Long ago I read a book defending the story of Noah’s Ark. One claim it made was that every culture in the world had a version of the myth.
I doubt it can be shown that every culture had a version and indeed it might be easy to show examples of cultures that didn’t have such a myth.
But how common was it? Do the Native American tribes have one? African tribes? Eskimo tribes? Peruvian?
For the purpose of the question, assume that it is similar enough to Noah’s myth to be included. Basic premises: Great Flood, huge boat that saves humanity and the animals.
Please note that you need not come in and point out that if the myth *is *universal, that doesn’t mean it is true. I’m not making that claim, I was just explaining how I became curious.
Just to muddy the waters, it is also possible that other cultures adopted a Flood myth after hearing it from somebody else. The Jewish story of the Flood is believed by many to be an adaptation of an older Babylonian myth (Gilgamesh, IIRC).
However, the Flood myth does seem to be, if not universal, very common.
The wiki page is quite good, and offers up some of the common hypotheses of why these myths are abundant (bigger-than-usual flooding, tsunami, cometary ocean impact, or just finding seashells on mountains and wondering how they got there).
It is indeed quite widespread. Here’s the Wikipedia article on it.
Comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell notes that it as hardly the only “universal” myth and argues against a literal interpretation of them.
There certainly are North American Indian versions of a Flood myth – see Cottie Burland’s North American Indian Mythology. There are Sumerian, Babylonian, and Greek versions. I’m pretty sure there are others, but my memory isn’t cooperating right now.
As others have said above, myths about destructive floods are nearly (but not absolutely) universal. Some of these have very little else in common with the genesis story, though. Joseph Campbell and other Jungian and post-Jungian scholars posit a connection based on their interaction with the collective human psyche; attempts to connect them on more mundane bases such as specific motifs and cultural connections don’t show any direct connection to the Genesis story. Many of them are simply “botched creation” myths: the gods’ first draft, as it were, which can be destroyed by earthquake, fire, flood, or any other natural disaster of your choice.
Just a WAG, but global sea levels rose dramatically when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. That could have given rise to widespread flood myths.
As Dr. Drake correctly notes, the details of most of these myths vary considerably – most of them aren’t Noah-type stories, where one man and his family save all the animals and everyone else drowns.
Although people have suggested that many flood myths can be traced back to one catastrophic mega-flood, possibly one that affected a large portion of the Tigris-Euphrates basin, or the flooding of the Black Sea, or even the flooding of the Mediterranean, I myself suspect that Flood myths originate in the common human experience of the occasional large flood, mixed with human storytelling capability to extrapolate and exaggerate. Myths rarely, if ever, seem to be based upon one single memrable event (although there are several examples cited in Barber and Barber’s When They Severed Earth from Sky that have taught me not to be dogmatic about this point Amazon.com )
No, it couldn’t. That hypothesis, while reasonable on the surface, doesn’t take into account the way that oral narration works. The time depth is too great; you’re essentially proposing race memory. Fortunately, you have the same phenomenon on a much smaller scale (landslips, river flooding, etc.) and observable phenomena (marine fossils at high elevations), not to mention human imagination.
You’ll find plenty of sources in the scientific community that seem to think oral narratives can survive 10,000 years and more, especially among archaeologists. I’m a narrative scholar with a specialty in myth and oral tradition, and I’m very skeptical of such claims, via Occam’s Razor if nothing else. There is, of course, no direct evidence back more than six thousand years in any case, so ultimately it depends on whose theories you think are strongest.