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93 brought his axe, the workers brought the tar stones, the young ones carried the pitch, the binders provided the rest." When the boat was finished, according to the Atra-hasis text, the townspeople helped him load it with food and water (kept in watertight compartments), as well as "with clean animals fat animals .. . wild creatures . . . cattle . .. winged birds of the sky.*' The list is akin to the one in Genesis, according to which the Lord's instructions to Noah were to bring into the ark two of each species, male and female, "of every living thing of flesh ... of the fowls after their kind and of the cattle after their kind." The embarkation of pairs of animals has been a_ favorite subject of countless artists, be it master painters or illustrators of children's books. It has also been one of the eyebrow raisers of the tale, deemed a virtual impossibility and thus more of an allegorical way to explain how animal life contin- ued even after the Deluge. Indirectly, such doubt regarding an important detail is bound to cast incredulity on the factu- ality of the whole Deluge story. It is therefore noteworthy that the Deluge recension in the Epic of Gilgamesh offers a totally different detail regarding the preservation of animal life: It was not the living animals that were taken aboard—it was their seed that was preserved! The text (tablet XI, lines 21-28) quotes Enki speaking thus to the wall: Reed hut, reed hut! Wall, wall! Reed hut, hearken! Wall, reflect! Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu: Abandon your house, build a ship! Give up possessions, seek thou life! Forswear goods, the life keep! Aboard the ship take thou the seed of all living things. We learn from line 83 in the tablet that Utnapishtim (as "Noah" was called in this Old Babylonian recension) had indeed brought on board "whatever 1 had of the seed of living beings." Clearly, this is a reference not to plant seeds, but to that of animals. The Deluge