Flood Stories from Around the World

Many peoples on Earth remember a time when the water rose.

The best-known versions come from Mesopotamia, the Bible, Greece and India. Utnapishtim builds a boat on the god Ea’s advice. Noah builds an ark for God. Deucalion and Pyrrha float in a wooden chest. Manu ties his ship to the horn of a fish.

Further away, the Maya drown a race of wooden people, the Inca shut a man and a woman in a box, and a Hawaiian hero named Nuu rides out the flood in a vessel with a house on its deck.

These stories do not agree on when the flood happened, why it came, how long it lasted, or who survived. Some floods drown the whole world. Others drown one valley or one town. So I read them as many memories and many lessons, not as reports of one single event.

Mesopotamia: Utnapishtim, Atrahasis and Ziusudra

Mesopotamia is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in today’s Iraq. It gives us the oldest written flood stories we have. Three heroes carry the same core story in three languages.

Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a Babylonian poem about a king of Uruk who searches for eternal life. On the eleventh tablet he finds Utnapishtim, the one man the gods made immortal. Utnapishtim explains how it happened.

The gods decided to destroy humanity with a flood. The god Ea, a friend to humans, warned Utnapishtim in secret. He told him to tear down his house and build a ship.

Utnapishtim sealed the hull with bitumen, a natural tar. He loaded his family, his craftsmen, animals and “the seed of life”. The storm raged for six days and nights.

The gods themselves panicked at what they had unleashed. George Smith, who first deciphered the tablet, translated one line like this: “The gods, like dogs with tails hidden, couched down.” (George Smith, “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge”, 1873)

When the storm calmed, the ship grounded on a mountain called Nisir. Utnapishtim then tested the land with birds. In Smith’s 1873 wording: “I sent forth a dove, and it left.” The dove came back. A swallow came back. A raven found food and stayed away.

What sets this version apart is that the gods regret the flood out loud. The goddess Ishtar weeps for her people. The god Enlil is angry that a human escaped, and Ea scolds him for punishing everyone instead of only the guilty. The flood is a decision made in a divine council, and the council argues about it.

I give the full Smith text on this site in The Chaldean Account of the Deluge.

Atrahasis

Atrahasis means “exceedingly wise”. The Atrahasis epic is an older Babylonian poem, copied around 1700 BC, that tells the same flood in a longer frame.

In Atrahasis the gods first create humans as workers, to take over the hard labour the lower gods refused to do. The humans multiply. Their noise keeps Enlil awake.

Enlil tries three times to reduce their number: with disease, then drought, then famine. Each time the god Enki, the Sumerian name for Ea, helps the humans survive. Enlil finally sends the flood.

Enki warns Atrahasis by speaking to the wall of his reed house, so that he never technically breaks the oath of the gods. Atrahasis builds a boat and survives.

The detail that makes this telling different is the motive. The flood is about population and noise, not about sin. After the flood the gods introduce limits on human life, such as childbirth that sometimes fails, so the problem will not return.

More on this site: Atrahasis.

Ziusudra in Sumerian

The oldest layer is Sumerian, the language of southern Mesopotamia before Babylonian. A single broken tablet from Nippur names the flood hero Ziusudra, “life of long days”. He is a king and a priest.

A god warns him while he stands beside a wall. The storm lasts seven days and seven nights. Ziusudra opens a window in his huge boat, and the sun god Utu shines in.

The unique detail is his reward. Ziusudra is given eternal life and is settled in Dilmun, a paradise land in the east. In later Greek sources the same figure appears as Xisuthrus.

I compare the three heroes in Utnapishtim, Ziusudra and Noah and in Ziusudra’s Flood.

The Bible: Noah

The story of Noah fills Genesis 6 to 9.

God sees that the earth is full of violence and decides to end all flesh. He finds one righteous man, Noah. God speaks to him directly and gives him exact measurements for an ark, a large wooden box-shaped vessel three hundred cubits long.

Noah brings in his wife, his three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, their wives, and pairs of animals. Clean animals come in sevens. Clean means fit for sacrifice under the later law.

The water comes from two directions at once. The World English Bible renders Genesis 7:11 like this: “all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the sky’s windows opened.” (World English Bible, public domain)

The ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat. Noah sends out a raven and then a dove. On the dove’s second flight, “in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf” (Genesis 8:11, WEB).

Noah offers a sacrifice. God promises never again to destroy all life by a flood, and sets the rainbow as the sign of that promise.

