Utnapishtim

Far beyond the waters of death, at the place where the rivers begin, an old man lies on his back with nothing to do. He has been lying there a long time. Salt wind moves through the reeds around his house, and the light is the flat, even light of a country that has no weather worth the name. When a filthy, exhausted traveler in lion skins finally crosses the sea and stands over him, the old man looks him up and down and delivers the disappointment that greets everyone who comes this far. He looks ordinary. No taller, no stranger, no brighter than the man staring down at him. This is Utnapishtim, the one human being released from dying, and his first revelation is that eternal life left no mark on him at all.

He had a city once. Shuruppak stood on the bank of the Euphrates, already ancient when the gods lost patience with humankind. People had multiplied, and the racket of them rose day and night, and Enlil, chief among the gods, resolved to wipe the species out with a flood. The plan was meant to be a secret kept by the divine assembly. Ea, god of the sweet underground waters and of useful cunning, had sworn with the rest to say nothing. So he said nothing to Utnapishtim. He spoke instead to the reed wall of the man’s house, loudly, while Utnapishtim happened to be standing on the other side of it. Tear down your house, the wall advised, and build a boat. Leave your wealth where it lies and save your breath.

What the man did next has the plain rhythm of a work record. The boat was built as a cube, its sides equal, its frame divided into seven decks and each deck into nine compartments. He drove in water plugs, stacked punting poles, set aside supplies. Pitch and bitumen went into the furnace and came back as hot black caulk that he poured over the hull until the seams vanished, and the reek of it would have clung to his hands for days. He slaughtered oxen and sheep for the workmen and gave them wine by the barrel, as if it were a festival rather than the end of the world. When the boat was finished he loaded it: his family, his kin, the craftsmen who had built it, the beasts of the field, the seed of every living thing. Then the weather turned, and he went inside, and sealed the door.

The storm that came was bad enough to frighten the gods who sent it. For six days and seven nights the wind and the flood flattened the world. The gods themselves cowered like dogs against the wall of heaven, and Ishtar cried out that she had let her own people be turned to clay. When it was over Utnapishtim opened a hatch and light fell on his face, and he looked out on a silence so complete it undid him. The sea stretched flat to every horizon. All of humanity had become mud. He sat down and wept.

The boat had run aground on the slopes of Mount Nimush, which held it fast and let it sway no further. On the seventh day Utnapishtim released a dove. It flew, found no resting place, and came back. He released a swallow, and the swallow returned the same way. He released a raven, and the raven found the water falling away and bare earth emerging, and it ate, and circled, and did not come back. That was the sign. He brought everyone out onto the mountain and set up an offering, burning reed and cedar and myrtle, and the hungry gods smelled it and gathered over the sacrifice like flies.

Enlil arrived furious that anyone had lived. Ea faced him down, arguing that a flood was a clumsy, indiscriminate punishment, that a plague or a famine or wild beasts would have thinned humankind without erasing it. Enlil’s anger broke. He came aboard the boat, took Utnapishtim and his wife by the hand, made them kneel, and touched their foreheads. Until now, he said, Utnapishtim was a man. From this moment he and his wife would be like gods, deathless. And then Enlil sent them to live at the mouth of the rivers, at the rim of the world, where they have remained ever since.

The traveler in lion skins was Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who had walked to the ends of the earth because his friend Enkidu had died and the fact of his own death had become unbearable to him. He wanted the secret. Utnapishtim gave him an answer he did not want to hear: the immortality he carried was the verdict of a divine assembly that met once and would never meet again, granted for surviving a catastrophe that would not be repeated. It could not be applied for. To make the point land, he set Gilgamesh a smaller test, to stay awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh sat down and fell asleep at once. He slept the whole week through while Utnapishtim’s wife baked a loaf for each day and lined them up to go stale beside his head, so that he could not deny how long he had been gone. A man who cannot conquer sleep is not going to conquer death.

Out of something close to pity, Utnapishtim told him of a plant that grew on the floor of the freshwater deep, thorned like a rose, that could give back lost youth. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet and sank to the bottom and tore it loose, his palms bleeding on the thorns. He carried it toward Uruk, meaning to test it on an old man first. He stopped at a pool to bathe, and a serpent rose to the scent of the plant and swallowed it, and shed its skin as it slipped back into the water. Gilgamesh went home with nothing. The skin the snake left behind is the only thing in the story that ever grew young again.

Utnapishtim is the last and best known of three men who survive the same flood under three names. The oldest Sumerian texts call him Ziusudra, a pious king of long life, and the Sumerian king list puts him on the throne of Shuruppak as the last ruler before the water. An older Akkadian poem calls him Atrahasis, the exceedingly wise, and the Gilgamesh tablet itself slips and uses that name once, when Ea is defending what he did. Berossus, writing in Greek for a Hellenistic readership, called him Xisouthros. The name Utnapishtim belongs to the Babylonian retelling preserved in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it carries, depending on how the syllables are read, a meaning close to He Found Life. The stories never describe his face or his build, and that absence turns out to be the point. When Gilgamesh finally reaches him, he expects a giant, a warrior, some visible proof of a man who beat death. He finds an aging man resting on his back, and the disappointment is its own kind of lesson.

