Dr McBeefington
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(1) A Variety of Flood Traditions
The generally accepted explanation of the story of the Flood is that it told of a local event experienced by ancient Sumerians who spread the tale by diffusion to the surrounding cultures.
"In 1929, the English archaeologist Sir Charles Woolley reported finding water-deposited layers as much as ten feet thick in excavations near the Euphrates..."
- Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, (1981) pp. 153-154
"...Evidence of a major flood just over 6,000 years ago has been found around Ur, where a layer of water-laid clay two and a half meters deep covers an area of more than 100,000 square kilometers. This amounts to a spread across the entire width of the Tigris-Euphrates valley from north of modern Baghdad to the coast of the Persian Gulf in what now includes parts of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait."
- Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus
"...Sumerian records speak of events as happening 'before the Flood' and 'since the Flood.' [This was later dated to about 2800 B.C.]
"Naturally, a particularly bad flood would destroy records, especially in a primitive situation where writing had, at best, barely come into use. For that reason, events 'before the Flood' would quickly take on a legendary and, very likely, highly exaggerated nature. The Sumerians listed kings who reigned for tens of thousands of years before the Flood; they made no such reports of kings who reigned after the Flood. And, of course, this reflected itself in the ages given of the antediluvian patriarchs in the Bible."
- Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, (1981) pp. 153-154
"All in all, then, from the purely geologic point of view we should expect independent flood traditions to have arisen almost anywhere in the world at almost any time, engendered by flood catastrophes stemming from perfectly natural causes, and of all the possible causes of floods, only tsunamis are capable of giving rise to flood legends in widely separated places at the same time."
- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth (1976) p. 150
For example the Greek myth of Deukalion's flood most likely originated in the tsunami created by the eruption of Thera in the 17th c. B.C.E.
"Later versions of the Deukalion story include details that closely parallel the Hebrew-Babylonian flood story. In the course of time the sea flood became nine days and nights of rain, the chest became an ark, animals were included in the passenger list, and Deukalion sent out a dove on successive occasions to see if the waters had receded.... Thus the traditions of two different places, based on floods centuries apart, merged into what is essentially the same story.... There is considerable lack of agreement concerning Deukalion and the characters associated with other Greek flood traditions."
- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth (1976) p. 160
Parallels with the Hebrew-Babylonian flood story in legends told by South Sea Islanders or North American Indians may be attributed to contact with Christian missionaries.
".... there is no sign of.... a universal deluge in the third millennium B.C. Egyptian history, for instance, carries right through the entire third millennium B.C. without any sign of a break or any mention of a flood."
- Isaac Asimov, In The Beginning, (1981) p. 165
"Flood traditions are lacking in semi-arid Central Asia, which is hardly surprising...."
"The only legend from southern Africa involving any sort of inundation is not a typical deluge tradition at all, but one which seeks to explain the origin of a particular lake.... This tale was collected by Livingstone, and was the only one he encountered in all his years of missionary work which had any resemblance to a flood tradition."
- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth (1976) pp. 163-164
Was the Flood story based a local inundation in Sumer or was there another source that may have more global implications? The most likely candidates are rising sea levels and catastrophic local flooding at the end of the last glacial period.