# The "great flood" myth is found in many religions. Any evidence it really happened?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [November 12, 2003, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755 "2003-11-12T03:16:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/1 "2003-11-12T03:16:03Z")
Great flood myths are found in many religions. Is there any geological evidence something like this happened in the scope of human memory?
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### Author:  [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/2 "2003-11-12T03:27:50Z")
The Black Sea flood is one candidate.
> [@](#):
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> The Black Sea flood was a truly major upheaval. Here’s what happened: The last ice age retreated 12,000 years ago and the world began warming. As it did, ice melted and oceans rose, while lakes began to evaporate and shrink.
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> The Black Sea was a great freshwater lake in those days and, as the new technology of farming matured eight thousand years ago, farmers moved into the lands around it.
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> By 5500 BC, the lake lay 500 feet below sea level. Then the thin strip of land between the salt Sea of Marmara and the freshwater Black Sea gave way. A terrible gush of water cut through, creating the Bosporus channel. The flow was 400 times greater than Niagara Falls – making a sound heard over sixty miles away.
[http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1192.htm](http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1192.htm)
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### Author:  [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/3 "2003-11-12T03:29:59Z")
Yes. The Black Sea Flood of about 7000 years ago. However, there’s to evidence to suggest that it inspired any of the “Great Flood” stories, intriguing as that might be.
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### Author:  [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/4 "2003-11-12T03:30:14Z")
Yep. [Here’s one.](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/99/11/flood.html) There was a PBS documentary on this a while back. Of course it wasn’t an actual worldwide flood–that would be impossible. I read someplace that if all the water in the atmosphere condensed out at once, it would only cover the Earth to a depth of one inch.
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### Author:  [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/5 "2003-11-12T04:01:15Z")
More on the Black sea Flood theory:
[http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html](http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html)
> [@](#):
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> • The story most familiar to many people is the biblical account of Noah and his ark. Genesis tells how “God saw that the wickedness of man was great” and decided to destroy all of creation. Only Noah, “who found grace in the eyes of the Lord,” his family, and the animals aboard the ark survived to repopulate the planet.
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> • Older than Genesis is the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, a king who embarked on a journey to find the secret of immortality. Along the way, he met Utnapishtim, survivor of a great flood sent by the gods. Warned by Enki, the water god, Utnapishtim built a boat and saved his family and friends, along with artisans, animals, and precious metals.
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> [snip]
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> Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman wondered what could explain the preponderance of flood legends. Their theory: As the Ice Age ended and glaciers melted, a wall of seawater surged from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea.
> • During the Ice Age, Ryan and Pitman argue, the Black Sea was an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland.
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> • About 12,000 years ago, toward the end of the Ice Age, Earth began growing warmer. Vast sheets of ice that sprawled over the Northern Hemisphere began to melt. Oceans and seas grew deeper as a result.
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> [snip]
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> • If the thesis is correct, signs of human habitation should lie beneath the Black Sea. A 1998 expedition, says Ballard, reported “a series of features that appear to be man-made structures.”
The problem: the last dispatches reported a lack of man-made structures so far, not to mention that the location is far from what the bible and Gilgamesh told the heroes came.
I still think a huge extraordinary flood occurred around the Tigris and Euphrates and the tale got better as time went by, and it was carried later to the rest of the world as humans emigrated.
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### Author:  [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/6 "2003-11-12T04:20:56Z")
> [@](#):
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> \*Originally posted by GIGObuster \*
> **I still think. . . the tale got better as time went by. . . .**
Yeah, I agree. Sorta the same way that the older your parents or grand-parents get, the longer they had to walk to school, and the deeper the snow got.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/7 "2003-11-12T04:47:56Z")
Let me re-emphasize what **Earl** said earlier.
There are lots of floods in earth history. There are many huge floods in earth history.
There is not the slightest shred of evidence that any particular flood is the progenitor for any particular myth.
All this talk about the Black Sea flood - and other candidates - being the source of the myth is total backwards-think. A) There’s a myth about a flood. B) Working backwards in time, we can find evidence of a great flood. Therefore B caused A.
Not only is there no direct evidence for any such connection, but the time lapses are so great that we have to posit an oral tradition lasting thousands of years and covering thousands of miles.
Not to mention that there is no good way to connect such an event to any mythologies outside their Mediterranean basin.
None of this is science in the usual sense of the word. It’s closer to modern day mythmaking.
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### Author:  [@Edward\_The\_Head](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Edward_The_Head)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/8 "2003-11-12T12:47:46Z")
There is also evidence of a massive flood in the city of Ur. Wooley (sp?), who excavated the city in the 50s got through a couple of layers of cities then came to around 20+ feet of sediment, then more evidence of people. His wife suggested that it was the “great flood”. This sounds better then the Black Sea flooding, as doesn’t Abraham come from Ur?
Sorry, it’s been years since I’ve read the book, I mostly remember this part as we talked about it in one of my classes.
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### Author:  [@refusal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/refusal)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/9 "2003-11-12T12:58:10Z")
> [@](#):
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> \*Originally posted by GIGObuster \*
> \*\*I still think a huge extraordinary flood occurred around the Tigris and Euphrates and the tale got better as time went by, and it was carried later to the rest of the world as humans emigrated. \*\*
The river Euphrates being one of the traditional sites of the Garden of Eden? If you’re not a Biblical literalist, I think you need to brush up on your ancient population movements.
