The Atrahasis-The Tale of the Super Sage PT 2

The 18th century BCE Akkadian Atra-Hasis epic, named after its human hero, contains both a creation myth and a flood account, and is one of three surviving Babylonian flood stories. The oldest known copy of the epic of Atrahasis can be dated by colophon (scribal identification) to the reign of Hammurabi's great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646--1626 BCE), but various Old Babylonian fragments exist; it continued to be copied into the first millennium. The Atrahasis story also exists in a later fragmentary Assyrian version, the first one having been rediscovered in the library of Ashurbanipal, but because of the fragmentary condition of the tablets and ambiguous words, translations had been uncertain.

W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, London (1965) published many additional texts belonging to the epic, including an Old Babylonian copy (written around 1650 BCE) which is our most complete surviving recension of the tale. These new texts greatly increased knowledge of the epic and they served as the foundation for the first English translation of the Atrahasis epic in something approaching entirety, by Lambert and Millard (Atrahasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood, Oxford, 1969). A further fragment has been recovered in Ugarit.

The surviving Atrahasis epic is written on three tablets in Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon.