Shuruppak: The Flood Hero's City and Its Real Flood Layer
The city of the Flood hero, where archaeologists really did find a flood layer, and some of the oldest literature on earth.
Shuruppak, today Tell Fara in southern Iraq, is the city tradition links to the Flood. Excavators found a river-laid flood layer there dated to around 2900 BCE.
Shuruppak, today Tell Fara in southern Iraq, was a Sumerian city sacred to the grain goddess Sud (Ninlil). In tradition it is the city of the Flood. The Sumerian King List ends the antediluvian kings with Ubara-Tutu of Shuruppak, followed by 'Then the flood swept over.' The Gilgamesh epic calls Utnapishtim 'the man of Shuruppak'.
The Instructions of Shuruppak, one of the oldest literary texts in the world, are framed as wisdom from a man named Shuruppak to his son Ziusudra, the Sumerian flood hero. Early copies were found at Abu Salabikh and date to around 2500 BCE. That makes them among the earliest works of literature ever found, and they already assume that the audience knows who Ziusudra was.
When German and American archaeologists dug the site, they found thousands of tablets from about 2600 BCE, making it one of the key early archives of Sumer. Erich Schmidt's excavation in 1931 also found a layer of river-laid sediment at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period, around 2900 BCE, which some linked to the Flood.
The idea is tempting: a city remembered for a flood that shows signs of a flood. Similar layers turned up at Ur and Kish, but at different dates, which suggests many local river floods rather than one. Even so, the memory of such a disaster in the heart of Sumer may lie behind the city's place in the legend.
A city that legend names as the home of the Flood hero turned out to have a real flood deposit under it.
Archaeologists stress that flood layers in southern Iraq come from different dates at different sites, pointing to repeated river floods, not a single worldwide deluge.
