The Ancients - The Flood Myth

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Thousands of years before the story of Noah and the Ark, people in ancient Mesopotamia were already telling tales of a devastating divine flood. Written into the Epic of Atrahasis, this ancient story describes a man chosen to survive catastrophe by building a great boat and preserving life from destruction.Today, Tristan Hughes is joined by Sophus Helle to explore this legend from ancient Babylonian folklore. What does the story of Atrahasis reveal about ancient Babylonian beliefs? How similar is it to the biblical account of Noah? And why did the memory of a great flood become one of humanity’s most enduring stories?MOREEpic of Gilgamesh: Rise of EnkiduListen on AppleListen on Spotify Babylon's Epic of CreationListen on AppleListen on Spotify We're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - grab your tickets here.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. When the gods were man, they bore the toil, carried the load. The load of the gods was great. The toil was heavy, the misery too much. Those are the opening lines to one of the greatest epics of antiquity, performed to crowds of people in the streets of Babylon and beyond some 4,000 years ago. a story about their creation, how humans came into existence, and how they were living in a world that had followed a divine flood. We know the epic today as the Atra Harsis, named after its

central character, a man who survived this divine flood by building a great boat, taking some companions with him and two of every animal. Sound familiar? This Babylonian epic, has many striking similarities to the biblical flood, of Noah and His Ark. And today, we're going to shine a light on it. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the oldest flood myth known from anywhere in the world. Our guest is Dr. Sophos Hell, a writer, translator, and expert on ancient Babylonian literature. Sofus, welcome back to the show.

So great to be back. I really enjoyed being on the ancients the first two times, and I'm so delighted to be here again. Well, we've done the epic of Gilgamesh and Babylon's Epic of Creation. And this is another epic, isn't it? Can we say that this is the original flood myth story? Well, it's one of the oldest floodmust, and in my opinion, the greatest. And we'll get to talking about why in a moment. But yeah, this is yet another Babylonian epic.

It's also one of the earliest Babylonian epics. So we're actually long before the composition of the Enuma Elish, this epic of creation we talked about, and also before the standard Babylonian Gilgamesh that we talked about. So this is really one of the great first classics of Babylonian literature. And I think, as we'll see as we explore key parts of the story, it can't be missed. You can't miss it. there are clear inspirations on the later, the flood story from the Hebrew Bible. Yes, exactly. And the flood story also appears in Gilgamesh, as we talked about in that episode.

But actually, recent research has shown that the flood story we see in Atrahasis that we're talking about today is closer to the version we find in Genesis than the one in Gilgamesh is. There is still a lot of open questions about how exactly the transmission happened, but it's worth keeping in mind. Okay, so how far back in time are we going with this flood myth story? Yeah, so as I said, like, we're really at the beginning of Babylonian literature. So we are in a period known as the old Babylonian period, and that basically means the beginning of the second millennium BCE. It's really hard to say when this poem that we're looking at today was first composed.

But we have a set of manuscripts, so a set of clay tablets on which it was written down, that are just like really high quality. So these are like, you know, there are other copies of this text, but we're especially reliant on these texts. They were copied by a man named Ipic Aya, when he was sort of like at the equivalent of the end of his university education. And he copied these tablets in the year 1635 BCE. So again, we can't exactly say when it was composed, but often when we sort of try to place this text in time, we use these manuscripts by Epic Aya to give it a sort of specific context. And he lived in the city of Sipar, very close to what is today, Baghdad, and as I said, 1635. But, Sophos, this is what I love with Mesopotamian epics, with Mesopotamian literature,

is that you can have these copies surviving that are almost 4,000 years old, and look at the writing today, because it's baked into clay, you have those surviving. Rather than, let's say, later, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, or later text where it's kind of little bits of fragments of papyrus that have survived, you have the clay tablet surviving from when that figure wrote it down almost 4,000 years ago. That just always blows my mind. Yeah, exactly. And I agree. It's part of what makes clay this wonderful material.

And I really feel like sometimes it gives us the sense of intimacy with these ancient people. Because not only do we have the Atrahas' epic by Ipegaya, but we can actually follow him through his education. We can see the other text he was studying in his quote-unquote university degree. And so we can sort of reconstruct what mindset he might have been in as he was copying this text, which is really exciting. The mindset as well. So you get indications into the manner, the nature, the mind of the copier, the writer down as well. Yeah. So we know that he was being taught by his father.

And we can sort of see the other text that his father is choosing for him. And a lot of them have to do with like the end of an era. A lot of them have to do with sort of like death and tragedy. but also with like words and you know what it means to to be a good servant of the god Enki this this trickster creative god that we're going to talk about a lot today and the name that they gave to this myth is it they called it the atrahasis do they so no that's actually a modern title and we name it after its main human character as we're going to see there are three main characters in this text two gods and one human and the human is called atrahas their name for it and this sort of

launches us straight into the story, because the Babylonians called their poems by the first line. And it's, you know, one of the best examples of this. It's Inuma ilu-a-willum, which means when gods were man, which is just a fantastic opening title, to be honest. And it then goes on to explain what it means with this rather puzzling sentence when gods were man, which is that in the beginning, gods were like men are today in that they were burdened with work. So if I can just read like opening lines of the text, it goes, when gods were men weighed down by work, they bore the burden. The burden of the gods was great.

