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Recently a case has been made for the likely existence of a similar Aegean Mycenaean po-
        etic tradition of the flood -- elements of which survived the dark age and reappeared in Homeric
        and later Greek poetry.


               Sandars goes on to say --


               The story of the Deluge did not form any part of the Gilgamesh cycle in Sumerian literature, but was an
               independent poem with, in the role of Noah, a hero named Ziusudra, which means "he saw life." There is an
               Old Babylonian "Deluge" dating from the first half of the second millennium, in which the hero is named
               Atrahasis...A late version of the Atrahasis poem was written down in the reign of Assurbanipal. It is not
               possible to say at what time the flood was drawn into the Gilgamesh cycle, since evidence is lacking from
               the Old Babylonian period. There has been much controversy on the question of the relationship between
               the Genesis flood and that of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian writers. The opinion, at one time
               widely held, that the Genesis account was a late refinement on a story once current in all the cities of
               Babylonia, is not now so general; while the view that it derives directly from a very old and independent
               history has many supporters (ibid., p.18).

               There is a remarkable resemblance between the story told in Genesis and the Gilgamesh
        tablet -- but there are also some striking differences. In Genesis the city is not named, but in the
        other versions (and in the independent sources) it is usually Shurrupak, the modern Fara, and one
        of the first of the Sumerian city-states to gain a pre-eminent position in the land.


               Other flood stories were known in ancient Mesopotamia, but the earliest Sumerian literary
        reference does not seem to be much older than the Old Babylonian Atrahasis of the early second
        millennium BC. In the definitive edition of W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard these lines occur:


               Twelve hundred years had not yet passed
               When the land extended and the people multiplied,
               The land was bellowing like a bull,
               The god got disturbed with their uproar.
               Enlil heard their noise...

               The description of the flood itself in Tablet III has so much in common with the language of
        Gilgamesh Tablet XI that it seems the latter must have been modeled after it -- or rather on some
        lost Middle Babylonian recension.


               Notes Werner Keller,


               Today we know that line 134 on the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh must depend on an EYE-
               WITNESS ACCOUNT. Only someone who had himself seen the desolation caused by the catastrophe,
               could have described it with such striking force (The Bible As History, p. 54).

               The great layer of mud -- that which Woolley uncovered in 1929 -- covered everything like
        a shroud and leveled the ground until it was as "flat as a pancake," and must have been personally
        seen by someone who had just had a remarkable escape.


               Writes Keller --



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