Position in chronology
British Museum Flood Tablet 1
Translation · reference
ExperimentalSource: Wikimedia Commons file: File:British Museum Flood Tablet 1.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABritish_Museum_Flood_Tablet_1.jpg. Description: "The Flood Tablet. This is perhaps the most famous of all cuneiform tablets. It is the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, and describes how the gods sent a flood to destroy the world. Like Noah, Utnapishtim was forewarned and built an a
Why it matters
Transliteration
Scholarly note
Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: "The Flood Tablet. This is perhaps the most famous of all cuneiform tablets. It is the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, and describes how the gods sent a flood to destroy the world. Like Noah, U
Attribution
Image: Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ). — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:British Museum Flood Tablet 1.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABritish_Museum_Flood_Tablet_1.jpg. Description: "The Flood Tablet. This is perhaps the most famous of all cuneiform tablets. It is the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, and describes how the gods sent a flood to destroy the world. Like Noah, Utnapishtim was forewarned and built an a.
Related tablets
Related sources
The single most important literary discovery of the 19th century. It rewired the understanding of the Bible's literary context and proved that the Mesopotamian flood tradition is older. It is the oldest surviving epic poetry in human history.
The literary tradition is no longer anonymous from this point. Authorship — the idea that a specific human voice composes a specific work — enters the historical record with her.
The single most influential Mesopotamian king list — the model for every later attempt to chronicle the deep history of the region. It transmits the political theology of divinely granted kingship, an idea that would echo through Babylon, Assyria, and into the Hebrew Bible. The Weld-Blundell prism (WB 444) at the Ashmolean is the most complete surviving copy.