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Its interesting that nearly all cultures across the world have a version of the Noah / flood myth
Perhaps that tells us the flood is a basic idea from Jung's collective unconcious rather than based on a historical event. Rather like the symbolism in dreams, perhaps floodwater represents something else.chatsubo said:Its interesting that nearly all cultures across the world have a version of the Noah / flood myth
I would tend to agree, especially as ancient near-eastern cultures used the image of large bodies of water as a symbol of primaeval chaos and anarchy. Probably the best known example of this is the first of the two creation myths found in Genesis.beakboo said:Perhaps that tells us the flood is a basic idea from Jung's collective unconcious rather than based on a historical event. Rather like the symbolism in dreams, perhaps floodwater represents something else.
More likely the formation of the Black Sea, which did occur within ancient historical times - I think the Med was much earlier.beakboo said:...the formation of the Med, which I suppose could have been a story that travelled round the ancient world spread by sailors.
Then of course you have Noah's ark....not a bible story...a babylonian story with Sumarian origins....but that I dare say should be another thread. But its another example of where the bible has appropriated other stories for its own teachings.
There's another school of thought about the similarities of tales; if there was indeed a deluge and flooding to the degree listed in both stories, the area would have widespread flooding and there may well have been more than one boat built. Me, I don't know for sure. But saying that the tale of Noah is definitively a hijacked Sumerian myth is as objectionable as the flip side, which would be to say that the Bible is the one and only true piece of literature from that era to survive.
Did Noah really build an ark?
By Jeremy Bowen
Presenter, Noah's Ark
In the Bible, God tells Noah he has to build an ark and load a pair of every kind of animal before a great flood engulfs the world. It is widely regarded as a myth, but could it actually be true?
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God warned Noah - the only good man left in a world full of corruption and violence - to prepare for a great flood. With his sons he built a great ark and the animals marched in two by two. By the time the rain started to fall, Noah was ready. The ark was a refuge until the waters went down, leaving Noah and his menagerie high and dry on Mount Ararat.
There are many problems with the story. It would have taken 35 years for Noah and his family to load the animals. And a flood that engulfed the Earth would have left a signature for geologists - yet none has been found.
But it is possible to build a much more credible version of the story based on a different reading of the Bible, on ancient Babylonian sources that predate the Book of Genesis, and on archaeology and science.
The traditional shape of Noah's Ark comes from the imaginations of 19th Century artists. It would have been about 450ft long, and experts say it would have broken apart.
Even if such a feat of marine engineering had been possible, there are about 30 million species of animals in the world. With Noah's deadline of a week he would have had to have loaded 50 pairs a second. For so many creatures, a fleet of enormous arks would have been needed.
But just because the details of this familiar story do not add up, should we turn our backs on Noah and the ark?
We have to forget the idea that such a huge boat carrying all known animals existed, that it came to rest on Mount Ararat in modern-day Turkey, and that a flood covered the entire Earth.
In 1851, British archaeologists discovered hundreds of clay tablets while digging in ancient Babylon.
It was 20 years later that British Museum assistant George Smith became the first person to read them. He found the story of Gilgamesh, which bore strong similarities to that of Noah. He was visited by the great gods, who decided there would be a great deluge, told him to make a boat and carry in it the seed of all living things.
Further Iraqi texts were discovered, showing the story emerged in Mesopotamia. And in the 1930s conclusive evidence of a huge flood in the area about 5,000 years ago - the time of the story of Noah - was found.
What we know of the culture of what is now Iraq gives the first glimpse of the real-life historical figure behind the myth.
Noah might have been king of a city called Shuruppak. He would have had a kilt, a shaven head and eye make-up, like the figures portrayed in artworks created in what was then known as Sumeria.
The epic of Gilgamesh says Noah had silver and gold, then the currency of wealthy merchants, suggesting he was a businessman.
Could this story have provided the inspiration for the Jewish priests who wrote the Book of Genesis 2,000 years later?
Instead of building an ark to survive a great flood, he is more likely to have built boats to trade goods like beer, grain and animals.
All the big trading centres of the era were on the River Euphrates and it was cheaper to move goods by water than land. Sumerians were able to build barges about 20ft in length, and marine archaeologists have not found remains or inscriptions of larger vessels.
