Xisuthrus
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Xisuthrus is a Hellenization of the figure from Sumerian mythology named Ziusudra. To the Babylonians, he was known as Utnapishtim where he is mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh and as Atrahasis in the Atrahasis Epic. He is the main character in the Mesopotamian version of the flood myth.
Xisuthrus is known from the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, an attendee at the First Council of Nicaea and early historian of the Christian Church. Eusebius was quoting Alexander Polyhistor, a Pontic historian living in Rome. Alexander was himself translating the writings of Berossus, a priest of Marduk in Babylon whom Alexander relied on heavily for information on Mesopotamia.
Among the interesting features of this version of the flood myth are that the Sumerian god Enki is syncretized with Chronos, the father of Zeus, in Greek mythology; and that it asserts the reed boat constructed by Xisuthrus survived at least until Berossus' day in the "Corcyrean Mountains" of Armenia. Xisuthrus is said to a king, the son of one Ardates, and to have reigned eighteen sari, equivalent to 64,800 years.
By the time Berossus was writing in the 4th–3rd century B.C., Sumerian had long been a dead language, but it survived as a literary and ceremonial language in Mesopotamia for centuries after it had ceased to be spoken. This is probably how the Sumerian form of the character's name happened to be transmitted into Greek.
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