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Ep. 120 Great Flood: What the Story of Noah's Great Flood Says About Our Collective Human Experience

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 120

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Back this week with one final, somewhat nautical episode to round out the month of June. This week we're talking about the Great Flood of Noah's Ark fame. It's one of the best known bible stories. But did you know, it doesn't end there? Almost every other major culture or religion that we know of has almost the same flood myth. The ancient Babylonians, the Greeks, Hindu, Buddhist, Aztec, Chinese, Norse, Aboriginal Australian, various Native Americans groups, and the list goes on and on. This story is everywhere. But is it just a freakishly common legend, a recurring myth meant to teach a lesson, or did it actually happen? Let’s fix that. 

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Pretty much everyone knows the story of Noah’s Ark. God decides to flood the whole Earth to punish humans for their wickedness, but he selects Noah and his family as the sole survivors. He instructs them to build a massive boat, to gather animals inside it, and then for 40 days and 40 nights it rains and the floodwaters rise. When the floodwaters finally recede, Noah’s ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat. Noah releases a dove which returns with an olive branch signifying that the flood had ended. God promises to never do that again, puts a rainbow in the sky, like “sorry, but here I made this for you.” And then Noah and the animals go about repopulating the Earth. It is one of the most well known religious stories prominent in the Christian bible, the Jewish Torah, and also the Muslim Quran. But, did you know, it doesn’t end there? I mean it would make sense if it did, right? All three of those religions share the same beginnings. They all trace back to Abraham. Christianity branches off with the birth of Christ in the first century, and then Islam branches off with the birth of Muhammad in the 7th century, but until then, they were all one religion. It makes sense that the story of Noah is shared between them. What doesn’t make sense is that almost every other major culture or religion that we know of has almost the same flood myth. The ancient Babylonians, the Greeks, Hindu, Buddhist, Aztec, Chinese, Norse, Aboriginal Australian, various Native Americans groups, and the list goes on and on. This story is everywhere. But is it just a freakishly common legend, a recurring myth meant to teach a lesson, or did it actually happen? Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I am back at you this week with both audio and video versions. If you missed that announcement last week, you can find the video version of History Fix on YouTube @historyfixpodcast or over on Patreon, patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. Check it out while it’s still a thing because we’ll see how long this lasts. I still can’t stop thinking about way back when I did the Great Pyramid episode, episode 10, I stumbled upon a sort of fringe theory based on geological evidence, that the Sphynx was at one time submerged in water. The Sphinx is like that big lion man head statue that sits near the pyramids in the middle of the desert. But around its base is evidence of water erosion. And so some people point to that and say hey look, there was water here at one point. Now there is a lot of debate over whether there was water there when the Sphinx was carved or long before and that evidence is still seen in the rock layers, but either way, there was water there at one point. That desert was once under a layer of water. And that’s very interesting when you consider how many different ancient cultures report some form of massive flood event. But also, important to note, these cultures aren’t writing about the flood like as it’s happening. In all of these stories, it was something that happened a long long time ago. A story that was passed down word of mouth and eventually written down. 




Creationist author James Perloff analyzed over 200 flood myths and noted that 95 percent of them mentioned a global flood, 70 percent involved a boat of some kind, and in over 50 percent of them, the survivors end up on a mountain. Now, Perloff is a creationist author, he’s trying to prove that the Noah’s ark story from the bible actually happened, so, you know, factor that in when considering those stats. Stats can be misleading. But there are enough obvious similarities between these various flood myths that we have to consider them. I’ve talked about this before. To really prove that something happened in history, you need one of two things, or ideally both. The best evidence is physical evidence. You need proof, like what Scott Dawson and Dr. Mark Horton have found on Hatteras Island with the hammer scale, evidence of a late 16th century blacksmith forge proving that English settlers were there for an extended period of time. The other thing, which isn’t as good, is accounts coming from different sources that don’t have any contact with each other. They aren’t getting the story from one another, they are independently reporting it. Bonus points if they have nothing to gain from reporting but that’s pretty rare, motives tend to run deep with humans. So we definitely have the latter here. We have the Noah’s ark story shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But we have a very similar story being told by the ancient Babylonians in the same area, the Epic of Gilgamesh recorded on 12 stone tablets. This is one of the first examples of literature ever found. The story is almost identical to that of Noah except the guy’s name was Utnapishtim. It’s actually more of a poem than a story, a very early epic poem. In the poem, Gilgamesh, who was a Sumerian king, went on a quest to discover how to become immortal. He meets this Utnapishtim guy who tells him a story about he gained his own immortality. And the story he tells is basically the story of Noah. Utnapishtim says he was granted immortality after building a ship and surviving a great flood. Just like Noah, he brought all of his relatives and all animal species aboard his ship to repopulate the Earth after the flood had ended. 