Their work was heavy. Their torment long. And it then goes on to explain that it's not all the gods that are working. There are two classes of gods. There is the Anuna and the Igigi. Now, the Anuna and the Igiki, those words mean different things in different Babylonian text, so it's easy to get confused. But in this text, the Anuna are the gods of heaven, and the Igiki are the working gods. And it literally tells us that the Anuna gods are idle.

It uses that word. So they're quite literally an idle class. They are the power holders. And the Igigi are the working class of the gods. And so the text begins with setting up this class conflict that is actually going to power the rest of the the myth. Because the first thing that happens, the first episode, is a labor strike. A labor strike. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, where the Igigi rides up in rebellion against the Anuna, they put down their tools and they say, we are being mistreated, our working conditions are awful. Genesis

is really hard work because the Igigi have to dig out the riverbeds and they have to build the mountains. And, you know, after centuries of doing this, they're exhausted. And so they they launched this labor strike, which is just a crazy thing. The work that those lesser gods are doing in this story, it isn't constructing a great building or anything like that. It is literally building geography, creating the world as we know it. Yeah, exactly right. And I think it's, you know, you have a lot of other creation myths,

including inuma Elish that we talked about, but, you know, I'm sure you talked about all sorts of other creation myths on the podcast, where like creation often seems this very sort of like magical, or perhaps sometimes instantaneous thing. And this is a myth that really looks at like, what is the labor involved in creation? What physical work does it take to make the world? I just find that fascinating.

And before we go on with the story, you read out that lovely part right at the beginning there. And I mean, straightway, the wording itself sounded very quite beautiful, quite poetic. And is there a particular style in which this epic should be delivered? Yeah, so again, just to flag this fact that we're at the beginning of the literary history of Babylonian literature, and in the early periods, it's quite paired down. The lines are very short. The words tend to be very simple, but at the same time, it's very musical. There's a lot of alliteration and play on words and that kind of thing, but, you know, the lines of later texts can be almost twice as long and actually sometimes three times as long as those natrahas. So it's a very of like, yeah, condensed literary form, I find it very, very beautiful, to be honest, which is also why I've pushed myself to convey it as well as I could in the translation.

And can we imagine it being spoken aloud in Acadian or whatever the language was at the time to a room full of people by someone who knew the text or who could read the text? Yeah, absolutely. And so I think Athanas is actually a really good example of how these ancient texts in the Babylonian culture would have circulated. And we tell, and I think in part based in the Greek model, to assume that there is sort of this duality that either text are circulating in written form or they're circulating in a spoken form,

but Atra Hazis makes it quite clear that it has a dual form. So the very last line, and we'll get to the context for that later, but the very last line is just the word, listen, which is being spoken to the audience, listen. And so that makes it very clear that this,

you know, and a text actually calls itself a song as well, Zamaru, which means song, yeah. And at the same time, this is also an object made of clay. You know, our Ipicaa copying his manuscripts in 1635, you know, he's working with clay. And as we'll see, this is a text that sort of brings clay and sound together in interesting ways. So you can, you should imagine it like circulating in two forms at once. So we have, as you've highlighted at the beginning, these two levels of gods and the lesser gods, should we say, or they're the work force. They're the labor, building the world, creating. And as you say, there's a strike. So how does this strike go? Lesser gods against the higher gods? It feels like it doesn't feel

like it's going to be very fortunate for the strikers. Yeah, but it actually is, which is, again, one of the crazy things about it. Like, the revolution works. So the Iggya being led by a god called Wei. And just to quote another bit, Wei says to his brothers, the striking niggi he says now cry war let us stir battle and strife the gods heard his words they set fire to their tools they set fire to their spades they burned their burden which i think is also very dramatic and then they they marched to the house of the leader of the heavenly gods the god called endlil the king of the gods and they sort of surround his house and yeah they demand better working conditions. And it literally says, you know, the workers revolted, which is, I don't know,

that's part of why the text feels so bizarrely modern, even though so very, very old. I'm guessing Enlil he's not too pleased to be risen by these people who he expected to be working. No, not at all. And Enlil is like famously angry. It's like one of his main character traits. And Atrahas is no exception. I actually think it really was one of the texts that helped establish this perception of of Enlil as a god who is just very trigger-happy. He's, you know, yeah, easily angered, especially when he's being woken up. And that's exactly what happens. He's woken up and he, you know, is furious. He first wants to isolate who the leader of the rebellion is so that he can sort of quite literally cut off the head of the rebellion. But the geeky,

they have a real Spartacus moment. And they say all of us called for this. strike. And they actually say something very interesting when they have their Spartacus moment. They say, every one of us called for this war, we formed our assembly in the ditch. And the reason that that's important is that there is this concept in Babylonian mythology of the assembly of the gods. So all major decisions in Babylonian mythology are taken in this assembly. Like it's a polytheistic system. There's many gods and the gods meet in their council, in their Pukur, as it's called, the Pukur-Ili, and then they make decisions. And this is, according to Atrahas, the first of these assemblies takes place in the ditch, and its first decision is a labor strike, right? So the use of that

phrase, we formed our assembly in the ditch, it might not mean much to a modern audience, but in its original context, it's actually quite a striking phrase. But yeah, and Lil, you know, he, He can't isolate the leader. And so instead he says, well, let's scrap this universe and start another one. Like he literally says, you know, let's just rewrite the rules of the cosmos because he's sort of that angry. But that's when we get the intervention of the god, Enki, also called Ea. And I think we've talked about Enki before on the podcast.

