In the Babylonian Atrahasis story, the hero builds a boat to survive a divinely sent flood. The god Enki warns Atrahasis and tells him to construct a vessel so that he, his family, and living creatures can escape.
The Atrahasis Epic is preserved on Old Babylonian tablets from the second millennium BCE, although the surviving manuscripts are damaged and incomplete. Its flood narrative is one of the important Mesopotamian parallels to the later Genesis account.
The story includes themes familiar from other flood traditions: a warning from a deity, construction of a large vessel, preservation of life, and the eventual end of the disaster. Its religious setting and character names differ from those in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Atrahasis is also the name used for the hero in the surviving epic. In the Gilgamesh tradition, a related flood survivor is called Utnapishtim, while some Sumerian material uses the name Ziusudra.