earthquake, which swept so rapidly over the face of the earth that only a
few people managed to escape in their canoes or take refuge on the tops
of the highest mountains, petrified with terror.20
The Luiseno of lower California had a legend that a flood covered the
mountains and destroyed most of mankind. Only a few were saved
because they fled to the highest peaks which were spared when all the
rest of the world was inundated. The survivors remained there until the
flood ended.21 Farther north similar flood myths were recorded amongst
the Hurons.22 And a legend of the Montagnais, belonging to the
Algonquin family, related how Michabo, or the Great Hare, re-established
the world after the flood with the help of a raven, an otter and a
muskrat.23
Lynd’s History of the Dakotas, an authoritative work of the nineteenth
century which preserved many indigenous traditions that would otherwise
have been lost, reports an Iroquois myth that ‘the sea and waters had at
one time infringed upon the land, so that all human life was destroyed’.
The Chickasaws asserted that the world had been destroyed by water ‘but
that one family was saved and two animals of every kind’. The Sioux also
spoke of a time when there was no dry land and when all men
disappeared from existence.24
Water water everywhere
How far and how widely across the myth memories of mankind do the
ripples of the great flood spread?
Very widely indeed. More than 500 deluge legends are known around
the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7
African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist
researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely
independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.25
20 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 426.
21 Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 111-12.
22 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 431.
23 Ibid., pp. 428-9; Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 115. In this version the character of
Michabo is called Messou.
24 From Lynd’s History of the Dakotas, cited in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 117.
25 Frederick A. Filby, The Flood Reconsidered: A Review of the Evidences of Geology,
Archaeology, Ancient Literature and the Bible, Pickering and Inglis Ltd., London, 1970,
p. 58. Andree was an eminent German geographer and anthropologist. His monograph
on diluvial traditions is described by J. G. Frazer (in Folklore in the Old Testament, pp.
46-7) as ‘a model of sound learning and good sense set forth with the utmost clearness
and conciseness ...’
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For example, early Jesuit scholars who were among the first Europeans
to visit China had the opportunity in the Imperial Library to study a vast
work, consisting of 4320 volumes, said to have been handed down from
ancient times and to contain ‘all knowledge’. This great book included a
number of traditions which told of the consequences that followed ‘when
mankind rebelled against the high gods and the system of the universe
fell into disorder’: ‘The planets altered their courses. The sky sank lower
towards the north. The sun, moon and stars changed their motions. The
earth fell to pieces and the waters in its bosom rushed upwards with
violence and overflowed the earth.’26
In the Malaysian tropical forest the Chewong people believe that every
so often their own world, which they call Earth Seven, turns upside down
so that everything is flooded and destroyed. However, through the
agency of the Creator God Tohan, the flat new surface of what had
previously been the underside of Earth Seven is moulded into mountains,
valleys and plains. New trees are planted, and new humans born.27
A flood myth of Laos and northern Thailand has it that beings called the
Thens lived in the upper kingdom long ages ago, while the masters of the
lower world were three great men, Pu Leng Seung, Khun K’an and Khun
K’et. One day the Thens announced that before eating any meal people
should give them a part of their food as a sign of respect. The people
refused and in a rage the Thens created a flood which devastated the
whole earth. The three great men built a raft, on top of which they made
a small house, and embarked with a number of women and children. In
this way they and their descendants survived the deluge.28
In similar fashion the Karens of Burma have traditions of a global
deluge from which two brothers were saved on a raft.29 Such a deluge is
also part of the mythology of Viet Nam, where a brother and a sister are
said to have survived in a great wooden chest which also contained two
of every kind of animal.30
Several aboriginal Australian peoples, especially those whose traditional
homelands are along the tropical northern coast, ascribe their origins to a
great flood which swept away the previous landscape and society.
Meanwhile, in the origin myths of a number of other tribes, the cosmic
serpent Yurlunggur (associated with the rainbow) is held responsible for
the deluge.31
There are Japanese traditions according to which the Pacific islands of
Oceania were formed after the waters of a great deluge had receded.32 In
Oceania itself a myth of the native inhabitants of Hawaii tells how the
26 Reported in Charles Berlitz, The Lost Ship of Noah, W. H. Allen, London, 1989, p. 126.
27 World Mythology, pp. 26-7.
28 Ibid., p. 305.
29 Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 81.
