Gilgamesh Flood Tablet

Tiny wedges cover the broken clay. They preserve part of a story about a great flood, written on a tablet in the seventh century BC. The tablet came from the library of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king at Nineveh. The passage belongs to Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, the story’s king, hears an account of a flood and the survival of life through it. The narrative explores the limits of human life through a legendary figure’s search. The age of this copy is different from the age of the stories that fed into the epic. A long written work occupied a sequence of tablets. This broken piece preserves only part of the text. Look at the lines before trying to take in the whole surface. Someone had to press each group of marks into clay and arrange it for another reader. A royal library kept literary works alongside the other written material a court gathered.