Sumerian Myths and the Flood Story

The temple schools of Nippur and Ur preserved hundreds of tablets with stories of the gods: Enki orders the world and hands out destinies, Inanna descends to the land of no return, mankind is created to labour in place of the gods. A separate strand is the flood: the gods resolve to destroy noisy humanity, but one of them warns a righteous man, who builds a vessel and saves life on earth. These stories lived in oral tradition long before they were written, and spread across the whole Near East. Their discovery in the nineteenth century forced the ancient texts of neighbouring peoples to be read anew.