Chris Weimer

That's another problem as well.

jeffevnz

IMO, there's a pretty strong case that several of the flood stories are related. Here is a list of textual coincidences.

The dove, the raven, and the sacrifice are all highly improbable coincidences between Noah and Gilgamesh. The connections between Gilgamesh and Atrahasis are even clearer. Tying Atrahasis to the oldest one, Ziusudra, is not as easy, but IMO the general outline of the story, along with the "side-wall" phrase, and the length of the storm, do the trick.

Now, whether Ziusudra was based on something historical is another question. There was a Ziusudra in the Sumerian King List (separate document). The SKL mentions him being King during a great flood, and both the SKL and the flood story say he was King of Shuruppak when it happened. We know from geological evidence that the Euphrates flooded Shuruppak roughly around the time that Ziusudra would have lived, based on efforts to date the SKL (the dates listed in the SKL are clearly bullshit, since they have kings ruling for 30,000 years at a time).

Donnmathan

I'd take a pass on Noah and Job for sure, but there's always a VERY slim chance that the others are based, loosely, on real people. This far from the events and times described, it's VERY hard to be 100% sure. Honestly, its like someone two thousand years from now reading a Tom Clancy novel and a few fragmentary accounts of late 20th century US history; sure, there are some real place names and people mentioned, but how does one really seperate them from the fictional characters and places without much more complete references?

On a side tangent, I've noticed everyone connecting the flood myths of mideast origin together, which I think is somewhat justified (except the Greek, IMHO). What ticks me off is when the True Christians (tm) hop in and start asserting that because so many cultures around the world have flood myths, Noah must be true.

Alf

I have seen several references to kings ruling for an outrageous number of years. Is that the story tellers intention or is it a typing mistake? For example the babylonians didn't have anything resembling decimal point as we have today so if you were to write 112 it could mean 11200, 1120, 112, 11.2, 1.12, 0.112, 112000 etc and simply context was used to dechipher exactly what the number meant. To translate to modern day 10-based system (babylonians actually used a 60-based system, so (13,2) could mean 13 + 2/60 or 13*60 + 2 or 13*60*60 + 2*60 etc.)

I can easily see how, over a couple of generations, one can easily believe that a king of old ruled for 10000 years when in fact he only ruled for a couple of years but someone along the way misunderstood the position of the digits.

Btw, the babylonians as such had a primitive positional system which was flawed because they lacked digit 0 but as it was a primitive form of positional system it was also more advanced than many other systems of writing numbers as has been used in various cultures. This was probably also a reason why babylonians were far ahead of other contemporary cultures in math. The greek for example struggled with numbers and preferred geometry. It wasn't until after Alexander the Great and the fall of the greek culture and rise of the hellenistic culture that they managed to get a grip on arithmetic to speak of. Similarly, romans struggled with large numbers. There is a method to multiply two roman numerals together but it is awkward and far from simple and worked best for small numbers.

It was in India that they first invented digit 0 and thus revolutionized arithmetic and made it simple, but that didn't reach europe until long after the roman empire was history and was at first opposed by the church because europe got the system from muslims and as such it was considered a system of the devil. However, as the system was far simpler than the roman numerals it eventually won and even the church switched to it eventually.

Alf