The Greek version is also very similar. Zeus is displeased with the humans and decides to wipe them out and start over. He tells a guy named Deucalion to build an ark for himself and his wife Pyrrha, who also happened to be his cousin. They do. Zeus floods the Earth for 9 days and then, afterwards, the ark comes to rest on Mount Parnassas which is in central Greece not at all close to Mount Ararat in case you were wondering, it’s like 1,500 miles away. The story differs slightly at this point. In order to repopulate the Earth, Deucalion and his wife are instructed to throw stones over their shoulders. Lenlee Keep writing for PBS explains quote “The stones thrown by Deucalion became men, and those thrown behind Pyrrha became women. Which was a relatively tidy (and magical) way to explain the repopulation of the earth while skirting the whole incest issue,” end quote. 


In the Hindu version, Noah’s name is Manu and he’s visited, not by God, but by a fish. Although in some tellings the fish was actually the deity Vishnu. Same deal though, the fish tells Manu that the Earth is going to be destroyed by a flood. Manu builds a boat and ties it to the horn of the great fish, which like, do fish have horns? I don’t know. The fish guides the boat through the flood and, predictably, to the top of a great mountain where Manu performs a ritual sacrifice by pouring butter and sour milk into the sea. After a year, a woman rose from the water and announced herself as Manu’s daughter. And so then Manu and his daughter repopulate the Earth. Weird. There’s a lot of incest in these flood repopulation stories I’m realizing. Like, Noah brought his relatives and all the animals on the ark. So then everyone on Earth came from Noah’s relatives? That’s a pretty small gene pool. Actually kind of explains a lot. 





The Aztecs have a great flood story as well. In this version, Noah is called CoxCox or sometimes Tata and he and his wife get inside of a giant cypress tree instead of a boat. The god Titlacauan seals them inside and tells them that they can only eat one ear of maize each. Then it gets weird. Instead of killing everyone else on Earth, the flood turns all the other humans into fish. After the flood, Tata and his wife disobeyed Titlacauan and ate fish so he turned them into dogs. Keep writes quote “The story ends with the world essentially starting all over again only this time with a hearty fish population and a couple of dogs,” end quote. 


In the Ojibwe/Chippewa Native American tribe Noah’s name is Waynaboozhoo and he makes a raft of logs and sticks. This story has some fun animal sidekicks too. Keep writes quote “The story goes that the Great Spirit was unhappy with man and created a great flood. The only survivor was a man named Waynaboozhoo who had made a raft of logs and sticks for himself and other animals that were alive. They floated around for over a month, but the waters had not gone down. Waynaboozhoo decided that he was going to have to rebuild the earth, and he needed mud from the ‘old world’ buried deep underwater.” end quote. So he tries to recruit some animals to help him go down and get this mud from the old world to start over with. A loon tries but the water is too deep. A beaver tries but he also fails. They’re all arguing about it and while they’re arguing a little duck named Aajigade comes up and volunteers to try to go down and get the old mud but they tell him he’s too small. There’s no way he can do it. They send him away and keep arguing. As the sun goes down, they’re still arguing and they notice the body of the little duck floating on the surface of the water. Waynaboozhoo picks him up and he has a tiny bit of mud in his beak, the old mud that he needs to rebuild the Earth. The little duck did it despite his size. They revive him and he goes on his way. Waynaboozhoo starts to shape the mud which grows larger and larger. He needs a place to put it to start to rebuild this new Earth from the old mud and a snapping turtle named Mikinaak offers his shell so Waynaboozhoo forms the new Earth on the back of a turtle. Not exactly the same story but we do have the destruction of the old world with a flood and the rebuilding of a new world. 