30 Ibid.
31 World Mythology, p. 280.
32 E. Sykes, Dictionary Of Non-Classical Mythology, London, 1961, p. 119.
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world was destroyed by a flood and later recreated by a god named
Tangaloa. The Samoans believe that there was once an inundation that
wiped out almost all mankind. It was survived only by two human beings
who put to sea in a boat which eventually came to rest in the Samoan
archipelago.33
Greece, India and Egypt
On the other side of the world, Greek mythology too is haunted by
memories of a deluge. Here, however (as in Central America) the
inundation is not viewed as an isolated event but as one of a series of
destructions and remakings of the world. The Aztecs and the Maya spoke
in terms of successive ‘Suns’ or epochs (of which our own was thought to
be the Fifth and last). In similar fashion the oral traditions of Ancient
Greece, collected and set down in writing by Hesiod in the eighth century
BC, related that prior to the present creation there had been four earlier
races of men on earth. Each of these was thought more advanced than
the one that followed it. And each, at the appointed hour, had been
‘swallowed up’ in a geological cataclysm.
The first and most ancient creation had been mankind’s ‘golden race’
who had ‘lived like the gods, free from care, without trouble or woe ...
With ageless limbs they revelled at their banquets ... When they died it
was as men overco
me by sleep.’ With the passing of time, and at the
command of Zeus, this golden race eventually ‘sank into the depths of
the earth’. It was succeeded by the ‘silver race’ which was supplanted by
the ‘bronze race’, which was replaced by the race of ‘heroes’, which was
followed by the ‘iron’ race—our own—the fifth and most recent creation.34
It is the fate of the bronze race that is of particular interest to us here.
Described in the myths as having ‘the strength of giants, and mighty
hands on their mighty limbs’,35 these formidable men were exterminated
by Zeus, king of the gods, as a punishment for the misdeeds of
Prometheus, the rebellious Titan who had presented humanity with the
gift of fire.36 The mechanism the vengeful deity used to sweep the earth
clean was an overwhelming flood.
In the most widespread version of the story Prometheus impregnated a
human female. She bore him a son named Deucalion, who ruled over the
country of Phthia, in Thessaly, and took to wife Pyrrha, ‘the red-blonde’,
daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. When Zeus reached his fateful
decision to destroy the bronze race, Deucalion, forewarned by
Prometheus, made a wooden box, stored in it ‘all that was necessary’,
33 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 460, 466.
34 C. Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, Thames & Hudson, London, 1974, pp. 226-9.
35 Ibid.
36 World Mythology, pp. 130-1.
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and climbed into it with Pyrrha. The king of the gods caused mighty rains
to pour from heaven, flooding the greater part of the earth. All mankind
perished in this deluge, save a few who had fled to the highest
mountains. ‘It also happened at this time that the mountains of Thessaly
were split asunder, and the whole country as far as the Isthmus and the
Peloponnese became a single sheet of water.’
Deucalion and Pyrrha floated over this sea in their box for nine days
and nights, finally landing on Mount Parnassus. There, after the rains had
ceased, they disembarked and sacrificed to the gods. In response Zeus
sent Hermes to Deucalion with permission to ask for whatever he wished.
He wished for human beings. Zeus then bade him take stones and throw
them over his shoulder. The stones Deucalion threw became men, and
those that Pyrrha threw became women.37
As the Hebrews looked back on Noah, so the Greeks of ancient
historical times looked back upon Deucalion—as the ancestor of their
nation and as the founder of numerous towns and temples.38
A similar figure was revered in Vedic India more than 3000 years ago.
One day (the story goes)
when a certain wise man named Manu was making his ablutions, he found in the
hollow of his hand a tiny little fish which begged him to allow it to live. Taking pity
on it he put it in a jar. The next day, however, it had grown so much bigger that
he had to carry it to a lake. Soon the lake was too small. ‘Throw me into the sea,’
said the fish [which was in reality a manifestation of the god Vishnu] ‘and I shall
be more comfortable.’ Then he warned Manu of a coming deluge. He sent him a
large ship, with orders to load it with two of every living species and the seeds of
every plant, and then to go on board himself.’39
Manu had only just carried out these orders when the ocean rose and
submerged everything, and nothing was to be seen but Vishnu in his fish
form—now a huge, one-horned creature with golden scales. Manu
moored his ark to the horn of the fish and Vishnu towed it across the
brimming waters until it came to rest on the exposed peak of ‘the
Mountain of the North’:40
The fish said, ‘I have saved thee; fasten the vessel to a tree, that the water may not
sweep it away while thou art on the mountain; and in proportion as the waters
decrease thou shalt descend.’ Manu descended with the waters. The Deluge had
carried away all creatures and Manu remained alone.41
With him, and with the animals and plants he had saved from destruction,
began a new age of the world. After a year there emerged from the
waters a woman who announced herself as ‘the daughter of Manu’. The
couple married and produced children, thus becoming the ancestors of
37 The Gods of the Greeks, pp. 226-9.
38 World Mythology, pp. 130-1.
39 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 362.
