Discovered in 1853 by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, the Epic of Gilgamesh’s flood story had been lost for millennia. Layard uncovered a library of clay tablets in the ruins of Nineveh, in modern-day Iraq. This story predates the earliest written version of the biblical flood story by at least 400 years and likely by more than a millennium. Both narratives tell essentially the same story, with different character names, minor variations, and a shift from multiple gods to a single god. The story of Noah’s Ark, set around 600-500 BCE, is a retelling of a much older Sumerian story from about 2550 BCE featuring the character Ziusudra.