by
“The December 2010 issue of
Current Anthropology discusses this subject and suggests that the flooding of both the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea
took place around the same time”.
I
would concur with those who have suggested that the massive Black Sea flood was
the same as the biblical Genesis event, though not with the dating of it to 7000
years ago.
Tim
Radford, for one, has connected the Black Sea flood to Noah, in his article of
2000:
Evidence found of Noah's ark flood victims
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2000/sep/14/internationalnews.archaeology
Marine
archaeologists have found the first evidence of a people who perished in a
great flood of the Black Sea that has been linked with the story of Noah's ark.
Using
robot underwater vehicles more than 300ft below the sea's surface, they have
begun to map a rolling landscape, fed by meandering streams and marked with
wattle and daub houses, that was flooded more than 7,000 years ago.
The
discovery was announced yesterday by Robert Ballard, the scientist who
discovered the wrecked Titanic.
The
Black Sea was once a freshwater lake, well below sea level. About 7,000 years
ago, according to geological evidence, the rising Mediterranean sea pushed a
channel through what is now the Bosphorus, and then seawater poured in at about
200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. The Black Sea would have widened at the
rate of a mile a day, submerging the original shoreline under hundreds of feet
of salty water.
Nearly
100,000 square miles were inundated. Sea shells on the beaches of the modern
Black Sea are of marine origin, but deep below the surface there are layers of
shells of freshwater molluscs, mute witnesses to the shoreline of the ancient
lake.
There
are many myths concerning a great flood in the region. There was a first
mention in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian work. The Romans and Greeks
had the legend of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who saved their children and animals by
floating away in a giant box. The Hebrew book of Genesis most famously tells
the story of Noah, who found grace in the eyes of the Lord, when all around him
were wicked. Noah was warned of a forthcoming flood, and built a huge
"ark" to hold his family and all the animals in pairs. Noah survived
when all perished. Tradition has it that his ark came to rest on the slopes of
Mount Ararat in Turkey.
Dr
Ballard began exploring the Black Sea in the Hull registered ship Northern
Horizon, and used side-scanning sonar to look for interesting shapes on the
seabed over a 200-sq-mile area, 12 miles off the Turkish coast, near Sinop.
The
instruments detected "targets" worth a closer look, so video cameras
mounted on underwater robot submarines were put to use. "We found two
ancient ships last night," said Dr Ballard speaking by phone from his
research vessel yesterday. "What we were trying to do in our wildest
dreams - which is exactly what happened - was find a structure that was
evidence, not a sunken ship, not trash and not geology, but characteristic of human
habitation."
They
found it. Above an area submerged too deeply for human divers, the sonar
instruments revealed details of the landscape. On September 9 they sent robot
scouts down to objects which looked like beams and branches, debris that might
have been the stiffening for wattle and daub homes.
They
found a rectangular area up to 12ft by 25 ft, over which an ancient mud and
wooden house had collapsed, and they found tools of highly polished stone,
together with fragments of ceramics.
"What
we are looking at is a culture that is definitely thousands of years old,"
said Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was
also on the ship. "The flood is an event that is geologically known, and
for us to find a structure in 150 metres of water means that these people were
definitely living there before it flooded, so it is pre-Greek. It is a
different world and it deserves a great deal of attention and years of study to
help us truly identify who these people were."
Dr
Ballard is perhaps oceanography's answer to Indiana Jones. As a marine
scientist in the US, two decades ago, he took part in the dramatic discovery of
communities of strange creatures living in submarine volcanic vents two miles
below the ocean surface. He also found the submerged liner Titanic, and tracked
the wreck of the German battleship, Bismarck, and the fleet which the US navy
lost off Guadalcanal in the Pacific.
He
formed his own exploration institute in Mystic, Connecticut, before going on to
lead National Geographic expeditions to probe the mud of the Mediterranean and
the Black Sea for lost treasures - and now a lost world.
But he
does not claim to have found the landscape of Noah. " We really cannot say
in any way, shape or form that this is the biblical flood. All we can say is
that there has been a major flood, that people were living here when it
happened. We prefer to stick with the facts -and who knows where those facts
will lead us."
About a decade later than this, some have also begun to connect the great
Persian Gulf flood to the Black Sea one, at least in terms of chronology. Thus:
“The December 2010 issue of Current Anthropology
discusses this subject and suggests that the flooding of both the Persian Gulf and the Black
Sea took place around the same time”.
Lewis Page tells of how the Persian Gulf was swallowed up by the Indian
Ocean (was this the ancient sea that has been called the “Tethys Sea”?):
Lost ancient
civilisation's ruins lie beneath Gulf, says boffin
'Oldest boat' perhaps used by Garden of Eden
refugees
Refugees from a lost civilisation whose
ruins and relics lie submerged on the seabed deep beneath the Persian Gulf may
have founded ancient, advanced Middle Eastern societies thousands of years ago
in the time before the Pharaohs.
According to Jeffrey Rose, a Birmingham
uni archaeologist, recent excavations and discoveries indicate that a large
number of substantial and relatively sophisticated settlements sprang up around
the shores of the Persian Gulf quite suddenly perhaps 7,500 years ago.
“Where before there had been but a
handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites
appear virtually overnight,” says Rose. “These settlements boast well-built,
permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated
pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in
the world.”
That was all big stuff back then: even
the ancient Egyptians, living along the unfeasibly fertile Nile delta and so
not required to scuffle for a living as much as most prehistoric people, had
yet to really get their act together back then. Rose believes that the
suddenly-appearing Gulf shore settlements may have been established by refugees
from a highly developed society living mainly on what is now the bottom of the
sea – the Gulf having only flooded about 8,000 years ago.
Before the Indian Ocean extended and
swallowed them up, Rose contends, the lands now under water would have been a
"Persian Gulf Oasis" - a rich and fertile region perhaps home to
humans for as much as 100,000 years before it was submerged. Unlike the hostile
deserts surrounding it, the Oasis would have been verdant and well supplied
with fresh water from the ancient Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Baton
Rivers – not to mention underground springs.
Parts of the region would still have
been flooded, but at the driest stage there would have been fertile Oasis
islands equivalent in land area to the British Isles in the Gulf area, Rose
believes.
….
In the following articles I give my own view of:
The Location of Paradise (Genesis
2:10-2:14). Part One
https://www.academia.edu/25789228/The_Location_of_Paradise._Part_Two_Centre_of_World
in relation to the riverine system of early Genesis.
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