I think we almost certainly have. It's been a moment. So Enlil, we should be thinking almost kind of this king of the gods, maybe Zeus or Jupiter like, should we think, just as a comparison? Yes, but somewhat less powerful, much less omnipotent than Zeus. And Denghi, Morva, Trickser, more of a, I'm just trying to think of it, like, more Athena-like, or I don't know, of a direct comparison.

But another important god, but known for their cunning, is it? Yeah, like Athena, in that he's known for his cunning, but a god of the water. Right. So he has this underground lake that he lives in. And, yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, I feel like Athena is often doing Zeus's bidding, but I guess you'll know more about that than me. It's difficult to make, yeah, to cross-compair, yeah, of course. But, like, Enki is more often subverting Enl's rule than helping Enl's rule.

And, yeah, I think that's, again, Athanasis is a great example of that. Because just when Enl is about to say, well, you know, scrap this cosmos, Enki intervenes. And he intervenes on the side of the strike. And he says, well, we've heard them complain. for a long time and we should take that seriously. And so Enki proposes a solution to the strike and that's us. We are the solution. We are the compromise.

He says, let's create a new creature, humanity, and they will then take on the labor of the gods. And, you know, our work, our daily work is sort of presented as an extension of Genesis, right? So like in the same way that the gods dug the rivers, we dig canals to, you know, sort of perfect weather the water is going, right, to guide it the rest of the way. And in the same way that they build mountains, we build cities, you know, and we build temples in those cities. And so I think, you know,

there is no clear-cut line between nature and culture in Babylonian mythology, but you can sort of have the equivalent of that be, you know, that the gods, they made what we would call nature and humans. We sort of continue that creation, but we make, you know, the human environment. And it's not completely random to pick out canals because I guess we should remind us that in Mesopotamia, like the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, these great cities of Mesopotamia, you know, they were now for their management of water and the creation of these beautiful canals, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

And yeah, people should really stick a pin in that point because, like, this idea of the management of water is going to come back later in a major way. But also this idea that humans, they are created to work. So this idea, I think you also see with. Adam and Eve as well, and the creation stories, humans right from the get-go, you've got to go out and toil. You've got to go out and

be a labor force. Yeah, and as I said, I think part of what I find interesting here is that it really sees our work as an extension of divine creation. And, you know, I think the text has a point. Because, like, the way that I put it in my book

about Atrahas is that all work is world-making. And I think that's also true today. You know, the way that we make the human world, the world that we live in, is through labor. You know, whether that's delivering packages or making podcasts or building buildings or whatever it might be, you know, like we make the world that we know through labor. And I think Atrahas sees that with a lot of clarity. But I think it's also important to emphasize that, you know, on the one hand, it does

make us into, you know, what I call holy robots. Like we have to feed the gods. We have to, you know, bring them offerings. We have to, you know, give them grain and beer and incense and songs. you know, but on the other hand, like, the text doesn't only give us the burden of labor from the gods. It also gives us something else. And this is where things become a bit technical, but there's a lot of puns in this passage that sort of describe what also happens. And so, for example, the name of this rebel leader way is written with a sign that also means ear,

and ear also means intelligence. and Enki explains that he will have to sacrifice one of the gods and that God will beware and use his blood to create humankind. And when Enki says this, he says that we will sacrifice the God who had the idea, meaning the idea for the rebellion. But the word for idea in that context, PAMU, another beautiful Babylonian word, Teymu, not to be confused with the, with the, modern TAMO, as it was. But this idea of TAMO doesn't mean just the idea specifically for the rebellion. It can also mean something like consciousness. And so the rebel leader is sacrificed and his blood is then used to create humankind.

But also we inherit his sort of rebellious instinct. And his idea for the rebellion becomes our consciousness. Like that's sort of the divine blood in us. So the spirit of way lives on inside us, that idea is. Yeah, exactly right. And the text expresses this rather beautifully here. It says, Forever after, let us hear the drum. From the flesh of the gods, let a spirit remain, and let it make the living know its sign so as not to forget, let a spirit remain. And it's then, you know, shown that the spirit is ways spirit living on inside us. But I particularly like this

line of let us hear the drum, because that's our heartbeat, you know, and it's that drum inside us that is constantly reminding us of this, you know, rebel God who lives on in our blood, in our minds. That's quite something. Okay, weighs the heartbeat. Okay, but weighs out of the picture, weighs sacrifice to itself for us, for humans. And then, Sefus, how do we get to these first humans? What does the story tell us about the earliest humans?

