Sumerian King List: Why Did Early Kings Reign for Millennia?

A list of kings who ruled for tens of thousands of years before the Flood, after kingship 'descended from heaven' at Eridu.

The Sumerian King List is a cuneiform text naming the cities that held kingship over Sumer. Eight kings before the Flood reign a combined 241,200 years; afterward reigns shrink to realistic lengths.

The Sumerian King List is a cuneiform text recording which cities held kingship over Sumer and for how long. Its best copy is the Weld-Blundell Prism in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, written around 1800 BCE. It begins: 'After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu.' There are more than a dozen copies and fragments, and they do not all agree on the names, order, or reign lengths.

Before the Flood, eight kings rule in five cities for a combined 241,200 years. Reigns are given in multiples of the sar, 3,600 years. Then 'the flood swept over', and kingship descends from heaven a second time, to Kish. Reigns shrink: first to hundreds of years, then to realistic lengths, as the list moves into kings known from other records.

It is full of famous names. Etana 'who ascended to heaven' rules at Kish. Gilgamesh rules Uruk for 126 years. Kubaba, a tavern keeper who became king of Kish, is the only woman in the list. Enmebaragesi of Kish, one of its kings, is the earliest ruler in the list whose name also appears on inscriptions made in his own time. That is where the legendary list begins to touch real history.

The list treats Sumer as one kingdom that passed from city to city, but historians know many of these dynasties ruled at the same time. Scholars think it was written to support the claim of later kings, like those of Isin, to rule all of Sumer. The pattern of long-lived early rulers is strikingly like the lifespans before the Flood in Genesis 5.