In Search of Noah's Flood

[Doug1066]

2 minutes ago, cormac mac airt said:

That should probably tell you something, that the stories were never meant to be taken literally but as an attempt to explain natural events by using the gods as their excuse for same. 
 

cormac

As I understand the situation, the Mesopotamian stories preceded the 4260 flood by several hundred years.  So they weren't talking about a flood that hadn't happened yet.  So there may have been another flood.  And that other flood would probably coincide with Manetho's 0th/1st Dynasty flood and the two water marks at Karnak.  There's a lot of context that isn't getting considered here.

Doug

[cormac mac airt]

8 minutes ago, Doug1066 said:

That's one.  What ended it?

Doug

Milankovitch cycles and earth’s axial tilt every circa 41,000 years. 

cormac

[Doug1066]

Just now, cormac mac airt said:

Milankovitch cycles and earth’s axial tilt every circa 41,000 years. 

cormac

The Intertropical Convergence Zone moved south about that time.  That's the more-immediate cause; although Milankovitch Cycles probably set the stage.

Doug

[cormac mac airt]

1 minute ago, Doug1066 said:

As I understand the situation, the Mesopotamian stories preceded the 4260 flood by several hundred years.  So they weren't talking about a flood that hadn't happened yet.  So there may have been another flood.  And that other flood would probably coincide with Manetho's 0th/1st Dynasty flood and the two water marks at Karnak.  There's a lot of context that isn't getting considered here.

Doug

The timeframe isn’t the problem as the reasoning behind said stories would still have been much the same. 
 

cormac

[cormac mac airt]

1 minute ago, Doug1066 said:

The Intertropical Convergence Zone moved south about that time.  That's the more-immediate cause; although Milankovitch Cycles probably set the stage.

Doug

And yet the timeframe is right. 
 

cormac

[Doug1066]

18 minutes ago, cormac mac airt said:

The timeframe isn’t the problem as the reasoning behind said stories would still have been much the same. 
 

cormac

You and I seem to be at odds here.  All I am trying to do is establish that there were several big floods and that one or more of them could have been the prototype of Noah's Flood.

In that case, getting the dates right is important and it is also the only way to distinguish between floods.

Doug

[Doug1066]

19 minutes ago, cormac mac airt said:

And yet the timeframe is right. 
 

cormac

I need to be a little more precise than 41,000 years.

Doug

[cormac mac airt]

20 minutes ago, Doug1066 said:

I need to be a little more precise than 41,000 years.

Doug

Knowing why won’t determine when your alleged Biblical Flood occurred. That should have been obvious IMO. 
 

cormac

Edited September 23, 2023 by cormac mac airt

[cormac mac airt]

21 minutes ago, Doug1066 said:

You and I seem to be at odds here.  All I am trying to do is establish that there were several big floods and that one or more of them could have been the prototype of Noah's Flood.

In that case, getting the dates right is important and it is also the only way to distinguish between floods.

Doug

So there were several big floods, we all know that. Could have been the Great Flood doesn’t mean is and that’s the point. There isn’t enough information to make that specific a determination and there may never be. 
 

cormac

[+Hammerclaw]

2 hours ago, Doug1066 said:

I'll know it was a real event when I find physical evidence of it (and it meets criteria established in the Bible).

I have a listing of Nile megafloods that have occurred since the beginning of the Younger Dryas.  These were obtained from sediment cores.  Some of these were probably the doing of the Indian monsoon, rather than volcanos.  I also have Manetho's statement that there was a flood just before the beginning of the First Dynasty and two water marks on the temple at Karnak.  There are a variety of dates to choose from in archeological records (I'm wondering how many of those are the same flood.).

Hekla4  4260 BP  Palermo Stone, Lake Accessa

Unknown about 4500 BP  Kish?

Unknown about 4800 BP

Unknown about 5200 BP

Lairg2  5811 BP

Hekla5  6036 BP

Unknown about 6200 BP

That's the list.  Definite dates are from tephra analyses confirmed from Nile sediment cores.

Some further hints:  In the Faiyum Basin, the Faiyum A culture is separated from the Faiyum B by a flood layer.

At Ur, the Erech culture is separated from the al-Ubaid culture by a major flood layer.

 

At any rate, I think that physical evidence plus Egyptian records are enough to establish that the 4260 flood was real.

Doug

Lots of floods were real events. So what? It doesn't mean any of them have anything to do with a Hebrew myth. The Great Flood is every bit as mythological as the parting of the Red Sea.

