Epic of Gilgamesh. A fragment of a version of this well-known text was discovered at the site of Megiddo in northern Israel. From here, about the Amarna Tablets in Canaan.
From Wikipedia
Modern rediscovery
.jpg)
In 1880, the English Assyriologist George Smith published a translation of Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh (right), containing the Flood myth,[85] which attracted immediate scholarly attention and controversy due to its similarity to the Genesis flood narrative.[86]
The Akkadian text of the Epic of Gilgamesh was first discovered in 1849 AD by the English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.[26][58][33]: 95 Layard was seeking evidence to confirm the historicity of the events described in the Hebrew Bible, i.e. the Christian Old Testament,[26] which was believed to contain the oldest texts in the world.[26] Instead, his and later excavations unearthed much older Mesopotamian texts[26] and showed that many of the stories in the Old Testament may be derived from earlier myths told throughout the ancient Near East.[26] The first translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh was produced in the early 1870s by George Smith, a scholar at the British Museum,[85][87][88] who published the Flood story from Tablet XI in 1880 under the title The Chaldean Account of Genesis.[85] Gilgamesh’s name was originally misread as Izdubar.[85][89][90]
Early interest in the Epic of Gilgamesh was almost exclusively on account of the flood story from Tablet XI.[91] It attracted enormous public attention and drew widespread scholarly controversy, while the rest of the epic was largely ignored.[91] Most attention towards the Epic of Gilgamesh in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from German-speaking countries,[92] where controversy raged over the relationship between Babel und Bibel (“Babylon and Bible”).[93]
In January 1902, the German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch gave a lecture at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin before the Kaiser and his wife, in which he argued that the Flood story in the Book of Genesis was directly copied from the Epic of Gilgamesh.[91] Delitzsch’s lecture was so controversial that, by September 1903, he had managed to collect thousands of articles and pamphlets criticizing this lecture about the Flood and another about the relationship between the Code of Hammurabi and the biblical Law of Moses.[94] The Kaiser distanced himself from Delitzsch and his radical views[94] and by the fall of 1904, Delitzsch was reduced to giving his third lecture in Cologne and Frankfurt am Main rather than in Berlin.[94] The putative relationship between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible later became a major part of Delitzsch’s argument in his 1920–21 book Die große Täuschung (The Great Deception) that the Hebrew Bible was irredeemably “contaminated” by Babylonian influence[91] and that only by eliminating the human Old Testament entirely could Christians finally believe in the true, Aryan message of the New Testament.[91]
From Wikipedia.
The Gilgamesh flood myth is a partial narrative of the Gilgamesh Epic. It is one of three Mesopotamian flood myths alongside the one included in the Eridu Genesis, and an episode from the Atra-Hasis Epic. Many scholars believe that the Gilgamesh flood myth was added to Tablet XI in the “standard version” of the Gilgamesh Epic by an editor who used the flood story, which is described in the Epic of Atra-Hasis.[1] A short reference to the flood myth is also present in the much older Sumerian Gilgamesh poems, from which the later Babylonian versions drew much of their inspiration and subject matter.