Well, it actually has a very long and detailed description of them, and that brings us to our second main character. So our first main character is Enki. He's going to be really a plot engine throughout the story, and he's this, trickster god, but he needs a collaborator. He says, I cannot create humanity alone. And so he brings in the mother goddess. The mother goddess has roughly 15 different names, but today we're going to use the name mommy. And mommy then takes the sort of living flesh, this living clay blood mixture that Enki has made and actually shapes it into humanity. And mommy lays the design of the people,

as the poem puts it. And what she designs in that moment is the system of proclamation. creation. She designs the system of reproduction. And so she, the mother goddess has a very extended description of first making the genders and then making mutual attraction. And then she invents sex. And she invents consent also, which is quite interesting. Like, it's actually repeatedly emphasized that these people who have sex must consciously choose one another, which is a great Acadian word. And then they have sex. And then she designs the process of pregnancy and childbirth and delivery and nursing. And like, it's a very long speech.

I think it goes on for almost 100 lines in which the mother goddess sort of lays out her vision for, yeah, motherhood with each and every step that that entails. And so she's, you know, created essentially a perfect system where the gods can just get free labor forever and ever and ever and ever. But no death at this point. It's just birth and creation. Okay.

Exactly right. because the mother goddess's perfect system has one big flaw in it, which is that she creates life and she creates the means for creating new life, but she does not create death. And that's the big problem here. Because then 1,200 years pass and there's been no death. It seems to be that you can still sort of die of like premature causes. I think the best way to think about this is that you can still die if the god era kills you.

An era can kill you with sickness and with war and like with murder and that kind of thing. But you don't die of like old age. You can die in like era coming and snatching you in the various ways he does. But you don't sort of, you know, there's no limit to your lifespan. It just goes on and on and on. And after 1,200 years, this has become a problem. And it's become a problem in the way that we've already met. Because what it does is that it keeps NLILA awake.

Is this the thing we've been Lill? Like, I'm the king of the gods, but at the end of the day, like, the thing that really matters to him is getting his good night's sleep. Yeah, exactly right. And, like, to be fair, it seems that he's not been able to sleep for centuries at this point. But still, the way that he puts it is as follows. And Lil heard their noise and said to the great gods, humanity's noise is too heavy for me. I cannot sleep for their roar. And, you know, I think like this is often the passage that people most remark on when I tell them the story of Atrahas is because it just seems sillier than the Bible.

Whereas this question of sin and all of that. But I honestly, I like this better, you know. I think in part because like sound plays such a role throughout the story, you know, we heard that when Wei is created, he becomes this drumbeat inside of us and then the lead up to the flood is. of this, yeah, this sense of humanity's noise becoming louder and louder and louder and louder and then endl being kept awake by it and then as we're going to see the flood itself is an explosion of sound. And since we heard that this text is a song, I actually think it's quite clever of it

that it lets the prime engine of the plot be sound, right? It's working with its own medium. And you can just sort of imagine this epic being performed and just becoming louder and louder itself, you know? So I think, even though it seems a bit silly at first, I actually think it would have been very affected. I think you're quite right.

And actually, the more I think of it, I think something like almost a pantomime, or, you know, kind of a live performance where you have the person reading it out, but maybe assisted by one or two people who are helping with the sound effects for those key parts of the story. And then all of a sudden, you can get more of a sense how this performance could well have what it could have looked like when it was being performed in a street in Babylon almost 4,000 years ago. That's cool. Yeah, exactly. and the drums resounding in the background when we hear that way becomes a drum.

So Enl can't get some sleep. Does that lead to him directly thinking it's time for a genocide, quite frankly? Or what's his next step? No, not yet. We're not at the genocide yet. And I think it's actually like this is a really interesting, this is actually a really interesting aspect of a lot of these ancient epics, is that a lot of them do depict a genocide,

but often they show us sort of the way there. So if you think of the Iliad, there's this mounting tension between the Greeks and the Trojans. And in book six of the Iliad, you reach the tipping point. And that's when the Greeks begin to talk about killing all of them, not killing their warriors, but literally killing the women and the children and the elders, right? And you'll see the same in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, that there's a sort of sense of tensions mounting before you get to the full genocidal attack. And in the case of Atrahas, Enlil makes three failed attacks.

at culling humanity before eventually resorting on the sort of final solution, which is the flood, right? But yeah, so, and in between each of these three attempts, 1,200 years pass, and there's a lot more humans and a lot more sound. So these early attempts, they fail because humans, they have the spirit of way, the spirit of resistance, the spirit of kind of fighting back against even by what are NLL's sent to try and get rid of them. humans prove incredibly resilient to it. Yeah, exactly. And there is one man who possesses this intelligence, you know, this arguably artificial intelligence, this created intelligence more than any of the other humans.

And that's our third main character, and that's Atrahus. This is Atrazis. Right. And his name literally means super intelligent. And he uses that intelligence. I think the intelligence in question, which is expressed with the word hasis, is very much the intelligence,

not sort of of internal meditation, but very much the intelligence of being able to listen to others and being able to speak himself. And in Atra Hasis' case, that is especially his conversation with his god, Enki, the trickster god that we already met. And Atrahas' skill is that he can talk with Enki and Enki talks with him, right?