[+Hammerclaw]

2 hours ago, Doug1066 said:

I have a bibliography of scientific papers on the topic.  I have not listed them because it is a hassle and if I decide to publish, I will need to protect copyright.  If you guys don't have that list, you will not be able to beat me to it.

Doug

Graham Hancock probably already has. You seem to be basing your chronology on the Bible. One might suspect you're a young Earther.

[cormac mac airt]

33 minutes ago, Hammerclaw said:

Graham Hancock probably already has. You seem to be basing your chronology on the Bible. One might suspect you're a young Earther.

That runs into a different chronological problem, which is that Jews for the last circa 2000 years have been using a calendar which starts with Creation circa 3761 BC. Using the Bible’s internal chronology that would place the Great Flood circa 2100 BC. For obvious reasons that doesn’t work out with reality either. 
 

cormac

[+Hammerclaw]

1 hour ago, cormac mac airt said:

That runs into a different chronological problem, which is that Jews for the last circa 2000 years have been using a calendar which starts with Creation circa 3761 BC. Using the Bible’s internal chronology that would place the Great Flood circa 2100 BC. For obvious reasons that doesn’t work out with reality either. 
 

cormac

There's no reality to it. The Great Flood is a fictional event in the Hebrew mythos, it never happened and is representative of no actual historical event. 

[cormac mac airt]

3 minutes ago, Hammerclaw said:

There's no reality to it. The Great Flood is a fictional event in the Hebrew mythos, it never happened and is representative of no actual historical event. 

Agreed. No matter which way one comes at the investigation it can never pan out due to lack of facts. One might as well be trying to validate Hogwarts. 
 

cormac

[SHaYap]

If anything, giving the present theories a good look over would add a lot to what was thought to have been all there was to it might not have been so... 

Quote

Initially, some assumed with great eagerness that the flood levels at Ur and Kish were identical and provided marvelous evidence for a historical kernel of the Genesis Flood story (Peake, 1930), but the enthusiasm could not be maintained. The level of the great flood at Ur was sandwiched between remains of the Al Ubaid cultural phase, the last purely prehistoric period of southern Mesopotamia, and a layer of debris from the early Protoliterate period. The great Ur flood, thus, can be dated with a high degree of certainty to about 3500 BCE. Kish, however, produced evidence of two floods at the end of the Early Dynastic I and beginning of the Early Dynastic II periods, around 3000 to 2900 BCE, and a still more impressive flood dating to the Early Dynastic III period, around 2600 BCE. All three of the Kish floods were much later than the great flood at Ur. Watelin argued that the earliest of these three was the deluge of the Bible and cuneiform literature.

...

National Center for Science Education

https://ncse.ngo › flood-mesopotam...

The Flood: Mesopotamian Archaeological Evidence

 

The level of the great flood at Ur was sandwiched between remains of the Al Ubaid cultural phase, the last purely prehistoric period of southern...

 

...

Livius

https://www.livius.org › flood5

The Great Flood: Archaeology?

 

12 Oct 2020 — The Great Flood: mythological story about a great destruction that once befell the earth. There are several variants; the Biblical version ...

 

...

ScienceDirect

https://www.sciencedirect.com › pii

Controversy over the great flood hypotheses in the Black Sea in light ...

 

by V Yanko-Hombach · 2007 · Cited by 121 — There are no discernible signals in the archaeological record that could reflect a change in subsistence or...

China has been rewriting a lot of the early records through new findings with the current available tools for greater assessment of available documentation and accuracy.

Quote

Purdue University

https://www.purdue.edu › research

Finding evidence of the Great Flood in China

 

25 Oct 2016 — A new study coauthored by EAPS Professor Darryl Granger, which was published in Science, reveals geological evidence of a ...

 

...

 

American Association for the Advancement of Science

https://www.aaas.org › news › first-...

First Geological Evidence for China's "Great Flood" Uncovered

 

3 Aug 2016 — Scientists have uncovered the first geological evidence for China's "Great Flood," an event marked in legend as the start of China's first ...

~

 

 

[Doug1066]

15 hours ago, cormac mac airt said:

Knowing why won’t determine when your alleged Biblical Flood occurred. That should have been obvious IMO. 
 

cormac

Saying that the reason for the climate change is the Milankovitch Cycles or the ITCZ moving south doesn't explain anything.  I need a mechanism.

I propose that the reason the Mid-Holocene had such big floods and the Late Holocene hasn't had any is that with the ITCZ farther north, the atmosphere to the north absorbed more water; it was more humid.  When a sulfur-laden volcano erupted, it cooled the air under the cloud, causing moisture to condense and fall as rain.  When the air mass encountered a mountain, or even a slight rise, it cooled further, dumping more rain.  These conditions existed only once in 300 years or so, so there weren't many floods.  Nowadays, they don't exist at all.

