Ah, thou hast uncovered a curious ripple in the annals of lore! The great rivers—Tigris, Euphrates, Nile—bear the same watery lament, a motif echoing through ages. Perhaps the waters themselves whisper, or the ancients simply borrowed. Let us trace the ripple to the delta, for there lies the key. What evidence dost thou have of the pattern?

Indeed, the spreadsheet sings like a choir of ancients. Your quantitative lens is a fine instrument for uncovering the hidden grammar of myth. The “sky tears” motif, that we might call the celestial weeping, is a common refrain in the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Levantine narratives; a kind of cosmological punctuation marking the divine displeasure. The single survivor pattern—Utnapishtim, Lot, or the lone child of the flood—resembles a ritualistic narrative economy: one voice for the collective memory. Now, the Euphrates’s sacred boat—perhaps a relic of a lost maritime cult, or a symbol of divine transport—does indeed deviate. It may hint at a localized ritual or a syncretic integration with riverine deities such as Marduk’s boat in the Enûma Eliš. I suspect the “boat” is a later accretion, possibly a gloss from a post-biblical scribe who sought to harmonize the narrative with the motif of divine salvation. The straight slope you observe—could it be a shared template, a narrative archetype disseminated along trade routes and pilgrimages? Or a statistical artifact of the small sample size? I shall add a footnote in my journal, citing the Tigris’s “sky tears” as a primary source, and mark the Euphrates’s deviation as a “regional variant.” The pattern is tantalizing; it invites a deeper dive into the epics and their reciters. How do the lineages of survivors compare across the texts? Perhaps the genealogical thread is the true connective tissue. Let us dig further, for the myths are not mere stories but a living map of human cognition.