The Atrahasis. Atrahasis begins after the creation of the world but before the appearance of human beings: When the gods, instead of man, did the work, carried the burdens. The burden of the gods was too great, the similarities in the epic of Gilgamesh and Noah. s Ark: 1 1 Both Utnapishtim and Noah built a large ship's ark in order to escape a flood. Both Utnapishtim and Noah were allowed to take their families and creatures on board. 3 The floods in each story were caused by Gods. 4.Noah takes his entire family with him, while Utnapishtim takes only his wife. The flood in Gilgamesh lasted seven days and seven nights. Noah's flood lasts forty days and forty nights. Utnapishtim is saved by a god sympathetic to man. In the Bible, God destroys the earth because of man's wickedness and saves Noah and his family because they are righteous. Such a comparison reveals that, famously, the Mesopotamian connections to the flood story first appeared with George Smith's decipherment of portions of the eleventh tablet of the standard Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. In this tablet, Utnapishtim, the survivor of the flood, tells his story to Gilgamesh, hero of the epic. The account of Utnapishtim not only parallels that of the Bible,