Or in the flood
You’ll build an Ark
And sail us to the moon
Dundes, Alan, ed. The Flood Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
“In 1872, a young Assyriologist, George Smith, working in the British Museum, came upon a cuneiform tablet which had been found earlier by archaeologists excavating at Nineveh, and on this table was an account of the flood ‘earlier’ than the biblical account. Before 1872, it had been possible to assume that all the other, various, flood myths reported from different areas of the globe were simply derivative from the biblical narrative” (3-4).