The Persian Gulf averages about 35 metres in depth and the seabed between Abu Dhabi and Qatar is even shallower, being mostly less than 15 metres deep. For thousands of years the Ur-Shatt (a confluence of the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers) provided fresh water to the Gulf, as it flowed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf of Oman. Bathymetric data suggests there were two palaeo-basins in the Persian Gulf. The central basin may have approached an area of 20,000 km2, comparable at its fullest extent to lakes such as Lake Malawi in Africa. Between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago much of the Gulf’s floor was not covered by water, only being flooded by the sea after 8,000 years BP.[27]
It sounds like a really big area, most of the Persian Gulf, that was flooded. Maybe it was gradual over a few hundred years. Maybe some sort of natural dam suddenly burst.
The Missoula flood, which I mentioned above, was catastrophic - the Columbia River had been dammed by a glacier, which caused an inland sea (Glacial Lake Missoula) to form stretching from central Washington all the way to western Montana. When that glacier gave way, the lake drained into the Pacific over the course of about 2-3 weeks, with 400 million cubic feet of water (about ten times the flow of every river that exists on Earth today combined) flowing every hour at a speed of 45 MPH.
I don’t know if there’s any archaeological evidence for such a flood happening in the Persian Gulf, but as I said there is Native American oral tradition about the Missoula flood, so if there was one, the story certainly could’ve survived. I personally lean toward the idea that the Mideast flood myth had more to do with the fact that annual river flooding was central to ancient agriculture there, though.
There’s a controversial but non-crackpot hypothesis that the biblical narrative of the deluge has its roots in a catastrophic inflow of Mediterranean water into the Black Sea, which had previously been a large inland lake, in the 6th or 7th millennium BC. This would have occurred over the course of a year.
During the LGM the Persian Gulf was a lush river valley. It would have had abundant wetlands and good hunting. I think that’s where the ancestors of the Sumerians came from. They attributed their origin to a place in the Gulf named Dilmun. It was probably the island of Bahrain, which would have been a mountain during the LGM and the focus of any cult that worshiped in high places. This would explain why the origins of the Sumerians are so mysterious and why they can’t be connected with any other people: their original homeland was drowned.
There are many deluge myths. In ancient times, for most observers, the “whole world” was what you could see from one horizon to another, maybe with a couple days walk in either direction. So a flood doesn’t have to be particularly large for observers to conclude that it covered the whole world. Or, that since an observed flood nearly covered the whole world, then maybe in the past there was a bigger one that actually did cover the whole world.
None of this requires that an Ice Age come to an end, it could be just once-in-a-millennium combination of extremely heavy snowfall in the mountains and a very warm spring season. It sounds unlikely, but at any given time, there’s a “once in a lifetime” weather event happening somewhere on the globe. The world is a big place, lots of moving parts, lots of ins and outs.
All that seems to be tied into periodic bouts of scriptural literalism as a sort of religious fad.
I know I don’t know, but I wonder how widespread in time or place those fads have been? The USA certainly seems to have had a couple of go-arounds involving a non-trivial fraction of mainstream Xian denominations going off the deep end into literalism.
Most of that flooding would have happened long, long before humans wrote things down.
You don’t have to theorize about glaciers when asking why floods feature prominently in human mythology; floods are just an inevitable part of being human, because we HAVE to live close to water, and water floods, and a flood is fucking terrifying.
Even if they were, they were never written as a way to account for the actual physical events, but rather to try to square up what had happened with their understanding of the metaphysical. In other words, the fact that something bad happened (in the story or real world) was the point, and why in a metaphysical/divine sense, not a physical sense.
In the case of something large like the Black Sea flooding, a universal flood myth could develop gradually as people traveled, meeting travelers from more and more distant spots, who recounted a flood at the same time, so that merging folktales could develop into a global narrative.
The natural disasters that affected the “world” in Middle Eastern mythology tended to be earthquakes and floods, because that’s what the locals saw. Localism is universal. The Taino people, living in the Caribbean, gave us the word hurricane, because Uracan was their bane from an evil god. The Mayans named their similar god Hurakan. In the Pacific Rim islands, earthquakes predominate.
We are in the fourth world of the Hopis, the first three having been destroyed by fire, ice, and flood. The Aztecs add one more early world. Going backwards the destructive forces were floods, fire, hurricanes, and jaguars.
I sometimes quote the adage that Science Fiction is never about the future; it is always about the present. A moment’s thought will serve to get the point. We haven’t lived through the future. Writers live in today, and readers live in today. Attempts in sf to get away from grounding a work in today usually fail because they are either too abstract or too phantasmagoria.
Mythology has a similar grounding in its era’s today. It must always reference the common experience of the readers or listeners, as the stories try to explain why the world they are living in exists. A primary purpose is to the blame off to one or many gods or creator beings, not on the current power structure who gets to be the power structure by adroitly manipulating the stories.
What becomes mythology must always contain content that is based off of history and is allegorically told to satisfy the demands of the present world. Older mythology often varied over time to accomplish this. The Greek myths have many versions of their stories, with gods behaving differently in each or the same story attributed to different gods. Only when myth hardens into religion are these ancient stories, particular to a time and place, forced to serve are eternal and universal verities. Nonbelievers see the strains, believers must enter into wilder and wilder contortions to make them fit. For them, any connection to real history, the required foundation that present in every one, is magically turned into confirmation of the entire story. That’s more amazing than any myth.
Great post. Thank you for your always learned additions. But it made me pause.
The god of the Old Testament was kind of a hard-ass. Sending plagues of frogs and locusts and such. Lotta folks really had the “fear of god” put in them with those moves.
But a god who sends a plague of jaguars? Now that’s bad-ass. Do not piss off the Aztec’s god(s) if you know what’s good for you.
Well, one of the Biblical plagues was unspecified “wild beasts” (some translate “insects”, but that seems redundant with the locusts). Could have been jaguars!
Exodus 8:20-21 (with emendation)
And the LORD did so. Heavy swarms of jaguars invaded Pharoah’s palace and the houses of his courtiers; throughout the country of Egypt the land was ruined because of the swarms of jaguars.
We seem to have a plague of leopards who specialize in face-eating around here right now. Leopards are sorta like jaguars.
Perhaps this really is the End Times. Although whether it’ll be the Aztec or the Xian version seems hard to predict. Good thing the Mayan calendar isn’t also coming to the end of its cycle about now.