In the norse version, the Earth is flooded with blood from a slain giant instead of water. Odin and his brothers Villi and Ve killed a giant named Ymir whose blood flooded the whole earth. A frost giant, which in Norse mythology is not a god but also not a human, frost giants are usually kind of like the antagonists to the gods but not always, it’s complicated. A frost giant named Bergelmir and his wife made an ark, just like Noah, were saved, and repopulated the Earth. Leave it to the vikings to flood the Earth with blood not water in their great flood myth. A blood flood. Has a nice ring to it. And the aboriginal Australian version involves a thirsty frog flooding the Earth instead of an angry god. This one might be my favorite. The frog, named Tiddalik, which is perfect, it’s basically tiddly wink, cutest frog name ever. He was so thirsty that he drank up all of the water on Earth which caused this massive drought that killed most things. The surviving animals got together and formed a council which came up with a plan to fix things. They need Tiddalik the frog to spit all the water back out and they decide that they only way to get him to do this is to make him laugh. Like, how cute is this story? So all the animals take turns trying to make Tiddalik laugh. Keep explains quote “Tiddalik couldn’t hold back any longer. The frog started a low laugh that sounded like distant thunder, and when he opened his mouth, water came pouring out, flooding the land. The flood gradually subsided, and the land was verdant and peaceful again,” end quote. Verdant that is a good word. 




So what are the chances that all of these different groups of people all over the Earth with incredibly different cultures, some of whom had no contact with one another at the time these stories emerged, would all tell virtually the same story? It’s very interesting and it definitely suggests some sort of worldwide flood situation. But, then we have to look for the other thing, the better thing, the physical evidence. Because, is there a chance, that all of these different groups, the Aztecs and the Babylonians, and the Aboriginals, the Norse, that they weren’t all experiencing the same worldwide flood? That instead, they’re just all humans and humans, no matter where or when they are, face similar challenges, like floods. That humans, no matter where or when they are, have similar psychology. They make up similar stories to teach similar lessons and address similar fears. Is that possible? Yes. So is there any physical evidence of a worldwide flood? Or are we talking about separate smaller scale floods that affected all of these different groups and stirred them to eventually record a very similar story? 


As of right now, there doesn’t seem to be any solid geological evidence of a worldwide flood as reported in the story of Noah’s ark. There is lots of evidence of various regional floods, even on a massive scale, but as far as the entire Earth being covered in water at one time, no. There’s no evidence of that. I dug into an article written for the National Center for Science Education by Lorence G. Collins who is a petrologist, which is apparently a scientist who studies rocks, specifically the origins of rocks and processes that form rocks over time. It was not a fun read, very heavy on the science. Dude might need to stick to rocks. He’s not a writer. I mean it’s not like poorly written, it’s just like this could make a whole lot more sense. Anyway I did my best to decode it. Basically, Collins looks at these layers of rock that are all over Earth that, because of their composition, suggest they were once underwater and then they were exposed to air and dried out again. He’s looking at oxidation, rust, that happens with exposure to the air. He’s looking at evidence of cracks that form in mud when it dries out and sort of shrinks. And so he’s saying, these particular layers of rock, he calls them red beds because of the red color from the oxidation, the rust, he says these are evidence of times when that area was briefly underwater and then dried out again, evidence of a flood. And his point is, if what he calls the Noachian flood happened, this worldwide flood, if that happened, you would expect to see this layer all over, marking the same incident, evidence of a flood in rock layers from the same time. And that’s not the case. It is found in many places, but at varying thicknesses and in between older and newer layers in the fossil record. The evidence suggests many different regional floods happening at different times as opposed to one massive worldwide flood. 