But they believe they would have had the technology to have built a series of barges and used them like pontoons on which a much larger boat, or ark, could have been constructed.
Parts of the Euphrates were only navigable at certain times of the year, when the waters were deep enough for large boats.
Noah was likely to have waited for the melt waters to arrive in June and July and, if these had combined with a tropical storm, the river could have flooded the Mesopotamian plain.
The currents in the area would not have taken him towards Mount Ararat, but out into the Persian Gulf. Life would have been difficult, but they could have survived on the animals and beer on board.
One Babylonian text suggests the ark came to rest on what is now the island of Bahrain, providing a very different yet plausible end to the adventure.
Could this story have provided the inspiration for the Jewish priests who wrote the Book of Genesis 2,000 years later? When they first heard the story, how could they fail to recognise its moral power, that if humankind falls short of God's laws, there's a dreadful price to pay. Behind that moral message lies one of the world's greatest stories.
And behind that story we can just glimpse a real man, a real boat and a real adventure.
Lake Missoula
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The glacial lake, at its maximum height and extent, contained more than 500 cubic miles of water. When Glacial Lake Missoula burst through the ice dam and exploded downstream, it did so at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world. This towering mass of water and ice literally shook the ground as it thundered towards the Pacific Ocean, stripping away thick soils and cutting deep canyons in the underlying bedrock. With flood waters roaring across the landscape at speeds approaching 65 miles per hour, the lake would have drained in as little as 48 hours.
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/Glac ... soula.html
Here, we know where the water came from (the World Ocean, via the Med) and we know where it went, because it's still there - it's the Black Sea.The Real-Life Basis for Noah's Flood
by Tina Blue
December 16, 2000
In their book Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), Walter Pitman and William Ryan detail the overwhelming evidence that the Old Testament story of Noah and the Great Flood (Genesis 6:9-9:17) was actually based on a real-life event, a cataclysmic flood that took place approximately 7,600 years ago, in 5,600 b.c. Other ancient oral literatures, most notably the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and an older Sumerian version, called The Deluge, also tell of a Great Flood that would have occurred at about the same time as the one recorded in Genesis.
All of the world's saltwater oceans are really one great connected body of water, the "world ocean." The Black Sea, which lies between Turkey and the former U.S.S.R., is connected to the world ocean by way of the Sea of Marmara, through the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. The narrow passageway between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus Strait, is marked by certain anomalous physical characteristics that point to a time when the Black Sea was actually an isolated freshwater lake, and the Bosporus Strait a mighty natural dam.
etc...
http://salvoblue.homestead.com/noah.html
Only because of that ?Bigfoot73 said:Yeah, the Biblical version, with Noah living to 900 and his sons managing about 500, and him rounding up specimens of every last creature on the planet, is BS.
The account in the Book of Enoch says,in so many words, that Noah awoke one day to see that the Earth had tilted. Perhaps there actually was some catastrophic nonsense and Velikovskian twaddle going on .What would remain in human memory would be much more than vague legends from old religious books. Same for other 'catastrophic' nonsense relating to recent prehistory / early history, like crustal shift or velikovskian twaddle.
The Earth tilted ? If this was the case, all evidence we would have would be a quote in the Book of Enoch ?Bigfoot73 said:The account in the Book of Enoch says,in so many words, that Noah awoke one day to see that the Earth had tilted. Perhaps there actually was some catastrophic nonsense and Velikovskian twaddle going on .
Yes. Many people all around the world faced gigantic floods at the end of the last Ice Age, and evolved their own myths. Sometimes similar to Noah's story, sometimes different. It is also possible that human memory was impressed with huge meteoritic strikes, like the one some supposed to have caused the extinction of big mammals.Bigfoot73 said:some of those global flood legends are not versions of the Ark story, they are accounts of other cultures' flood experience - for instance the Yakima indians of western America, who built their own Ark which allegedly came to rest on Mount Jefferson.
As postulated by Velikovsky. He crops up in a few threads, but we have one dedicated to him here.Bigfoot73 said:What I think happened - purely speculation of course- is that Earth had a close encounter with another planet, the gravity from which pulled the Mediterranean and Black Sea into a pile over the Ararat region and that this dissipated as the effect wore off.
