The Flood: a controversial ancient legend

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The ancient legend is still controversial. Some believe that Noah's ark is hidden on Ararat, others argue that as a result of the flood, Crimea appeared on the map.

The plot of the biblical story is well known: several centuries after the creation of the world, angels began to take earthly women as mistresses, morality was shaken, and life went awry. Then the disappointed god decided to stop the failed experiment, destroying all of humanity, and at the same time all life on earth except fish.

God took pity on only the righteous Noah. He was ordered to build a huge ship, which would have enough space for each creature in pairs. Shipbuilding dragged on for more than a hundred years. When the ark was ready, and the representatives of the fauna occupied their stalls and cages, Noah's wife and three of his sons and wives climbed aboard. Having closed the front door tightly, the hermits began to wait.

A terrible downpour began, which lasted forty days, and the water rose above the highest mountains. Everything on Earth died except the inhabitants of the ark and the ocean. Noah's ship was carried along the waves for another 150 days, until the water began to subside and the top of Mount Ararat appeared. Noah began to release birds for exploration. Waiting for one of the pigeons to bring an oil-tree leaf in its beak, the righteous man realized that the danger had passed. He performed a thanksgiving service, and, accompanied by his family and menagerie, moved south to his native land. His sons and their wives were to give birth to all post-Flood humanity.

For thousands of years, the biblical story has not raised doubts about its truthfulness. Fossilized shells found high above sea level were declared evidence of the authenticity of the flood. The founder of paleontology, Georges Cuvier, describing the discovered dinosaurs, believed that reptiles were antediluvian animals, for some reason not taken by Noah into the ark.

In the 1860s, the English archaeologist George Smith, excavating ancient Assyria, discovered an entire library of clay tablets. On some of them, the Babylonian epic was captured, which told, among other things, about the worldwide flood. Moreover, these legends were much older than the biblical ones. Over the following decades, several more variants of recorded flood stories were found in the Middle East. It became clear that the biblical version is a retelling of more ancient traditions.

In general, all options were similar to each other. The gods were angry at the atrocities committed by people, and were going to destroy the human race. At the same time, one righteous man was warned of an impending catastrophe and was armed with advice on how to be saved. Then a flood inevitably followed, destroying all living things. The righteous man who escaped usually released the birds, and, having learned from them that dry land had appeared, he restarted the history of mankind.

For example, in the Babylonian version, King Xisuthrus, who received a warning, took on his ship many more people than Noah. In addition, he wrote down all information about the history and achievements of mankind on clay tablets and buried them in a conspicuous place.

With the development of ethnography, legends about the flood of various peoples became known. Australian aborigines, Siberian shamans, leaders of Polynesian and African tribes, descendants of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas told scientists about the ancient flood. The progenitors of these peoples escaped from the flood on the shell of a turtle or the back of a giant crab, in a huge coconut or magic pumpkin, on a raft or canoe, in the branches of a growing tree or among the stalks of a wonderful bean. Usually those rescued in these various ways waited for the gods to calm down and the water to subside.

From the common apocalyptic plots for many mythologies, the epic about the flood is knocked out, preserved in the memory of the hardworking Chinese. Their hero Gun and his son Yu do not wait for the gods to have mercy on the human race, but fight the flood by erecting dams and digging canals. They drain the remaining swamps, defeat the dragons that have bred there, and the land becomes even more fertile.

Scientists have long tried to bring the flood legends of different peoples to a common denominator. The easiest way to explain them was the end of the Ice Age, when the level of the World Ocean rose strongly about 10 thousand years ago. However, the ice was melting slowly, the water rose steadily, but at a rate of several centimeters per year, which did not in any way resemble a flood and could not cause panic among the coastal tribes.

In addition, the seemingly almost identical flood legends, upon closer examination, differ greatly from each other in the main: in most epics, the terrible flood is not of a worldwide character. It is destructive, destructive, but locally and does not threaten to destroy the entire human race. Most likely, in the memory of many peoples and tribes, terrible floods have survived, which at the same time did not go beyond the natural phenomena already familiar to ancient people.

