Two Flood Warnings in the Sumerian Record — One Was Ignored and Came True 3,000 Years Later

In 1893, an excavator with the University of Pennsylvania pulled a clay tablet out of the ruins of Nippur, in what is now central Iraq, and packed it into a crate bound for Philadelphia. The tablet was small. The lower third of a larger document. The script was Sumerian. The cuneiform was clean, well-cut, and entirely unreadable to anyone living at the time.
The crate was logged. The tablet was shelved. And there it sat, in a drawer, for nineteen years.
In 1912, a German Assyriologist named Arno Poebel finally turned it over and began the work of translation. What he found, line by line, was a flood story. Older than the Bible. Older than the Babylonian version that scholars had been arguing about since 1872. The oldest written account of a great flood that any human civilization had ever produced.
#archaeology #history