{"it":{"id":"TX003","kind":"text","sub":"Sumerian","name":"Eridu Genesis (The Flood story, ETCSL 1.7.4)","place":"Philadelphia","date":"c.1600 BCE copy (composition earlier)","oldest":"c.1600 BCE","inst":"CBS 10673, Penn Museum (provenance Nippur) -- confirmed in ETCSL c.1.7.4 source list","lang":"Sumerian","src":[201,504,202],"lat":39.949,"lon":-75.191,"tags":["Near East","Flood myths","Creation myths"],"sum":"'Waves and windstorms had rocked the huge boat for seven days and seven nights.' Then Utu, the sun god, comes out and lights heaven and earth. The animals disembark, and the gods grant Ziusudra 'life like a god' and settle him in Dilmun. This is the Sumerian flood story, often called the Eridu Genesis, and it is older than the version in Genesis.\n\nIt survives on one broken clay tablet, Penn Museum B10673, excavated at Nippur by Penn's first expedition in the 1890s and dated to the seventeenth century B.C. Only the lower third remains, with six columns of text, three on each side. It is the only account of the flood in the Sumerian language. In the translation, whole sections are missing, about 34 lines in one place and about 38 in another. In what remains, the gods' assembly decides that 'the seed of mankind is to be destroyed', and a voice warns Ziusudra through a wall.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is how often this story returns: in Sumerian, in Akkadian with Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and in the Bible with Noah.\n\nErich von Däniken, in Chariots of the Gods, saw the flood as a real catastrophe told by eyewitnesses, and noted that this Nippur tablet was older than the Gilgamesh account. The tablet answers him in its own words. Its flood is decided in an assembly of gods, announced through a wall, and ends with a king given eternal life in Dilmun. That is the shape of myth, and a story retold across three cultures points to a shared tradition, not a single eyewitness.\n\nThe open question is the flood behind the story. Which real flood, if any, did the first teller have in mind?","why":"The oldest written flood story, told from the surviving lines and its gaps.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":7,"yt":"Line up the warning scene in ETCSL 1.7.4 with Atrahasis and Genesis 6.","rel":["TX004","TX006","TX056"],"hook":"A Sumerian flood: Ziusudra's huge boat is tossed for seven days and seven nights before the sun god returns."},"S":{"201":["etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk","https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm"],"504":["Wikipedia: Eridu Genesis","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eridu_Genesis"],"202":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atra-Hasis"]},"rec":{"id":"TX003","alias":["W11T08","W15T06"],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA107","a":"Memory of real cataclysm and sky-gods.","who":"Hancock (cataclysm); Sitchin","main":"Earliest flood narrative; shares structure with Atrahasis/Gilgamesh/Genesis via literary transmission.","ms":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1},{"id":"AA205","a":"ancient/NHI-origin claims","who":"various (not itemised)","main":"First 36 lines lost; Sumerian","ms":"W11S58;W11S79","st":"no data","n":"Genuine text.","nl":"1"},{"id":"AA221","a":"Records contact with non-human/advanced beings or craft","who":"AA literature (see claimant_index)","main":"c.1600 BCE (Sumerian); first 36 lines lost","ms":"W15S12","st":"no data","n":"Penn museum number not in opened text this wave (see W11 prim penn10673 for prior wave).","nl":"1"}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[{"who":"Erich von Daniken","med":"book","ep":"Chariots of the Gods? (Eng. pb, IA scan), ch.6 (TOC p.55)","v":"Oldest Flood account; five antediluvian cities","b":"S","s":["W17S17"]}],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"ETCSL t.1.7.4 Seg. A ll.10-14","q":"\"After An, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursaja had fashioned the black-headed people\"","exact":"yes","tr":"ETCSL","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm","mo":"creation"},{"ref":"ETCSL t.1.7.4 Seg. B ll.6-18","q":"\"after the exalted crown and throne of kingship had descended from heaven\"","exact":"yes","tr":"ETCSL","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm","mo":"descent from heaven"},{"ref":"ETCSL t.1.7.4 Seg. D ll.1-11","q":"Flood rocks the huge boat seven days and nights; Utu appears. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"ETCSL","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm","mo":"flood"},{"ref":"ETCSL t.1.7.4 Seg. E ll.3-11","q":"Ziusudra granted eternal life and settled in Dilmun. