Sure…but how often do floods wipe out an entire settlement? Can’t be all THAT often, not to the point where the settlement is permanently abandoned. I would think that kind of catastrophe would have more impact on the survivors and be something that was handed down in an oral tradition. It would have meaning and impact on people (and thus continue to be told) because floods happen and people can grasp what they mean…and are able to extrapolate what a really big flood would do and be like (though looking at the Noah myth they can’t alway extrapolate very accurately ).
If the settlement is within a dozen miles of a major river, I’d say every couple of hundred years at least. And the settlers get scattered to all the other settlements, carrying stories of the devestation. Look at the area flooded in 1927–14% of Arkansas was underwater. The Mississippi was 60 miles wide as far north as Memphis. It seems more likely that a memory of a flood like that would linger 300 years than that a memory of the Black Sea has lingered for 12,000.
IIRC the Black Sea flooded out sometime between 5500-6000 BC. That’s not 12,000 years. Seems plausible to me that if a memory of a big flood could kick around for 300 years then a truly catastrophic flood like that must have been would be told for a couple thousand years before recorded civilization started. How long did the story of Troy hang out before it was finally written down?
I watched the same documentary – it came in here on History Channel – and I was of the distinct impression that the theory being advanced was that the flooding of what is now the Dead Sea is, in fact, the genesis of the flood myth. I don’t remember the narrator saying that every culture has had a flood myth, only that the flood myth was common among the ancient peoples, and that flooding on a massive scale was common in that area at one time.
Among Native Indian tribes, flood is a common event in tribal myths, although usually not a personified actor but generally caused by a god. Having lived most of my life in the South Platte River Valley, I can attest to the awesome nature of a flood. It is inexorable and irresistible. I remember standing on the banks of the South Platte as the water rose and watching the river go by as if it were an endless animal, ignorant of my existence, indifferent to everything around it. Later, as I watched it slowly devour my wife’s family’s cropland, I felt a fearful helplessness that I’ve never experienced before or since. That kind of experience lends itself to a tribe’s mythmaking, I would think.
According to Wiki, it was 7000 years ago, so it certainly didn’t effect native American myths. In any case, I am not sure how huge a flood has to be before it gets to “really fucking huge” and any additional flooding is meaningless: if you were on the ground, would a flood that covered 60,000 square miles over a year seem of a different magnitude from a flood that covered 30,000 square miles in few weeks? I suspect there have been many floods in the “fucking huge” catagory, and the ones that we can retroactivly label as the biggest may not have been that much more memorable.
One thing that makes me especially dubious about the Black Sea thing is that in that case, rather uniquely, the flood waters never went back down. If that incident were the kernal of all the flood stories in the region, you’d expect them to have that idea in them–that the new seas had new shores–but I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a flood myth. It’s always “water goes up, water goes down”.
Well, there is no way to definitively know that. Certainly there were no mass migrations to America at that time…but there are new theories as to how people got to America in the first place, and it’s at least theoretically possible there was some interaction. (ok…probably not…but you never know. One thing they have found is that man moved around a lot more than was previously thought…and found lots of ingenious ways to move to places thought inaccessible.)
If it sweeps away your entire settlement and maybe your neighbors settlement as well then I think it’s big enough to be remembered. If it sweeps away, permanently, your entire ‘world’…well, that’s something else again. And I think the Black Sea flooding (if it even happened) would constitute a big enough disaster that it would be remembered and the story of which would be retold and spread (and in the spreading change).
Well, oral stories are…stories. So, they are bound to change in the retelling. Like the story about Troy, there only has to be a kernel of truth around which myths form. I think the very thing that makes you skeptical is what makes it believable to me…it was such a unique and terrifying event that it would be remarkable if there was no memory of it at all passed down to future generations. It’s just too good a story to not tell.
Why would a flood the size of the Black Sea seem to sweep away your entire world but the Mississippi flood only seem to sweep away your settlement? To a family near ground zero, I think they’d both seem huge beyond imagination. The Black Sea didn’t so much flood as creep up steadily for a year or so, near as I can tell: a weird event, but in many ways less terrifying and memorable than the river flooding in just a few weeks.
If you want to connect a myth to a certain specific event, I think you need a tie to some element of the event that is unique to that event. None of the flood myths seem to have anything that attaches them specifically to the Black Sea flood–in fact, the ones I am familiar with all talk about a whole lot of rain–the Black Sea flood would also have been unique in that it may not have been accompanied by heavy rains.
Depends on who you believe whether the Black Sea flooded massively or crept steadily…I’ve seen both theories. Obviously I’m basing my own conjecture on the massive flooding theory where essentially an earthen dam burst and let in several hundred feet of sea in a short period of time.
As to why it would be different, I’d say first off because unlike a flood on the Mississippi where eventually the waters would recede and at least the land would be back, here you would have something that would in a very real sense reshape the world…permanently. Secondly I presume (again, pure conjecture) that there were multiple settlements…perhaps even a proto-civilization…around the old Black Sea lake area…which would have all been swept away essentially over night. I would think this would have a much greater impact than the flooding of the Mississippi…traumatic as that would have been to the inhabitants.
I freely concede that MMV and that this is pure conjecture on my part. We are unlikely to ever know.
Well, we don’t know the events leading up to the (supposed) collapse of the dam holding back the sea…nor do we know what other events through time may have contributed to the myth(s) of different peoples. The way oral stories propagate through time and distance would pretty much assure that much of the original story would be garbled, embellished (perhaps with local events), or otherwise be changed. Popular oral stories would of course become local favorites (such as the stories that lead to the biblical Noah account which can be traced back to several other regional cultures).
I don’t think rain is a show stopper to be honest. One can speculate that it was raining heavily prior to the collapse of the dam holding back the sea (and perhaps it was the rain that caused the final erosion that lead to the collapse) for instance. Or perhaps rain figured into another flood, and the events were folded together in the way that oral stories take on aspects of the local events and/or cultures they pass through.
And you could add that the Biblical flood story, at least, specifies a deluge as the mechanism, rather than a sudden inflow of surface water.
Still, it seems to me quite possible that the Black Sea event was the kernel for the various flood legends in the region. It’s even possible that Noah is based on a real person, or a group of people, who suspected a flood was coming and built boats. I’m not sure how far it’s possible to go with this; if these “Noahs” explored the region to their southwest and discovered that a vast sea of saltwater existed a thousand feet above their homes, would they have been able to understand the implications?
When discussing isolated cultures today it usually seems a safer bet not to underestimate what they understand about the world, at least on a practical level.
IIRC, the oldest remains in North America are something like 11k-13k…so probably no one was living there around 15k. At least no remains I’m aware of have been found that old.
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