You’re looking at a clay tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh—the flood story, Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian version.
Written in cuneiform in the first millennium BCE, it preserves a far older memory.
Copies were found in the royal library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, with fragments from sites across Mesopotamia, including Nippur, Sippar, and Uruk.
Here, Uta-napišti tells Gilgamesh how the gods sent a great flood, how a boat saved life, and how survival brought secret knowledge of immortality.
But this is more than a disaster tale.
It is a king’s education: Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk, seeks wisdom, fame, and the limits of power.
That is why this text matters.
It fixes communal memory in clay—of kingship, catastrophe, and endurance—and asks the oldest human question: if even great kings must die, what lasts? Cuneiform made memory durable.
From these wedges, a four-thousand-year-old voice still speaks.