Long before Genesis or Hesiod were written down, the scribes of Sumer and Akkad were already recording floods, creations, and gods who crossed into the underworld. This chart traces the strongest documented lines from those cuneiform originals into the Hebrew Bible and Greek mythology, and marks where later popular claims (Christ and the "dying-and-rising god," in particular) reach further than the primary texts support.
Read left to right: wellspring, transmission, and the two downstream traditions. Solid lines mark parallels with strong textual or linguistic evidence. Dashed lines mark real but contested or structurally looser connections.
A god warns one man of a coming flood, he builds a boat, loads animals aboard, sends out birds to find dry land, and offers sacrifice afterward. The template both later flood myths follow almost beat for beat.
Marduk orders the cosmos out of Tiamat, the primordial salt-water chaos. A watery formlessness organized into a structured world by a ruling god.
A shepherd-consort god passes into the underworld and returns for part of each year, tied to the seasonal death and revival of vegetation.
A wise man is offered the bread and water of immortality before the gods and, misled, refuses them. Immortality lost through a choice at a divine table.
A generational succession of sky-gods, each overthrowing the father before him, passed down through Anatolia toward the Aegean.
A Semitic honorific for a consort-god, carried into the Greek world and eventually adopted as a proper name.
An independent Greek philosophical line, not Mesopotamian: the ordering rational principle of the cosmos, later grafted onto Hebrew wisdom tradition.
Zeus floods a corrupted earth; a righteous couple survives by boat and repopulates the world. Independent descent from the same Near Eastern flood tradition as Genesis, not a copy of it.
Uranus is overthrown by Cronus, Cronus by Zeus. The succession pattern maps closely onto the Kumarbi cycle's line of deposed sky-fathers.
A mortal beloved of Aphrodite who dies young and is mourned each year. The name and the seasonal death-and-mourning structure both trace to Dumuzid by way of the Semitic title "adon."
Same sequence as the Mesopotamian flood texts: divine warning, an ark, paired animals, birds sent to test for land, sacrifice on landing. Likely transmitted during or after the Babylonian exile.
The Hebrew tehom, the primordial deep, is linguistically related to Tiamat. Formless waters are separated and ordered into a structured cosmos by a single ruling god.
Adapa is offered immortality and refuses it; Eden's couple is forbidden fruit and take it anyway. A real thematic echo, but inverted, not a direct copy.
Often grouped with Dumuzid and Adonis as a "dying-and-rising god." Osiris in fact becomes lord of the dead rather than returning among the living, and the Egyptian tradition is old enough to be independent rather than borrowed.
Logos is imported directly from Greek philosophy, not from Mesopotamian myth. A case of Greek metaphysics grafted onto Hebrew wisdom writing.
The category itself has been challenged by scholars, notably Jonathan Z. Smith, as a template imposed on myths that don't actually share a resurrection structure in their original texts.