Those are the best but extensions of those stories are everywhere. The church knew this a burned nearly every scroll of the south American ancient Indians; Mayans, Incas, ext.. Currently only 20% of Mayan stone writings have been interpreted for the reason they continue to support a great global flood story.

A global flood in my opinion would have inevitable occurred when the ice sheets started to melt beginning around 7500BC. Not necessarily raising sea levels but definitely flooding land and adding to lakes and rivers. The flooding of continental shelves and land near melting ice sheets would certainly have been cause for global flooding stories. As for a catastrophic one big huge global flood I'm not sure.
I just read last night an amazing theory by a creationist trying to show a global Noah flood and the idea was the water sprang up from the worldwide ridge that includes the mid Atlantic ridge, encircling Antarctica, all of it, a split occuring because of a meteor hit that allowed a stream of water up from a water table between the crust and athenosphere, I think it was, here's the link:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/...eOverview2.html
I am no creationist but the whole idea was certainly interesting reading, even if we think God didn't do it. thier is good evidence for this occurance......and continents splitting from the ridges instead of each other got me to thinking about it all. I had beed reading 2 long articles about how tectonic plate theory had many questions and some other alternatives for it.

10 And after the seven days were passed, the waters of the flood overflowed the earth.

21 And all flesh was destroyed that moved upon the earth, both of fowl and of cattle, and of beasts, and of all creeping things that creep upon the earth: and all men. 22 And all things wherein there is the breath of life on the earth, died. 23 And he destroyed all the substance that was upon the earth, from man even to beast, and the creeping things and fowls of the air: and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noe only remained, and they that were with him in the ark. 24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.

1 These are the names of the children of Israel, that went into Egypt with Jacob: they went in every man with his household: 2 Ruben, Simeon, Levi, Juda, 3 Issachar, Zabulon, and Benjamin, 4 Dan, and Nephthali, Gad and Aser. 5 And all the souls that came out of Jacob's thigh, were seventy: but Joseph was in Egypt. 6 After he was dead, and all his brethren, and all that generation, 7 The children of Israel increased, and sprung up into multitudes, and growing exceedingly strong they filled the land.

8 In the mean time there arose a new king over Egypt, that knew not Joseph: 9 And he said to his people: Behold the people of the children of Israel are numerous and stronger than we. 10 Come let us wisely oppress them, lest they multiply: and if any war shall rise against us, join with our enemies, and having overcome us, depart out of the land.

Those are the best but extensions of those stories are everywhere. The church knew this a burned nearly every scroll of the south American ancient Indians; Mayans, Incas, ext.. Currently only 20% of Mayan stone writings have been interpreted for the reason they continue to support a great global flood story.

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, as I haven't been through the entire thread yet, but from what I've learned in the classes I've taken at my Church, the entire Torah/Pentateuch was written by the same author - Moses.


And before anyone asks, I don't believe that the entire world was flooded. Actually, I was taught that it was just the area around the Tigris,

God Bless,
MoonChild02

I think you've been listening too much at Church and not thinking enough for yourself.

Moses did not write the Old Testament or Torah, it has been studied and is written by different people, even women, starting around 800BC.

and who told you that it was just the area around the Tigris? Let me guess....your Church?? was the Priest there? There is worldwide debate and no certain answer to the question of if there was a flood, worldwide or otherwise or what flooding this may even be. I have studied this alot and this is what you will find.

LOL I was trying to be nice when I replied to MoonChild02's post. If you're looking at it from the perspective of the Old Testament, MoonChild02's post was accurate. Naturally Moses didn't write the Old Testament--it's rather tricky for someone to write about his own death. It can be convincingly argued that the biblical Moses is a purely mythical, literary figure--a device the ancient Hebrew scribes used to establish their rights to the Promised Land.

However, there is archaeological proof of a widespread flood of the Tigres and Euphrates in early Mesopotamian history. This goes back to the 1920s, when Leonard Woolley was digging at the Sumerian ruins of Ur. His team found a layer of flood deposits that would later be found at other sites, too. This was clearly a regional flood when the rivers overflowed their banks in disastrous fashion. Woolley never outright claimed it was proof of the biblical flood, but many Europeans were quick to latch on to the idea, and because some of those wealthy Europeans were financing his digs, he let them believe what they wanted to believe. Crafty fellow, that Woolley.

But as others have noted at UM, to these people in ancient times, a large and destructive flood would seem to have devastated their world--their region of Mesopotamia. This is only one of numerous much older traditions from which the scribes of the Old Testament borrowed in the writing of their holy book.