And it is by talking with the god of creativity, that he again and again comes up with these creative solutions to foil Enki's plans. And those often involve manipulating the one tool that humanity has at their disposal because they God have given the humans control over their food supply, right? Which might not have been the best idea. Because now the humans can withhold the food, and they can also decide to give all their food offerings to one specific God. So when Enki tries to send a disease, a pandemic, again, there are too many way to relatable

things about atrazis, right? But Enl attempts a pandemic. And so the humans bring all of their offerings only to the god of disease. So nobody else gets any, all the other gods are starving. And suddenly the god of disease is sitting there with all of these offerings. And he literally feels ashamed, right? He feels embarrassed. And so he lets the disease leave.

the land. And that's the first round of plague. But eventually, sort of Enlal catches on to what Enki and Atrejasis are doing. So he makes it still more difficult for them to communicate with each other. I do have an idea of that God and that clever person, that extraordinary human figure, the conversations, because, I mean, you do think of things like Odysseus and Athena or Telem because, you know, these extraordinary figures from Greek mythology, these so-called heroes, you know, who are because they are a bit better, as they're portrayed or a bit different to the everyday figures, they have that connection with the gods. And you have that similar theme here in this epic in Babylon, you know, with the figure of Atrahasis and the god Enki as well.

It's funny how you can see parallels there. Yeah, absolutely. There are various culture heroes in Babylonian mythology. You know, we've also looked at Gilgamesh, of course. But what I think interesting about Drathas is that he's such an empty character. Like, he is his intellect and nothing more. Like, we learn almost nothing else about him, his personality or, you know, even like his condition in life is unclear what his profession is.

Is he a king? Is he a priest? Is he just a commoner? It's not fully certain. And, you know, I like to call him the exceptional every man because I think we can really project ourselves into him because he is this empty character. But the one thing that he is, he is Atrahas,

he is super smart, right? He is extra intelligent. So let's get to the flood. I know there are a few other things that happen, but you cover them in detail in your books. I don't want to give everything away. But how do we get then to Enlil deciding, right, I need to do something different. We need a flood. Yeah.

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not fully clear because the text is fragmentary. But I think we can sort of reasonably extrapolate from what we know so far that it gets to a point where Enlil has again and again tried to foil. First of all, he's tried to call humanity. He's tried to foil Enkis and Atrahas' schemes. And then he just has enough. And he says, okay, this is it. No more humans.

I'm sick of this cycle. It's been going on for 3,600 years. Enough of this. And so he decides on, yeah, this final solution. And, you know, the text gives us, like, a lengthy treatment of the meeting of the gods, the assembly of the gods in which they decide to call them. the flood. So another assembly. Okay, interesting. Another assembly, exactly. And I think that's also really worth worth noting that Atrahasas has a lot of reversals between the first and the second part. So first

we get the creation of humanity in the first assembly, and then we get the destruction of humanity in the second assembly. And there are specific lines that are repeated from the first part and the second where they flip meaning and really tying the two parts together and establishing this sense of contrast. But yeah, so, I mean, unfortunately, the minutes of this meeting are lost because that, the description of that assembly is very fragmentary. But that's what happens. The gods decide to call the flood. And I think it's also very interesting that the text will repeatedly insist that Enlal subverted the, what we could call the sort of, in quote unquote, democratic process of the assembly, right? Like, he doesn't listen to everybody else to the assembly, and he really sort of

forces his own agenda through, and it said that he confused the assembly, he subverted the assembly. So I think it's also a reminder that, and this is really a widespread trope in Babylonian literature, that if a leader stops listening to his assembly, pretty terrible things happen almost immediately. And Atrahas and the story of the flood is a great example of that. Like, the reason that the flood happened is that Enl stopped listening to the other gods, stop listening to his assembly and his advisor. So that could be reflection on Babylonian kingship and the council and the priests and the, all the people that would have been around to met his court. Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, it's, it's a story that's particularly appealing to the people like Epigaya, our scribe who is copying out this text as part of his university education. Because what is his job going to be? Well, it's going to be a professional advisor, right? So like, here is a myth, which is the crowning moment of his education that tells him, you know, there was once a time where universal design. could have been avoided if the king of the gods just listen to a person like you. You know, like that's that's a sort of. What an ego boost. There you go.

Right. So how is Atrahas, how does he get word of this destruction decision? Well, at first it's very difficult because Enlil has ensured that Enki can't just do the same trick again. So he has imposed an oath of silence on all the gods. they've all been sworn to secrecy. And this seems, and this is a bit my interpretation, but I'll present it, and then you'll see whether you agree. So it seems to be a Babylonian explanation of why we can't talk with the gods directly, right?

And the Babylonians had a solution to their problem, which is to interpret the omens that the gods sent to them. And this story explains how that system came about, because Enki can't just say to Atrahas, this is what's about to happen. so he sends to him a series of omens, first in the form of a dream, but then Atrahas can't understand that dream,

and then in the form of these reeds. So, you know, Enki is living in this underground lake, so the reeds are like tiny pipes that he's sort of like, you know, piping up through Atrahas' house, which is also made of reeds, right? So it's like the whole house is talking to him. But this thing of communicating through objects, that's an omen, you know?

like, that's what an omen is. And the Babylonians, you know, they were obsessed with omens. They saw omens absolutely everywhere. And the story of the flood may have been an explanation of why the gods communicate in this rather bizarre way, rather than just talking to us. Right. And so Enki manages to get word tetraasis through this manner, and what is he told to do? Well, let me read you the passage. Okay.

