6 It was also the first discovered, making it the most studied of the early flood accounts. 5 The Babylonian account is the most intact, with only seven of 205 lines missing. While there are differences between the original Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian flood accounts, many of the similarities are strikingly close to the Genesis flood account. Babylonian and Assyrian are two dialects of the Akkadian, and both contain a flood account. Cuneiform writing was invented by the Sumerians and carried on by the Akkadians. 4 The stories that were discovered on cuneiform tablets, which comprise some of the earliest surviving writing, have obvious similarities. There have been numerous flood stories identified from ancient sources scattered around the world. Even secular scholars have recognized the parallels between the Babylonian, Phoenician, and Hebrew accounts, although not all are willing to label the connections as anything more than shared mythology. However, some Christians have studied the ideas of creation and the afterlife presented in the Epic. 1, 2 The rest of the Epic, which dates back to possibly third millennium B.C., contains little of value for Christians, since it concerns typical polytheistic myths associated with the pagan peoples of the time. The Epic of Gilgamesh has been of interest to Christians ever since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century in the ruins of the great library at Nineveh, with its account of a universal flood with significant parallels to the Flood of Noah's day.
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