What sets Noah apart is the covenant. A covenant is a binding agreement between two parties. In Genesis the flood ends with a written contract between God and every living creature, not just with a gift to one hero.

The bird sequence is the clearest parallel to Gilgamesh. The order differs, though. Utnapishtim sends the dove first and the raven last. Noah sends the raven first.

I read the chapter verse by verse in Genesis 7: Noah and the Flood, and the landing place in Mount Ararat.

Greece: Deucalion and Pyrrha

Greek myth has several floods. The most famous belongs to Deucalion, son of the Titan Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora.

Zeus decides to wipe out the men of the Bronze Age. Prometheus, who already stole fire for humanity, warns his son. Deucalion builds a chest, a larnax in Greek, and stocks it with food.

The mythographer Apollodorus gives the short version. In James George Frazer’s translation: “Deucalion, floating in the chest over the sea for nine days and as many nights, drifted to Parnassus.” (Apollodorus, Library 1.7.2, trans. J. G. Frazer, 1921)

The Roman poet Ovid tells the same story at length in Book 1 of his Metamorphoses. He stresses why these two were spared. In Henry T. Riley’s prose translation: “No man was there more upright than he, nor a greater lover of justice, nor was any woman more regardful of the Deities than she.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1, trans. H. T. Riley, 1851)

The ending is what makes the Greek version unique. The couple ask an oracle how to repopulate the empty world. They are told to throw their mother’s bones over their shoulders. They understand that the mother is Earth and her bones are stones. The stones Deucalion throws become men, and the stones Pyrrha throws become women.

Greek tradition also remembers older floods, under the kings Ogyges and Dardanus. In Plato’s Timaeus an Egyptian priest tells the Athenian Solon that the earth has been purged by water many times, and that the Greeks remember only one. That passage is why flood myths and the Atlantis story sit side by side on this site.

More on this site: Deucalion and Pyrrha.

India: Manu and the fish

India’s flood hero is Manu, the ancestor of humankind in Hindu tradition. The oldest version is in the Shatapatha Brahmana, a prose ritual text from roughly the first millennium BC.

It begins with an ordinary morning. In Julius Eggeling’s translation: “When he was washing himself, a fish came into his hands.” (Shatapatha Brahmana 1.8.1.1, trans. J. Eggeling, 1882)

The fish makes a bargain. “Rear me, I will save thee!” it says (Eggeling, 1882). It explains that a flood will carry away all creatures.

Manu keeps the fish in a jar, then a pond, then the sea, as it grows. On the predicted year he builds a ship. When the flood rises, the fish arrives, Manu ties the ship’s rope to the fish’s horn, and the fish tows him to a northern mountain.

Manu survives alone. He makes an offering in the water, and from it a woman is born. Through her, humankind begins again.

What makes this version different is that the warning comes from an animal Manu has rescued. Saving a small life buys the saving of all life. In later texts, such as the Mahabharata and the Matsya Purana, the fish is revealed as a form of the god Vishnu, or of Brahma, and Manu brings seven sages and the seeds of all plants aboard.

More on this site: Who Was Vaivasvata Manu?

The Americas

The Americas hold hundreds of flood traditions. Many were written down by Spanish priests after the conquest, so any detail that echoes Noah needs care.

The Maya: the wooden people of the Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh is the sacred book of the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala. It was written down in the sixteenth century from older tradition.

In it the gods try several times to make humans who will honour them. First they make creatures of mud, which dissolve. Then they carve people out of wood.

The wooden people can speak and multiply, but they have no hearts and forget their makers. The gods destroy them. In Lewis Spence’s 1908 summary-translation: “the waters were swollen, and a great flood came upon the mannikins of wood.” (Lewis Spence, The Popol Vuh, 1908)

Nobody is warned and nobody is meant to survive. Demon birds tear the wooden people apart. Their own dogs, cooking pots and grinding stones turn on them for the way they were treated. The few that escape become the monkeys of the forest.

This is the clearest case of a flood as a failed experiment. The gods are not punishing sinners in a world they already like. They are scrapping a prototype and starting over. Humans of maize dough come next, and they finally work.

More on this site: Popol Vuh: Creation Story.