So Enki speaks through the wall and says, wall, listen to me, fence, heed my every word, flee the house, build a boat, leave your stuff, save your life. And then he goes into a sort of lengthy description of what this arc, this boat is supposed to look like, how it is to be shaped, what its measurements are, and Atrahasis is told to take on board the seed of every living things, meaning, at least in the Bible's rendition, two of every kind of animals. and also the craftsmen of every kind of craft so that humanity doesn't lose the crafts that are the bedrock of our society

and Atrahasis is also allowed to take his family. So slightly rumoured boat than the Bible, but that the same basic idea. I remember talking to Irving Finkler about this a couple of years ago, and is it actually this idea that the boat was supposed to be round? Well, that's actually not as clear in Atrahas, so Irving found another text that has a more detailed description.

of the boat than what we see in Atrahasis. It's a little harder. So sort of mentally reconstruct the boat if you're just going by the Atrahasis description. But it sounds like, so Atrahas is allowed to save a few more people than in the biblical story, but he can't save everyone. Is that true? Yeah, and he's clearly heartbroken about it.

So he, you know, gets all the people of his city to build this boat because he only has a week before the flood is coming. It has to be a very big boat. And so, you know, he's truly opening the treasury. He is holding a big feast for all of his workers, but he knows that they're all going to die. And that is a pretty terrible psychological situation. And so at this feast, he has just overcome by emotions.

And so the text says, they were eating, they were drinking. But he went in and he went out, could not sit and could not crouch. His heart was broken. He vomited gall. And yeah, I don't know, it's a tragedy. That's like a last supper of beer and barley. And that's the kind of the drink and the food, isn't it, that you should think of as well? Yeah, exactly right.

And so the workers build the boat, they're not allowed on it. Yeah. And then the flood comes. In the story, the flood comes straight away. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly right. Literally, right after the lines I read right now, the next lines are, then the face of the weather change and Adad began to roar in the clouds.

Adad being the storm god. And, well, what happens? Take it away, Sophos. Yeah, so we get this very dramatic description of the flood. Again, sort of really emphasizes how loud the flood is, which again, I can very easily imagine a skilled performer having a field day. Tempastuous. Right, exactly right, with recreating the sound of the flood.

But yeah, let me just read you a passage. Like battle, design. Laster spread over the people. Brothers looked in vain for each other. Men all looked the same in the slaughter. The flood was bellowing like a bull. The winds wailed like an eagle's cry. The darkness was dense.

The sun had gone. And the children of men became like flies. The gods grew afraid of the noise of the flood. They hid in heaven and took refuge. In the open, they sat and wept. It's very uncontrolled. just sheer destruction at its maximum. Exactly right. And that's one of the big differences from the biblical account, right? Like where in the Bible, you know, think what you will of the God of

the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. But, you know, he at least knows what he's doing, right? He has control over the operation of the flood. In the Babylonian version, they lose control over it immediately, you know. And I think it's partly also interesting to think about this in class terms. And, you know, I'm sorry to be sounding very sort of barksist in my analysis here, but it does sort of reflect the structure of the text, you know, that the revolt of the gigi in the beginning of the poem was these workers rising up against their masters. And the story of the flood is the inverse of that. And so it is the masters killing their workers. It's the gods killing humanity. And again, there's one of these lines sort of making that link.

So earlier we heard that the Igigi were described as the work has revolted. And here we hear the flood being described as the waters revolted. And so this is, you know, it sort of has, again, an eerily modern resonance because it sort of describes catastrophic climate change as class warfare from above. And again, I know that that sounds very Marxist, but I'm sort of trying to present the poem in, you know, in terms that makes sense to this day. and I think it's kind of crazy how much Atrahas allows for those modern parallels. It's part of why I'm so obsessed with the story.

How long does the chaos last then? If these very quickly, almost instantly, the waters, the floods, they can't be controlled by the gods as soon as they've issued it in. I mean, how long does this kind of uncontrolled chaos last? So it lasts for seven days and seven nights. Okay. So it lasts for this very dramatic week. And then at the end of it, the gods, the gather,

on a mountain, and they sort of begin to take stock of what's happened. And there's another very beautiful mirroring here, because we heard earlier about how the heartbeat is created. The heartbeat is created to be this regular reminder of the moment in which humanity was created. And likewise, the mother goddess, who is absolutely devastated at seeing humanity being destroyed, she creates a regular reminder to herself so that she can remember what happened in the flood. And That's, again, what we see in the Bible where it's the rainbow. But strangely, in Atrahas, the rainbow is created by the mother goddess taking jeweled flies. So you know how flies have these shimmering wings?

And she makes this, you know, cosmic necklace of jeweled flies and hangs it around her neck. And that becomes the rainbow. So, yeah, the heartbeat and the rainbow are respectively these regular, rhythmical reminders of humanity's creation and are near total destruction. gods like her goddesses, are they mourning the complete destruction of humanity at that time? Do they know that Atrahas and his select few have actually survived aboard this boat? So they find out after the flood is over because Atrahas does the Noah trick of sending out a series of birds and then finally, in this case, the crow finds the peak that is Mount Ararat in the Bible. and here it's released in the later Babylonian tradition, it's Mount Nisirtu.

