Majestic ArchiveThe Night Of
Scene · reconstructed from the paperworkPicture it. London, 3 December 1872. A room full of members of the new Society of Biblical Archaeology, and a self-taught man named George Smith standing up to read a paper. He begins plainly. A short time back, he says in his paper[smith-1872], he discovered among the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum an account of the flood.
Smith had been sorting the museum's tablets from Nineveh by subject. In the pile of myths and legends he found pieces of a story, and then he searched several thousand smaller fragments for more. In the end he recovered 80 of them, enough to restore nearly all of the flood description. The flood, he told the room, was on the eleventh tablet of a set of at least twelve.
The tablet at the centre of it is still in London. The British Museum[bm-k3375] lists it as K.3375, The Flood Tablet: the upper right corner of a clay tablet, written in the 7th century BC, excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at Kuyunjik, the mound of ancient Nineveh. It is about 15 centimetres long. The museum calls it the single most famous cuneiform text.
What it says is a story told by a survivor. In the museum's summary, the gods decide to send a flood; one of them, Ea, reveals the plan to Utnapishtim and tells him to build a boat and take birds and beasts aboard. The rains come, the rest of mankind perishes, the boat grounds, and birds are sent out until one does not return. Utnapishtim later tells all of this to Gilgamesh.
You can see why the room went quiet. The museum[bm-k3375] says the tablet caused a sensation precisely because it looked so much like the flood story in Genesis.
The witness in this file is Smith himself, in his own published words. Nobody else in the room is quoted here. The rest is clay.
The Paper Trail
The paper trail starts in a palace library and ends in a modern catalogue.
The tablet comes from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The British Museum record[bm-k3375] gives the finder, Hormuzd Rassam, the findspot, Kuyunjik, and the date of the copy, the 7th century BC. CDLI[cdli-p273210], the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, catalogues it as P273210: Neo-Assyrian, Akkadian, a witness to Tablet 11 of the Gilgamesh epic, with George's 2003 critical edition as its primary publication.
Smith's own paper[smith-1872] already understood what he had. He found fragments of three copies of the same text, all from Ashurbanipal's time, and he noted that the text itself pointed back to the city of Erech, Uruk, as its origin. He did not claim his tablet was the first version. He said older copies were waiting in the ground.
He was right. In 1889 Budge's third mission brought tablets from Sippar to the museum. One of them, BM 78943[bm-atrahasis-78943], is the top half of an Old Babylonian tablet dated 1635 BC, from a set of three that told the story of Atrahasis, hero of the Babylonian flood. In that version the man warned by the god is not called Utnapishtim.
The Sumerian tradition has its own survivor. The Oxford corpus publishes The flood story[etcsl-flood], in which King Zi-ud-sura survives the deluge and the gods settle him in Dilmun. File #023 deals with the Sumerian gods; this file only notes that the flood hero has three names across three languages and periods.
The newest paper is from 2014. Irving Finkel of the British Museum wrote on the museum's blog[bm-blog-ark-2014] about a tablet a visitor had brought in: sixty lines of the flood story, written about 1750 BC. Its edition[seal-ark-tablet] has Enki tell Atra-hasis to build his boat on a circular plan.
Inventory: one famous Assyrian copy, catalogued twice; Smith's 1872 paper; older Atrahasis tablets in the same museum; a Sumerian version online; and a privately owned ark tablet published in 2014.
The Turn
The turn in this file is that the famous tablet stops being the beginning of the story.
In 1872 the Flood Tablet looked like a lost original, a Babylonian Noah that might be older than the Bible. The museum[bm-k3375] still describes the sensation it caused. But the record that followed put it in its place: it is a 7th-century BC copy of a story that was already more than a thousand years old.
The Atrahasis tablet[bm-atrahasis-78943] from Sippar is dated 1635 BC. Finkel's Ark Tablet[bm-blog-ark-2014] is put at about 1750 BC. And the details move between versions. In Gilgamesh XI the boat is built by Utnapishtim; in the Ark Tablet, Atra-hasis is told to build it round, a giant coracle, which Finkel says nobody had imagined before. The Sumerian text[etcsl-flood] has yet another king.
That changes what the tablet can be used for. It is excellent evidence of what Assyrian scribes copied and read. It is not a logbook of an event. It says what a poem says.
The arguments people build on it go in opposite directions. One reading, which Smith himself leaned toward in 1872[smith-1872], is that the flood stories share a common origin in the plains of Chaldea, and the Hebrew account came later. The opposite reading is put by Answers in Genesis[aig-2022]: the Mesopotamian poems differ from each other and from Genesis, they are entertainment, and their very spread points to a cultural memory of a real flood that Genesis records faithfully. Our Other Side[aig-2022] box gives that view at full strength.
Neither argument is settled by the clay. That is why this file is graded Recorded: the tablets are real, dated and readable. What they mean for Genesis, or for the world's geology, is argument.
What's Still Open
What is still open about the Flood Tablet is mostly about the story, not the object.
First, the road to Genesis. The tablets show a Mesopotamian flood tradition at least as old as the Atrahasis tablet[bm-atrahasis-78943] of 1635 BC. How that tradition relates to the Hebrew account, and which way any borrowing went, is argued by scholars and by believers[aig-2022] alike. The clay does not say.
Second, a real flood. Many readers ask whether a local Mesopotamian flood lies behind the story. The Archive has not opened any archaeological report on that question for this file, so it stays a question and nothing more.
Third, the missing lines. The Nineveh copy[bm-k3375] is a corner of a tablet. Smith restored the text from 80 fragments[smith-1872] and three copies; the modern edition fills more from other witnesses. Where exactly the gaps are is a matter for the critical edition, which the Archive cites but has not read.
Fourth, the round ark. The Ark Tablet[seal-ark-tablet] belongs to a private collection and has no known findspot. Its text is published; its history before the 1940s is not.
Fifth, the gods. Anyone looking here for the Anunnaki as visitors from another planet should open file #023. This file finds a flood story, a boat, birds and a grateful survivor. It finds no spacecraft.
The honest position: Recorded, a 7th-century BC copy of Gilgamesh XI with the flood story, read by George Smith in 1872. Recorded, older versions with Atrahasis and Zi-ud-sura. Argued, how these relate to Genesis. Not shown, a worldwide flood.
- Which way did the story travel?
- Is there a real flood behind it?
- What do the lost lines say?
The folder stays open and the file stays a draft for the editor.
