The Great Flood that covered the world is one of the oldest -- and most widespread -- stories of early human civilization. The basic outlines of this story can be found in a number of ancient texts. The Noah's Ark story from Genesis, chapters 6-9, is just one example. There are legends from many early civilizations in which a man is warned by a god that a great flood would cover the earth. To prepare, the man builds a boat of some sort to save himself and his family, and these survivors of the flood repopulate the world. Beyond that, however, there are several variables. For example, in some versions of the story -- such as Noah's Ark -- animals are saved also. But not in all of them. And please note that in this essay I do not intend to question whether the Great Flood literally happened, or not. This is simply a story about a story. However, I do argue it's foolish to claim that all these ancient flood stories prove the Great Flood described in Genesis really happened. No, they don't.
I assume most readers will be familiar with the Noah's Ark story. According to tradition, Moses wrote the book of Genesis in the 13th century BCE, or thereabouts. Scholars today say that Genesis was composed in the mid-to-late 1st millennium BCE. In his book Who Wrote the Bible?, Richard Elliott Friedman analyzes the Genesis story of the Great Flood and shows how it appears to be the work of two authors whose separately written accounts were stitched together into one. Of course, the Genesis story probably was based on earlier oral traditions or other sources. This article will look at some of those possible sources.
Before we go any further, it must be noted that the Great Flood story is not universal, as is sometimes claimed. It's true that myths and legends about floods can be found in early civilizations from around the globe. This shouldn't be surprising. Humans need water; communities thrived where there was a water source. And where there is water, there will be floods. It's also the case that a gentle little stream can flow through a community for generations. And then a weather or geological event many miles away can cause the stream to overflow its banks and wash away everything in that community. It's an event that people would remember and turn into stories.
But the many flood legends are not all the same. Many don't claim that the flood covered the whole world, for example. The Great Flood Legend of China was definitely a regional flood, not a global one, and nobody tried to ride out the flood in a boat. Instead, after years of devastating seasonal floods the clever Emperor Yu invented drainage canals. There are African legends about floods that were sent by gods to purify the earth, but I don't believe any of them feature a Noah-like character who saves some people and animals on a boat. An ancient Egyptian flood myth tells us the gods flooded the world with beer dyed red to look like blood. The point of this was to entice a ferocious blood-drinking goddess into drinking lots of beer and getting intoxicated so that she would stop killing people. No boats were involved in this story. And why no one has turned this tale into a major motion picture I cannot say. But it's an entirely different story from Noah's Ark.
On the other hand, there is an Aztec legend of a husband and wife named Tata and Nena who were warned by the god Tezcatlipoca that a great flood was upon them. Tata and Nena carved a canoe out of a tree and survived the flood. Other non-aquatic life forms were on their own, however. Greek mythology tells us that the god Zeus grew angry at mankind and sent a great flood to destroy everyone. But Deucalion was warned of the flood by his father, the god Prometheus, and so with his wife Pyrrha he survived the flood in a well-provisioned chest. But as in the Aztec myth, no animals were saved.
And before moving on I want to just mention a Sumerian flood myth featuring Ziusudra, said to have been a king of a city Shuruppak, who played the role of boat-builder. We know this story from a single fragmented tablet, written in Sumerian, that has been dated to the 17th century BCE. What we have of this version correlates, for the most part, to the one found in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The clay tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh were found in the ruins of Nineveh, in present-day Iraq, in 1853. They were written in the Akkadian language of ancient Mesopotamia. The tablets were dated to 1300-1000 BCE. Since their discovery, even older versions of the story of Gilgamesh have been found, some dating to 2100 BCE. Although the Epic of Gilgamesh is considered fiction, there is some evidence there was a historical Gilgamesh. He may have been a king who ruled the Sumerian city-state of Uruk sometime during the Early Dynastic Period of Mesopotamia, c. 2900-c. 2350 BCE.
One tablet found in 1853, designated Tablet XI, contained a version of the Great Flood story. In this story, several gods conspired to bring about a great flood to destroy humankind. However, one God, Ea, alerted a king named Utunapishtim. Ea told Utnapishtim to demolish his house and build a boat. The boat had seven decks and seems to have had a box shape -- all sides measured 120 cubits. (A cubit was a unit of measure based on the distance between a man's elbow and the tip of his middle finger.) When the boat was finished, Utnapishtim loaded his relatives, the craftsmen who had built the boat, and "all the beasts and animals of the field" onto the boat. Then the storm came. It lasted six days and six nights, and it was so terrible even the gods were frightened. When the storm subsided, the boat was lodged on a mountain. Utnapishtim began releasing birds to see if they would return. When a raven failed to come back, he knew the raven had found food and shelter, and the passengers could disembark.