Now, it’s very likely that there was a massive widespread flood event in the area where Noah would have lived, ancient Mesopotamia. Did it cover the whole world in a scientific geographical sense? No. But did it cover Noah’s whole world in a the only world he knows about way, possibly. Collins explains the geography of that area, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. He talks in great mind numbing detail about the elevation there and how it would have lead to frequent flooding which is also evident in the rock layers, and how people would have lived on natural levees that kept them above the recurring floods. He also points to evidence that there was a great flood in that area, probably around 2900 BC which is just about 5,000 years ago. He says, according to the evidence that I won’t bore you with, this flood would have covered around 1.6 million square kilometers from the Persion gulf, through Mesopotamia, and into Syria and Turkey. He says depths of these floodwaters would have reached up to 32 meters above these natural levees where people were living to avoid the regular minor flooding that took place. So that’s significant. If they are already living on the highest point of the land and then that highest point gets submerged under 32 meters of water, that’s over 100 feet. That’s a major flood situation, of biblical proportions. And the fact that that flood would have reached all the way into Turkey is significant. Because the various Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all say that Noah’s ark eventually came to rest on Mount Ararat which is in northeastern Turkey, near its border with Iran. 




So let me take you to Mount Ararat where something very interesting and of course controversial was found back in 1959 by a Turkish army captain and cartographer named Ilhan Durupinar. According to reports, heavy rainfall and three separate earthquakes back in 1948 exposed an interesting formation around 29 kilometers south of Mount Ararat that was later observed by Durupinar. It’s called the Durupinar formation and it very much looks like a large boat, a ship. In fact, it is actually almost the exact dimensions recorded for Noah’s ark, 157 meters long, 26 meters wide, and 16 meters high. So, you know, people are immediately like, “this guy found Noah’s Ark! Here it is! Here’s the boat, right here, right near Mount Ararat where it was supposed to be.” And it does look like a boat and it’s the right size, but, you know, we need more than that. Is it a boat or is it not a boat? Well, according to the Jerusalem Post, a research group from California called Noah’s Ark Scan has recently conducted scans, ground penetrating radar scans, there that have revealed some promising results. This article is from a month ago so this research is still ongoing. The Jerusalem Post reports quote “A new analysis of radar data has supposedly revealed "central and lateral corridors that cross the vessel" and angular structures up to six meters deep, which may represent rooms beneath a deck-like platform. The Noah's Ark Scan team will verify whether the structures detected underground at the Durupınar site are of artificial or natural origin,” end quote. So results pending there, but they have found what looks like structures within the formation that are consistent with a boat. They’ve also tested the soil their. The article says quote “William Crabtree, a member of the research team, discussed their soil analysis, noting that organic matter was found to be double inside the formation compared to the surrounding soil. "If you know soil science—as I am a soil scientist—you will understand that potassium levels, organic matter, and pH can all be affected by the decomposition of organic materials. If this was a wooden vessel and the wood had rotted over time, we would expect to see increased potassium levels, changes in pH, and higher organic content—and that's exactly what we find," Crabtree explained, according to Newsbomb.The team also noticed that the plants growing on the structure are of a different color compared to the surrounding area, which Jones suggested could indicate an anthropogenic origin. "This difference in plant color suggests that the underground structure has a different substrate," Jones noted,” end quote. Jones is referring to independent researcher Andrew Jones who is leading the Noah’s Ark Scan group with the ground penetrating radar. 


So did we find Noah’s Ark 29 kilometers south of Mount Ararat? Maybe? But, TBD. Research is still ongoing. There are many who believe it is just some kind of natural rock formation. But, I mean, I think it’s looking promising that it was something manmade at least, some kind of wooden structure. The Jerusalem Post concludes quote “Collaboration with Turkish universities and the use of technology, such as deep-penetration scanners and geochemical analysis, could provide concrete answers about the nature of the underground structures at the Durupınar site. The researchers seek to gather more key data before implementing a preservation plan for the archaeological site,” end quote. So, yeah, TBD. 




There is another location not too too far away from that with evidence of a massive flood event. This one involves a familiar name, a guy I talked about a couple weeks ago actually in regards to the wreck of Titanic, Robert Ballard. So, if you recall, Robert Ballard was the guy who discovered Titanic on the bottom of the North Atlantic back in 1985. He is a famed underwater archaeologist. You know, he’s like the Beyonce of underwater archaeologists or whatever. He managed to breach the science nerd pop culture gap which is something few have done. Well, Ballard has turned his attention to the Black Sea. The Black Sea is also near Turkey, it’s to the north of Turkey so it’s not a crazy distance from Mount Ararat and the Durupinar formation. And the reason Ballard is focusing on the Black Sea is because he believes there may be evidence of an ancient civilization dating back to the time of Noah, pre-flood, beneath it. 


