Antediluvian Chronologies

The long-lived generations around the Flood, in one table: the eight antediluvian kings of the Sumerian King List (WB-444 recension — 241,200 years across five cities), the ten kings of Berossos (120 sars = 432,000 years), and the Genesis 5 and 11 patriarchs — with the Masoretic, Samaritan Pentateuch, and Septuagint figures side by side in parallel columns. Scholars reconstruct this comparison by hand every time the biblical-chronology debate comes up; here it is once, machine-readable, every number anchored to a primary-text locator.

The four lists

• sumerian-king-list-wb444 — Alulim of Eridu through Ubara-Tutu of Shuruppak, reign lengths as the prism gives them, ending "then the flood swept over." Verified line-by-line against the corpus's own digitized King List, which every row deep-links.
• berossos — Aloros through Xisouthros (= Ziusudra), reigns counted in sars of 3,600 years, from the Babyloniaca fragments (FGrH 680 F 3). The 432,000-year total is the figure made famous by Hamlet's Mill.
• genesis-5 — Adam through Noah: age at fathering, remaining years, and total for each patriarch in MT, SP, and LXX. Masoretic figures verified verse-by-verse against our Genesis translation.
• genesis-11 — Shem through Terah (the postdiluvian decline curve), same three-witness treatment.

Where the witnesses disagree

The three textual traditions are not minor variants of one another — they encode different chronologies, and the table makes the divergences exact:

• The LXX adds a century to most fathering ages (Adam begets at 230, not 130), stretching the world-era by ~1,400 years.
• The LXX-only second Kainan (Genesis 11:13 LXX; Luke 3:36) gets his own row, with the MT and SP columns honestly null.
• Methuselah in the majority LXX reading (167/802) survives the Flood by fourteen years — the note records the Alexandrinus variant that repairs it.
• The SP compresses Genesis 5 so that Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech all die in the Flood year, and gives Terah 145 years so Abram leaves Harran at his father's death.
• Eber manages three different lifespans in three witnesses (464 / 404 / 504).

Every fathering + remaining = total identity in the table is checked programmatically at build time; where a witness doesn't state a number, the cell is null rather than reconstructed.

How Wheel of Heaven reads it

Two features of this material carry the corpus's larger argument. First, the shape is shared: Mesopotamia and Genesis both remember a sequence of extraordinarily long-lived figures before the Flood and a stepwise decline after it — the antediluvian entry treats the parallel at length. Second, the numbers are structured, not random: Berossos' 120 sars and the sexagesimal reign-lengths belong to the same numerical world as the precessional figures examined in Hamlet's Mill and the corpus's World Ages reckoning. The canon reads the long lifespans as memory of the creators' longevity technology rather than mythical inflation — a reading developed in the wiki, while this table stays neutral comparative data.

Also available on

This dataset is also published, CC0, on two open-data platforms — the same files, mirrored for reach and preservation:

• Hugging Face — huggingface.co/datasets/wheelofheaven/antediluvian-chronologies
• Kaggle — kaggle.com/datasets/zarazinsfuss/antediluvian-chronologies