The flood legends preserved in the epics of the Near East have a planetary character. Archaeological excavations in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys have partially explained this. Immediately in several ancient cities of Mesopotamia, under the cultural layer of 5 thousand years ago, a one and a half meter layer of clay was discovered, without any signs of human activity. Under this clay again began to come across artifacts that were very different, however, from those that archaeologists found above. Apparently, a very large flood occurred in Mesopotamia 5 thousand years ago.

The water flooded all the settlements, and the layer of silt brought by the rivers buried the civilization that existed in Mesopotamia. When the flood subsided, new inhabitants settled in these fertile places, creating a culture that was markedly different from the previous one.

Could this flood be a type of a global flood? Doubtful. River floods occur regularly, and even the most destructive of them, coastal peoples could hardly mistake them for a universal catastrophe. Only a unique cataclysm of a much larger scale could give birth to a legend. What is it?

In ancient times, the Bosphorus did not exist. The Black Sea was separated from the Mediterranean, and hence from the World Ocean, by a granite bridge. The then Black Sea, much smaller than the modern one, was an inland freshwater basin. Its waves splashed one and a half hundred meters below the level of the World Ocean. In the late Neolithic era, the Black Sea region was inhabited by tribes of fishermen and farmers. About 7, 5 thousand years ago, the Mediterranean Sea broke through the cofferdam, and a huge waterfall of salt water was formed. The surrounding geography changed quite quickly. The Sea of Azov was formed, the Crimean Peninsula acquired its present shape. The water level rose literally before our eyes at a speed of about half a meter a day. Surely, most of the coastal residents managed to take refuge in the non-flooded hills, but all their settlements and crops a year later ended up at a depth of 140 m.

The Black Sea flood theory was made public in 1996. Four years later, it was brilliantly confirmed by the American underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard. With the help of a radio-controlled submarine, he explored the seabed in the vicinity of the Turkish city of Sinop. The submarine discovered perfectly preserved wooden buildings 20 kilometers from the coast at a depth of 95 m. These underwater Pompeii have become tangible evidence of the terrible ancient flood.

Perhaps the inhabitants of Asia Minor who survived this cataclysm migrated to Mesopotamia. Their stories of rapid flooding merged in the memory of their descendants with the history of the powerful flood of the Tigris and Euphrates. This is how the legend of the flood originated.

These findings were refused to be recognized by creationists - supporters of the fact that the Bible literally describes the history of the universe. Attempts have been made on several occasions to find the remains of the ark. Investigations of Mount Ararat were undertaken back in the Middle Ages, but they were interfered with by the Arabs, the Turks, or the angels who appeared to the searchers in a dream.

In the 20th century, photographs of Ararat appeared, taken from the cockpit of an aircraft. Any dark spot on the snow-covered slopes of the mountain was declared to be the surviving fragments of the ark. On careful examination of the images, these spots most often turned out to be defects in the film.

Despite the fact that today Ararat, located on Turkish territory close to the Armenian border, has been declared a closed border zone, ark seekers are still making attempts to explore the snow-covered slopes. Over the past hundred years, sensations have flared up repeatedly about the long-awaited find. At times, even fragments of the ship's wooden paneling were presented to the public. However, radiocarbon analysis showed that the age of the material did not exceed 1,500 years.

The last and most ambitious expedition to Ararat to date was undertaken in 2007. It was funded by Chinese billionaire Yuen Man-Fai, who founded the Ark Museum in Hong Kong, which houses a "replica" of Noah's ship the size of a five-story building. Two years later, it was announced that the expedition had found the same ark. A video of the remains of a certain wooden structure, located high in the mountains, and fragments of boards about 4, 8 thousand years old were presented.

Scientists were very skeptical about this sensation. Their doubts were aggravated by the fact that not a single professional archaeologist was included in the expedition, but there were an abundance of members of the biblical society there. The laboratories that supposedly confirmed the age of the finds did not have the necessary certificates and enjoyed a bad reputation. The "discoveries" of the Hong Kong expedition did not like the creationists either. In their opinion, the announced age of the found ark did not correspond to the calculations gleaned in the Bible. So the point in the search for the ark and the history of the Flood has not yet been set.