The Flood Tablet
In 1872 a self-taught former engraver named George Smith, sorting broken tablets at the British Museum, read this one and found a flood, a boat that comes to rest on a mountain, and birds sent out to look for dry land. It was a story like Noah's, told in Babylonian by a man called Utnapishtim, and it is the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Found: Kuyunjik (Nineveh), near Mosul, Iraq, from the library of Ashurbanipal; British Museum K.3375.
What it is
A fragment of a clay tablet about fifteen centimetres tall, from the library the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal gathered at Nineveh in the seventh century BC. It is one copy of the eleventh of the epic's twelve tablets, the last of the story proper, and it holds the part where Gilgamesh, looking for a way not to die, finds the man the gods made immortal, together with his wife. Utnapishtim tells him how he got that way: a god warned him of a flood, he built a boat, the storm drowned everyone else, and when the boat grounded he sent out a dove, a swallow and a raven.
Why it made a stir
Smith read it out to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872, with the Prime Minister in the audience. A Babylonian flood with a boat and birds, on a tablet written centuries before the oldest surviving copy of Genesis, was news, and a newspaper paid for Smith to go to Nineveh and look for the missing pieces. The story itself is older than this tablet: Babylonian scribes were already writing a flood like it down by about 1650 BC, in the poem of Atrahasis.
Why the photograph is a visitor's
The British Museum's own photographs of this tablet are licensed under a non-commercial licence. This one was taken in the gallery by a visitor in 2010, who gave it away with no conditions, so it can hang here.
- George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (2003): Tablet XI
- George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (Penguin, 1999)
- Smith, 'The Chaldean Account of the Deluge', Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2 (1873), 213–234: the lecture of 3 December 1872
- Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007)
- British Museum K.3375, collection record
- Photograph: BabelStone, 2010, CC0 (via Wikimedia Commons). Object: British Museum, London, K.3375. Licence verified 2026-09-25.