But either way, the crow finds land and Atrahas sets up an offering. And, you know, the offering really reveals the idiocy of the endless quote-unquote plan because, you know, he hadn't thought it through. Like, now that he had obliterated humanity, the gods starve. And because, again, the gods are given their servants, humanity, control over their food supply. And so the gods also reveal themselves to be dependent on humanity because it's said that they had shrunk to the size of flies and they're sort of swarming to Atrahas' sacrifice

because they've not eaten for a week. And so I think that's what the flood ultimately illustrates. It ultimately illustrates this bizarre balance of power in Babylonian cosmology between the gods and humanity, that the gods are dependent on us, but we're also very dependent on them because they can just wipe us out, right? And so I think that's part of what this myth reveals.

And as I said, it began with this sentence, Inuma ilua, when gods were men, at a moment in time in which the gods are very much like humans, and now they have become very unlike each other. They're so powerful and we're not. But at the same time, much as we've become also very different, we remain very profoundly linked. They depend on us and we depend on them.

That's what this sort of final meeting on the mountain reveals. So is this the context for us getting to that, that third and final meeting, the post-flood decision as to what is going to happen to humans? Right, exactly right. And what is going to happen to humans is the creation of death. And that is a sort of final supplement that brings the story to a close. because we've had this sort of very dynamic story where each problem was resolved, but then the solution became the occasion for the new problem, right?

So, like, there was this labor strike that was solved with the creation of humanity, but that then became a problem because there were too many of us, and that led to these, you know, famines and diseases and so on and so forth, and they were resolved, but that only made the problem worse. And then that led to the quote-unquote final solution, which is the flood, which then turned into a huge problem, right? And then out of the sort of rhythm of problems and solutions and problems and solutions,

emerges the final problem slash solution, which is death, right? And it's a solution because it brings this whole thing to a sort of stable endpoint where humanity now won't sort of explode in population numbers. We won't bother NL, and we can just sort of keep providing these regular offerings of food, but it's a problem for us, right? It might not be a problem for the gods, but it's a problem for us because we have to die. And the one person who is accepted from that is Atrahasis. So Atrahasis kind of receives, he's allowed to maintain his immortality then.

Is that the idea? Right. And in later Babylonian tradition, he is then given a new title. And that new title is the one who found life, or in Acadian Utanapishti, which is the name of the character that we meet in Gilgamesh. And that's in the epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh goes searching for his life. immortality and that's why he goes to meet Utner Pishdin. Exactly right.

Who is Atrohastus. Okay, so that's how they link together. Okay. We won't go down the epic of Gilgamesh, because we've got two great episodes of view on that. We'll put a link to that in the episode notes. And that's the end of the epic. So humans, the family of Atrohastis and the other people

who were allowed on the boat, the idea is that they will slowly expand, they will slowly populate, repopulate the earth from then on. Yeah, exactly right. And just as the mother goddess was earlier being tasked with creating humanity and she set up the system of like reproduction and procreation, she then is tasked with the opposite. She becomes the creator of death. But she also creates a number of other sort of like measures that are like anti-reproduction, anti-procration. So she creates women who don't give birth, which includes a series of priestesses who were barred from having children. The Naditu women is one example. The N priestesses is another example. So, for example, the first known author in Hiduana, she was an end priestess, so she was not allowed to have children. The mother goddess also creates this demon called Lamashtu, which would snatch newborn babies and was sort of the Babylonian explanation for infant mortality.

And all of these measures are, yeah, made here at the end of the poem. And that's the end of the epic. I mean, Sophie, just how long, we've covered the main themes there, really grateful to go through them. Just how long was this epic? Could we imagine that people would have been listening to a performance of this epic and they'd be able to watch the whole thing in one sitting, so to speak? Yeah, I do think so. So it's about 50 pages in a modern translation.

So I do think you could listen to all of it in one sitting. In the original Acadian, we don't have the whole thing preserved, but it comes out to, what we have comes out to around 500 lines. So yeah, much shorter than something like the Iliad or the Odyssey, also much shorter than Gilgamesh, shorter than Beowulf. And I just think like it's so amazing how much this poem packs into its story. Like this is a history of humanity that in the last lines, it seems to be revealed that this is being told by the mother goddess.

So this is her account of the history of humanity. And, you know, we've touched on a lot of themes that are relevant for today, like classical conflict and labor disputes, climate disaster, arguably artificial intelligence, you know, and we've seen the invention of sex and we've seen the invention of the opposite of sex, you know, like we've had all of these themes being explored in, as I said, not a long, not a long poem. Well, I mean, I was, you kind of preempt to my next question, which was like, what would have been the main themes for someone listening to this performance and watching it, you know,

almost 4,000 years ago, I mean, how would they have interpreted it? What do you think would have been the key takeaways for them? That's a really good question. And I think our only chance of answering that is by looking at a specific individual, which in this case is Epigaya. So as I said, like, Ipegaya is being taught by his father. Describe who created the copy that we've talked through. Okay, yeah.

Exactly right. Exactly right. We know that he would have been, yeah, let's say, give or take 19 when he's doing this. We know that his family, he comes from a family of scribes, and the family was devoted to the god Enki. So most people in his city were devoted to other gods, including Ishtar and Shamash. But his family is sort of pro-Enky, and this is very much a myth about Enki. So I think that would have been important to him. But as I mentioned earlier, his father had recently, in his education, been teaching him texts that has to do with the end of an age.

