What other types of flood myths are there? It seems like to pre-scientific cultures, the supernatural cause (only conceivable explanation) plus prophesy (people often look for some means of control/divination/forewarning when it comes to natural disasters) plus worldwide devastation (did many people know how far the world extended or was their own village for all intents and purposes “the world”) would almost be the default myth associated with any flood-prone culture.
Also tales grow in the telling. After a few rounds of story tellers trying to make the story interesting around here gets to be the whole world, and a lot of people killed grows to everybody but a small few.
But if there really is a big flood story in a high percentage of cultures, is it possible it’s due to some massive event (earthquake, asteroid strike) causing tsunami’s with enough power to go far inland?
Of course it’s theoretically possible, but it’s an unnecessary explanation when you take into account the above and the fact that most, if not all, early agricultural cultures were situated on rivers: most, if not all, of which experience periodic normal flooding that the locals would try to explain.
gazpacho also makes a good point that myths like this will inevitably get embellished. Take a severe but normal flood story, add a few thousand years, get a world-wide flood myth, no asteroid required.
Most civilizations started and grew out of river valleys. For the most part devastating floods happen at least every few generations. That coupled with people being as creative and imaginative as they are now seem sufficient explanation to me.
Also, as **Cecil **has discussed, floods are more devastating than most other natural disasters - they usually kill more people than earthquakes, forest fires, volcanoes, etc. So flood stories should be expected. It’s even conceivable that some of them are based on a real occurrence - some farmer took his family and two of each kind of livestock on a houseboat and survived when the rest of his tribe died. It is weird how most of the myths talk about all the races of the world coming from the survivors of the flood, though.
What does “race” mean in this context? How many “races” would your average ancient Mesopotamian, for example, have known of? Or does " all the races of the world" mean/derive from something like “everybody alive in the village today, and in those surrounding villages, are descended from Bob, Joe, and Bill, who were the only survivors”?
“All the races of the world” seems like a relatively modern interpretation of these myths.
Thousands of bodies of water, many in Northern Europe, too, have dramatically transformed at some point in (pre-)history, due to isostatic uplift and other geological processes. Loads of remains of prehistoric cultures are now under water around the Baltic and North Seas, for instance. Plenty of material for mythical flood stories to emerge.
All recorded Norse Mythology was recorded by Christian scribes 200-300 years after the near complete suppression of Norse religion by forceful Christian conversion and the Norse area had been neighbours to an increasingly Christian Europe for centuries even before that. So any flood story could very well be the result of Christian influence. Or not. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything in Norse Mythology that’s really a parallel to the flood myth.
That’s highly exaggerated. Continents are large, so certainly some areas on each are going to be flood plains. Many cultures have no significant flood myths. And, it’s unfortunate but true that many myths of cultures recorded by people from essentially invading cultures are actually just the other culture’s myths being retold back to them: i.e., they weren’t original to that culture but were picked up from missionaries and other proselytizers, which were then adapted and then retold by someone writing them back down.
The theory that the Black Sea flooding caused The Flood Myth is not well accepted by academics. It was just popularized by the media. Like anything else, criticisms of theories do not get anywhere near as much coverage as whatever dramatic thing some overenthusiastic scholar or fringe belief promoter who can cook up vaguely academic sounding credentials somewhere has to say.
As far as the deep-seated psychology goes, not liking to drown is fairly widespread among humans, yes, and all the more worrisome in civilizations formed on major flood plains, which is most of them, for reasons which are obvious when examined.
I agree with the theory that the story builds with each retelling. Sort of like how your grandparents described a big snowstorm when they were children. The truth is that probably it was a large snowstorm, but just like the bad ones you have experienced. But through time, the story grows to where the snow was 8 feet deep and it was -100 degrees outside and they were resorting to cannibalism to survive.
Likewise, there was probably a horrific flood in a valley at one point in time that killed a bunch of people. Throughout generations, details were added that the flood engulfed the whole world, and killed everyone except two people that God chose.
Well, there’s the Table of Nations in Genesis 10; I don’t know about other flood narratives. Naturally, it only included peoples known to the ancient Israelites, although early modern scholars, who took the flood story literally, attempted to apply it to the entire world.
I just wanted to say that as far as I know, ancient writings that describe or purport to describe day-to-day life and culture are pretty thin on the ground. Most of the ancient stories that I am familiar with describe heroic events. Maybe Plato’s description of life in Atlantis?
I mean, you are looking for stories written a long time ago, and set a long time before that, but detailing day-to-day life, right? I just can’t think of any examples. How much day-to-day life is there in the Illiad?
You make a good point. True, there are some ancient accounts of day-to-day life, such as the comedies of Aristophanes (although those are kind of late for our purposes), Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the Satire of the Trades, and it is also possible to discern some elements of everyday life from longer narratives, such as the Odyssey and the patriarchal portion of Genesis. But the likelihood that a flood narrative is also going to evidence pre-flood everyday life seems quite remote.