Rumours of the deluge
Descriptions of a killer global flood that inundated the inhabited lands of the world turn up everywhere amongst the myths of antiquity. In many cases these myths clearly hint that the deluge swept away an advanced civilization that had somehow angered the gods, sparing ‘none but the unlettered and the uncultured’31 and obliging the survivors to ‘begin again like children in complete ignorance of what happened … in early times’.32 Such stories turn up in Vedic India, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient Egypt. They were told by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Jews. They were repeated in China and south-east Asia, in prehistoric northern Europe and across the Pacific. Almost universally, where truly ancient traditions have been preserved, even amongst mountain peoples and desert nomads, vivid descriptions have been passed down of global floods in which the majority of mankind perished.33
To take these myths seriously, and especially to countenance the possibility that they might be telling the truth, would be a risky posture for any modern scholar to adopt, inviting ridicule and rebuke from colleagues. The academic consensus today, and for a century, has been that the myths are either pure fantasy or the fantastic elaboration of local and limited deluges – caused for example by rivers overflowing, or tidal waves.34 ‘It has long been known,’ commented the illustrious anthropologist Sir J. G. Frazer in 1923,
that legends of a great flood in which almost all men perished are widely diffused over the world … Stories of such tremendous cataclysms are almost certainly fabulous; [but] it is possible and indeed probable that under a mythical husk many of them may hide a kernel of truth; that is they may contain reminiscences of inundations which really overtook particular districts, but which in passing through the medium of popular tradition have been magnified into worldwide catastrophes.35
Unquestioningly following Frazer’s lead, scholars to this day still persist in seeing flood stories as
recollections – vastly distorted and exaggerated … of real local disasters … There is not one deluge legend but rather a collection of traditions which are so diverse that they can be explained neither by one general catastrophe alone, nor by the dissemination of one local tradition alone … Flood traditions are nearly universal … mainly because floods in the plural are the most nearly universal of all geologic catastrophes.36
Not all mainstream academics toe this line. But amongst those who don’t it seems to have been generally agreed that almost any explanation, however harebrained, is more acceptable than a simple literal interpretation of the myth of a global flood – i.e. that there actually was a global flood … or floods. For example, this from Alan Dundes, Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, is regarded as a perfectly acceptable scholarly position on the problem: ‘The myth is a metaphor – a cosmogenic projection of salient details of human birth insofar as every infant is delivered from a “flood” of amniotic fluid.’37
My guess is that such thinking will not much longer survive the steady accumulation of scientific evidence which suggests that a series of gigantic cataclysms, exactly like those described in the flood myths, changed the face of the earth completely between 17,000 years ago and 8000 years ago. At the beginning of this period of extraordinary climatic turbulence and extremes, fully evolved human beings of the modern type are thought to have been in existence for 100,000 years38 – long enough in theory for at least some of them to have evolved a high civilization. While much of the land they formerly lived on is now submerged beneath the sea, and as unfamiliar to archaeologists as the dark side of the moon, how certain can we really be that some of them did not?
Dark zone
SCUBA is the acronym for the ‘Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus’ invented by the late Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan in 1943.39 At first thought likely to be expensive and of use only to specialists, the technology rapidly entered the mass market and, today, scuba-diving is the world’s fastest-growing sport.40
Although it should be obvious, it is worth remembering that only since scuba-diving was introduced has any kind of systematic marine archaeology become possible. Moreover, funds for this kind of research are limited, and the oceans are extremely large – constituting, in fact, more than 70 per cent of the earth’s surface.41 Marine archaeologists have barely been able to begin the investigation of the millions upon millions of square kilometres of coastal shelf inundated since the end of the last Ice Age. As a result, the underwater world continues to constitute a gaping dark zone in human knowledge; it is entirely possible that archaeological surprises and upsets await us there.
Question: Why has the first extensive evidence of large-scale prehistoric structures beneath the sea come from Japan?
Answer: Japan has more scuba-divers than any other country and it follows that its coastal waters have been more thoroughly explored than those of any other country.
Question: Why have the main underwater structures in Japan all been found south of the thirtieth parallel?
Answer: Because most sport divers prefer warm water. There may be structures further north as well which simply haven’t been noticed yet because few divers are attracted to the cold or stormy seas in which they lie.
India is the opposite of Japan. It has almost no leisure-diving industry (just a couple of dive-shops in the whole subcontinent)42 but it does have marine archaeologists like S. R. Rao whose minds are open to extraordinary possibilities. Rao’s work around Poompuhur was guided by ancient Tamil traditions that speak of the submergence of large masses of land off southern India thousands of years ago.43 And he himself admits that the ‘U-shaped structure’ found at 23 metres is hard to explain within the orthodox framework of history.