That older poem, the one that names him Atrahasis, begins long before there was anyone to drown. In it the work of the world is done by gods. The junior gods, the Igigi, dig out the beds of the Tigris and the Euphrates and haul the earth away in baskets, and after generations of it they break. They burn their tools in the dark, set fire to the carrying baskets, and go in a mob to surround Enlil’s house at midnight. Nusku, his steward, opens the gate to find the entire labour force of heaven standing outside it. The gods concede, and their solution is to build something else to carry the load. One of the rebels, a god the copies name Aw-ilu or We-ila and describe as the one with sense in him, is killed in the assembly, and the birth goddess Nintu works his flesh and his blood into clay. She pinches off fourteen pieces, seven that become men and seven that become women. Everyone alive in that poem is therefore part river mud and part murdered god, and the intelligence people carry around is the dead one’s, still running.

What comes next explains why a flood had to be invented at all. The people multiply and the noise of them rises, and Enlil, who cannot sleep through it, tries three times to thin them out before he reaches for water. He sends plague, and Atrahasis goes to Ea, who tells him to have everyone stop feeding the other gods and pile every loaf and every offering on Namtar, who carries the sickness, until he is too ashamed to keep sending it. It works. Enlil sends drought, and the same trick is turned on Adad, who holds the rain. It works again. Then comes famine, salt crusting the fields until the ground will not take seed, and the people eat what nobody writes down willingly. Only after three attempts have been talked out from under him does Enlil settle on drowning the species outright, and he makes the whole assembly swear to keep it quiet. That oath is the reason Ea ends up talking to a wall.

The poem does not stop when the water goes down. Nintu stands over the wreckage grieving for people she had made with her own hands, and Ea, who has now saved humankind twice, offers a settlement in place of a second flood. Rather than drown them again the next time they get loud, build the brake into them. From now on there will be women who cannot conceive at all. There will be a she-demon, the pasittu, whose only function is to snatch the infant out of its mother’s lap. There will be orders of priestess forbidden to bear children, and death will be fixed in place for everyone. The oldest surviving flood story in the world ends not with a covenant or a bow in the clouds but with a quota.

His power is simple and total. He does not age toward an end, he does not sicken toward one, and he holds in memory the whole of the world as it was before the water, which makes him the only reliable witness to the oldest story there is. But the gift is sealed inside him. He cannot hand it on, cannot teach it, cannot even point to a path toward it, because there is no path; the assembly is adjourned. And immortality fixed him in place. He has no city and no people, only a wife, a boatman, and the quiet at the mouth of the rivers. He won the thing every king in the epic wants, and the winning cost him the world of the living. He gets to watch it from very far away, and he does not get to go back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Utnapishtim?

Utnapishtim is the immortal flood survivor of Mesopotamian myth, best known from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. Once a mortal man and king of the city of Shuruppak, he was warned by the god Ea to build a boat before the gods drowned the world, and for surviving he was granted eternal life. Utnapishtim now lives at the mouth of the rivers, at the edge of the world.

How did Utnapishtim survive the great flood?

Utnapishtim survived the flood by building an enormous cube-shaped boat on the instruction of the god Ea, who warned him by speaking aloud to the reed wall of his house. He sealed his family, his craftsmen, and animals of every kind inside, then rode out six days and seven nights of storm. The boat finally came to rest on the slopes of Mount Nimush.

Why is Utnapishtim immortal, and can he grant immortality to others?

Utnapishtim is immortal because the god Enlil, after the flood, took him and his wife by the hand and made them like gods. He cannot grant immortality to anyone else. As he explains to Gilgamesh, his eternal life was the one-time verdict of a divine assembly that will never meet again, not a reward that can be earned or requested.

What is the connection between Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh?

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, journeys to the ends of the earth to find Utnapishtim and learn how to escape death. Utnapishtim tells him his immortality cannot be repeated and sets him a test to stay awake for seven nights, which Gilgamesh fails immediately. Utnapishtim then reveals a plant that restores youth, but a serpent steals it before Gilgamesh can use it.

How is Utnapishtim related to Ziusudra and Atrahasis?

Utnapishtim, Ziusudra and Atrahasis are three names for the same flood survivor across Mesopotamian tradition, and Berossus later gave him a fourth in Greek as Xisouthros. The oldest Sumerian texts call him Ziusudra, “life of long days”; the older Akkadian poem calls him Atrahasis, “the exceedingly wise”; and Utnapishtim belongs to the Babylonian version in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Atrahasis poem is the fullest telling, and it alone explains where people came from, why the gods wanted them gone, and what was imposed on human fertility once the flood was over.

Related Entries

Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Enki, Enlil, Ninhursag, Shamash, Ishtar, Anu (Mesopotamian), Humbaba, Bull of Heaven, Anunnaki, Marduk, Tiamat, Noah