Historical accounts of a 'Great Flood'

[kurushio95]

I've noticed in most cultures, there is mention of a "great flood." in Native American legend, the Earth was created from a flood, Christianity has the story of Noah...and thoughts on this?

 

[verty]

Religions evolve. You are seeing modern renditions of old myths.

 

[arildno]

A lot of water can be disastrous for those exposed to it. Great conflagrations aren't unusual mythical themes, either.

 

[tehno]

I've noticed in most cultures, there is mention of a "great flood." in Native American legend, the Earth was created from a flood, Christianity has the story of Noah...and thoughts on this?

Something "big" ,on global scale,certainly has happened in the past,and many cultures noticed it.

 

[verty]

Something "big" ,on global scale,certainly has happened in the past,and many cultures noticed it.

No. They borrow from each other as time goes on.

 

[arildno]

No. They borrow from each other as time goes on.

That is an not a very well evidenced assumption, and rather unlikely, if we draw an analogue to archeology:

At the time of Evans, the current theory of culture development was that of a cradle civilization in the Mesopotamia that sent cultural tendrils (like architecture) all across Europe.
At the surface, this type of theory had much credibility, which was shattered when PRECISE dating techniques proved that several of these supposed "chains of cultural influence" were all awry.
They couldn't possibly be true, and archeologists reconceptualized their field into one where:

Local cultures are dynamic quantities that evolve on their own, and if there are similarities between cultures, this similarity may well be due to that both cultures need to face the same problems (and hence, their responses become similar), rather than naively assuming a cultural "influence" across the culture gap.

There is no reason why this shouldn't be the case with the evolution of religions, either.

EDIT:
Suddenly, I am unsure:
Perhaps your post was meant to deny that there is any evidence for some unique, historical disaster like Noah's flood. In that case, I agree with you.

 

[verty]

My mother who is a Christian tells me that it has been prophesied in the Bible that california will sever from the mainland. So it 'will' happen, she says.

Another good example is the rapture. Christians tell us that the rapture will happen very soon, thereafter world war 3 will happen. If you read the passage concerned, you'll find it was about some effect that happened at the time it was written and was probably written after that event, whatever it was, in a manner to show that it was prophesied.

So I'm just saying that religions change and their modern revisions are surely very different from what they started out being. I would hesitate to infer anything from what they say.

 

[Evo]

This wikipedia article touches on some of the main flood myths. The story of Noah is thought to be a re-hash of the older myths as verty pointed out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(mythology )

 

[Arian]

No. They borrow from each other as time goes on.

I have a different way of explaining this.
Do not forget that after the Ice Age native Americans and were stranded from having the rest of the world's culture. They too, developed flood stories as did Greek, Babylonia, Islamic and Jewish religions.
Now, I believe this can be pinpointed at precise points.
Both of these happens near the end of the last Ice Age.
Imagine, if you will, the supposed flood that happened when a retreating glacier near Europe broke and flooded some sea whose name I have forgotten.
Now, the story of this flood quickly made its way around the small civilizations that were just starting up (i.e Greece, Middle Eastern Peninsula). Very quickly all kinds of myths grew out of this.

Yet, this does this describe native American's having a flood story...
Yet, we can presume that they too, may have had a giant flood- caused by the same cause:
end-of-ice-age
North American, too, had glaciers and there is geological evidence that a flood did happen around the time that native began reaching that area, so we might assume that native american's saw a different side of the same stick, glacier melting.

Something "big" ,on global scale,certainly has happened in the past,and many cultures noticed it.

the something "big" would be glacier melting.

 

[hypatia]

Here is a pretty good link to flood stories.

http://www.neopage.com/know/flood_myths.htm

 

[arildno]

And why wouldn't any type of disastrous swelling of a brook at the homestead be equally well suited to generate later stories?
Why does it have to be glacial melting behind it all??

 

[nannoh]

And why wouldn't any type of disastrous swelling of a brook at the homestead be equally well suited to generate later stories?
Why does it have to be glacial melting behind it all??

Check out this thread I started and please disregard the "cause mass extinctions?" part of the title.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=127303

In this thread I give links to the discovery of a 2 mile by 5 mile city that is submerged under 120 ft of ocean off the west coast of India. It has been dated to be from around 10,000 years ago using the straw mixed in the bricks of the streets and buildings and drainage conduits and so on. The "myths" that have survived since this time tell of a flood that originated with the glaciers that had locked up passage through the Himilayan mountains and how the ocean rose fast enough and high enough to swallow up quite a few cities along India's coasts.