So he had been studying texts that have to do with the end of the Old Acadian Empire, where, according to myth, the sort of vanglorious King Naram Sine brought this great empire crashing down. He had been studying some texts related to the fall of the Urethri Empire, which is a couple of centuries after the fall of the Old Akkadian Empire, where the Urethri, this great Sumerian-speaking empire, was toppled by an invasion from Iran. And so he's studying texts that have to do with one period giving way to another.

And I think he would have seen the floodmeth in those times, because this is sort of quite literally about the end of an antediluvian age and the beginning of a new age, about the end of an age in which we could talk directly to the gods and which we were without death to what was broadly conceived for the Babylonians, the present, right? Like our age.

And so I think that's one way in which you would quite likely have understood it. Do you think work is a big thing at all or kind of this idea that we are to work? Absolutely, yeah. Sorry to cut you off here, but yeah, sorry. The reason I was so enthusiastic in answering is that the book that I've written about Atrahasis is literally called, for its subtitle, Babylonian Reflections of Labor, because I think that's what this is, right?

Like Atrahas sees human life as being shaped by labor, both in the sort of obvious sense that we're created to serve the gods and to labor for the gods and to extend the labor of the gods. but labor also becomes many other things in the poem as well, including it becomes crucially linked to inequality. And the sort of dynamic of labor and inequality and how they shape each other really propels the entire poem. So yes, I absolutely think that labor is central,

not just to this poem, but to the entire sort of period of cultural history that Ipegaya lived in, the old Babylonian. There are many stories about labor in different ways at that time. Sophos, I must ask, because you highlighted this earlier, like the strength of natural disasters like the floods and, of course, how the flood gets out of control of the gods almost instantly. Yeah. Could there be any elements of truth behind this story of the flood? Could there be any hearkening back of, like, historical memory of Babylonians that could there have been a memory of a very terrible flood that occurred, like the Tigris of the Euphrates, from long before? from which, you know, the story of this myth could have been loosely or at least slightly based on? Yes, it's a really good question.

And, you know, when we think about the flood myth in Atrahas, there are two big questions that pop up. One we've already talked about, which is, you know, is there a direct connection to the Bible? We don't know, but it seems like Atrahas is at least closer to the Bible. So that's one question. And the other question is, was this based on a real flood? and I'm just going to start with the argument against it being based on a real flood, and then we can sort of look at the arguments four. But the main argument against is that the stories about floods really begin to circulate

in the Babylonian and Sumerian literature in the early second millennium BCE. So we have Samarian literature from the third millennium, in which the word flood just means like what it means in English, you know, like a flood of water, right? Like a lot of water coming rushing down from a mountain or whatever. It doesn't mean like this cataclysmic event. And then around year 2000,

we have this political event, I briefly mentioned a bit ago, the fall of the Uthi Empire. And that political event really leaves a huge scar in the political and cultural memory of Babylonian culture. They return

to this event quite obsessively. They sort of process it over the couple of centuries that follow. And it's in that context when you're getting things like the lamentation of the destruction of the land, which is a great text, you also at that time get the flood myth exploding in importance. And so there is a scholar called Samuel Chen, who has written a really good book about this for the primeval flood myth, where he argues that the flood myth becomes what we know today through this sort of process of taking this political shock and then turning it into a myth, right? So you're processing this great empire that fell.

Imagine the fall of the Roman Empire, and you're sort of trying to, yeah, to make sense of it. And so you come up with this myth of a time in which the world change radically in a single week, you know. And I actually find Chen's argument very convincing. Interesting. But again, that does leave us with less of a connection to the real flood. But, I mean, like, it is definitely possible that real geological events like informed this, you know.

I think it's a discussion that's very similar to Atlantis, where, you know, it was Plato who came up with the myth of Atlantis. Is it possible that his coming up with the myth was informed by real events? Yes, it's possible. But that just becomes a lot harder to prove and to establish. Very much so. But I save that question to the end, and I have it in big, bold letters. on my questions for you right before we finish because I have to ask it. Surfus, this has been so much fun.

Last but certainly not least, you have written a book which goes into this story in so much more detail and explains why this flood myth is so important and deserves to be better known. It is called. Yeah, so I have the book Human, Babylonian Reflections on Labor, which is out with the University of Chicago Press in May, May 26. but I would also like to flag another book that I have on the way with Thames and Hudson's Illustrated Myth series. That book is called Babylonian Myths.

And I also have one chapter there talking about the Atrehasa's myth, but then I have other chapters dealing with a range of other Babylonian stories. Fantastic, Sophos, we'll get you back on for more stories in the future. But it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's always a delight to be on the ancients. Well, there you go.

there was Dr. Sophos Hell returning to the podcast, such a great guy and a brilliant expert on these great epics, these stories of ancient Mesopotamia, of Babylon and Beyond. Always a pleasure having him on the show to talk through them. And I really do hope you enjoyed this latest episode with him. If you want more episodes about these stories that we've done in the past with Sophos, well, we'll put a link to them in the show notes. We've done a two-parter with him all about the epic of Gilgamesh, the most well-known epic of ancient Mesopotamia. I've also done the story of Babylon's Epic of Creation too. And I'm sure there'll be other great stories we can cover with Sophos in the future.

Really do hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you're enjoying the ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favor. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries

with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.