Thread: Rising ocean levels create...world wide flood

Here's a few ideas about a possible explanation for an ancient flood. I think the Bible is a written record of oral traditions passed down for what might have been thousands of years. We're dealing with ancient peoples who had zero knowledge of any science. To them, the forces of nature were magical, supernatural events. Its not their fault they didn't know what we know today. They simply didn't know, so they described events as best they could within their own cultures.

The Sumarian's had a similar account of a great flood in their records, very similar to later Biblical accounts. So I assume they might refer to the same event. Sumeria was the first major civilization and developed the first written language, lirerally thousands of years before the bible was written.

The last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago. As the glaciers melted, oceans levels would have risen. Low lying lands would have been flooded, quickly or slowly, depending on how fast the ice melted and flowed to the oceans. The Sumerians or their predesessors were alive and well during this period of glacial melting and ocean levels rising. They were probably to far south to be aware of glaciers, but they would have been aware of rising ocean levels as lands increasingly were flooded.

The rest of the story about Noah, etc.,blah blah gave the story the much needed human element. What good is story telling without a good story? The basic fact of the end of the last Ice Age needed jazzing up, and with a few thousand years and a host of story tellers, no wonder the Bible story is what it is.

Bottom line: the Bible story of the flood may have been an ancient account of the end of the last Ice Age.

The much earlier flood myths of Mesopotamia are far more interesting and entertaining than the Noachian myth, to be sure. The passages of Gilgamesh that discuss the flood of Utnapishtim are clearly the source of the noachian myth. In some places the borrowing is word for word with obvious embellishment throughout.

But the motif of floods being directed by gods shouldn't be surprise in any human culture around the world. After all, we're a species that needs water and we live in flood prone regions everywhere in the world. Floods happen.

But the notion that a inundation in a post-Pleistocene thaw isn't all that far-fetched. The Sumerian people migrated to the region of Mesopotamia they ultimately created their civilization. Writing eventually developed there, but the tales of a flood may have been passed down as an oral tradition before finding itself in written form as the Atrahasis or within Gilgamesh.

Pure speculation, but the Sumerian people may have been displaced from the lush valley that once occupied the land which now sits at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. This valley was exposed during the last glacial period, inundated at around 12,000 - 10,000 years ago. It would, however, have been a relatively slow inundation when compared with a sudden flood. But a few centimeters or meters per day would have been sufficient to force inhabitants to higher ground. The Sumerian myths include Dilmun, a utopia-like mythical place of origin, which was very likely on or near modern-day Bahrain.

There is some evidence of a natural damn that used to be in that area. Some scientists believe that this damn may have busted and flooded a large area around mesopotamia, which, if these people didn't have much communication with many other parts of the world then these ancient peoples may have thought that this was worldwide.

What's the evidence for this?

I've been doing some searches about this idea, her's some links

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1207/features/noah.htm

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Noah-...rs-71449.shtml

I wrote a review of Ryan and Pittman's book if anyone is interested: http://ahotcupofjoe.net/2006/09/book...f-noahs-flood/

When I click the link I get a yellow sign with a red exclamation point.
Here's a link from Columbia U

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/ar...od_Theory.html about it

The above link should be fixed now.

Also, I cleaned this thread up a little, removing the meta-discussion about the broken link above. I upgraded my blog's theme at the same time I posted here, and the upgrade had a slight problem.

Oh, and I cleaned up stlekee's link. the html was caught between the "a" and the "bout" creating a url that started "ahttp..".

Let's get back to the topic now :-)

Nice review SkinWalker, you seem well infrormed. while searching for info linking Noah's flood tho the ice age, I found many creationist sites that claim the ice age was caused by the flood - which is backwards from the topic of this post. To me, this idea doesn't seem credible, any creationists out there that want to get in on this?
Here's a lnk to a creationist site supporting the idea the the flood caused the ice age

http://dancingfromgenesis.wordpress....enesis-histor/

Lets not bait those trolls.

Couldn't it be as simple as a single guy getting washed out to sea, losing sight of the land, and assuming it all must have been covered in water?

Originally Posted by kojax

Couldn't it be as simple as a single guy getting washed out to sea, losing sight of the land, and assuming it all must have been covered in water?

And "It all" from a Bronze aged early city dweller's level of knowledge would have been a very small area.

Originally Posted by Lynx_Fox

Originally Posted by kojax

Couldn't it be as simple as a single guy getting washed out to sea, losing sight of the land, and assuming it all must have been covered in water?

And "It all" from a Bronze aged early city dweller's level of knowledge would have been a very small area.

And just think how much the problem compounds if he's adrift at sea for a long time with his family, and ultimately comes to rest in an area that's uninhabited. (Leading him to believe that all the rest of humankind has perished.)

His descendants go like 3 or 4 generations, spread out a bit (with no shortage of inbreeding, unfortunately) , and when they finally come into contact with humans from another family group, they just assume its children of some of their distant relatives who they aren't on close terms with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List

this puts the flood about 25,000 bc

Kojax, your idea is interesting, but why would this story be so significant that it would be handed down throughout the centuries? I mean it wouldn't even make it as a documentary on the history channel.

I think what makes the story memorable isn't the Noah part, its the flood part. The flood is what's being remembered, Noah is just just along for the ride to give it that human element, just like any good disaster movie.

Granpa, i checked out that link on Sumeria. Cool, but the way I read it it dates some flood at about 2500-2900 BCE, not 25,000

I think that behind every myth, legend, fable is some fact, however small, of a real event or situation. Then our job is to try to unravel the story and see what might really have happened.

