Deluge (mythology)
A large percentage of the world's cultures have stories of a "great flood", though the story of Noah's Ark of Genesis is probably the best known. (See Noah for more details).
Another very similar version is given in the Babylonian account of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which apparently derives from a much earlier similar Sumerian account. In this the only male survivor, Utnapishtim, lived after the Deluge on the island of Dilmun and had achieved a great age when Gilgamesh sought him out for the secret of immortality. The Sumerians also referred to a great flood in other texts, such as the Sumerian king list, with accounts remarkably similar to the Biblical version. This suggests that the Genesis account has drawn influence from the older Sumerian depiction.
Noah and Utnapishtim have a counterpart in Greek mythology, Deucalion. The full details are at the entry for Deucalion, but in essence the wrath of Zeus has been ignited against the Pelasgians, the original inhabitants of Greece. But Deucalion has been forewarned by his father to build an ark and provision it. He and his wife Pyrrha are the surviving pair of humans when the waters recede and their ark touches Mount Parnassus, or Mount Etna, or Mount Athos, or perhaps Mount Othrys in Thessaly. Accounts differ. Though Deucalion is no longer allowed to be the inventor of wine as Noah still is, his name gives away his secret: deucos + halieus "new wine sailor." His wife, named "wine-red," just happens to be the sister of Ariadne who mothered with Dionysus, several winemaking progenitors of Aegean tribes.
After the flood has subsided, Deucalion and Pyrrha give thanks to Zeus. However, the repeopling of the world is the work of Thetis, who advises the new primal pair, "Cover your heads and throw the bones of your mother behind you," and the stones of Gaia thrown over their shoulders, take life and repeople the land. There is no mention of the plight of animals in this Flood myth.
In Hindu scriptures (specifically the Puranas), an avatar of Vishnu in the form of a fish, Matsya, warned Manu of a terrible flood that was to come and that it would wash away all living things. Manu cared for the fish and eventually released it in the sea. There the fish cautioned Manu to build a boat. He did so, and when the flood arrived, the fish towed the ship to safety by a cable attached to his horn.
Among the Inca, Viracocha destroyed the giants with a Great Flood, and two people repopulated the earth. In Maya mythology, Huracan ("one-legged") was a wind and storm god caused the Great Flood after the first humans angered the gods. He supposedly lived in the windy mists above the floodwaters and spoke "earth" until land came up again from the seas.
At the most recent glacial maximum, so much of the planet's water was locked up in the vast ice-sheets that formed ice domes kilometers thick, that the sea level dropped by about 120 to 130 meters. As the sheets melted, starting about 18,000 (16000 ), sea levels rose. Most of the glacial melt had occurred by about 8000 ybp (6000 BCE), but the changes have not been as regular as a constant drip at the edges of the world's glaciers might suggest. In the geological past, within human experience, several great floods are widely suspected to have occurred, with varying amounts of supporting evidence.
Sea levels have changed significantly since Late Paleolithic time, and shorelines have migrated. The sea has not always steadily encroaching upon the land, for the immense weight of the ice-sheets depressed the continental plates under them and caused isostatic rebound around their edges, which are still adjusting today. Averaged rates of sea-level-rise are misleading. Where sills formed dikes that protected low-lying areas, a winter storm or a sudden spurt of meltwater thousands of miles away could raise ocean levels, and the natural dike could be catastrophically eroded like a dike in the Netherlands. The ocean could fill vast basins in matters of weeks or months, in catastrophes that are unimaginable in today's world (though our grandchildren may be in for some surprises).
Several examples where such rapid encroachment of the sea occurred are provoking geologists' and archaeological investigations.
When sea level were low, the combined Tigris-Euphrates river flowed through a wide flat marshy landscape that must have teemed with life, as wetlands are highly productive. At a certain time, the sill at the modern Strait of Hormuz and the entire lower Tigris-Euphrates basin, from horizon to horizon was flooded, to form the Persian Gulf with the island of Dilmun (now Bahrain). This is an interesting, less-publicized possible source for the Universal Deluge.
