The importance of this last discovery was that it enables us to focus on the figure of Noah himself. For it relates how the god, having created mankind, regretted it and decided to drown it by flood; but Enki, the water-god, revealed the catastrophic plan to a certain priest-king called Ziusudra, who built a boat and so survived.14 Ziusudra was undoubtedly a real person, king of the south Babylonian city of Shuruppak about 2900 BC, in which capacity he figures in the earliest column of the Sumerian king-list. At the site of Shuruppak itself there is evidence of a phenomenal flood, though the
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