The Great Flood: Eridu Genesis
The Great Flood: mythological story about a great destruction that once befell the earth. There are several variants; the Biblical version is the most famous. The possibility that there is a historical event behind the story (a local flood in southern Babylonia in the twenty-eighth century BCE) cannot be excluded.
The Eridu Genesis is written on a Sumerian cuneiform tablet of which about two thirds are now lost. The missing parts can be reconstructed from texts like the Sumerian King List and Berossus: first the creation of men, then the kings who ruled before the Great Flood, and finally the Flood itself, culminating in an offer of eternal life to the Sumerian Noah, Ziusudra. It is essentially the same story as the "Priestly document" that appears to have been a source of the canonical version of Genesis.
The translation of the Eridu Genesis offered here is adapted from a translation by Thorkild Jacobson. After the story of the Creation of Mankind, the gods were disturbed by the noise produced by men, and the supreme god Enlil decides to destroy human beings.