells a closely related story. God sees the earth filled with violence and tells Noah to build an ark 300 cubits long. Rain falls for forty days and nights, the waters swell for 150 days, and the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat. Noah sends out a raven, then a dove that returns with an olive leaf; he makes burnt offerings, and God sets a bow in the clouds as a sign that no flood will again cut off all flesh.

In the Library attributed to Apollodorus, Zeus sets out to destroy the men of the Bronze Age, and on Prometheus's advice Deucalion builds a chest and floats in it with Pyrrha for nine days and nights before landing on Parnassus. In India's Shatapatha Brahmana, a small fish asks Manu to raise it and warns him that a flood will carry away all creatures; Manu ties his ship to the fish's horn, reaches the northern mountain and alone survives. In China, Mencius describes the waters of Yao's time leaving their channels in what James Legge translated as "a universal inundation", until Yu cleared the rivers and led them to the sea.

How the versions differ

The Mesopotamian and biblical accounts share an unusual cluster of details: a warning to one man, a boat full of animals, birds sent out to test for dry land, and a sacrifice at the end. The British Museum says its Gilgamesh tablet caused a sensation when first read in the nineteenth century for exactly that reason.

On a Mesopotamian tablet about 4,000 years old studied by Irving Finkel of the British Museum, the Associated Press reported in 2014, the boat is a round coracle of rope reinforced with wooden ribs and coated in bitumen, and the animals go in two by two. Genesis itself gives two counts: two of every kind in chapter 6, seven pairs of every clean animal in chapter 7.

Causes and endings differ most. Genesis gives human wickedness and violence as the reason, Apollodorus gives Zeus's wish to end the Bronze Age race, and the Shatapatha Brahmana gives none. In Gilgamesh everyone outside the boat perishes; in Apollodorus the flood covers the greater part of Greece and a few people escape to the mountains. Deucalion and Pyrrha throw stones that become men and women, and Manu's offerings in the waters produce a woman through whom he fathers "this race of Manu". In Mencius nobody escapes in a boat: the flood ends through engineering.

How scholars explain it

Great flood myths explained by scholars fall into a few kinds, and none covers every case. The first is borrowing. Kramer treated the Old Testament version as based on the Mesopotamian story, and Finkel told the Associated Press he was sure the flood-and-boat story was a Babylonian invention, probably passed on to the Jews during their exile in Babylon in the 6th century BC. That explains Gilgamesh and Genesis, but not Manu's fish or Yu's rivers.

The second is real floods. In 1929 Leonard Woolley dug below the pottery and ash of settlement at Ur into clean, water-laid mud, eleven feet thick in a larger pit. Kramer accepted a real flood but not Woolley's date. The Ur deposits go back to at least 3500 BC, too early for Ziusudra, while flood layers at Kish and at Shuruppak, Ziusudra's own city, lay directly above remains of the Jemdet Nasr period, closer to his date. Kramer concluded that the story was inspired by a disaster some time about 3000 BC, catastrophic "but by no means universal".

The third is the sea. Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid, in Australian Geographer in 2016, gathered Aboriginal stories from 21 locations around Australia's coast about land drowned by rising sea level. They argued the stories describe events more than about 7,000 years ago, when the sea reached roughly its present level there, and corroborate sea-level rise after the last ice age.

The fourth is the most contested. In 2016 Q. Wu and colleagues argued in Science that China's legendary Great Flood was real: an outburst flood around 1920 BC, when a landslide dam in the Jishi Gorge on the Yellow River collapsed. Dave Petley, on the American Geophysical Union's Landslide Blog, noted that many scholars regard the Xia dynasty, said to have followed Yu's taming of the flood, as mythical, and expected the link to be highly controversial.

Later retellings

Retelling began early. The Associated Press noted that the flood story recurs in later Mesopotamian writings, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Kramer and Finkel both read the biblical account as a further link in that chain. The British Museum now calls its Gilgamesh flood tablet the single most famous cuneiform text. Finkel's book The Ark Before Noah set out his reading of the round ark, and a television documentary was to follow attempts to build it.

Verdict

Are great flood myths real? As texts, yes, and some are close enough that scholars treat them as one tradition. As a true story of one flood that drowned the whole world, the evidence cited here does not show one; it points to catastrophic but local floods in Mesopotamia, coastlines lost to a rising sea and a disputed candidate in China. Many cultures have one for several reasons: shared tradition, remembered local disasters, and stories about taming water. Religious meaning is not something archaeology can test, and this file does not try. Real or Legend files the explanation as disputed.