A great majority of people in this country, including myself, were taught the typical biblical account of the Great Flood. I grew up playing with toys and hearing stories about Noah, his ark, and all of the animals lined up two by two. And also like the majority in this country, I had never heard of the story of Gilgamesh. So when I was given an assignment to read Gilgamesh, I couldn't help but feel like I had heard the story somewhere before. It didn't take me long to tie the two stories together in the belief that they were somehow one and the same. Granted the details and timelines are different, but the basic story is the same. After doing some comparative research on the two stories, I was further convinced that the similarities were not a coincidence. It didn't take me long to conclude that they actually were the same story, but told by different people at different times.
The first question I needed to answer in order to verify my conclusion was who wrote the Bible and who wrote Gilgamesh? Getting a definitive answer to this question was going to be harder than I thought. The origins of the Bible are highly controversial and still debated today. Furthermore, Genesis is part of The Old Testament that is believed by the Jewish faith to be adapted from The Torah3. And the Torah was believed to be written by Moses as a true account of the history of the Hebrew people. Finding out who wrote the epic of Gilgamesh was even more difficult. The only person I could find credited with writing Gilgamesh was a man named Shin-eqi-unninni who was also known as Nimrod in the Bible5. .
The second question I needed to answer and more importantly was when each story was written. Genesis was written on papyri and believed to be written somewhere between 1500 and 500 BC3. Given that Genesis' origins came from the Torah, I researched its timeline as the more relevant and found the Torah to be off on its timeline by as much as 500 years.