‘11,000 years old, or older’
In August 2000 I took on a new research assistant, Sharif Sakr, who had just graduated in Human Sciences from Oxford University. One of the first tasks I gave him was to find me a top-flight academic, in Britain, who would be prepared to act as a kind of ‘resident expert’ on sea-level rise and who would be qualified to give an authoritative opinion on the date of submergence of almost any underwater structure in the world. Sharif came back to me with Dr Glenn Milne, a specialist in glacio-isostacy and glaciation-induced sea-level change at Durham University’s Department of Geology. Milne and his colleagues have established a worldwide reputation predicting ancient sea-level changes and the corresponding changes in the earth’s coastlines. Their predictions are based on a sophisticated computer model that has been under development since the 1970s and that takes into account many variables beyond changes caused solely by the melting of ice-sheets – the technical term is eustacy.44
In October 2000 Sharif approached Milne on my behalf and asked him to calculate the latest date that the large U-shaped structure and other nearby structures off the coast of Poompuhur could have been submerged.
Thursday 12 October 2000, Sharif Sakr to Glenn Milne: Hi Glenn,
Hope everything’s OK.
Just a quick question: I’ve got a series of structures 5 kilometres off the south-east coast of India (Tamil Nadu region, probably roughly around 11N, 80E as a rough guess).45 The structures are 23 metres underwater – which is extremely deep. If we assume only eustatics, then the implication would be that the structures are older than around 7000 BC. But there is also isostatic subsidence to consider: what proportion of that 23 metres depth, as a rough off-the-record guess, could be explained away through subsidence?
Does the depth of the structures still suggest great antiquity, even when isostatics are brought into the equation?
Thursday 12 October 2000, Glenn Milne to Sharif Sakr: Hi Sharif,
I did a quick model run for that site and the predicted sea-level curve shows that areas currently at 23m depth would have been submerged about 11,000 years before the present. This suggests that the structures you mention are 11 thousand years old or older!
No civilization known to history ??
?
Although I could not be certain of anything until I was able to dive on it myself, the early descriptions of the U-shaped structure by the NIO’s marine archaeologists left little doubt that it was man-made. The ‘stone blocks’ and ‘courses of masonry’ that had been reported by all these experienced witnesses seemed to exclude any possibility that it could be natural or recent – or indeed anything other than the ruins of a very old stone building, resting on bedrock, constructed here before the ocean rose to cover it.
Now, as I studied the e-mail from Glenn Milne, I knew just how ancient the U-shaped structure really might be – at least 11,000 years old. That’s 6000 years older than the first monumental architecture of ancient Egypt or of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia – traditionally thought of as the oldest civilizations of antiquity. Certainly, no civilization known to history existed in southern India – or anywhere else – 11,000 years ago. Yet the U-shaped structure off the Tranquebar-Poompuhur coast invites us to consider the possibility that it was the work of a civilization that archaeologists have as yet failed to identify – one whose primary ruins could have been missed because they are submerged so deep beneath the sea.
2 / The Riddle of the Antediluvian Cities
And the Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden … And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food … And a river went out of Eden to water the garden …
Genesis 2:8–10
I think we are going to get many surprises yet on land, and under the sea.
Thor Heyerdahl, June 2000
Millions of square kilometres of useful human habitat swallowed up by rising sea-levels at the end of the Ice Age. Myths of an antediluvian civilization destroyed by global floods. Sightings and rumours of inexplicable submerged structures in many different parts of the world. Could there be a connection?
In order to investigate this problem systematically what I really needed was some method of correlating the facts about land loss at the end of the Ice Age with the localities suggested by the myths and with any eye-witness reports of anomalous underwater structures. I needed, in other words, something like an ‘antediluvian Encarta’ – an electronic atlas of the world as it had looked before, during and after the sea-level rise that accompanied the end of the Ice Age. Ideally I should be able to see, on demand, any coastline, any island, any expanse of ocean, as it had looked at millennium intervals throughout the entire period of the meltdown.
Such a program, unfortunately, does not exist commercially, nor is information of the extremely specific kind I needed gathered together in any single work of reference. Detailed studies of scattered areas are available but no comprehensive, time-factored global picture. Yet, as I was to discover, cutting-edge research into post-glacial sea-level rise is underway at many universities and the information necessary to create a useful and reasonably reliable ‘antediluvian atlas’ does in fact exist – though not in published form. Glenn Milne and his colleagues at the Geology Department of Durham University are the leading UK specialists in the field and from September 2000 onwards it was they who came to my rescue. As noted in chapter 1, the state-of-the-art computer model that they have developed calculates the relevant variables to the extent that they are known and produces printable screen images of any location at any epoch during the past 22,000 years. Since the model does not incorporate tectonic motion and not all its variables are known with great certainty, it is most accurate at predicting shoreline changes in tectonically inactive regions and over time intervals of several centuries or more – beyond that, its predictions are useful as approximate guides. The processing is not instantaneous and skilled man-hours are required to extract the required information from the program location by location. So Glenn was kind beyond measure in cheerfully and helpfully preparing all the inundation maps that are used in the later chapters of this book.
