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The story of the Deluge, the Great Flood, is part of human lore and communal memory virtually in all parts of the world. Its main elements are the same everywhere, no matter the version or the epithet-names by which the tale's principals are called: Angry gods decide to wipe Mankind off the face of the Earth by means of a global flood, but one couple is spared and saves the human line. Except for an account of the Deluge written in Greek by the Chaldean priest Berossus in the third century B.C., known to scholars from fragmentary mentions in the writings of Greek historians, the only record of that momentous event was in the Hebrew Bible. But in 1872 the British Society of Biblical Archaeology was told in a lecture by George Smith that among the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh discovered by Henry Layard in the royal library of Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital, some (Fig. 21) contained a Deluge tale simi- lar to that in the Bible. By 1910 parts of other recensions (as scholars call versions in other ancient Near Eastern lan- guages) have been found. They helped reconstruct another major Mesopotamian text, the Epic of Atra-hasis, that told the story of Mankind from its creation until its near-annihila- tion by the Deluge. Linguistic and other clues in these texts indicated an earlier Sumerian source, and parts of that were found and began to be published after 1914. Although the full Sumerian text is yet to be discovered, the existence of such a prototype on which all the others, including the bibli- cal version, are based, is now beyond doubt. The Bible introduces Noah, the hero of the Deluge tale 87 THE DELUGE