![]() ![]() 12 The King List is also of interest as it mentions the flood specifically-"the deluge overthrew the land." 13 Indeed, after Gilgamesh, the kings lived a normal life span as compared with today. 11 This length of time is not a problem when compared with the age of the pre-flood patriarchs of the Bible. The Sumerian King List shows Gilgamesh in the first dynasty of Uruk reigning for 126 years. The main figure is Gilgamesh, who actually may have been an historical person. The Epic was composed in the form of a poem. 9 The Sumerian cuneiform writing has been estimated to go as far back as 3,300 B.C. compiled from material that was much older than that date. 8 Linguistic experts believe that the story was composed well before 2,000 B.C. and are obviously not originals since fragments of the flood story have been found on tablets dated around 2,000 B.C. 7 The actual tablets date back to around 650 B.C. The Epic of Gilgamesh is contained on twelve large tablets, and since the original discovery, it has been found on others, as well as having been translated into other early languages. 6 It was also the first discovered, making it the most studied of the early flood accounts. 5 The Babylonian account is the most intact, with only seven of 205 lines missing. While there are differences between the original Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian flood accounts, many of the similarities are strikingly close to the Genesis flood account. Babylonian and Assyrian are two dialects of the Akkadian, and both contain a flood account. Cuneiform writing was invented by the Sumerians and carried on by the Akkadians. 4 The stories that were discovered on cuneiform tablets, which comprise some of the earliest surviving writing, have obvious similarities. There have been numerous flood stories identified from ancient sources scattered around the world. Even secular scholars have recognized the parallels between the Babylonian, Phoenician, and Hebrew accounts, although not all are willing to label the connections as anything more than shared mythology. However, some Christians have studied the ideas of creation and the afterlife presented in the Epic. 1, 2 The rest of the Epic, which dates back to possibly third millennium B.C., contains little of value for Christians, since it concerns typical polytheistic myths associated with the pagan peoples of the time. The Epic of Gilgamesh has been of interest to Christians ever since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century in the ruins of the great library at Nineveh, with its account of a universal flood with significant parallels to the Flood of Noah's day.
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