Legends of the Great Flood

April 10, 2012 Legends of the Great Flood

The Great Flood, or Flood myth as academia refers to it, is a story that is shared by most major cultures around the world explaining massive loss of life caused by water levels rising and an excess of rain.

Some prominent examples, but there are far more:

Christian/Judaism/Islam- Great Flood. Man and family build craft to escape waters loaded with the animals of the Earth.
Mesoamerican- World is destroyed by water in the Fourth Sun. Only one couple survives.
India- Manu saves mankind from a global flood.
Egypt- Book of the dead reference to a flood of antiquity.
China- Great Flood that continued for two generations.
Babylonian- Gilgamesh flood story.
Greek, Finnish, Native North Americans, Maasai in Africa.
In fact, there are more than 500 cultures that retell this story from their cultural and geographic perspective.

But is this only myth or the collective memory of mankind, passed down through the millennia via oral tradition? Thinking about this since I was a child and doing quite a bit of reading, there are some uncanny pieces of evidence supporting the idea of a global flood and perhaps massive loss of life correlative to certain time periods:

Not more than 13,000 years ago, much of the continent of North America was mostly covered with ice. This ice is known to have been as thick as 2 miles and caused sea levels to rise after melting.
Europe and Siberia were covered in massive glaciers as well. This ice also melted and caused sea levels to rise.
Herodotus, the Greek historian well-known as being the first (at least Western) historian visited Egypt circa 450B.C. During his visit, he documented what he saw in a book called “An Account of Egypt” (free book on amazon/itunes). In this book, Herodotus witnessed salt incrustations part-way up the sides of the Great Pyramid. Upon excavation of the Queens chamber and other parts of the pyramid, archaeologists discovered more heavy salts deposited on the interior walls. I have only seen pseudo-science explanations for these salt deposits.. flooding makes the most sense in my opinion.
The Arab historian al-Biruni (973-ca – 1050) is also credited with noting that the pyramids were found to have salt encrustations on their sides before the casings on the pyramids were removed by the Sultans.
Most of the world’s modern ancient and great societies have calendars that call our world/era roughly 5000 years old, no matter where they originate geographically. China’s calendar is 5000 years old, so is the Mesoamerican, Hebrew and many more.
There is evidence for a massive comet hitting our planet roughly 5,000 years ago as postulated by Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Yonaguni in Japan and other currently underwater formations that at least appear to be man-carved are being examined.

I have also read many articles written by respectable scientists and researchers that attempt to debunk or minimize the stories of a great flood; castigating the stories as religious or superstitious beliefs related to a specific geographic area and its social mores.

On the flip side of the coin, you have what I will call ‘religious researchers’- not usually researchers at all- but simply people of faith that are well-funded looking to locate the resting place of Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat or something.. again this usually takes the form of speculation instead of research that has scientific control variables.

Just as today, the major cities of Earth sat on the world’s shorelines. As a former sailor, I know the relationship that sea transport has to logistics and projection of power. If our polar caps melt off in our lifetimes, most projections show that we are in for some trouble. Remember Fukushima last year? The relevance is that almost all nuclear power plants are located on the coasts for cooling purposes. Tokyo, New York, London, Amsterdam and most other major coastal cities on Earth would be submerged. In short, rising sea levels will cause a cataclysm on man because resources that were once plentiful will become scarce– and fast. Populations would surge for high-ground and conflict would ensue.

To me, it is silly that the questions of where the flood took place are being scrutinized. It seems that everyone has an agenda when religious topics are examined. Perhaps my agenda is to simplify the question and step back a little bit to a more common frame of reference, at least on a global scale, and play the philosopher. Let’s try William of Occam, whose Occam’s Razor postulate states in paraphrase “other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one.”

Due to the volume of ice on land at glacial maximum, sea level was approximately 120 meters lower than present! The ice that used to lock all that fresh water up on land was melted into the rivers to be carried out to sea. All that fresh water killed man and fish, led to destabilization in environment and a mass extinction occurred.. perhaps more than once in human memory.

Questions for thought:

Are any of these myths and their timelines correlative on a global scale?

As the giant sheets of land and sea ice melted, is it possible that this could have destroyed many of the existing structures on Earth? (sorry this is leading, but ties into one of my ideas I will publish here about why only stable stone structures from antiquity remain.)