The Inca: a man and a woman in a box

Cristóbal de Molina, a priest in Cusco in the 1570s, recorded the Inca account. In Clements Markham’s translation: “No living things survived except a man and a woman who remained in a box.” (Cristóbal de Molina, Fables and Rites of the Yncas, trans. C. R. Markham, 1873)

When the waters fell, the wind carried the box to Tiahuanaco, the great ruined city near Lake Titicaca. There the Creator began again. He made each nation out of clay, painted its clothes, and gave it its language and songs.

The unique detail is what happens next. Each new nation travelled underground and came up in its own homeland, out of a cave, a hill, a spring or a tree. That place became its huaca, a sacred site. The flood story is also a map of where every people’s ancestors emerged.

The Cañari: the mountain that grew

Molina also recorded a story of the Cañari people near Quito. Two brothers fled the flood to a mountain called Huaca-ynan. In Markham’s words: “As the waters rose the hill also increased in height, so that the waters never reached them.” (Molina, trans. Markham, 1873)

There is no boat. The refuge is a living mountain.

After the flood the brothers find food cooked for them every day by two macaws with the faces of women. One brother catches the smaller bird, and the Cañari descend from that union. The Cañari honoured the macaw for it.

Molina gives a similar tale from Ancasmarca near Cusco. There a shepherd’s llamas, which Molina calls sheep, watched the stars and warned him. He and his six children climbed a mountain that also grew with the water.

The Anishinaabe: Nanabozho and the earth-diver

The Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe, of the Great Lakes tell of a flood sent after Nanabozho, a culture hero and trickster, fights the underwater spirits. The water covers everything. Nanabozho survives on a floating log or the top of a tall tree, with a few animals.

He asks the animals to dive for a handful of mud from the old earth. The strong divers fail. The small muskrat dives, dies, and floats up with mud in its paw. Nanabozho spreads the mud on the back of a turtle, and it grows into the land.

This telling differs because the flood comes first and creation comes second. The new world is built from a pinch of the old one. People still call North America Turtle Island because of stories like this one.

I tell the Ojibwe version in Waynaboozhoo and the Great Flood.

East Asia: the flood that was managed

China’s flood tradition is not about a boat. It is about engineering.

The Shujing, or Book of Documents, is one of the oldest Chinese texts. In its chapter on the sage emperor Yao, the emperor asks his court for help. In James Legge’s translation: “destructive in their overflow are the waters of the inundation.” (Shu King, The Canon of Yao, trans. James Legge, 1899)

Yao appoints Gun, who fails after nine years. Later sources say Gun tried to dam the water with a magical self-growing soil. Gun is punished, and his son Yu takes over.

Yu works for thirteen years. He does not build walls. He cuts channels and lets the rivers run to the sea. He becomes Yu the Great and founds the Xia, the first Chinese dynasty.

Nobody survives by luck here, and no god warns a chosen family. The flood is a long disaster that a ruler must solve with labour and planning. The hero earns his throne by draining the land.

Other peoples in southern China and mainland Southeast Asia tell a very different kind of story. In many of them a brother and sister ride out the flood in a gourd or a drum. They are the only survivors, and they must marry to restart humanity. That pattern of the surviving siblings is common there and rare elsewhere.

Africa: the quiet continent

Africa is the surprise in this survey. Flood stories are much rarer there than on other continents.

The Scottish folklorist James George Frazer collected flood traditions from everywhere he could in 1918. He wrote that “it may be doubted whether throughout that vast continent a single genuinely native tradition of a great flood has been recorded.” (J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, vol. 1, 1918)

Frazer overstated it. Later collectors found local floods in many African traditions. Still, a world-ending flood with one surviving family is not a common African theme.

Several of the stories that do exist look borrowed. Frazer gives a Maasai tale from East Africa, recorded by a German officer, in which a righteous man named Tumbainot builds a wooden ship, saves his family and animals, and sends out a dove and then a vulture. He judged it a late echo of the Bible, carried in by Christian or Muslim contact.

In Angola, the explorer David Livingstone heard that a whole village, with its fowls and dogs, had perished where Lake Dilolo now lies. A local flood that swallows one village is the more typical African shape.

More on this site: African Flood Stories.

Europe: Norse, Welsh and Irish floods

Northern Europe has flood stories, but they sit inside creation and settlement myths rather than standing alone.

Norse: the blood of Ymir

In the Prose Edda, written down in Iceland by Snorri Sturluson around 1220, the first being is the frost giant Ymir. The god Odin and his brothers kill him. So much blood pours from his wounds that every frost giant drowns except one, Bergelmir.