Originally Posted by stlekee

I think that behind every myth, legend, fable is some fact, however small, of a real event or situation. Then our job is to try to unravel the story and see what might really have happened.

Or complete fabrications to impress people or make a legitimate claim to land or something else.

Inundation of land from thawing of ice at the end of the last glaciation period is a reality. Some archaeologists are now finding stone age artifacts from dredging the North Sea.

However, it strikes me as being a very unlikely source of flood legends. The inundation took many centuries. A very slow motion flood!

The flooding of the Black Sea did not take centuries. The timescale of the flooding of the Gulf is not well defined, but did not necessarily take centuries.

How fast did the Bering Strait flood?

Originally Posted by stlekee

Kojax, your idea is interesting, but why would this story be so significant that it would be handed down throughout the centuries? I mean it wouldn't even make it as a documentary on the history channel.

Well, you have to remember that people were really ignorant in ancient history. Nobody is able to compare their notes and realize that this guy was wrong in thinking that all of humanity except his family had died in a flood.

With all the poorly kept genealogies and such, when his descendants finally meet those other family groups, and mistake them for relatives........ those other family groups also mistake themselves for relatives.

Originally Posted by Lynx_Fox

Originally Posted by stlekee

I think that behind every myth, legend, fable is some fact, however small, of a real event or situation. Then our job is to try to unravel the story and see what might really have happened.

Or complete fabrications to impress people or make a legitimate claim to land or something else.

Or a mix. Sometimes a good story just gets co-opted or hijacked... or embellished.

For sure nobody knows, but its interesting to speculate. I like to try to understand the world view of ancient people, they were NOT the same as modern folks in their understanding and knowledge.

One thing we do have in common is that we believe we know something, it helps make sense of the world. I'm of the belief that people hold on to old ideas of religion, no matter how far removed from reality, because it connects them to something permanent in a changing world. Lets face it, most people don't like change.

So we have ancient religions and beliefs that tried to explain reality to help people deal with their world. And we hold onto these religions and beliefs even though they now are far removed from reality as we know it today - I used to ask myself, how can anybody believe this stuff, it doesn't make sense. But I guess people really don't make sense after all, and we really don't want the world or god to make any sense.

But the flip side is people hold onto these religions because they don't want to risk going to hell, another concept that doesn't make sense. Why would a loving, forgiving god send us to hell? Is anybody else frustrated with this stuff, this religion stuff?

Originally Posted by stlekee

I think that behind every myth, legend, fable is some fact, however small, of a real event or situation. Then our job is to try to unravel the story and see what might really have happened.

Would you care to explain what real even or situation inspired Star Wars of Spiderman? People love to just make up entertaining bullshit. I'm sure that a large portion of myths have some original factual basis, but I certainly don't see any reason to think that all of them do.

Originally Posted by granpa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List

this puts the flood about 25,000 bc

Do you want to edit that number?

Originally Posted by Ophiolite

Originally Posted by granpa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List

this puts the flood about 25,000 bc

Do you want to edit that number?

If memory serves correct, that number is accurate. But you have to understand that the Sumerian Kings List is one that is reliable only to a certain date. Beyond that (I think somewhere around 5,000 BCE) the list becomes mythology.

It's been a while since I read up on Sumeria, but this is as I recall it.

woah woah woah.... Doesn't the YEC calendar put creation at around 4,004 BCE though?

The Sumerians weren't YEC.

Right, I understand that, but wouldn't a reliable list of Sumerian kings that dates back to at least 5000 BCE invalidate the YEC claims rather immediately? I'm more stuck on how the YEC never included that little bit in their calculations.

I suspect the OP is right, that flood accounts have some basis in climate change.

At the SW corner of the Caspian there are petroglyphs depicting organized migrations: fleets of boats large enough to carry 20+ paddlers, some apparently with livestock. The region from Aral, Caspian, and Black Sea saw vast (and possibly catastrophic) flooding due to changes in ice sheet drainage.

Maybe coincidence that Noah is supposed to have landed at "the land of Ararat", whose lofty peak is visible from the petroglyph site, i.e. you could navigate by it. Or maybe there were many Noahs.

Pictures here: http://www.donsmaps.com/gobustan.html



In the Georgia Strait / Puget Sound area (now renamed the "Salish Sea") flood myth claims that waters rose so high, only an arbutus tree stood above water. This would correctly describe the early millenia of deglaciation as islands and coastline rebounded from below sea level, and the habitable coasts would be lined with the one tree species tolerant of salt.

But is it historic account, or just clever guess "if there was a flood"?



One question that nags: How could prehistoric people not practice (quaint) archeology? Surely they were finding ruins, dinosaur fossils, strange humanoid skulls. They'd wonder about these things. The rise of sea levels must have resulted in cumulative ruins visible and just offshore, as a constant reminder for thousands of years.

Originally Posted by Arcane_Mathematician

Right, I understand that, but wouldn't a reliable list of Sumerian kings that dates back to at least 5000 BCE invalidate the YEC claims rather immediately? I'm more stuck on how the YEC never included that little bit in their calculations.

Absolutely right, however the Sumerian King List is mostly mythology. As I understand it some of the Kings live for hundreds of years, etc etc

Gen 11:9 can be read

therefore hath [one] called its name Babel, for there overflow (balal) YHWH shore's all the earth