Was watching a show on Discovery talking about the ‘fact’ that ‘every’ culture from the ancient world that we know of has some kind of flood myth. They were speculating that this may be legends handed down from the time the Black Sea was flooded out…about 8000 years ago.
It got me wondering a few things. First off…DOES every culture from the ancient world have some kind of flood myth? If not all, do most of them? Some? A few? What is the number of ancient peoples who have such a myth.
Secondly…what could it mean? Simply that floods have a large hold on us even today? Or could it be that some traditions were horrible enough that they were handed down orally for generations, gradually becoming myth? It’s a powerful idea (to me at least)…and one that is probably impossible to prove (thus it’s probably outside the realm of science and pure speculation…thus the forum I put this in).
Lastly…has any major archaeological work been done in and under the Black Sea region? If so…have there been any results? I seem to recall that Ballard launched an expedition there but I don’t remember any results. Has anyone else been looking in the region…and if so, have there been any results?
(I know there have been similar debates on this…I may have started one myself in fact. I’d like to have folks thoughts on this anyway as it’s a subject that interests me. From a full disclosure perspective: while I was born and raised a Catholic I haven’t been a practicing one since my late teens and would rank myself as firmly agnostic ( ). I have zero belief in the Noah story, at least from a biblical perspective…but I DO think that there is a chance that the story itself has a basis in truth, being perhaps a legend from the survivors of a flood in either the Black Sea or perhaps the Persian Gulf…or maybe pieces of many legends from various catastrophic floods that have periodically occurred through pre-history and sort of mashed together.)
I dunno about EVERY culture, but certainly many of the near-east and middle eastern cultures did. And we know (from archaeological and geological evidence) that there were periods of considerable flooding in Mesopotamia. Thus, it’s not surprising that stories/myths about flooding would arise in Mesopotamia or Babylonia and spread thence to other cultures. Stories travelled and were traded, especially stories about great heroes or gods.
Don’t forget- back then, “The Entire World” consisted of, at most, a day or two’s travel away from your home. If everything around you flooded, clearly the entire world had flooded.
I am not aware of an Egyptian flood myth. Or a Roman flood myth (I do not know if the Romans ever believed the Greek flood myths). Did the Carthagians have a flood story? Or the Canaanites? I do not think we know. And that is a problem with a lot of ancient cultures. We do not know their beliefs.
The Greeks had a flood myth…so, most likely the Romans did to since much of their culture came by way of the Greeks. What basis do you use to state the Romans never believed it?
As for the Carthaginians, weren’t they founded by the Phoenicians? And THEY had a flood myth. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to extrapolate that the Carthaginians also had a similar myth.
The Egyptians had a flood myth that had to do (from memory) with the god RA. It certainly wasn’t like the biblical myth (or that of some other Mediterranean peoples), but it certainly had a flood in it.
Yes, exactly. There is zero evidence of a global flood in human pre-history…but to a people living in the Black Sea, say, or in what is now the Persian Gulf or the English Channel the ‘world’ consisted of their homes, fields and settlements.
I’m unsure if every ancient civilization had a flood myth. Weren’t most of the cities of ancient civilizations built near a river, lake, ocean, or some other source of water? I would expect that almost all of them must have experienced a flood at one point or another.
Well, the whole world pretty much did flood at the end of the last ice age (in the sense of the coastlines where a lot of people probably lived). Civilization itself is not nearly that old, but I don’ think its implausible that the very early civilizations retained some sort of mythical remembrance of that event passed down from their late paleolithic ancestors.
I expect ancient cultures had myths involving floods for the same reason they had myths involving wars; they had experience with such things, and based their myths on them.
Stephen Jay Gould once wrote an article about the geological evidence for a massive flood in North America. IIRC that flood occurred when an ice dam broke and part of the Great Lakes emptied into some valley. If any native people had been around at the time (I’m not sure about the era this happened) they might have created a myth too.
A few civlizations have flood myths that are similar to each other. From what I understand, these civlizations were notably connected through trade, conquest, and settlement. Why couldn’t it just be ONE original flood myth that got borrowed by the Jews and the Greeks and the Phoenecians and Babylonians?
Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive list of cultures with flood myths, and they include both New World and Old World civilizations, so unless the original myth goes really far back, its unlikely they all came from a common origin or event.
The article also include what I think is probably the most likely explanation for the widespread myths, every culture was probably aware that the fossils of sea animals could be found in areas that were far from the coast lines of their day. After finding a few horseshoe crap fossils on top of a mountain, or even a whale skeleton in a fresh water lake, a giant flood probably seemed a much more obvious explanation then the present day theory of plate tetonics.
Stupid question, but what is implied by the term ‘flood myth’?
I think of Noah’s arc (i.e. someone having to build a vessel to contain the earth’s animals whilst the entire earth was flooded) but I’m guessing you are all meaning just a myth of a great flood at some time in our past?
In 1993, many of us witnessed a flood that was pretty amazing; a “500 year flood” it got called. So, if that’s a “500 year” event, what’s a “10,000 year” event look like? Pretty impressive, I’d imagine.
People need to live near a source for freshwater, which more often than not means a river. Ergo, given enough time, most people (here, I mean “cultures”) will have memories of some gawdawful thing where everything to the horizon and beyond was going under. Throw all that in the same blender as urban legends and voila!
There’s also the whole ice caps melting 11,000 years ago thing. Be hard NOT to notice when the sea level goes up 400 feet…*
*All the preceding are thoughts of my own. I back them up with neither data nor credentials in any field.
Look at the Mississippi flood in 1927: 27,000 square miles were flooded. In this day and age, we keep our rivers so tightly controlled with levees and dams, it’s easy for forget that rivers used to be living things, moving their beds and bursting their banks erratically. I don’t think you’d have to go back to the Black Sea to find a memory of an awe-inspiring flood for any group.
). I have zero belief in the Noah story, at least from a biblical perspective…but I DO think that there is a chance that the story itself has a basis in truth, being perhaps a legend from the survivors of a flood in either the Black Sea or perhaps the Persian Gulf…or maybe pieces of many legends from various catastrophic floods that have periodically occurred through pre-history and sort of mashed together.)