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"ETCSL","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm","mo":"immortality"}],"tr":[{"by":"ETCSL","yr":"1998","t":"The Flood story t.1.7.4","lic":"open","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm"}],"mo":[{"v":"sky_descent","ev":"P006","n":"Sumerian","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm"},{"v":"flood","ev":"P007","n":"Sumerian original","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm"},{"v":"withdrawal_of_gods","ev":"Ziusudra removed to Dilmun (partial)","n":"Sumerian","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm"}],"tl":[],"wit":[{"id":"W11T08","mw":"CBS 10673 Flood Tablet, Nippur, baked clay, lower third of 6-column tablet, ca. 1650 BCE (Penn); found 1893 Penn expedition, recognized by Poebel 1912","kn":"First 36 lines lost; Sumerian","pf":"genuine ancient","st":"no data","sn":"Genuine text.","b":"V","s":["W11S58","W11S79"]},{"id":"W15T06","mw":"Primary tablet from Nippur, Univ. of Pennsylvania expedition 1893, recognised by Arno Poebel 1912; fragment from Ur also cited","kn":"c.1600 BCE (Sumerian); first 36 lines lost","pf":"genuine ancient","st":"no data","sn":"Penn museum number not in opened text this wave (see W11 prim penn10673 for prior wave).","b":"S","s":["W15S12"]}],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Earliest flood narrative; shares structure with Atrahasis/Gilgamesh/Genesis via literary transmission.","alternative_reading":"Memory of real cataclysm and sky-gods.","alt_proponent":"Hancock (cataclysm); Sitchin","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Fragmentary (~1/3 survives); restorations conjectural.","key_theme":"gods fashion 'black-headed people'; kingship descends from heaven; Ziusudra survives flood","language":"Sumerian","physical_object_institution":"CBS 10673, Penn Museum (provenance Nippur) -- confirmed in ETCSL c.1.7.4 source list","composition_date":"c.1600 BCE copy (composition earlier)","oldest_ms_date":"c.1600 BCE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W17S17","t":"von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods? English pb (Internet Archive OCR full text; saved prim/chariots_ia.txt)","u":"https://archive.org/download/chariots_of_the_gods/chariots_of_the_gods1_djvu.txt"},{"id":"W11S58","t":"Penn Museum CBS 10673 Flood Tablet","u":"https://collections.penn.museum/collections/object/97591"},{"id":"W11S79","t":"Wikipedia Eridu Genesis","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eridu_Genesis&oldid=1365484301"},{"id":"W15S12","t":"Wikipedia Eridu Genesis","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eridu_Genesis&oldid=1365484301"},{"id":"S0646","t":"etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk","u":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Eridu Genesis","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eridu_Genesis"},{"id":"S0428","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atra-Hasis"},{"id":"VTX003-8","t":"University of Pennsylvania NELC 133 exhibit: object biographies, the Flood Tablet","u":"https://pennds.org/nelc133/exhibits/show/object_biographies/flood_tablet"},{"id":"VTX003-9","t":"von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (Internet Archive)","u":"https://archive.org/details/erich-von-daniken-chariots-of-the-gods-unsolved-mysteries-of-the-past-pdfdrive"}],"qs":["A Sumerian hero builds a boat to save life, long before Genesis. Who told the story first, and why does it keep returning?","Von Däniken read flood stories as eyewitness memory. What would it take to convince you?","The gods decide humanity must be destroyed. What does that say about how Sumerians saw their gods?"],"sum":"# The Eridu Genesis: The First Flood Story\n\nA king stands beside a wall and listens. His name is Zi-ud-sura, a ruler and a priest, and something \"that was not a dream\" has come to him. The voice that speaks does not address him directly. It speaks to the wall. \"Side-wall standing at my left side,\" it says, \"I will speak words to you; take heed of my words, pay attention to my instructions. A flood will sweep over\" the land. \"A decision that the seed of mankind is to be destroyed has been made. The verdict, the word of the divine assembly, cannot be revoked.\"\n\nThis is the oldest written account of the great flood that we know of, and the strangest detail in it may be that the god who warns humanity does so sideways, through a wall, just after every god has sworn an oath.\n\n## One broken tablet\n\nThe story is known to scholars as the Eridu Genesis, and in the Oxford translation simply as The Flood Story. Its main witness is a single clay tablet in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, catalogued as CBS 10673. It was excavated at Nippur, in southern Iraq, by the University of Pennsylvania's first expedition there, in 1893, and its story was recognised by the Assyriologist Arno Poebel in 1912. It dates to the seventeenth century BC, around 1600 BC by the commonest estimate, and the composition itself is older.\n\nWhat survives is only the lower third of a tablet that once carried six columns of text, three on each side. It is written in Sumerian, and it is the only account of the flood in that language. Two other fragments help: one from Ur, from roughly the same period, and a bilingual Sumerian and Akkadian piece from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, from about 600 BC. A further fragment was published in 2018.\n\nBecause the tablet is broken, the story reaches us in pieces. The translation marks the gaps plainly: about 36 lines lost at the start, then about 32, about 34, about 38, about 33 and about 39 more. Whole scenes are missing, including the instructions for building the boat. Every reading of the Eridu Genesis is a reading of what is left.\n\n## Creation, cities and crowns\n\nWhen the text begins, a goddess is speaking. She is Nintud, a goddess of birth, and she plans to rescue her creatures from \"perishing.\" \"Let them build many cities so that I can refresh myself in their shade,\" she says. \"Let them lay the bricks of many cities in pure places.