Nippur, Nineveh, Sippar and the museums that hold the copies, Iraq
Ancient Texts
Copies from about 1900 to 500 BC (literary tablets, not the age of the cities they name)
The cities of southern Iraq left their own account of beginnings. It survives on clay: a sage of Eridu who refuses the food of life, a flood warned by Enki, a creation in which Marduk splits the sea, a poem in which the arts are handed out, and the death of Gilgamesh after he has reached the flood survivor.
These are not one tablet filed under one heading. The rooms below keep each composition with the copies that actually carry it, the way those copies are dated, and the readings a visitor can weigh. One object beside them is not a story at all. It is a Babylonian drawing of the world.
Why this is extraordinary
The oldest of these literary copies are Old Babylonian, roughly the 19th to 17th centuries BC, from Nippur and from Tell Haddad. The signs on the clay are cuneiform, wedge-shaped writing pressed in with a stylus. The most famous flood tablet is much younger. It was read in London in 1872 from a copy made for Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. A claim that any one of them is the oldest writing does not survive the tablets. Accounts from Uruk are older, and so are the Instructions of Shuruppak and the hymn of the temple at Kesh, known from copies of about 2600 BC.
The plots do not agree with one another in the way a single report would. Enlil sends the flood in one poem and is not the champion in another. The hero is Ziusudra, or Atrahasis, or Utnapishtim, and Adapa never boards a boat. A museum heading that says only "flood" is a filing word, not an identification. One creation in the set has Marduk split the sea. Beside the poems sits a different kind of object, a Babylonian drawing of the world, a circle on clay rather than a story.
If the poems remember real floods and real teachers, that memory has to be matched to a layer, a city, and a date, and those dates are not the same. If they are school literature, they are still testimony. They are what the scribes chose to copy about their own past. The pin is Nippur, where many of the Sumerian copies were dug. The Assyrian copies are weighed with Nineveh. The mounds are the Sumer hub.
The rooms
Each mystery has its own room. The pin on the map opens this page.
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The Myth of Adapa A sage of Eridu refuses the food of life. The tablets are old. They are not the oldest writing. -
Atrahasis The gods send a flood because humans are too noisy, and Enki warns one man to build a boat. -
Enuma Elish When on high the heavens were not yet named, Marduk splits the sea and Babylon is founded. -
Enki and the World Order Enlil places the divine powers in Enki's hand, and Enki assigns the waters, the fields and the crafts. -
The Eridu Genesis A Sumerian tablet from Nippur founds the cities, Eridu among them, and has Ziusudra survive a flood. -
The Gilgamesh Flood Tablet Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how he survived the flood, on a Nineveh tablet read aloud in 1872. -
The Death of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh lies dying. The gods recall that he reached Ziusudra and brought back rites that had been forgotten. - The Babylonian Map of the World A clay disk of the world, Babylon near the middle, an ocean ring, and distant regions written beyond the circle.