It takes slightly more of a catastrophe than a stream breaching its banks, effecting many lives and many families, to start a story that will survive through the ages, in the case of India over 10 millenia. There are stories from the same area probably because the whole area from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Sumeria and India had a rather sharp rise in sea level. In fact there is evidence of 3 major surges of melt water giving rise to the ocean. I can find you references but to save me time just have a look at the thread I linked.

 

[arildno]

It takes slightly more of a catastrophe than a stream breaching its banks, effecting many lives and many families, to start a story that will survive through the ages, in the case of India over 10 millenia..

A totally unevidenced assumption. A story survives if people like it to be re-told, if it is a boring story it is soon forgotten.
That is, whether or not a story survives does not depend in any large measure upon what events might have inspired the story in the first place, but upon whether the story is a skillfully wrought tale or not.

 

[nannoh]

A totally unevidenced assumption. A story survives if people like it to be re-told, if it is a boring story it is soon forgotten.
That is, whether or not a story survives does not depend in any large measure upon what events might have inspired the story in the first place, but upon whether the story is a skillfully wrought tale or not.

Do you have evidence to support your assumption?

When I wrote about how it takes the lives of many many people being up-rooted by a flood, or by any catastrophe, to form a story that will survive many thousands of years it was in my opinion.

I didn't say it was my opinion because unless I have offered evidencing references to verify my statement I (erroneously) assume that what I've written can only be interpreted as my opinion.

I'd think that it is probable where both story-telling mechanisms will work to keep "a story alive". Whether the story is a well contrived tale by a few well placed officials of an organization or the collective experience of thousands of people in either case the story will last.

However, there's no denying that the more people who have experienced the events that initiate a story the more people will hear about it. And the more people who hear a story means more people will continue to spread the story. (And the more the story changes) So I believe it is a matter of numbers when it comes to the survival of a story. How the story is told is up to the person telling it.

 

[verty]

So I believe it is a matter of numbers when it comes to the survival of a story. How the story is told is up to the person telling it.

And the story changes to take account of new knowledge because the teller wants it to sound credible.

 

[nannoh]

And the story changes to take account of new knowledge because the teller wants it to sound credible.

Take the story of a world wide flood. This story was taken as the truth. Millions of people believed and still believe that there was a time when the world was flooded and all peoples and all animals and plants would have been eliminated were it not for Manu (in India, just plants actually) or Noah (two by two and so on) and so on. Today we can physically prove that the excessive rains, rising seas and floods in those geographical areas did slow the progress of specific civilizations. But we can also point to areas that were not affected by flood and to civilizations that continued to progress while others were challenged by rising sea levels.

If you look at a map of the rise in sea level between 15,000 ybp to 7000 ybp (please google for yourself) you will see that all the continents of the world lost the equivalent of a small continent in coastlines and associated lands. When these prime lands went the civilizations who utilized them for trade, fishing and habitation were disrupted and forced to adapt. This is the stuff stories are made of.

 

[verty]

That change doesn't seem too fast. Is calling it a great flood all that accurate?

 

[Dresden]

well, if you live in a society who has never seen a flood before, and suddenly you rock up to a house underwater ('i could SWEAR i left it here yesterday...'), what are you going to think? that the Earth is sinking?

 

[nannoh]

That change doesn't seem too fast. Is calling it a great flood all that accurate?

Having only read about it I imagine that as conditions changed the ocean being a foot or two higher each 10 years more or less and when any violent storms occurred the loss of property and prosperity would seem instant. Sort of like the tragedy that happened in New Orleans if you think about it.

 

[verty]

Wouldn't it make more sense if there were myths of the 'great creeping waters' or some such?

 

[nannoh]

Wouldn't it make more sense if there were myths of the 'great creeping waters' or some such?

That's the mechanism of time. Over time the stories of the floods (various regions flooded at various times) became one big flood. Today its not the story of the many floods that happened over a 7000 year span of time, its the story of "The Flood". This is how time has grandiosized the events of so very long ago.

The loss of life, property and prosperity that happened during storm surges must have seemed instantaneous but in the big picture the losses were spread out over a long period.

Think of it like this. When you're in orbit around the Earth you can pass over New York city in about half a minute or less. However, when your passing through New York city it can take up to a day depending on weather, traffic and other conditions. When people look back at a period in time they see the whole period in a few seconds of reading, story telling or whatever. But the actual event(s) may have lasted many years. This is the myopia that is caused by being distanced from events by time. And during the same span of time the embellishments that get tacked on to a story tend to warp the whole reality of what happened out of shape.

