Primary-Source Dossier: The Flood Tablet (PDF)

One broken piece of clay in the British Museum, catalogued K.3375, carries the oldest famous flood story in the world: Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This dossier puts that object, and the man who read it first, in front of you with the record checked at every step.

You get the tablet itself first: what it is, where it came from, how big it is, how many lines it carries, and where it sits today. Then you meet George Smith, the banknote engraver with no university degree who sorted thousands of fragments in his lunch hours, recovered 80 of them, and read his flood paper to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872. His own words are quoted in short public-domain excerpts, exactly as he published them.

The flood story itself is summarized in plain language, with its parallels to Genesis and its differences stated side by side, and with the older versions behind it, Atrahasis and Ziusudra, placed where they belong. The dossier also does what most retellings skip: it tells you where Smith was wrong, why the modern translation to trust is A. R. George's, and what the tablet does not prove, however confidently it gets repeated.

Like every dossier in this series, it closes with the three-layer sorting page: evidence, claims, and unknown, with ruled lines for your own notes. Lay the evidence out plainly. Hand the conclusion back. That is the whole method, and it works on every ancient mystery claim you will ever meet.

What's inside

- A checkable fact sheet for the Flood Tablet: catalogue K.3375, Kuyunjik and Nineveh, size, line counts, the Library of Ashurbanipal, Room 55

- A photograph of the tablet itself, with its CC0 credit printed on the page

- George Smith's story: Chelsea 1840, the banknote apprenticeship, the 1867 museum appointment, the 3 December 1872 paper

- Two short excerpts from Smith's own published words (1872 and 1873), public domain

- A plain-language summary of the flood story on the tablet: Ea's warning, the boat, Mount Nimush, the dove, the swallow, and the raven

- The Daily Telegraph expedition of 1873 and the missing first column found in a trench at Kuyunjik

- A photograph of the older Atrahasis flood tablet, credited on the page and labeled as a different tablet from K.3375

- A timeline separating the story's age, the copy's age, and the reading's age

- An honest-limits section: Smith's errors, the modern standard edition, and the questions the tablet leaves open

- A ruled three-layer sorting page (evidence / claims / unknown) and a full sources list

Who it is for

- Readers of Gods of the Clay Tablets who want the Flood Tablet chapter's evidence in one printable file

- Viewers of Tablets & Truth who want to check the episode's claims against the object

- Book clubs, teachers, and homeschoolers who want a primary-source handout with the credits printed beside the pictures

- Anyone who loves the ancient mystery genre and wants a fair way to weigh its claims

Delivery and format

- Instant download after checkout, delivered by Payhip as a single PDF file

- 14 pages, US Letter size (8.5 x 11 in), designed for home printing or tablet reading

- Print-ready with embedded fonts and generous margins for binding and handwritten notes

- Yours to keep: reprint the sorting page as often as you like for your own study

Primary-Source Dossier: The Flood Tablet. Written by Franklin Onikan, author of Gods of the Clay Tablets, The Ritual Life, and The Descent of the Watchers. Copyright 2026 Franklin Onikan. All rights reserved.