\" Then comes a line about the making of people and beasts: \"After An, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursaja had fashioned the black-headed people,\" the Sumerians' name for themselves, \"they also made animals multiply everywhere.\"\n\nAfter a gap, civilisation arrives from above. \"After the exalted crown and throne of kingship had descended from heaven, the divine rites and the exalted powers were perfected, the bricks of the cities were laid in holy places.\" Five cities are named and given to gods: Eridu first, to Nudimmud, another name of Enki; then Bad-tibira, Larag, Zimbir and Shuruppak. These are the same five cities, in the same order, that the Sumerian King List names before the flood.\n\n## The flood\n\nThen another gap, and the gods have changed their minds. The surviving lines are broken but grim. The goddess Inana laments for her people. Enki takes counsel with himself. The great gods make all the gods of heaven and earth swear an oath. Zi-ud-sura, \"the humble, committed, reverent\" king, stands day after day in devotion, and then comes the scene at the wall. \"Their kingship, their term has been cut off,\" the voice says of humanity.\n\nAfter the longest gap of all, the waters arrive. \"All the windstorms and gales arose together, and the flood swept over\" the land. \"After the flood had swept over the land, and waves and windstorms had rocked the huge boat for seven days and seven nights, Utu the sun-god came out, illuminating heaven and earth.\" Zi-ud-sura drills an opening in the boat, and the sun god enters \"with his rays.\" The king prostrates himself, then sacrifices oxen and \"innumerable sheep.\"\n\nThe ending is short and extraordinary. \"More and more animals disembarked onto the earth.\" The great gods An and Enlil treat Zi-ud-sura kindly. \"They granted him life like a god, they brought down to him eternal life.\" And because he preserved \"the animals and the seed of mankind,\" they settled him \"in an overseas country, in the land Dilmun, where the sun rises.\"\n\n## The same story, told again\n\nAnyone who knows Genesis has heard this before. A divine decision to destroy humanity, one man warned, a great boat, animals saved, a sacrifice after the waters fall. The same story appears in Akkadian in the Atrahasis epic and, with a hero named Utnapishtim, in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Researchers have long assumed that the Mesopotamian versions influenced the Hebrew Bible. The usual view treats the Eridu Genesis as the earliest form of a narrative passed down and reshaped through literary transmission.\n\nSome scholars connect it with an actual event. At Shuruppak, the city of Zi-ud-sura in the tradition, and at other cities as far north as Kish, excavators found a layer of river sediment that interrupts the continuity of settlement, radiocarbon dated to around 2900 BC. Pottery of the Jemdet Nasr period, about 3000 to 2900 BC, lies immediately below the Shuruppak layer. On this reading, a local river flood, catastrophic for those who lived through it, grew in the telling into the end of the world.\n\n## A memory of something larger?\n\nOthers read the story as more than literature. Erich von Däniken, in Chariots of the Gods, treated the flood as a real catastrophe described by eyewitnesses and pointed out that this Nippur tablet is older than the Gilgamesh account. Writers on lost civilisations have read it as the memory of a global cataclysm.\n\nThe tablet itself does not settle the matter. Its flood is decided in an assembly of gods, announced through a wall, and ends with a king given eternal life, all hallmarks of myth. And yet the shape of the story is worth noticing. Kingship arrives \"from heaven\" already complete, with crown and throne. Cities are founded in an order that recurs in other Sumerian texts. A ruling council of gods decides humanity's fate behind closed doors, and one sympathetic god finds a loophole. After the flood the survivor is not left among men. He is taken away, given the life of the gods, and settled in a distant land in the east.\n\nIn Sumerian the word often read as \"mountain\" in later flood stories can also mean \"land,\" a foreign country or the underworld, so even the landing place shifts with translation.\n\nThe people who wrote this tablet already believed the flood was ancient history, told in a story of gods, councils and a king carried off to Dilmun. If they were remembering something, how far back does that memory reach, and what did it actually see?"},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX003-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Eridu Genesis (The Flood story, ETCSL 1.7.4), Philadelphia — Tablet of the Sumerian Flood Story (or Eridu Genesis). Nippur, 17th century BC. Penn Museum CBS10673…","by":"Onceinawhile (talk · contribs)","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CBS10673_Sumerian_Flood_Story_Penn_Museum.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"c. 1600 BCE","h":"c.1600 BCE copy (composition earlier)","s":[272]},{"v":"c.1600 BCE","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[272]},{"v":"Sumerian","h":"Language","s":[272]},{"v":"CBS 10673","h":"Where the physical copy is held","s":[272]}],"hs":{"272":["etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk","https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr174.htm"]}}