40 Ibid., Satapatha Brahmana, (trans. Max Muller), cited in Atlantis: the Antediluvian
World, p. 87.
41 Ibid. See also Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 78-9.
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the present race of mankind.42
Last but by no means least, Ancient Egyptian traditions also refer to a
great flood. A funerary text discovered in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I, for
example, tells of the destruction of sinful humanity by a deluge.43 The
reasons for this catastrophe are set out in Chapter CLXXV of the Book of
the Dead, which attributes the following speech to the Moon God Thoth:
They have fought fights, they have upheld strifes, they have done evil, they have
created hostilities, they have made slaughter, they have caused trouble and
oppression ... [Therefore] I am going to blot out everything which I have made.
This earth shall enter into the watery abyss by means of a raging flood, and will
become even as it was in primeval time.44
On the trail of a mystery
With the words of Thoth we have come full circle to the Sumerian and
biblical floods. ‘The earth was filled with violence’, says Genesis:
And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had
corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, ‘The end of all flesh is
come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold I
will destroy them with the earth.’45
Like the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Manu, and the flood that
destroyed the Aztecs’ ‘Fourth Sun’, the biblical deluge was the end of a
world age. A new age succeeded it: our own, populated by the
descendants of Noah. From the very beginning, however, it was
understood that this age too would in due course come to a catastrophic
end. As the old song puts it, ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more
water, the fire next time.’
The Scriptural source for this prophecy of world destruction is to be
found in 2 Peter 3:
We must be careful to remember that during the last days there are bound to be
people who will be scornful and [who will say], ‘Everything goes on as it has since
it began at the creation’. They are choosing to forget that there were heavens at
the beginning, and that the earth was formed by the word of God out of water and
between the waters, so that the world of that time was destroyed by being flooded
by water. But by the same word, the present sky and earth are destined for fire,
and are only being reserved until Judgement Day so that all sinners may be
destroyed ... The Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, and then with a
roar the sky will vanish, the el
ements will catch fire and fall apart, and the earth
42 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 7:798. The Rig Veda, Penguin Classics, London, 1981,
pp. 100-1.
43 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 48.
44 From the Theban Recension of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, quoted in From Fetish
to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 198.
45 Genesis, 6:11-13.
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and all that it contains will be burnt up.46
The Bible, therefore, envisages two ages of the world, our own being the
second and last. Elsewhere, in other cultures, different numbers of
creations and destructions are recorded. In China, for instance, the
perished ages are called kis, ten of which are said to have elapsed from
the beginning of time until Confucius. At the end of each kis, ‘in a
general convulsion of nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains
spring up out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings
and everything are ruined, and the ancient traces effaced ...’47
Buddhist scriptures speak of ‘Seven Suns’, each brought to an end by
water, fire or wind.48 At the end of the Seventh Sun, the current ‘world
cycle’, it is expected that the ‘earth will break into flames’.49 Aboriginal
traditions of Sarawak and Sabah recall that the sky was once ‘low’ and tell
us that ‘six Suns perished ... at present the world is illuminated by the
seventh Sun’.50 Similarly, the Sibylline Books speak of nine Suns that are
nine ages’ and prophesy two ages yet to come—those of the eighth and
the ninth Sun.’51
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Hopi Indians of Arizona
(who are distant relatives of the Aztecs52) record three previous Suns,
each culminating in a great annihilation followed by the gradual reemergence of mankind. In Aztec cosmology, of course, there were four
Suns prior to our own. Such minor differences concerning the precise
number of destructions and creations envisaged in this or that mythology
should not distract us from the remarkable convergence of ancient
traditions evident here. All over the world these traditions appear to
commemorate a widespread series of catastrophes. In many cases the
character of each successive cataclysm is obscured by the use of poetic
language and the piling up of metaphor and symbols. Quite frequently,