When does the flood happen in the epic of Gilgamesh?

Answer 1

AnswerThere are fragments of an Akkadian recension from the middle of the second millennium. The Boğazköy archives have yielded also important fragments of a Hittite translation, as well as a fragment of a Hurrian rendering of the epic. From the first half of the second millennium we possess representative portions of the Old Babylonian version of the epic. That this version was itself a copy of an earlier text is suggested by the internal evidence of the material. The original date of composition of the Akkadian work is placed at the turn of the second millennium, or slightly earlier.

Gilgamesh learnt of the Flood when he was journeying in search of the secret of immortality. He learnt that the flood wind blew and the south-storm swept the land for six days and nights, then Utnapishtim's ship came to a halt on Mount Nisir.

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The flood happens in the distant past in the time of Utnapishtim, an ancient ancestor of the hero who lived in Shuruppak. We are given no idea of timescale in the epic, although archaeological evidence suggests that there was a local flood around 2900BCE in Shuruppak that may have been the basis for the later myth of a universal flood.

Incidentally, there is no geological or archaeological evidence for either a mesopotamia-wide or worldwide flood.