In Rasmus B. Anderson’s translation: “He and his wife went on board his ark and saved themselves in it.” (The Younger Edda, trans. R. B. Anderson, 1879)

The Old Norse word behind “ark” is uncertain. It may mean a boat, or a hollow log, or even a flour bin, and scholars still argue about it.

What makes this version unique is that the survivors are not humans. The flood saves the line of the giants, the enemies of the gods. The world itself is then built from Ymir’s body, and his blood becomes the sea.

Welsh: Dwyfan and Dwyfach

The Welsh tell of the bursting of Llyn Llion, the Lake of Waves. Its waters flooded all lands. Only Dwyfan and Dwyfach survived, in a ship without sails or mast, and Britain was repeopled from them.

The monster of the lake, the addanc, is dragged out by the oxen of Hu Gadarn so the lake cannot burst again.

The story survives in a group of Welsh triads published around 1800 from the papers of Iolo Morganwg, a collector who is known to have forged and reworked many of his sources. So it may be an eighteenth-century creation built on older lore, not a medieval tradition.

Irish: Cessair and Fintan

The Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, was compiled by Christian monks in the eleventh century. It begins Irish history before the biblical flood.

A woman named Cessair, a granddaughter of Noah in the text, sails to Ireland with fifty women and three men, hoping to escape the coming deluge. The flood drowns them all except one man, Fintan mac Bóchra.

Fintan survives by turning into a salmon, then an eagle, then a hawk. He lives for thousands of years and becomes the witness who remembers all of Irish history.

This version is unique because the survivor is a shape-shifter and a living archive. The monks fitted a native Irish memory of a very old seer into the timeline of Genesis.

The Pacific: Nuu and the canoe of the carpenters

The Pacific Islands hold rich flood traditions. Missionaries arrived early, so Bible echoes can creep into what was written down.

Hawaii: Nuu

Abraham Fornander, a nineteenth-century judge and historian in Hawaii, recorded the flood of Nuu, called Kai-a-Kahinalii, “the sea of Kahinalii”. At the command of his god, Nuu “built a large vessel with a house on top of it” (Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, vol. 1, 1878).

Nuu saved his wife, his three sons and their wives. When the water fell, the gods Kane, Ku and Lono came to the vessel and told him to step out. He found himself on the summit of Mauna Kea, the highest mountain on the island of Hawaii.

The detail I find most striking is local. Nuu names a cave on Mauna Kea after his wife, and the legend Fornander recorded says the cave is still there. The flood is tied to a real place in the landscape.

The three sons and their wives match Noah closely, which is why I read Pacific versions carefully. More on this site: The Ark of Nuu.

Fiji: the god who overslept

The Fijian flood began with a bird. The great god Ndengei had a pet bird whose call woke him every morning. His two grandsons shot it and hid the body.

Ndengei overslept, found out, and sent his warriors. The grandsons hid behind the stockade of a tribe of carpenters. When the god could not break the wall, he sent rain until the mountains were covered.

The rebels were saved in canoes, or in large bowls, made with the help of the carpenter god Rokoro.

This telling stands out because the cause is personal and petty. A god’s lost sleep floods the world. Frazer recorded the story in 1918 from earlier missionary reports.

More on this site: Oceania Flood Stories.

What the stories share, and where they split

Some patterns repeat across these stories. They are patterns, not proof. A shared motif can come from a shared memory, but it can also come from borrowing, from missionaries, or from the simple fact that people everywhere live near water that floods.

Shared patterns

A warning to one person. Utnapishtim, Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Noah, Deucalion, Manu and Nuu are all told in advance. The warning comes from a god, a father, a fish, a goddess or a voice through a wall.

A vessel that is a box. The Mesopotamian ark, Noah’s ark, Deucalion’s chest, the Inca box and Bergelmir’s “ark” are boxes or chests more than boats. They float, and the survivors wait inside until the water sets them down.

Birds that test the land. Gilgamesh and Genesis both send birds. So does the Maasai story recorded by Frazer. That is the strongest single parallel in this survey, and it is also the clearest sign of borrowing in the late versions.

A mountain landing. Nisir, Ararat, Parnassus, the northern mountain of Manu, Mauna Kea. Survivors come down from a peak.

A new start for humanity. Almost every story ends with people being made again, from stones, from clay, from an offering, from a single couple or from a mother bird.

Where they split

The cause. Sin in Genesis. Noise and overpopulation in Atrahasis. A failed design in the Popol Vuh. A dead pet bird in Fiji. A murdered giant in the Edda. Ordinary bad luck in China.