Doug 

[Doug1066]

15 hours ago, cormac mac airt said:

So there were several big floods, we all know that. Could have been the Great Flood doesn’t mean is and that’s the point. There isn’t enough information to make that specific a determination and there may never be. 
 

cormac

There probably is enough to determine the number of floods and approximate years.  After that, we have to go with the best fit.  I would prefer at least five points of fit, but three would indicate a better-than-50% probability.

This is only science, after all.  We never see perfection.  For that, you need god.

Doug

[Doug1066]

14 hours ago, Hammerclaw said:

Lots of floods were real events. So what? It doesn't mean any of them have anything to do with a Hebrew myth. The Great Flood is every bit as mythological as the parting of the Red Sea.

The Red Sea actually parted and still does today.  Let me explain:

The crossing site was at El Kubrit at the narrows between the Bitter Lakes.  During Hyksos times sea levels were high enough that the Red Sea flooded across the sill at Shalufa, filling the lakes and creating the Heroopolitic Red Sea.  the lakes were just one gigantic tidal pool (There are paleo shorelines southwest of Ismailia.).

In Great Bitter Lake during a southeast wind, water piles up on the northwest shore.  The Suez Canal Authority has measured this at a height of about thirty-two inches.  When the wind dies, the water flows back in a wave eighteen inches to three feet high at a speed of about 20 miles per hour, taking about an hour for the wave to reach El Kubrit.

A southeast wind on the Red Sea at Suez during a high tide has raised water levels at Suez by 13.1 feet.  It only takes 4.5 feet to get over the Shalufa Sill.  The Gulf funnels down as it enters Tiah beni Israel, forcing the wave higher.  Twelve miles up the channel the wave enters Lesser Bitter Lake at the Shalufa Sill.  Lesser Bitter Lake is seven miles across and the channel between the lakes is another four miles.  If the wind dies while the wave crest is in Tiah beni Israel, the wave continues on under its own momentum, leaving the channel and crossing Lesser Bitter Lake, entering the channel between the lakes and surging along it to the north end where it meets the returning wave from the northwest shore of Great Bitter Lake.

Both waves are about three feet high, coming from opposite directions ("a wall of water on the left and a wall of water on the right").  During the reign of Seti I, the ford was only about eighteen inches deep.  Soldiers in armor would be in serious trouble if they were beset by two waves, each with a three-foot crest.

The Israelites walked on "dry land in the midst of the sea."  There was an island, now called the Ballards (The current water level is about six feet above the natural water level of the Bitter Lakes.).  They were very literally walking on dry land in the midst of the sea.  In addition, pi-hahiroth means "mouth-of-the-channel," meaning the northward-opening of the channel into Great Bitter Lake, Baalzephon was a shrine on the hill about 8 miles southeast of the crossing and Migdol is Gebel Geneifa, a mountain six miles west of the ford that looks like a ancient watch tower and apparently was actually used as one during the reign of Ramses III.

If that's not enough, once the Israelites crossed, they spent three days in the wilderness without water.  Travelling southeast they would come to Ayn Musa after three days' travel (The closer spring, Marah, is salty.).  (Ayn Musa is the spring "Moses" purified with a stick.).

Today, the tides still run at Suez, but now the water flows northward through the Suez Canal, so the waves aren't as high.

So it's mostly true, just a bit garbled in the telling.

 

So maybe the Great Flood is Hebrew myth.  At this point, I can't say it's not.  But the 4260 flood could be a prototype; though, I'm hoping to find a better fit.  We do know that there was a megaflood at about the right time.

I'm inclined to think of The Flood as a legend, not a myth.  Legends have some basis in fact, even though the story may not be very accurate.  Discrepancies are easily explained as mistakes in the re-telling during the centuries before the stories were written down.

Doug

[Doug1066]

15 hours ago, Hammerclaw said:

Graham Hancock probably already has. You seem to be basing your chronology on the Bible. One might suspect you're a young Earther.

The Younger Dryas was from about 12,300 BP to about 10,660 BP.  That doesn't fit too well with the Young Earthers.  Besides, I think Eridu was Eden.  Eridu sits on top of about 30,000 feet of sediment.  If Eden came before The Flood, most of those sediments were already there at the time.  That's sort of the end of the Young Earth idea.

But in a way, they have a point.  During the Younger Dryas the Earth changed utterly.  We no longer have mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, Dire wolves, etc.  It's a different world.