In a 1981 Journal of Cuneiform Studies article, "The Earliest Tangible Evidence for Dilmun," Theresa Howard-Carter espoused her theory identifying Dilmun with Qurna, an island at the Strait of Hormuz. Her scenario put the "original" mouths of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers, which she thought should be the site of the primeval Dilmun, at or even beyond the Straits of Hormuz. Mainstream archaeologists have avoided mentioning her article, for fear of its apparent catastrophism, an awkward subject in geology. .
The drainage of the combined glacial era Tigris-Euphrates made its way down the marshes of this proto-Shatt-al-Arab to the sill at Hormuz and disgorged far beyond, into the Arabian Sea. Reports of the exploration ship "Meteor" have confirmed that the Gulf was an entirely dry basin about 15,000 BC. Close
to the steeper Iranian side a deep channel apparently marks the course
of the ancient extended Shatt al-Arab. A continuous shallow shelf across
the top (north) of the Gulf and down the west side (at 20 m.) suggests
that this section was the last to be inundated. At the Straits of Hormuz
the bathymetric profile indicates a division into two main channels which
continue across the Bieban Shelf before dropping to a depth of c 400 m.
in the Gulf of Oman.
Dive conditions decribed in 1999 (see links below) in Dubai found coral-encrusted sand barrier islands situated 32 km off the coast of the Saudi city of Jubail. There lies a chain of five coral cays, barely above the tide. They appear to be formations called diapirsin which a mobile core containing minerals of low density such as salt, deforms under pressure. The core pushes upwards, deforming overlying rock to form a dome. An ancient diapir at Enorama formed an island in shallow seas, buoyed up by salt. There are similar examples today in the Persian Gulf.
During glacial times a huge peaty swampland joined Malaya, Sumatra, Java and southwestern Borneo to the Asian mainland. The present landmasses were highlands framing a vast wetlands ecosystem larger than any on earth today which is now covered by the southern part of the South China Sea. Though the area never lost its tropical to subtropical vegetation, the monsoon weather system, which is powered by the continental mass, is likely to have been more intense than it is today. At one of the "pulses" of sea level rise, the combination of violent monsoons over a single drainage basin, in a landscape that dwarfed modern Bangladesh, provide a scenario for some of the most devastating flooding humans have ever witnessed anywhere.
During glacial times, a stretch of level plain joined Australia with New Guinea and enabled humans to walk into Australia. That plain flooded to form the Gulf of Carpentaria, between ca 12,000 and 10,000 ybp. It is significant that aboriginal Australian myth of the "dream time" includes a Great Flood which is not ordinarily a recognizable feature of the Australian climate and geography, except for infrequent filling of ordinarily dry lake basins (e.g. Lake Eyre).
The recently disclosed and much-discussed refilling of the freshwater glacial Black Sea with water from the Aegean, was described as "a violent rush of salt water into a depressed fresh-water lake in a single catastrophe that has been the inspiration for the flood mythology" (Ryan and Pitman, 1998). The marine incursion, which was caused by the rising level of the Mediterranean, occurred ca 7600 ybp/5600 BCE.
Areas that have not been as widely discussed include the refilling of the Aegean basin itself. A look at a modern chart shows that it must have been a marshy low-lying plain dotted with lakes, where the combined waters of all the glacial-age rivers emptying from the Black Sea passed through the Sea of Marmara which was a fresh-water lake. There is a sill depth about 70 m. at the Dardanelles Strait, where the great river continued to its mouth at the edge of the Sea of Crete. Rising seas reached their present level in the Aegean about 6,000 ybp (4000 BCE).
In 1998, the archaeologist B.J. Coles identified as "Doggerland" the now-drowned habitable and huntable lands in the coastal plain that was formed in the North Sea when sea level dropped. Doggerland has not caught the popular imagination, but the terrain was available for settlement. Its gentle swells remain as the Dogger Banks. Paleolithic reindeer hunters roamed the land; some traces of their encampments have been identified, but the timing of the submergence has not been fixed.