There are other candidates for floods, e.g. that following the eruption of the volcano Thera in the Aegean Sea, which is connected with the Greek flood myth ([cite](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/minoan_01.shtml),[cite](http://www.dienekes.com/blog/archives/000415.html)). And many regions, e.g. the Nile valley, parts of Eastern China, modern-day Bangladesh, are prone to regular flooding; it’s far from impossible that travellers tales from these regions had an influence. If you weren’t used to the Nile flooding, it might have seemed like an apocalypse.
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### Author:  [@Futile\_Gesture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futile_Gesture)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/10 "2003-11-12T13:31:55Z")
Early settlements of people were often in river flood plains. To these people that plain, and maybe 50 miles in each direction, _was_ the entire world.
It is therefore not at all surprising that many society’s religions, myths and legends contain stories of the world being flooded.
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### Author:  [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/11 "2003-11-12T13:40:25Z")
I’m agreeing with **Futile** , but also want to ask – we know of the Genesis Noah story and the Babylonian Gilgamesh story. That’s two. That doesn’t seem to me to be “many.”
I mean, OK, the Genesis Noah story finds its way into “many” religions, but they all tie to the same story. I think the Qu’ran echoes that story, too, as it does other Old Testament stories, but we’re still talking about the same origin story. Where do you get “many”, **astro**?
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### Author:  [@ronbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ronbo)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/12 "2003-11-12T13:44:43Z")
Seashells and Fishbones are found at the summits of mountains.
Obviously this land was once underwater.
A world-wide flood is the “obvious” explanation. We’ve all seen floods. Who among us has actually seen a mountain rise?
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### Author:  [@orianabird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orianabird)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/13 "2003-11-12T13:51:26Z")
I agree with Futile and GIGObuster as well.
Just think of how much back breaking work went into farming with hand tools and how the survival of you and your family hinged on the weather. Certainly, floods were bad news to all early agrarian societies and the story of a horrific, world-wide flood would be better than any car accident. Acient people we just as imaginative as we are today, we just have cooler toys.
Add in the Moses spin for those in Europe and you get an explination as to why there are still people on the earth and the warm-fuzzy feeling from knowing that you are descendent from God’s chosen.
More on Moses and inbreeding later.
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### Author:  [@orianabird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orianabird)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/14 "2003-11-12T13:52:36Z")
Much appologies for the poor spelling. It’s very early here.
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### Author:  [@Futile\_Gesture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futile_Gesture)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/15 "2003-11-12T13:58:45Z")
Check [this page](http://www.nwcreation.net/noahlegends.html) out for a summary of world-wide flood legends. This is a ‘Creation Science’ site which naturally goes on to use the frequency of the tale as proof that everyone knows Noah, so the bible must be true.
But it does show that flood tales are uniform throughout the world. It’s a testiment to the uniformity of human development across the globe and the similarity of human needs and aspirations. When you are in an early agri-culture society floods are very big deals with very similar results and very similar human responses.
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### Author:  [@Gary\_T](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_T)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/16 "2003-11-12T13:59:27Z")
> [@](#):
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> \*Originally posted by orianabird \*
> \*\*Much appologies for the poor spelling. It’s very early here. \*\*
Yeah, spelling “Noah” as M-O-S-E-S is pushing it. 😃
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### Author:  [@T0Mmy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/T0Mmy)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/17 "2003-11-12T14:01:45Z")
> [@](#):
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> \*Originally posted by ronbo \*
> \*\*Seashells and Fishbones are found at the summits of mountains.
>
> A world-wide flood is the “obvious” explanation. We’ve all seen floods. Who among us has actually seen a mountain rise? \*\*
Mountains are formed by Tectonic plates moving together and being forced up into the air. It therefore stands to reason that these fossils found at the top of mountains started off under the sea once. The Himalayas for example where formed when India crashed into asia. The bit in the middle was under water and was raised.
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### Author:  [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/18 "2003-11-12T14:02:32Z")
> [@](#):
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> \*Originally posted by ronbo \*
> Seashells and Fishbones are found at the summits of mountains.
Where? cite? what specific circumstances?
> [@](#):
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> Obviously this land was once underwater.
Not “obviously”. There are many ways for seashells and fishbones to end up at a mountaintop. They could be carried there by swallows.
> [@](#):
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> A world-wide flood is the “obvious” explanation.
Maybe obvious if you are ignorant enough.
> [@](#):
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> We’ve all seen floods. Who among us has actually seen a mountain rise?
And who among us has read anything about geology?
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### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/19 "2003-11-12T14:02:43Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by C K Dexter Haven \*
> \*\*I’m agreeing with **Futile** , but also want to ask – we know of the Genesis Noah story and the Babylonian Gilgamesh story. That’s two. That doesn’t seem to me to be “many.”
>
> I mean, OK, the Genesis Noah story finds its way into “many” religions, but they all tie to the same story. I think the Qu’ran echoes that story, too, as it does other Old Testament stories, but we’re still talking about the same origin story. Where do you get “many”, **astro**? \*\*
See [Flood Myths – Part One](http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/titania.htm) for Sumerian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Australian, Chaldean, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Greco-Roman, Jicarilla (Apache), Mayan, Aztec, Squamish, Skagit, Mandingo, Yakima, Caddo, Chippewa, Navajo, and Hopi “great flood” references.
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### Author:  [@Futile\_Gesture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futile_Gesture)
#### Post date: [November 12, 2003, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-great-flood-myth-is-found-in-many-religions-any-evidence-it-really-happened/212755/20 "2003-11-12T14:03:31Z")
Ummm, anyone hear a whooooosh around here?
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