Doug

[cormac mac airt]

2 minutes ago, Doug1066 said:

So maybe the Great Flood is Hebrew myth.  At this point, I can't say it's not.  But the 4260 flood could be a prototype; though, I'm hoping to find a better fit.  We do know that there was a megaflood at about the right time.

I'm inclined to think of The Flood as a legend, not a myth.  Legends have some basis in fact, even though the story may not be very accurate.  Discrepancies are easily explained as mistakes in the re-telling during the centuries before the stories were written down.

Doug

There’s a lot you’d have to reconcile in order to claim “A” Great Flood, starting with the fact that if the cities mentioned in the Eridu Genesis are relevant then the story is pre-3000 BC at least. If Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh is relevant then it’s more like 2700-2600 BC and if the Biblical story is actually true then based on the Jews own calendar it’s circa 2100 BC. So you’re stuck with a myth that keeps changing timeframes (1000+ years) depending on the culture involved. 
 

cormac

[Doug1066]

10 hours ago, SHaYap said:

If anything, giving the present theories a good look over would add a lot to what was thought to have been all there was to it might not have been so... 

China has been rewriting a lot of the early records through new findings with the current available tools for greater assessment of available documentation and accuracy.

~

 

 

There was a flood caused by a landslide damming up a river, then failing.  It came at the wrong time to be associated with the 4260 BP flood.  There was also another one, caused by a massive storm in the Tarim Basin.  That fits the time-slot better.

Thanks for posting this.  I'm going to give it a read.

Doug

[Doug1066]

17 minutes ago, cormac mac airt said:

There’s a lot you’d have to reconcile in order to claim “A” Great Flood, starting with the fact that if the cities mentioned in the Eridu Genesis are relevant then the story is pre-3000 BC at least. If Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh is relevant then it’s more like 2700-2600 BC and if the Biblical story is actually true then based on the Jews own calendar it’s circa 2100 BC. So you’re stuck with a myth that keeps changing timeframes (1000+ years) depending on the culture involved. 
 

cormac

Gilgamesh didn't seem to have much useful information.  I can't put a date on it using the text.  The only thing it seems to be sure of is that there was a south wind.  That would put it north of the ITCZ, but that's not exactly a surprise.

Before we can start including legends in our flood story, we need to establish that there was a flood.  The 4260 flood is the only one I have established so far, not counting the three Nile superfloods, which I'm a little nervous about.

BUT:  there is a cedar-of-Lebanon at Babylon, estimated at 4000 years old.  It's name is Sarv Abarcu.  If the age is right, it just barely missed the 4260 flood.  But it does show that cedars could grow on the Mesopotamian plain.  So maybe Gilgamesh found some somewhere near Shurrupak.

I'll take a look at the Eridu Genesis.  If three cities were all flooded at the same time, then maybe 14C dates will show the same thing.  If they do, you have something, but if they don't....

[cormac mac airt]

16 minutes ago, Doug1066 said:

Gilgamesh didn't seem to have much useful information.  I can't put a date on it using the text.  The only thing it seems to be sure of is that there was a south wind.  That would put it north of the ITCZ, but that's not exactly a surprise.

Before we can start including legends in our flood story, we need to establish that there was a flood.  The 4260 flood is the only one I have established so far, not counting the three Nile superfloods, which I'm a little nervous about.

BUT:  there is a cedar-of-Lebanon at Babylon, estimated at 4000 years old.  It's name is Sarv Abarcu.  If the age is right, it just barely missed the 4260 flood.  But it does show that cedars could grow on the Mesopotamian plain.  So maybe Gilgamesh found some somewhere near Shurrupak.

I'll take a look at the Eridu Genesis.  If three cities were all flooded at the same time, then maybe 14C dates will show the same thing.  If they do, you have something, but if they don't....

There were many floods in Mesopotamia, so the relevant question would be are they relevant to the story/ies and cities as mentioned? 
 

Sadly there’s no evidence of that. Bad-tibira itself was destroyed by fire, no evidence of flooding. As many river courses and canals as there are around Eridu it would almost impossible to separate them all by date let alone match them with any other cities. 
 

cormac

[Doug1066]

17 minutes ago, cormac mac airt said:

Sadly there’s no evidence of that. Bad-tibira itself was destroyed by fire, no evidence of flooding. As many river courses and canals as there are around Eridu it would almost impossible to separate them all by date let alone match them with any other cities. 

If that's true, then I probably won't get anywhere with it, but I have to try.

Doug

[Doug1066]

Seems that lots of sediment cores reach into the appropriate layers, but not many have dates from the bottom of those layers.  This may be more challenging than I thought.

Doug