Atra-Hasis

Atra-Hasis (Akkadian: 𒀜𒊏𒄩𒋀, romanized: Atra-ḫasīs) is an 18th-century BC Akkadianepic, recorded in various versions on clay tablets and named for one of its protagonists, the priest Atra-Hasis ('exceedingly wise'). The narrative has its origins in Sumerian historiography and comprises four focal points: An organisation of allied upper and lower gods shaping Mesopotamia agriculturally; a political conflict between them, pacified by manufacturing of a first human couple to serve as their labour force; the human's mass reproduction within a few millennia; and a devastating deluge linked to the intention of the upper gods to destroy their imperfect artificial creatures.

Atrahasis is a relatively late epic of the flood myth ubiquitous in Mesopotamia; its oldest known versions date from the Ur III period, followed by an almost unbroken chain of transmission comprising Akkadian, Babylonian, Biblical and Qur’anic accounts (cf. flood myth). Recent research suggests that the relatively rapid rise in sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age may have formed the actual backdrop to this narrative – such an event suggests that ‘it is likely to have made an impression on the emerging settled communities (…), particularly given that the population living in the affected areas had become fully literate within three millennia of the last flood.' (J. Rose)

Atra-Hasis himself is first mentioned in the Sumerian King List as a ruler of Shuruppak, which, according to another of its accounts, was one of the earliest city-states in the period before that great deluge. The oldest known copy of the epic tradition concerning Atrahasis can be dated by colophon to the reign of Hammurabi’s great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646–1626 BC). However, various Old Babylonian dialect fragments exist, one more was recovered in Ugarit, and the epic continued to be copied into the first millennium BC.

The story of Atrahasis also exists in Assyrian dialect versions, rediscovered in the Library of Ashurbanipal, though its translations have been uncertain due to the artifact being in fragmentary condition and containing ambiguous words. Nonetheless, its fragments were first assembled and translated by George Smith as The Chaldean Account of Genesis, the hero of which had his name corrected to Atra-Hasis by Heinrich Zimmern in 1899. In 1965, Wilfred G. Lambert and Alan Millard published many additional texts belonging to the epic, including an Old Babylonian copy (written c. 1650 BC) which is the most complete recension of the tale to have survived. These new texts greatly increased knowledge of the epic and were the basis for Lambert and Millard’s first English translation of the Atrahasis epic in something approaching entirety.