Flood myths compared across cultures

The short answer

The oldest known divinely initiated flood story is Mesopotamian, and several others are compared with it in the reference pages. Of ten flood heroes below, two are Attested, four Scholarly and four Popular claim. The Greek, Hindu and Zoroastrian cases carry scholarly comparisons. Chinese and Native American traditions are listed as flood stories on the pages without any stated link to Mesopotamia.

Flood stories are common, and pages differ on why. Some propose a shared inheritance, some local floods and some natural events. This article reports those proposals and does not choose among them.

Mesopotamia: the baseline

The Flood myth entry calls the Mesopotamian account the oldest known divinely initiated flood narrative. It appears in the Atra-Hasis epic (18th century BC), the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Eridu Genesis. The hero is Atrahasis, Utnapishtim or Ziusudra depending on the text. Enlil sends the flood, and Enki warns the hero so he can build a boat.

The Atra-Hasis entry gives the reason. Humans multiplied until their noise kept the gods from sleeping. Enlil first sent plague, then storms and drought, and then decided to destroy humanity with a flood, angry that Enki had repeatedly protected humans. Enlil had made Enki swear never to speak to humans again, so Enki spoke to the wall of Atrahasis's reed hut while Atrahasis slept.

He told Atrahasis to leave his house, build a boat, give up his possessions and save his life, and to take food and animals. The boat was cube-shaped, roofed and sealed with pitch. After the flood it came to rest on a mountain. Atrahasis released birds, then offered sacrifices, and the starving gods gathered eagerly around the food.

In the Gilgamesh version the hero is Utnapishtim, son of Ubara-Tutu, and Enki (Ea) secretly tells him to build a boat with exact dimensions, sealed with pitch and bitumen. His family, his craftsmen and all the animals of the field boarded. A storm lasted six days and seven nights, the frightened gods retreated to the heavens and Ishtar lamented. The boat rested on Mount Nimush. He released a dove, a swallow and a raven, and the raven did not return. Enlil was angry that anyone survived and Enki rebuked him for an excessive punishment. Enlil then blessed Utnapishtim and his wife and granted them eternal life.

The later version omits details from the earlier one, such as the banquet and the gods' hunger and thirst, and softens the human-like portrayal of the gods. It suggests a lost intermediate version was used as a source.

Hero by hero

Each row names a flood hero, the tradition and the story it is compared with. The comparison is against the Mesopotamian baseline unless the row says otherwise. The marks are explained at the end.

Genesis and the older accounts

God spares Noah, his family and one pair of every animal species by means of an ark 300 cubits long, 50 wide and 30 high, made of gopher wood and sealed with pitch or bitumen. It says scholars have long held that the account draws on older Mesopotamian models and names the Utnapishtim account as the closest. Other parallels it lists include the Hebrew word for ark, which resembles the Babylonian word for an oblong boat, and the Hebrew word for pitch, which is closely related to its Babylonian counterpart.

It also records the differences. Genesis presents the flood as judgment on wickedness, the Gilgamesh account gives no reason and the Atrahasis account links the flood to human overpopulation. On the Gilgamesh page, Andrew George argues that Genesis follows the Gilgamesh version point by point and in the same order, and Robert Wexler suggests both drew on a common Mesopotamian flood tradition that diverged in retelling.

Irving Finkel concluded that the Flood story, Noah and the Ark originated in ancient Mesopotamia. The entry also notes that since the 18th century the Genesis narrative has been analyzed as a combination of two source versions, distinguished partly by the divine names Elohim and Yahweh. Readers hold a range of views on the text, and this article reports only the comparison.

The Atra-Hasis entry adds that both accounts create the first man from clay, and links the 120-year lifespan in Genesis to the lifespan limit Enki sets in the epic. The Noah entry dates the last known Mesopotamian version to Berossus, who wrote in Greek in the 3rd century BC.

