While the story of Noah building an ark to survive a flood sent to destroy humankind is certainly these days the best-known version of that story, Noah wasn't by any means the only Flood Guy, nor was he even the first. In fact, the story of a lone group of human survivors escaping a worldwide flood in a boat is so common across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, that the so-called "flood myth" or "deluge myth" is one of the best-known tropes in comparative mythology.

Besides Noah, Flood heroes can be found in the Mesopotamian stories of Ziusudra, a virtuous man who rode out the storm in a boat built at the command of the god Enki, and the more famous narrative of Utnapishtim and his wife from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Greek myth tells of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who repopulate the world after Zeus floods it for the wickedness of humanity. Hindu myth has Manu, who is warned to build a boat by a fish he had helped.

The ubiquity of this story across Eurasia suggests it may have roots in an actual historical event — not a true worldwide flood, but probably a massive deluge in southeast Mesopotamia in the plains between the Tigris and Euphrates. The geological record shows that such a flood did happen around 2900 BCE and may have inspired all of these stories.

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