Gods, monsters and the oldest great story

To a Mesopotamian, a temple was not a place to meet on a weekend. It was the god's house. The Sumerian word for temple, é, simply means "house". The biggest temples stood on or beside a ziggurat, a stepped tower that lifted the god closer to the sky.

Inside lived the god's statue, made of precious wood, covered in gold and dressed in fine clothes. People believed the god was present in it. After a special ceremony called "washing of the mouth", the statue was treated like a living ruler: it was woken up, dressed, and "fed" two big meals a day of bread, meat, fruit and beer. After the god had "eaten", the food was shared among the priests and temple workers.

Priests and priestesses ran the temple. Some sang hymns, some read signs of the future, some looked after the statue. Most ordinary people never went inside the inner room. They prayed in courtyards, or left small statues of themselves to keep praying for them.

A monster who was also a guardian

Humbaba (in Sumerian, Huwawa) is the guardian of the Cedar Forest, appointed by the god Enlil to protect it. His face, with its twisting lines, was often modelled in clay. A newly read tablet, published in 2014 and widely reported in 2015, showed the forest as a noisy, beautiful place full of birds, monkeys and insects, with Humbaba enjoying its music like a king at a party. That makes cutting down his forest feel less heroic, and more sad.

Mesopotamia was flat land between two rivers that could burst their banks without warning, so it is no surprise that its poets told of a great flood.

In the Atrahasis epic (written down by about c. 1700 BCE), the gods are annoyed by the noise of humans and decide to wipe them out. Enki secretly warns a wise man named Atrahasis to build a boat and save his family and the animals. After the flood, the gods regret what they have done.

Tablet 11 of Gilgamesh retells the same story through Utnapishtim. His boat comes to rest on a mountain, and he sends out a dove, a swallow and a raven to look for dry land. When the raven does not come back, he knows the water has gone down.

These stories share many features with the later flood story of Noah in the Bible: a warning from God or a god, a boat, animals saved, birds sent out, a mountain, and an offering afterwards. Scholars compare them to understand how stories travelled and changed across the ancient Near East. Different people read these connections in different ways, and this page does not try to say which story is "true".

There is an even older Sumerian flood story, about a king named Ziusudra. All three heroes (Ziusudra, Atrahasis and Utnapishtim) play the same part, and their names all point to the same idea: long life or great wisdom.

Clay is cheap, but it is tough. A sun-dried tablet can last thousands of years in the ground, and fire, which destroys paper, bakes clay harder. When Nineveh was burned in 612 BCE, the tablets in Ashurbanipal's library were buried in the ruins, and many survived. The British Museum holds more than 30,000 tablets and fragments from it.

In 1872, a young British Museum worker named George Smith, who had taught himself to read cuneiform, was sorting fragments when he recognised a flood story on one of them. He announced it in a lecture that December, and it caused a sensation.

The stories are still growing. In 2014, scholars Farouk Al-Rawi and Andrew George published a tablet bought by the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan, and it made news around the world in 2015. It added about twenty new lines to Tablet V of Gilgamesh, the Cedar Forest episode. And in 2021 the "Gilgamesh Dream Tablet", taken out of Iraq decades earlier, was returned home from the United States. Every new fragment fills in a gap.