 

[Andre]

Again, stories are stories, there will be myth stories of the great warming in the past, when people are trying to survive between the Arctic ice sheets in some 5,000 years from now, or 20,000 or something.

It's tempting to consider the enigmatic Melt Water Pulses as floods, the largest one, MWP1A, 14,600 years ago, is thought to be pertaining 25-30 meters sea level rise within decades. There is a major problem though, there is no credible source for all that water.

More here: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=113807

 

[nannoh]

It's tempting to consider the enigmatic Melt Water Pulses as floods, the largest one, MWP1A, 14,600 years ago, is thought to be pertaining 25-30 meters sea level rise within decades. There is a major problem though, there is no credible source for all that water.

More here: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=113807

Yes you've mentioned this before and its baffling for me. Maybe its an hydro-isostatic effect. Rising seabeds or sinking continents.

Andre, is this something you've been studying for a while?

BOILING SEAS LINKED TO MASS EXTINCTION (AND BIBLICAL FLOOD)
Nature Science Update ^ | 22 August 2003 | TOM CLARKE
A massive methane explosion frothing out of the world's oceans 250 million years ago caused the Earth's worst mass extinction, claims a US geologist.

Similar, smaller-scale events could have happened since, which might explain the Biblical flood, for example, suggests Gregory Ryskin of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois1. And they could happen again: "It's a very conjectural idea but it's too important to ignore," says Ryskin.

Up to 95% of Earth's marine species disapeared at the end of the Permian period. Some 70% of land species, including plants, insects and vertebrates, also perished. "It's arguably the single most important event in biology but there's no consensus as to what happened," says palaeontologist Andrew Knoll of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massacheusetts.

Ryskin contends that methane from bacterial decay or from frozen methane hydrates in deep oceans began to be released. Under the enormous pressure from water above, the gas dissolved in the water at the bottom of the ocean and was trapped there as its concentration grew.

Just one disturbance - a small meteorite impact or even a fast moving mammal - could then have brought the gas-saturated water closer to the surface. Here it would have bubbled out of solution under the reduced pressure. Thereafter the process would have been unstoppable: a huge overturning of the water layers would have released a vast belch of methane.

The oceans could easily have contained enough methane to explode with a force about 10,000 times greater than the world's entire nuclear-weapons stockpile, Ryskin argues. "There would be mortality on a massive scale," he says.

"It's a wacky idea," says geologist Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds, UK, "but not so wild that it shouldn't be taken seriously." There is evidence that the oceans stagnated at the end of the Permian period. And the chemical signature in fossils of the time hints there was a massive change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide would have been produced as methane broke down or exploded in the atmosphere.

After all, belches of trapped methane from lakes and oceans are "a rare but well-known maritime hazard", Wignall adds.

Flood warning

The same phenomenon could explain more recent events, such as the Biblical flood, Ryskin also argues. An eruption from Europe's stagnant Black Sea would fit the bill. There is even some geological evidence that such an event took place 7,000-8,000 years ago.

Other sluggish seas might still be accumulating methane at their depths and could represent a future hazard, Ryskin adds. "Even if there's only a small probability that I am right, we should start looking for areas of the ocean where this might be happening," he argues.

References 1. Ryskin, G. Methane driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions. Geology, 31, 737 - 740, (2003).

(c) Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

 

[Andre]

Yes you've mentioned this before and its baffling for me. Maybe its an hydro-isostatic effect. Rising seabeds or sinking continents.

Could be, data can be explained in more than one way but that should be a thread for Earth science

is this something you've been studying for a while?

indeed but not only 250 Million years ago, also 55,2 million years ago, and every 100,000 years for the last 700,000 years.

 

[nannoh]

Could be, data can be explained in more than one way but that should be a thread for Earth science
indeed but not only 250 Million years ago, also 55,2 million years ago, and every 100,000 years for the last 700,000 years.

Very interesting. For this thread I'd say that it really doesn't matter what the cause of these floods was but rather the way, when and how they impacted human development.

The frequency with which the floods interupted human activity was spread out, as I understand it, to 3 major floods from 15,000 years to around 8000 or 9000 ya. The predominant stories from the times call it all one flood. Regional stories from the times of the floods actually hold records of the cities that were affected and the actions taken to stem off complete defeat in those regions. The embellishments from over thousands of years that were added to all of the stories obscure the sequence of events and add judgment calls and logic to natural and neutral occurances.