Back Atra-Hasis Afrikaans أترا هاسس Arabic Mýtus o Atrachasísovi Czech Atraḫasis-Epos German آترا-هاسیس Persian Mythe d'Atrahasis French Atrahaszísz-eposz Hungarian Wiracarita Atrahasis ID Atrahasis (poema epico) Italian Atrahasis-epos Dutch
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Atra-Hasis (Akkadian: 𒀜𒊏𒄩𒋀, romanized: Atra-ḫasīs) is an 18th-century BC Akkadian epic, recorded in various versions on clay tablets[1] and named for one of its protagonists, the priest Atra-Hasis ('exceedingly wise').[2] The narrative has four focal points: An organisation of allied gods shaping Mesopotamia agriculturally; a political conflict between them, pacified by creating the first human couples; the mass reproduction of these humans; and a great deluge, as has been handed down many times in the different flood myths of mankind. Probably the relic of a natural catastrophe in Mesopotamia caused by rising sea level at the end of the last ice age,[3][4] the epic links this flood with the intention of the upper gods to eliminate their artificial creatures.
The name "Atra-Hasis" also appears, as a king of Shuruppak on the Euphrates in the times before that flood, on one of the Sumerian King Lists.[5] The oldest known copy of the epic tradition concerning Atrahasis[i] can be dated by colophon (scribal identification) to the reign of Hammurabi’s great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646–1626 BC). However, various Old Babylonian dialect fragments exist, and the epic continued to be copied into the first millennium BC.[6]: 8–15
The story of Atrahasis also exists in a later Assyrian dialect version, first 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[7] 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.[6] A further fragment was recovered in Ugarit.
- ^ Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226067155. p. 40.
- ^ Helle, Sophus (2021-10-26). Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-26259-9.
- ^ "Lost Civilization Under Persian Gulf?", Science Daily, December 8, 2010
- ^ Rose, Jeffrey I. (December 2010), "New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis", Current Anthropology, 51 (6): 849–883, doi:10.1086/657397, S2CID 144935980
- ^ "Sumerian King List." WB 62. circa 2000 BC.
- ^ a b Lambert, Wilfred G., and Alan R. Millard. 1999 [1969]. Atrahasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood. London: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 1-57506-039-6.
- ^ Lambert, Wilfred G., and Alan Millard. 1965. Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum. London.
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