The scale. Genesis, Gilgamesh and the Popol Vuh destroy the world. Lake Dilolo drowns one village. The Shujing describes a flood that a government can drain.

Who survives. A righteous man and his family. A pious couple. A lone man. Two brothers on a growing mountain. A brother and sister in a gourd. A giant and his wife. A seer who becomes a salmon. Sometimes nobody at all.

How I read the overlap

The closest matches are inside the ancient Near East. Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, Ziusudra and Noah share the warning, the sealed vessel and the sacrifice. Gilgamesh and Noah also share the birds. Those four are almost certainly one tradition retold over two thousand years.

Outside that region, the matches loosen fast. Manu’s fish, Yu’s channels, the wooden people of the Maya and Ymir’s blood are not versions of each other. They are different answers to the same old question: what if the water had not stopped?

The dates also refuse to line up. The Mesopotamian tablets point to floods in the cities of southern Iraq around 2900 BC. Greek tradition places Deucalion a few generations before the Trojan War. The Oera Linda Book, for comparison, puts the sinking of its Atland at 2193 BC. Plato’s Egyptian priests place the end of Atlantis about 9,600 BC. No single date fits all of them.

From a paleo-contact point of view, I find the Mesopotamian cluster the most interesting. It is the one where the flood is a decision taken by a council of named gods who argue, regret and break ranks to save a favoured human. That is a very specific memory, and it is not the same as the other stories.

Related on this site

• What Is the Relationship Between Utnapishtim, Ziusudra, and Noah?
• Genesis 7: Noah and the Flood
• Deucalion and Pyrrha
• Who Was Vaivasvata Manu?
• Mount Ararat

FAQ

Are all flood myths about the same event?

No. The stories disagree on the date, the cause, the size of the flood and who survived. The Mesopotamian and biblical versions are clearly related to each other. Most of the others are independent traditions.

Which flood story is the oldest?

The oldest written flood stories are the Sumerian tale of Ziusudra and the Babylonian Atrahasis epic. Both survive on tablets from roughly 1700 to 1600 BC. The Gilgamesh flood tablet that George Smith read in 1872 was copied around 650 BC from older originals.

Why are there so few flood stories in Africa?

Nobody knows for sure. Frazer noticed the gap in 1918. Many African traditions do have local floods, often tied to one lake or village. The idea of one world-ending flood with a single surviving family is rare there, and several of the examples that do exist seem to have been borrowed from the Bible.

Did the flood stories come from the end of the Ice Age?

Some researchers link flood myths to rising seas after the last Ice Age, about 12,000 to 8,000 years ago. Others point to local river floods, tsunamis or lake bursts. The stories themselves do not settle the question, because they give such different dates and causes.

Sources

Quotations come only from public-domain translations:

• George Smith, “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge”, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2 (1873). Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI.
• World English Bible (public domain). Genesis 7:11 and 8:11.
• Apollodorus, The Library, translated by James George Frazer (Loeb Classical Library, 1921). Book 1.7.2.
• Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Books I to VII, translated by Henry T. Riley (Bohn, 1851). Book 1.
• The Satapatha-Brahmana, Part I, translated by Julius Eggeling, Sacred Books of the East vol. 12 (1882). 1.8.1.
• Lewis Spence, The Popol Vuh: The Mythic and Heroic Sagas of the Kichés of Central America (1908).
• Cristóbal de Molina, “An Account of the Fables and Rites of the Yncas”, in Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas, translated by Clements R. Markham (Hakluyt Society, 1873).
• The Shu King, translated by James Legge, Sacred Books of the East vol. 3, second edition (1899). The Canon of Yao.
• James George Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, vol. 1 (1918). Part I, chapter 4, on the Great Flood.
• The Younger Edda, translated by Rasmus B. Anderson (1879). Gylfaginning, chapter 7.
• Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, vol. 1 (1878).

Summarised without quotation: the Atrahasis epic and the Sumerian Ziusudra tablet (no public-domain English translation of the full texts), the Mahabharata and Matsya Purana versions of Manu, the Anishinaabe Nanabozho story, the story of Yu the Great from later Chinese sources, the Maasai and Lake Dilolo accounts as reported by Frazer, the Welsh triad of Llyn Llion (published from Iolo Morganwg’s papers around 1800), the Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn, and the Fijian Ndengei story as reported by Frazer.