There is no geological proof of a worldwide flood in the time of humans, period...despite what occasional fringe websites might try to claim.

http://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/specex/ur/ur-flood.htm
"Woolley began digging into Ur's earlier levels already in 1928-29, with several small soundings below the floors of excavated burials. One such sounding, located near the "Great Death Pit" (PG 1237), yielded a dramatic discovery: a 3.70 meter (ca. 12 feet) thick layer of water-laid clay that sealed strata containing painted pottery of the Ubaid period, the earliest known phase of occupation in southern Mesopotamia. His other soundings had yielded similar, if shallower, deposits and Woolley quickly associated the strata with the flood known from the Sumerian King List, the Akkadian Epic of Atrahasis, the Sumerian flood story (the only known copy of which is on display here), and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the likely source for the Biblical flood narrative. Woolley announced his discovery quietly to the Directors of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum at the end of January 1929, and made a public splash with a story in the London Times on March 16, 1929, shortly after the excavations had ended for the year.

Woolley's flood, sensational as it may have been, had to compete for public attention with evidence of another flood (more accurately, floods) discovered at Kish, in the northern portion of the floodplain. The upper Kish flood was later in date than Woolley's discovery, in fact roughly contemporary with Woolley's royal tombs. The Kish flood strata had apparently been discovered before Woolley had discovered his flood, and the Kish excavators felt that Woolley had cheated them of credit for the discovery of the flood. In a letter to the Director of the Field Museum dated March 20, 1929, Stephen Langdon, Director of the Field Museum-Oxford University Joint Expedition to Kish, pointed out that Woolley had been at Kish on January 26-27 and Charles Watlin, Field Director of the Kish excavations, had shown him the alluvial deposits. When Woolley returned to Ur, he discovered his own alluvial deposit and claimed credit for the discovery of the flood in the popular press without mention of Kish.

In reassessing the evidence for the flood, Max Mallowan, Woolley's assistant at Ur, who married Agatha Christie, argued that neither the Ur flood, dating as it did to a remote prehistoric period, nor the upper Kish flood, so late in time, could be the source of the Mesopotamian narratives. Instead, he suggested that a flood layer discovered at Fara (ancient Shuruppak) in the University of Pennsylvania Museum's 1931 excavations might lie behind the Mesopotamian legends. Mallowan cited literary traditions linking Shuruppak and the flood, as well as the likely identification of Ziusudra, king of Shuruppak, with Ziusudra, hero of the Sumerian flood story. Other archaeologists have noted that the date of the Fara flood, late Early Dynastic I (ca. 2750 BC), corresponds closely with the dating of the archaeological levels that have yielded the oldest inscription of an historically attested king.

Today, archaeologists and language specialists alike doubt that the Ur, Kish, or even Fara floods could be the source of the Mesopotamian flood narratives, and prefer to take them merely as evidence for the endemic hazard posed by floods in the flat alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia."

But oddly enough there is a Gilgamesh flood (Noah's flood) yet to be found...........

That was a great web page, weareallsuckers. Thanks for sharing it with me. LOL I especially liked the info about the Field Museum because that's one of the institutions where I work as a docent here in Chicago. We have a tremendous collection of artifacts from Kish but I've seen most of them only on video because so few are on public display in the museum.

I never realized people were arguing over precisely which flood or floods are to be attributed to Gilgamesh. I would've figured Woolley's flood level at Ur was logical because it's from the Ubaid period, like the web page mentions, and that's very far back in time (5,000-3,750 BCE). For some reason I was thinking "older is better," but that may be where I'm mistaken.

I was confused where the web page mentions that the McClung Museum has "the only known copy" of the Sumerian flood story. It also mentions the poem of Atramhasis (a.k.a. Atrahasis), which is known as "When the gods were man." My confusion comes from the fact that the story of the flood as it appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh does not exist in any known copies of the story from the Sumerian period. There are five known, disparate poems of Gilgamesh dating to the time of Sumer, back when the character was called not Gilgamesh but Bilgames. The flood as it appears in Gilgamesh enters the tale sometime around the Old Babylonian period, and it originates from the Akkadian of Atramhasis' poem (George: 1999). The Old Babylonian period was a time of literary rebirth and excellence in Mesopotomia and Gilgamesh was a particularly popular tale at this time. It was a part of every scribe's studies.

I don't doubt that flood stories dated to even the earliest of Sumerian times, and it's possible that Atramhasis was working from an older copy, but the flood wasn't originally part of the Gilgamesh epic (at least as the evidence exists to this point).

Thanks again, weareallsuckers. I saved that web page to my Favorites. And I'm going to stop now before I drone on any longer.

To suggest this is the only, or even a substantial, reason the Spanish destroyed Meso-American writing is to deliberately misinterpret the facts. But you don't seem to mind doing that with science, so why should doing it in history bother you?

--Jaylemurph