When Tablet XI was translated, scholars speculated that Gilgamesh was the source for the Noah's Ark story. But later they learned it wasn't the only possible source.
The Epic of Atra-hasis -- sometimes spelled without the hyphen -- is another Mesopotamian work that was found on clay tablets, some of which also were found at Nineveh. The oldest extant copy can be dated by an inscription to the reign of Hammurabi's great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa, 1646-1626 BCE. The Atra-hasis flood story is very similar to the one in Gilgamesh. It's speculated that both epics are the fruit of the same oral tradition that existed for generations before either was put in writing. But there is at least one detail in Atra-hasis that is closer to the Noah story than Gilgamesh.
It begins very differently. The gods grew tired of forming the world. Digging out the Tigris and Euphrates rivers must have been a chore. So they made humans to do the work. But after a while the humans got too loud and disturbed the gods' rest. To reduce the number of humans and shut them up, the gods sent drought, pestilence, famine. And then, finally, they sent a great flood. But the god Enki took pity on his servant Atra-hasis and told him to build an ark that would survive the flood. Further, Atra-hasis was told to save two of each kind of animal so that they can repopulate the earth. This is the oldest known mention of that particular detail. Also, the god Enki promised no more floods would be sent to end humanity, another detail in Genesis that is missing from Gilgamesh. For more parallels between Atra-hasis and the Noah story from the Torah, see The Mesopotamian Origin of the Biblical Flood Story.
I want to mention one other Mesopotamian account, even though it is not old enough to be a source for Genesis. It was recorded by the Babylonian priest Berosus, who lived in the 3rd century BCE or so. Berosus included an account of the Great Flood in his three-volume work Babyloniaca, a history of Babylon, written in Greek. Berosus is important because he was drawing on older Babylonian records and texts that are now lost. And because he wrote in Greek his work gained wide circulation and was quoted by many other scholars, including Josephus and Eusebius, over the next few centuries. It's through those quotations that we know about Berosus, actually, because we have only fragments of his own writing. So all this is a bit tenuous.
What's most notable about the Berosus flood story is that the Ark he describes is longer than it is wide, which makes it more like the Ark in Genesis, although the dimensions are different. Berosus also has the Ark landing in modern-day Armenia, which some scholars say is where "the mountains of Ararat" in Genesis 8:4 were located. The current Mount Ararat, in Turkey, was probably misidentified as the landing place of Noah's Ark sometime in the Middle Ages.
The Stories Thus Far are all from the region of Mesopotamia. Here's one that isn't.
Manu is a name from very old Hindu scriptures beginning with the Rig Veda, which may date to as far back as 1500 BCE. The flood story featuring Manu is not that old, however. The flood story is in the Shatapatha Brahmana, which may date to about 800 to 700 BCE, although the final version probably was written about 300 BCE. It's believed portions of the Shatapatha Brahmana could be from much older oral traditions, however.
In this story, a small fish came to the righteous man Manu and asked for protection from the dangers of the water. So Manu first kept the fish in a pot. When the fish outgrew the pot it was released into a into a nice, quiet pond, and then a lake. As the fish grew much larger it was released into the ocean. And at that point the fish revealed himself to be the god Vishnu. Vishnu advised Manu that a flood was about to cover the entire world. To save himself and other life, Manu was told to build a boat. Manu's boat was filled with plants and seeds, many animals, and copies of the Vedas, the holy scriptures. Vishnu caused the boat to land on the great Himalaya mountains. When the flood was over Manu was the only human being alive. Yet somehow through his prayers, meditations, and rituals, a new human race emerged. You can read more about Manu and the Great Deluge here.
I'm not saying that this is a source for Noah's Ark. However, it's not impossible this story contains some roots in Mesopotamia. By the mid-1st millennium BCE there were trade routes that connected Greece and Babylon and Persia and northern India. And then Alexander the Great (346-323 BCE) led his troops from Greece to Mesopotamia and Babylonia -- with a side trip to Egypt -- and east to the Indus Valley, where his troops refused to go further. But it's known Alexander and his officers came into contact with Brahmins and Jains. There was more cultural intermingling than we might imagine in the ancient world. It's not at all impossible for a version of a Mesopotamian story to have reached India by 300 BCE, to be included in the Shatapatha Brahmana. For that matter, it's not at all impossible for a Mesopotamian story to have reached Greece and be adapted into Greek myth.