Great Flood

in the mythology of a number of peoples “god’s punishment” sent upon humanity or on all living things on earth. The first mention of the myth of the great flood, which dates from the first half of the second millennium B.C., is to be found among the Sumerian: righteous Ziusudra, who is saved in a large ship, is the only one to survive the flood sent by the gods to destroy “the seed of the human race.” In the Akkadian epic about Gilgamesh (from the middle of the second millennium B.C.), Utnapishtim, saving himself from the flood, takes “the seed of every living thing” with him in the ship that he built on the advice of the god Ea. In the fragments of another Akkadian epic, the Atrahasis epic, the sending of the flood is motivated by the fact that the noise of the human multitudes disturbs the sleep of Enlil, the god of air. According to the Hebrew myth (Old Testament), the great flood is sent because of grave sins and obliterates “every living thing from the face of the earth” except the righteous Noah and his family and a pair “of every kind of flesh”—seven pairs of clean animals, seven pairs of unclean animals, and seven pairs of birds. They are saved in an ark built by Noah in accordance with divine command. The variants of the Near Eastern myth about the great flood probably reflect in mythologized form an immense inundation that occurred in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys at the beginning of the third millennium B.C. The biblical myth of the great flood became the basis for the Muslim and Mandaean variants. A number of scholars believe that the ancient Greek myth of the great flood has its genesis in Mesopotamia. Analogous myths also exist in Chinese and Mayan myths. An analogy of the great flood myth is the ancient Iranian myth of a severe cold and inundation after the 1,000-year rule of King Yima.