Alan R. Millard

This is a three tablet 1700 B.C.E. flood story that would later get incorporated into other Babylonian and Abrahamic religion origin stories. In this case, the Akkadian gods spend the first tablet laboring over the creation of the world and create humans to "carry the load" of maintaining the world. However, in tablet two the population explodes, and Enlil becomes the god who wants to kill off humans while Enki is the god who tells Atrahasis to destroy his home and build a ship. The third tablet is the story of life surviving the flood. Tablet one is mostly intact while tablets two and three have a lot of damage, so most of what historians know about the story is extrapolated from myths built from this one.

Standard with reading ancient literature, I enjoyed the adventure of being an amateur historian by reading the original in as far as an English translation of the original, but otherwise these type of stories aren't exactly enticing.… (more)

One of the oldest and most classic Mesopotamian flood stories, probably written around 1700 BCE (at least those are the oldest cuneiform tablets found to date). In the Gilgamesh story, which is much older, the Deluge is only part of the whole cycle, here the Deluge stands alone, as the outcome of an extensive preceding development. I was particularly struck by the very poetic formulations and the essentially humanistic slant of the story. More on that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4152618394… (more)