The Flood story was real. Before Noah there was Utnapishtim and before him there was Atrahasis, and yes before him there was Ziusudra. All from different eras and different people but its the same fucking story. Humanity faces annihilation by water and one man is warned. He is told to prepare a massive vessel. Life is preserved aboard it. The world gets crushed by the flood. The survivor emerges afterward and offers sacrifice. By the time we reach Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh, we even get the birds being released to see whether the waters have gone down. Then centuries later we get Noah. Genesis did not invent the Flood story. The Hebrews inherited a tradition that was already ancient. Did the Sumerians invent it? I seriously doubt it. Writing appears pretty late in the human story. People were telling stories around fires for tens of thousands of years before anybody knew cuneform. The oldest version we possess is not necessarily the oldest version. Its the oldest version that we have. There have been all kinds of deadly floods in the past that we have evidence of, but something that traumatic doent get forgotten. Someone remembered a flood so big that it stayed in the human memory for .. well... ever! Ziusudra. Atrahasis. Utnapishtim. Noah. I don't think we're looking at four separate flood stories. I think we're looking at four surviving layers of an really old human memory. My question is how fucking old was the story already when Sumer wrote it down?