No. Venus is demonstrably there. The point is, it didn't come past us on its way there. IIRC, it's been where it is now as long as we've been where we are.Bigfoot73 said:Perhaps it was Venus, being dragged into he solar system by the gravity from the Sun and Jupiter. Perhaps it was something else altogether.
So because there isn't a complete and convincing explanation of how it got there, it isn't there.
..and, most Forteans would agree that fish and frog falls do happen, too. We know they happen. What we don't have in those cases is an explanation (or explanations, who's to say there's one universal cause?) Comparing a known phenomenon with this case isn't really a runner, in all honesty.This is rather like saying that because there is no explanation for falls of frogs and fish etc. they don't actually happen. To which I suppose either of you would counter that the frogs and fish are demonstrably existent...
Yes it is there, but there are other theories of solar system history which suggest it might not have been so for very long.No. Venus is demonstrably there. The point is, it didn't come past us on its way there. IIRC, it's been where it is now as long as we've been where we are.
There is far more to the evidence for the Ark than Genesis , and it was originally a Sumerian story anyway. That's why I made the fish -fall comparison, the evidence for the Ark does make it a runner. Noahs arksearch.com is as good a starting point as any although most of the evidence there is available elsewhere too.Evidence of what? Noah's Ark (primary source - Genesis), Venus swinging by in a celestial game of Boules (Velikovsky), or something else?
There are - but, 99% of astronomers and physicists are content that it evolved in its orbit at the same time as the earth in its respective orbit. The mechanics and evidence all fit, as opposed to the theories about Venus swinging in from elsewhere, wherein huge gaps are ignored or filled with other theories that make even less sense.Bigfoot73 said:Yes it is there, but there are other theories of solar system history which suggest it might not have been so for very long.No. Venus is demonstrably there. The point is, it didn't come past us on its way there. IIRC, it's been where it is now as long as we've been where we are.
Bigfoot73 said:There is far more to the evidence for the Ark than Genesis , and it was originally a Sumerian story anyway. That's why I made the fish -fall comparison, the evidence for the Ark does make it a runner.I said:Evidence of what? Noah's Ark (primary source - Genesis), Venus swinging by in a celestial game of Boules (Velikovsky), or something else?
There are - but, 99% of astronomers and physicists are content that it evolved in its orbit at the same time as the earth in its respective orbit. The mechanics and evidence all fit, as opposed to the theories about Venus swinging in from elsewhere, wherein huge gaps are ignored or filled with other theories that make even less sense.Bigfoot73 said:Yes it is there, but there are other theories of solar system history which suggest it might not have been so for very long.No. Venus is demonstrably there. The point is, it didn't come past us on its way there. IIRC, it's been where it is now as long as we've been where we are.
Can't argue with that, but I would add the rider that there's a subtle difference between the search for geographic areas or zoology, and religious artefacts - faith adds another dimension to it.Bigfoot73 said:I read Rynner's and Analis's comments as meaning it couldn't possibly be the Ark because there's no way it could have got up there.
There are plenty of witnesses who did not go up Ararat , or fly over it, with the sole intention of finding it. However most explorers who go looking for anything do so because they believe what they seek exists.
I think you misunderstood my point - that fish fall from the sky is a known and tangible quantity, it's the mechanism that's unknown. With the Ark, what we have is a lot of very old anecdotal evidence (I know there's lots of similar motifs in a number of cultures), and an unverified claim that it's been found. That's the difference.Bigfoot73 said:There is far more to the evidence for the Ark than Genesis , and it was originally a Sumerian story anyway. That's why I made the fish -fall comparison, the evidence for the Ark does make it a runner.I said:Evidence of what? Noah's Ark (primary source - Genesis), Venus swinging by in a celestial game of Boules (Velikovsky), or something else?
So is the Ark, it's just that the awareness of it has never been universal and the tangibility has had a turbulent history. Biscardi's rubber monkey suit and the Santilli film are transparent BS touted by con artists.that fish fall from the sky is a known and tangible quantity
Bigfoot73 said:So is the Ark, it's just that the awareness of it has never been universal and the tangibility has had a turbulent history.I said:that fish fall from the sky is a known and tangible quantity
Biscardi's rubber monkey suit and the Santilli film are transparent BS touted by con artists.
And the crocs.The sharks ate them.
The sharks ate them.