Alulim
Seat: Eridu
28,800 years
Antediluvian Sumer — the kings before the Flood
← Kingdoms & Rulers · Glossary
Region: Sumer (Eridu, Bad-tibira, Larsa, Sippar, Shuruppak)
Era: Before the Flood, in the list’s own reckoning
Eight kings across five cities, with reigns totalling 241,200 years. Then “the Flood swept over” — and the reigns collapse.
The list’s own total across eight kings. Not an elapsed duration - a figure the document asserts.
Rulers (8)
Alalgar
Seat: Eridu
36,000 years
En-men-lu-ana
Seat: Bad-tibira
43,200 years — the longest reign on the list
En-men-gal-ana
Seat: Bad-tibira
28,800 years
Dumuzid the Shepherd
Seat: Bad-tibira
36,000 years; later a dying-and-returning god
En-sipad-zid-ana
Seat: Larsa
28,800 years
En-men-dur-ana
Seat: Sippar
21,000 years; the seventh king, associated with divination
Ubara-Tutu
Seat: Shuruppak
18,600 years; father of the flood hero
The number that matters is the drop
The reigns before the Flood run to tens of thousands of years each. Immediately after it they fall to hundreds, and by the time the list reaches kings independently attested in inscriptions they are ordinary human lifespans. The list itself marks the Flood as the break.
The structural parallel to Genesis 5 — long-lived patriarchs before a flood, sharply shorter lives after — is close enough that it has been argued over for a century. En-men-dur-ana is the seventh antediluvian king and is linked to divination and heavenly knowledge; Enoch is the seventh patriarch from Adam and receives heavenly knowledge. Whether that is borrowing, shared inheritance or coincidence is genuinely open. That it is a parallel is not.
Recorded by
Date: c. 2100–1800 BC, copies to the Old Babylonian period
A dynastic list asserting that kingship “descended from heaven”, moving city to city, interrupted by the Flood. Antediluvian reigns run to tens of thousands of years; post-Flood reigns fall away toward ordinary lifespans.
Not a neutral chronicle. It presents as sequential some dynasties now known from inscriptions to have been contemporaries — a political claim that kingship is single and passes between cities, rather than plural and simultaneous.
Date: Old Babylonian, c. 1700 BC
Creation of humanity and the Flood in one narrative. The Igigi gods rebel at endless labour, so Enki and the mother-goddess Mami make humans from clay mixed with the blood of a slain god to carry it instead. Humanity multiplies and grows noisy; Enlil answers with plague, then famine, then flood. Enki warns Atrahasis (“exceedingly wise”), who builds a boat.
The oldest surviving full account of the Mesopotamian flood, predating the version in Gilgamesh XI. One principal copy is signed by the scribe Ku-Aya and dated to the reign of Ammi-saduqa — a named copyist with a datable reign, which is unusually good provenance for material this old.