Flood-Myth Concordance

A single table lining up the ancient flood traditions field by field — the survivor, the power that decrees the flood, the one who warns the hero, the stated cause, the vessel, the birds released, the landing place, and the aftermath — each row linked to the digitized source text where the Wheel of Heaven library holds one.

Traditions covered

Sumerian (Ziusudra), Babylonian Atra-ḫasīs and Gilgamesh XI (Utnapishtim), Hebrew Genesis (Noah), Islamic Qurʾān (Nūḥ), Greek Deucalion, the Greco-Babylonian Berossus (Xisuthros), the Vedic Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (Manu), the Aztec Leyenda de los Soles (Tata and Nena), the Andean Viracocha chronicles (Betanzos, Molina), and the Norse Prose Edda (Bergelmir).

What it's for

Comparative-mythology work usually reconstructs this table by hand from a dozen scattered editions. Here it is once, in the open, as CSV and JSON — free to sort, filter, merge, and cite. The JSON is self-describing (columns + rows); the CSV opens in any spreadsheet.

How the table was built

Each row is a flood tradition attested in a primary text — named in the Source text column. A tradition is included when its flood account survives in a readable source and states enough of the shared elements to populate the comparative columns; the concordance is deliberately conservative, favouring eleven well-attested traditions over a long tail of fragmentary or contested parallels. Where the corpus has digitized the source, the Read in link points into the Wheel of Heaven library; where it has not, the source is named but not yet hosted.

The columns are the recurring elements of the ancient Near Eastern and Indo-European flood narrative — the survivor, the power that decrees the flood, the figure who warns the hero, the stated cause, the vessel, the birds released, the landing place, and the aftermath. A blank cell means the element is absent or unstated in that tradition's source, not that it was dropped.

Approximate date is the scholarly consensus for the composition of the source text, not for any event it narrates. Traditions are grouped by textual family, so the two Babylonian rows (Atra-ḫasīs and the Gilgamesh Tablet XI) appear separately: they are distinct compositions, not two readings of one text.

This is version 1.1 of the concordance. Version 1.0 shipped eight rows across the Near Eastern and Mediterranean core; 1.1 adds three traditions from outside it — Aztec (Tata and Nena), Andean (Viracocha), and Norse (Bergelmir) — for eleven rows in all. It is CC0, so it can be extended, corrected, or merged without permission; additions should preserve the "primary text required" rule so every row stays anchored to a citable source.

How Wheel of Heaven reads it

The rows are laid out as neutral comparative data — but read down the columns and a shared procedure appears rather than a shared mood: a destruction decided in assembly and sworn as irrevocable, a single survivor given precise instructions and told to preserve the seed of all living things, and a warning delivered by one member of the planning body against the will of another. The Wheel of Heaven corpus reads that convergence not as a borrowed folk-motif but as the administrative record of a managed reset — treated at length in The Flood Was a Reset, Not a Punishment and the Great Flood entry.

This concordance is one family of the broader Myth Index, which lines up nine motif families — flood, divine council, theomachy, creation of humans, and more — in a single spine table with Thompson Motif-Index cross-references.

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/flood-myths
• Kaggle — kaggle.com/datasets/zarazinsfuss/flood-myths