Babylonian Map of the World names Ararat as the ark's landing place

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Key facts

• The Penn Museum tablet known as the Death of Gilgamesh (Bilgames) records Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, seeking immortality and travelling to the underworld, where he meets Ziusudra.
• The tablets describe Ziusudra as priest-king of Shuruppak, the last city of an older world, warned by Enki, the 'snake god' of the Anunnaki, through a reed wall beside a marsh.
• Ziusudra is told to build an ark of cedar planks sealed with bitumen, take his family including three sons, and two of each kind of animal; the flood lasts seven days and seven nights and birds are released to find land.
• The British Museum's Babylonian Map of the World, described as the oldest surviving map, had a mislabelled fragment identified in the 1990s; once reinserted into the map's triangular composition the text could be read and it names Ararat as the landing place of the ark.
• The presenter states that only two Mesopotamian tablets mention the me - the Gilgamesh text and Enki and the World Order, where Ishtar/Anunnaki refer to the me as the holy laws of heaven and earth.
• Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer rendered the phrase as 'commandments and rights'; the presenter argues the correct sense is 'divine laws of heaven and earth'.
• The video argues the flood was regional rather than global, since human populations continued elsewhere, and that Gilgamesh brought the me back to Sumer but kept it rather than passing it on, after which the knowledge was lost.

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