The document has since been studied by a whole host of scholars, and the story it tells is now known to be as follows: It was just a little over a hundred years ago, on December 3, 1862, to be exact, that an Englishman by the name of George Smith who had been studying thousands of clay tablets and fragments brought to the British Museum from Ancient Nineveh, read a paper before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, in which he announced the discovery and decipherment, on one of the clay tablets dug up from the long buried library of King Ashurbanipal, of a version of a Deluge myth that showed marked resemblances to the Flood of the Book of Genesis. The myth inscribed on this tablet was probably composed about 2000 B.C., or even earlier, but the tablet itself dates from the early second millennium B.C. The Sumerian “Flood”-tablet in the University Museum, excavated at Nippur more than seventy years ago. And even among the skeptics, there are some who feel that there must be at least a kernel of truth in the Flood-motif it seems to have played too large a role in Mesopotamian myth and legend for it to have been nothing more than a total fabrication of fancy and fantasy. Still there are a few who, especially in view of the Biblical account of the Deluge that has been part and parcel of Judaeo-Christian tradition for thousands of years, would like to think of it as an authentic event that had taken place in the far distant past. Little did the ancient scholar who “penned” these lines dream that this innocent-sounding passage would provoke heated debate and passionate controversy among his colleagues living and working more than four thousand years after he had departed for the Sumerian “Land of No-Return.” For what he seemed to say is that he knew of a real, historic, universal, catastrophic Deluge that had overwhelmed and destroyed not only Sumer, but mankind as a whole, a statement which most modern historians would hardly accept as credible and true. After the Flood swept over everything, and kingship had (once again) descended from Heaven, Kish became the seat of kingship. Following the hegemony of these five antediluvian cities, the document goes on to tell us: “After kingship had descended from Heaven,” begins our King List, there were five cities “before the Flood” whose eight fabulous kings ruled no less than 241,200 years. etc.” The King List was probably composed in part about 2100 B.C., but the copies excavated thus far date from the early second millenium B.C. Then the “Flood” passage (shown in color) that reads: “The Flood etc. The first line (shown in color) reads: “After kingship had descended from heaven.” There follows a list of the eight legendary rulers of the five antediluvian cities, together with the fabulous length of their reigns. Stephen Langdon’s copy of the first part of the Sumerian King List, from a prism in the Weld-Blundell Collection of the Ashmolean Museum. It is the very first section of this Sumerian “King List” that contains two brief passages of fundamental significance for the subject of this paper: the character and chronology of the Mesopotamian Flood as revealed in the available cuneiform material. But in spite of its defects and shortcomings it provides us with an historical framework of inestimable value if utilized with discrimination and understanding. To be sure, this unique document is actually a mixture of fact and fancy, and it is often difficult to decide where the one begins and the other ends. Now one of the most valuable of the cuneiform chronicle-like documents that has as yet been dug up from the Mesopotamian soil is the so-called Sumerian “King List,” which records the dynasties and kings that held sway over much of Mesopotamia from the time when “kingship descended from heaven,” that is from the very beginning of history, down to the early second millennium B.C. Lacking the essential intellectual tools of definition and generalization, and immobilized by a sterile, static view of man and his past, they became at best archivists and chroniclers rather than interpreters and expositors of historical truths. Historiography, the writing of history, was hardly a favorite subject of the ancient Mesopotamian academicians and men of letters.
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