The Flood Myth — Before Noah, There Was Utnapishtim

The Sumerian flood story is at least a thousand years older than Genesis. The gods decided to destroy humanity with a great flood. Enki warned one righteous man — Utnapishtim — to build a boat and take aboard every living creature. The flood came. The boat held. The water receded. A bird was released to find dry land. The survivor made offerings of gratitude to the gods who had tried to kill him. This story — found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Atrahasis Epic, in the Eridu Genesis — predates every other flood narrative in recorded history. When the authors of Genesis wrote their flood story, they were almost certainly working with a tradition that had already been told in the land between the rivers for two thousand years. Utnapishtim was first.

These signs carry the ark on the floodwaters, the dove on the horizon, the mountain that emerged from the deep, and the story that humanity could not stop telling itself.