Flood Legends:
Most (if not all) early human settlements were located close to rivers (for continuity of water supplies). If heavy rains occur, then the rivers flooded, and settlements may have been wiped out and some loss of life likely occurred. So it would seem that flood stories were often told, and likely (since they were oral stories) stories would be telescoped together.
When writing developed (and practical writing materials including a medium to write on) the stories that had been memorised for ages began to be recorded in writing. But there was a practical problem, what you could write was limited by the medium (and whether we would ever read it now was dependent on its durability) on which someone could write the story.
There were limits on the amount of writing material available. Around the Euphrates/Tigris river system, clay was used, so we have a flood story that endured, written on a clay cuneiform dated to the seventeenth century BCE and earlier. (That's much older than "Israel," so we'd have to say that it is the original flood story, and the Hebrew version (in Genesis) was developed from the Sumerian version.
You can read some details of the Sumerian version at this link: http://www.livius.org/fa-fn/flood/flood2.html
In part the author says:
Quote: "The Great Flood: mythological story about a great destruction that once befell the earth. There are several variants; the Biblical version is the most famous. The possibility that there is a historical event behind the story (a local flood in southern Babylonia in the twenty-eighth century BCE) can not be excluded."
Quote: "The story of the Great Flood has its origins in Sumer, the southern part of ancient Babylonia. Even though the younger Epic of Atrahasis and theEpic of Gilgameš, written in Babylonian, change many details, they continue to refer to Šuruppak as the city of the hero of the Flood story, even though the Sumerian name of the hero, Ziusudra, has been changed into Atrahasis or Ut-napištim. In the youngest Babylonian version, by Berossus, we see the original name return: testimony to the vitality of the Sumerian story, which has been called Eridu Genesis by modern scholars.
Quote: "The story survives on a cuneiform tablet from the seventeenth century BCE, of which only the lower third survives. However, this is sufficient to establish that the pattern described above was already present. However, there are small differences. The Eridu Genesis must have begun with the Creation of Man, but continues with the establishment of kingship and a list of cities. Then comes the list of antediluvian rulers, which confirms the pattern again, and the supreme god Enlil's decision to destroy mankind. The reason was recorded on a missing part of the text, but may have been the noise men created, as it is in the later, Babylonian texts."
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More to come.