Greece: Deucalion

Plato's Timaeus, around 360 BC, describes Zeus sending a flood against the Bronze race, with Prometheus warning his son Deucalion, who builds an ark that lands on a mountain. The Deucalion entry adds the cause: Zeus acts in anger at King Lycaon of Arcadia, who had sacrificed a boy to him. Deucalion builds a chest and stocks it with provisions. It comes to rest on Mount Parnassus, though other sources name Etna, Athos or Othrys.

To repopulate the earth, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha consult an oracle of Themis, which tells them to throw the bones of their mother behind them. They take the mother to be Gaia and the bones to be rocks. Stones thrown by Pyrrha become women and those thrown by Deucalion become men. The fullest accounts are in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the mythographer Apollodorus, and Pindar also describes the stone-born people. The Deucalion entry notes the Gilgamesh parallels of a boat built for safety, birds sent to test the water and animals taken aboard.

India and Persia

Vaivasvata, the seventh Manu, ruled as king of Dravida before a great flood. The Matsya avatar of Vishnu warned him, and Manu built a boat that carried the Vedas, his family and the seven sages to safety with Matsya's help. The tale recurs with variations in the Mahabharata and several Puranas. The Flood myth entry names the Satapatha Brahmana and the Puranas as texts carrying the story. The Manu entry lists Noah, Ziusudra, Atra-Hasis and the Hawaiian Nu'u as related figures and does not state the specific parallels.

The Flood myth entry records two arguments by Oettinger. The first is that the Zoroastrian Yima story was originally a flood myth. In the Zoroastrian account Ahriman attempts destruction through drought, and Mithra ends it by shooting an arrow into a rock that releases a flood, with one man surviving in an ark with his cattle. The second is that Indian flood myths originally had Yama, not Manu, as protagonist.

China and the Americas

In the Yu the Great page, floods repeatedly devastated the Chinese heartland under Emperor Yao. Yao assigned Yu's father, Gun, who spent more than nine years building dikes and dams with a special self-expanding soil, and the effort failed. Yu studied the river systems, then built irrigation canals to divert floodwater into fields and dredged the riverbeds, working with Hou Ji. At Mount Longmen he widened a narrow channel that blocked the river's flow east.

His projects took thirteen years, and the page says he passed his home three times without going inside. The entry does not compare the story to other flood myths. It notes that the Doubting Antiquity School viewed Yu as a water god or mythical figure, naming the Dragon Kings, and cites a c. 1920 BC outburst flood at Jishi Gorge as possible support for a historical basis.

The Flood myth entry also lists the Blackfeet "Language on a Mountain", where Napi survives and gives the people water of different colors that produces different languages; the Hopi and other Puebloan traditions of a flood nearly reaching the mountaintops; and a Cheyenne story possibly set in the Missouri River Valley. It makes no comparison between any of these and an Old World story.

Why so many flood stories

The Flood myth entry lists the proposals without endorsing one. Flooding was common in Mesopotamia, and a 60-centimeter alluvial layer at Shuruppak, about 2900 BC, may reflect river avulsion. Sea-level rise after the last glacial period flooded the Persian Gulf region. Adrienne Mayor suggests that seashells and fish fossils found inland or on mountains may have inspired flood stories.

A tsunami from the Thera eruption may underlie the Deucalion myth, though its effects were local. The Black Sea deluge hypothesis, a proposed inflow around 5600 BC, is called controversial, and the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is called refuted. Bruce Masse linked many myths to an oceanic impact around 2807 BC. The entry also notes that Yi Samuel Chen argues the flood narrative was added to Sumerian texts in the Old Babylonian period.

What the strength marks mean

Attested means a named ancient text makes the match: the Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis epics for the Utnapishtim and Atrahasis identification, and the Sumerian Ziusudra text. Scholarly means a reference page records the comparison, with the limits it states. Popular claim means no page read for this article compares the story with a Mesopotamian one.

The sources are reference pages and the ancient texts were read through them. A story with no stated link may still be related, and the pages say nothing either way.