But I had made forays into antediluvian geography before I met Glenn Milne. This was feasible wherever sufficiently detailed sea-level data was accessible to build up a sense of how the inundation of a particular region had progressed over a period of several thousands of years. Thanks to the work of Kurt Lambeck, a geologist at the Research School of Earth Sciences of the Australian National University, such data has been on public record for the Persian Gulf since 1996. Lambeck’s findings (which I was later able to confirm against Glenn Milne’s modelling of the post-glacial shorelines of the Gulf) were of enormous interest to me because the Persian Gulf was the home of a mysterious and extraordinary ancient culture – the Sumerians. Their flood myths seem to form the archetype for the much later Noah story in the Old Testament, and they are regarded by archaeologists as the founders of the oldest high civilization in the world.
Inundation data for the end of the last Ice Age has never before been thought likely to have a bearing, one way or another, on the problem of the origins of civilization and has therefore never been used as an investigative tool by archaeologists interested in this problem. But since the relevant data was available for the Persian Gulf, I decided to try to find out what it might show.
The five antediluvian cities of Sumer
Located immediately to the north-west of the present coastline of the Gulf between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, ancient Sumer flourished during the fourth and third millennia BC and the earliest surviving written version of the global flood ‘myth’ was found during excavations of the Sumerian city of Nippur1 (located on the Euphrates 200 kilometres south of the modern city of Baghdad). Inscribed on a tablet of baked clay, the Sumerian tradition is accepted by scholars as the source of the later Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh2 (which likewise speaks of a universal flood that destroyed mankind) and also bears a close relationship to the much-better-known flood account in the Old Testament.3
The Sumerian text is from a fragment – the lower third – of what was once a six-column tablet.4 And while it is clear that it belongs to a very ancient and widely dispersed family of flood traditions, it nevertheless remains – in itself-a ‘unique and unduplicated’ document. ‘Although scholars have been “all eyes and ears” for new [Sumerian] deluge tablets, not a single additional fragment has turned up in any museum, private collection or excavation.’5
What a rare and precious thing this little slab of baked mud is! And what a tale it has to tell. When I first read it I was instantly intrigued, because it contains explicit references to the existence of five antediluvian cities which, we are informed, were swallowed up by the waters of the flood. If such cities ever existed, then where should we expect to find their ruins today?
The first thirty-seven lines of the Sumerian tablet are missing, so we do not know how the story begins, but at the point where we enter it the flood is still far in the future.6 We hear about the creation of human beings, animals and plants.7 Then another break of thirty-seven lines occurs after which we find that we have jumped forwards in time to an epoch of high civilization. We learn that in this epoch, before the flood, ‘kingship was lowered from heaven’,8 a phrase that is eerily reminiscent of similar sky-ground symbolism contained in ancient Egyptian scriptures such as the Pyramid Texts (c.2300 BC), the Book of what is in the Duat (c. 1400 BC) and the much later Hermetica (C.AD 300).9
Then comes the reference to the foundation of Sumer’s antediluvian cities by an unnamed ruler or a god:
After the lofty crown and the throne of kingship had been lowered from heaven,
He perfected the rites and the exalted divine laws …
Founded the five cities … in pure places,
Called their names, apportioned them as cult centres.
The first of these cities, Eridu …
The second Badtibira …
The third Larak …
The fourth Sippar …
The fifth Shurrupak …10
‘A flood will sweep over the cult centres …’
When we rejoin the narrative after a third 37-line lacuna the scene has changed bewilderingl
y. Although the flood is still in the future, the foundation of the five antediluvian cities is now far in the past. It is apparent from the context that in the intervening period the cities’ inhabitants have behaved in such a way as to incur divine displeasure and that a convocation of the gods has been called to punish mankind with the terrible instrument of an earth-destroying flood. At the moment where we pick up the story again a few of the gods are dissenting from this decision and expressing their unhappiness and dissatisfaction with it11
Without preamble, a man called Zisudra is then introduced – the Sumerian archetype of the biblical patriarch Noah. The text describes him as ‘a pious, god-fearing king’12 and allows us to understand that one of the gods – unnamed – has taken pity on him. The god tells Zisudra:
Take my word, give ear to my instructions:
A flood will sweep over the cult centres.
To destroy the seed of mankind,
Is the decision, the word of the assembly of gods.13
A text break of forty lines follows, which scholars deduce, from the many later recensions of the same myth, ‘must have continued with detailed instructions to Zisudra to build a giant boat and thus save himself from destruction’.14 When the story resumes the cataclysm has already begun: