Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Flood Myths gathers five narratives centered on a catastrophic deluge or comparable near total destruction, with one survivor or couple preserved to found the world anew.

Three come from the same broader Mesopotamian tradition and share a documented literary relationship. Atrahasis and the Mesopotamian Flood has the gods, disturbed by an overpopulated and noisy humanity, move from plague to famine and finally to a flood meant to silence it; warned by the god Enki, the wise man Atrahasis builds a boat and survives, and the gods afterward accept permanent limits on human fertility and lifespan in place of destruction. The Flood of Utnapishtim, preserved on Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, draws directly on Atrahasis and older Sumerian tradition, its survivor granted immortality as an isolated exception rather than a gift available to Gilgamesh, who hears the story from him. Noah and the Flood shares the same broad shape, a single righteous man building a vessel to exact measurements, pairs of every kind brought aboard, and a covenant sealed with a rainbow when the survivors reach dry ground, Genesis dating the flood's rise and fall precisely and sending out a raven and then a dove.

The other two come from unrelated traditions with independently structured versions of a comparable event. Deucalion and Pyrrha, the Greek flood myth told most fully in Ovid, has Zeus destroy an impious age of humanity, its two survivors repopulating the world by throwing stones behind them. Yima and the Vara, the Avestan myth of the first mortal king, has him build an enclosed shelter at Ahura Mazda's command to preserve the finest of every living thing against a coming mortal winter rather than a flood, the group's one member preserving against cold rather than water.