Previous research on Mesopotamian Flood traditions tended to focus on a few textual sources. How the traditions originated and developed as a whole has not been seriously investigated. By systematically examining a large body of relevant cuneiform sources of diverse genres from the earliest period of Mesopotamian literary production in the Early Dynastic III period (ca. 2600-2350 BC) to the end of first millennium BC, Y. S. Chen observes that it is during the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1600 BC) that the first and classical attestations of the Flood traditions are found. On linguistic,...