The Black Sea Deluge theory came about back in the mid 1990s in response to a lack of Neolithic sites in northern Turkey. There is a time and a place where humans ceased to exist so they wondered, well, you know, what happened to them? And thus the Black Sea Deluge theory was born, that catastrophic flooding occurred in that area when water from the Mediterranean sea rushed in, possibly due to a rise in seawater when ice melted after the last ice age. The main proponents of this theory are Columbia University Oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman. According to Hannah Fairfield in a Columbia University Record article from 1999 quote, “Ryan and Pitman believe that the sealed Bosporus strait, which acted as a dam between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, broke open when climatic warming at the close of the last glacial period caused icecaps to melt, raising the global sea level. With more than 200 times the force of Niagara Falls, the thundering water flooded the Black Sea, which was no more than a large lake, raising its surface up to six inches per day and swallowing 60,000 square miles in less than a year. As the Mediterranean salt water replaced fresh water, it expelled a wave of human migration from what had been an oasis of fresh water within very arid lands-an exodus traumatic enough to be recorded in human memory as the epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of Noah's Ark, the scientists said.” end quote. 


This caught Robert Ballard’s attention. In talking about the last ice age, he says in an article for ABC News quote “Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube… But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history." end quote. According to the article which is from 2012, Ballard and his team started looking for evidence of an ancient flood in the area of the Black Sea and they seem to have found it. According to ABC News quote “Four hundred feet below the surface, they unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred.” end quote. 





This is significant because what’s now the salty Black Sea used to be a small freshwater lake. That ancient shoreline Ballard found, those shells on an ancient shoreline below the now Black Sea, they once rested beside a comparatively small freshwater lake which would have made a great place for humans to live. Freshwater, are you kidding me? It was like an oasis until it flooded with salty water from the Mediterranean. So what would have happened? Well anyone who survived the flood would have been forced to move out of that area, a diaspora of ancient peoples. And this was a crazy thing that had happened to them. This was a big event, a traumatic event, they weren’t going to stay quiet about it. Having lost their freshwater source, they likely moved on to live in surrounding areas and brought the story of the great flood with them. Dr.s Ryan and Pitman who first proposed the theory also suggested that these people, this diaspora brought with it new farming techniques because around this same time that the area was thought to have flooded, we see major agricultural development taking place in surrounding areas. 

So what is going on with all of these different flood stories? Scientifically, geologically, logically, it does not appear that they are all referring to the same worldwide flood, rather smaller scale, regional floods that left a lasting impact. When you look at where ancient civilizations spring up, they are pretty much all near substantial bodies of water or important rivers. We need water. We need it for a lot of reasons. We have to drink it to stay alive, we can eat the animals that live in it, we can use it for cooking and cleaning, we can use it for transportation and trade. We are basically nothing without water. And so that’s why almost every single ancient civilization that we know of lived next to water. A consequence of that is also flooding. Because if you live next to a body of water at some point, you are going to experience some form of flooding. And floods can be devastating, especially in ancient times when people didn’t really understand science or weather and they couldn’t predict things like floods very well. Floods happen quickly and unexpectedly, and in an instant your entire world is washed away. We can’t live without water but also, it will kill you in a heartbeat. So when you talk about writing a cautionary tale, a story that’s supposed to teach people a lesson to obey a deity and behave so that they don’t get destroyed, a flood is a pretty great consequence to write into that story. Just literarily, it works. It drives the point home nicely. And so it’s not a shared worldwide flood that happened, it’s a shared worldwide human condition, a realization of our collective fears and weaknesses and will to survive coming out through storytelling. The ancient Babylonians, the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Greeks, the aboriginals, the Native Americans, the Aztecs, the Norse… These groups did not all experience one flood event in all of their various corners of the globe. What they experienced together without realizing it was being human. As much as we want to separate ourselves by nationality or belief system or culture or the color of our skin, we are all humans and our experiences reflect that, that we are all one together experiencing what it is to be human. And that my friends might just be the real lesson of our shared great flood story.


 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from the National Center for Science Education, ABC News, PBS, How Stuff Works, Wikipedia, the Jerusalem Post, The Columbia Univesity Record, Mini Museum, and World History Encyclopedia`. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.