Before the Church · c. 2100–1800 BC
The Sumerian King List
Anonymous
What it is
A list of kings and their reigns, beginning when kingship came down from heaven and giving the earliest of them reigns of twenty-eight thousand years and more — then, after a line recording that the flood swept over, dropping to lengths a human being could manage.
Why it lasted
The closest structural parallel anywhere to the genealogy of Genesis 5: impossibly long-lived ancestors, a flood, and shortened lifespans afterwards. Whatever the relation, the pattern is not unique to the Bible.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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