In North America, during glacial maximum, there were no Great Lakes as we know them, but "proglacial" (ice-frontage) lakes formed and shifted. They lay in the areas of the modern lakes, but their drainage sometimes passed south, into the Mississippi syystem, sometimes into the Arctic, or east into the Atlantic. The most famous of these proglacial lakes has been termed Lake Agassiz. A series of floods, as ice-dam configurations failed created a series of great floods from Lake Agassiz, resulting in massive pulses of freshwater added to the world's oceans. The Missoula Floods of Washington were also caused by breaking ice dams, resulting in the Columbia Scablands.
The last of the North American proglacial lakes, north of the present Great Lakes, has been designated Lake Ojibway by geologists. It reached its largest volume about 8.5kya (6500 BCE), when joined with Lake Agassiz. But its outlet was blocked by the great wall of the glaciers and it drained by tributaries, into the St. Lawrence far to the south. About 8.3 - 7700 kya (6300 - 5700 BCE), the melting ice dam over Hudson Bay's southernmost extension narrowed to the point where pressure and its buoyancy lifted it free, and the ice-dam failed catastrophically. Lake Ojibway's beach terraces show that it was 250 meters above sea level. The volume of Lake Ojibway is commonly estimated to have been about 163,000 cubic kilometers, more than enough water to cover a flattened-out Antarctica with a sheet of water ten meters deep. That volume was added to the world's oceans in a matter of months.
The detailed timing and rates of change after the onset of melting of the great ice-sheets are subjects of continuing study.
There is also a strong possibility that a global climatic change in recent geological time brought about some large deluge. Another theory, although one not widely supported, suggests some of the major floods may have been caused by plate tectonics, the drifting apart of continents. Evidence is mounting from ice-cores in Greenland that the switch from a glacial to an inter-glacial period can occur over just a few months, rather than over the centuries that earlier research suggested.
An earlier catastrophe, too far back to be within human memory, occurred at the most recent re-flooding of the Mediterranean Sea's dry basin, dated by general consensus about 5 million years ago, before the emergence of modern humans. It is an example of the catastrophic events that punctuate the serenely incremental changes to climate and geography as we think we have experienced them in the last couple of millennia. The basin had previously become a desert once again, the most recent desiccation in a series, as deep cores in the seabed have revealed a series of several layers of salt, separated by loess deposits, after continental movement had closed the Strait of Gibraltar, an event variously placed at 8 million or 5.5 million years ago. The Mediterranean did not dry out during the most recent glacial maximum.
Compare Alexander Tollmann's hypothetical bolide, a hypothesis that one or several bolides (meteors or comets) struck the Earth at 7640 BCE (+/-200), with a much smaller one at 3150 BCE (+/-20) causing the flooding of myth.
This page has been assembled from several sources
Mythology
Historical deluges
Ordinary deluges are dealt with elsewhere at Wikipedia, but certain catastrophes connected with the climatic emergence from the Ice Age may well have sparked myths of a Universal Deluge. Here are some of the current candidates for The Deluge.The lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley
Reflooding the Persian Gulf (after 12000YBP)
The Persian Gulf today has an average depth of only 35 meters. During the most recent glaciation, which ended about 12000 years BP, worldwide sea levels dropped 120 to 130 meters, leaving the bed of the Persian Gulf well above sea level during the glacial maximum. It had to have been a swampy freshwater floodplain, where water was retained in all the hollows. High in the Taurus montane glaciation will have been extensive.
In our time, mangrove edge habitat and so-called coral reefs characterize the Persian Gulf. Mangroves recolonize easily from established mangrove fringe colonies elsewhere in the Arabian Sea. Artificial reefs are being established today along the coast of Iran. But if the Persian Gulf filled so recently, then how have the reefs re-established? The present-day natural reef developments in the Persian Gulf, corals grow on hardground substrates but do not have not yet formed the massive calcium carbonate structures familiar from, say, Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Reference: G.F. Camoin, ed, Reefs and Carbonate Platforms in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (IAS International Workshop on reefs) held at Sydney 1995
"Protecting the Persian Gulf": gives average depth 35 meters.
Great Sunda wetlands, Indonesia
The Carpenteria plain (after 12000YBP)
The Black Sea (circa 7600YBP)
The Aegean Basin
Doggerland
North America
The refilling of the Mediterranean
External links and references