Myths from around the world tell us of a distinct event in pre-history. In the Bible, the event involves Noah, to whom God said he was to build an ark and take aboard it his family and breeding pairs of all animals.
Seven days after completion, the rains came and water rose from the ground. For forty days and nights this continued until the world was submerged. Three months later Noah found land and planted the first vine. We are talking, of course, of the Biblical Flood.
FLOOD AND AGRICULTURE
The Flood is not confined to the Blble. In Babylonian legends we find the words: ‘aboard the ship take thou the seed of all living things’. In ancient Greek legend Deucalion and his wife built and stocked a huge wooden chest and survived a deluge. After the flood he threw over his shoulder some stones and they became people.
Deucalion, like Noah, is associated with the vine. Dionysus is the god of wine and vegetation, and in another Greek myth he is depicted sailing in a boat with grapes hanging from the rigging. In ancient Egypt, one variation of the Osiris myth - another god eventually associated with agriculture - has him murdered and set afloat in a wooden chest. Does this connection with agriculture give a hint to what is going on?
EVIDENCE OF THE DELUGE
The above myths are suggestive of a huge flood in prehistory. However, many scholars have rejected a global flood in favour of a localised event. For instance, all the above cultures came from the same geographical area, or had early contact with this area.
This is the ‘fertile crescent’ of the eastern Mediterranean - modern day Iraq - between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which were infamous for flooding.
In 1928 archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley found evidence of such local flooding in soil samples at Ur. However, whilst the above can be traced to a possible common source, and as such, could be remembrances of a localised flood, the same cannot be said for the following.
WORLDWIDE MYTHS
Flood myths have been reported throughout the world. In Australia, the semi-human python Yurlunggur brought about a flood, the eventual result being today’s world.
In south east Asia we have myths concerning divine ancestors, the Thens. In a rage they caused a flood which devastated the world. Three great men took a raft and built a house upon it and took women and children to the upper kingdom. Eventually the flood receded and they returned to a world with animals and vegetation.
Many flood myths abound in ancient Chinese mythology. Typical ls that of the Yao people of southern China, who have the story of a man who castigates the Thunder God for creating a deluge.
In India the first man, Manu, earns favours from a small fish which he had saved from being eaten by a bigger one. The fish grows to a huge size and warns Manu of a coming cosmic deluge.
He instructs him to build a ship and fill it with the seeds of all things, and when the deluge comes, the fish tows Manu to safety. India also gives us Yamaha, the bear, who appears when the Earth is plunged into the ocean. He raises up the earth to save it.
In Andean mythology Viracocha, the creator god, sends a great flood. The world that survives is a better place and his son Manco Capac and daughter Mama Ocllo go on to teach the arts of civilisation to the survivors.
Similar myths exist throughout the Americas, right up to Canada, where the Chippewa Indians have a story of a mouse nibbling the leather bag that contains the sun. Released, the sun melts the snows and the meltwater goes on to flood the world.
BOTH GLOBAL AND LOCAL
Mythologies concerning a great flood exist throughout the world, suggesting that such an event really happened. Again, some scholars discount this by claiming that they are all remembrances of various localised events. However, perhaps they are both right and wrong.
For instance, one theme that constantly crops up in flood myths is the idea that following the flood came vegetation or civilisation. The way that this constant theme appears with flooding suggests some global event of a shared nature to be behind the various myths.
Intriguingly, a known event was taking place between 12000 and 8000BC that can answer such myths, and many of the other enigmas concerning a possible lost civilisation.
During this period, the last ice age came to an end.
Rather than being a spectacularly cataclysmic event, the retreat of the glaciers would have been a process taking many centuries, if not millenia. The result of the melting ice sheets would be that global sea levels would eventually rise possibly one hundred metres.
Whilst this event would be slow - hardly noticed in some areas - it would have occasional localised repercussions of devastating proportions. As water tables rose globally, valleys would be flooded, waters seeming to come up from the ground.
At times, rivers would suffer massive and devastating floods. Low lying islands would suddenly disappear below the sea, possibly leaving small outcrops such as at Easter Island.
Perhaps the most spectacular repercussion presently aired by some theorists is the idea of the Black Sea at one time being dry land. As the Mediterranean rose, a huge deluge would have submerged the area with waters bursting through the Bosphorus.
OF CATACLYSM AND RENEWAL
A slow ending of the last ice age would not cause a global cataclysm capable of wiping out the existing hunter/gatherers, but it would involve regional disasters capable of creating the myths.
And significantly, it was following the last ice age that peoples throughout the world began to leave behind their hunter/gatherer ways and turn to agriculture, and, eventually, civilisation.
So maybe the flood stories that come to us from antiquity are not ‘myths’ at all, but remembrances of real events.
In other words, coloured with the language of mythology as they are, we could be talking of the first known histories.
By Anthony North, January 2008
