The Great Flood: Gilgameš
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 Epic of Gilgameš is one of the most famous texts from ancient Babylonia. It tells the story of a king who is trying to find immortality, and meets Ut-napištim, who has survived the Great Flood and has found what Gilgameš is looking for. In the following text, tablet of XI of the standard edition composed in c.1100 BCE, Ut-napištim tells what had happened to him. It is sometimes an almost verbatim quote from the Epic of Atrahasis.
The translation offered here was found at AncientTexts.Org, and was translated by Maureen Gallery Kovac. Some small adaptations were made.