Noah
Noah West AsiaThe flood myth of West Asia is Mesopotamian in origin. There survives a Sumerian king list with the statement that following the reigns of the first eight monarchs, a legendary era of 241,200 years, ‘the flood swept over the land’. These kings, reminiscent of the patriarchs before the biblical deluge, included Gilgamesh and Dumuzi. According to the fragments preserved, when the gods decided to drown mankind, the water god Enki warned the pious and god-fearing Ziusudra, King of Sippar, who built a boat in order to escape the seven-day flood. Later Ziusudra acquired ‘life like a god’. In Akkadian literature there are two versions of the flood story. The Gilgamesh Epic makes Utanapishtim the hero, while in another myth the survivor of primordial famine and flood is Atrahasis. During the Assyrian ascendancy, in the seventh century BC, the Atrahasis myth was used as an incantation at childbirth. For Christian symbolism the deliverance...
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