Flood myth
The god Ea, who had created humans out of clay and divine blood, secretly warns the hero Utnapishtim of the impending flood and gives him detailed instructions for building a boat so that life may survive.
[5][6] There is also the similar Eridu Genesis (c. 1600 BCE),[7] known from tablets found in the ruins of Nippur in the late 1890s and translated by assyriologist Arno Poebel.
[10] In the Hebrew Genesis (9th century BC), the god Yahweh, who had created man out of the dust of the ground,[11] decides to flood the earth because of the corrupted state of mankind.
[17][18][19] In Zoroastrian Mazdaism, Ahriman tries to destroy the world with a drought, which Mithra ends by shooting an arrow into a rock, from which a flood springs; one man survives in an ark with his cattle.
The Titan Prometheus, who had created humans from clay, tells the secret plan to Deucalion, advising him to build an ark in order to be saved.
[22] The Cheyenne, a North American Great Plains tribe, has a tradition where a flood altered the course of their history, perhaps occurring in the Missouri River Valley.
[26] Archaeologist Bruce Masse stated that some of the narratives of a great flood discovered in many cultures around the world may be linked to an oceanic asteroid impact that occurred between Africa and Antarctica, around the time of a solar eclipse, that caused a tsunami.
[29] His hypothesis suggests that a meteor or comet crashed into the Indian Ocean around 3000–2800 BCE, and created the 18-mile (29 km) undersea Burckle Crater and Fenambosy Chevron, and generated a giant tsunami that flooded coastal lands.
[34] The geography of the Mesopotamian area changed considerably with the filling of the Persian Gulf after sea waters rose following the last glacial period.
Global sea levels were about 120 m (390 ft) lower around 18,000 BP and rose until 8,000 BP when they reached current levels, which are now an average 40 m (130 ft) above the floor of the Gulf, which was a huge (800 km × 200 km, 500 mi × 120 mi) low-lying and fertile region in Mesopotamia, in which human habitation is thought to have been strong around the Gulf Oasis for 100,000 years.
[35][36] The historian Adrienne Mayor theorizes that global flood stories may have been inspired by ancient observations of seashells and fish fossils in inland and mountain areas.
Although the tsunami hit the South Aegean Sea and Crete, it did not affect cities in the mainland of Greece, such as Mycenae, Athens, and Thebes, which continued to prosper, indicating that it had a local rather than a region-wide effect.
[47] In Pierre-Simon Laplace's book Exposition Du Systême Du Monde (The System of the World), first published in 1796, he stated:[48] [T]he greater part of men and animals drowned in a universal deluge, or destroyed by the violence of the shock given to the terrestrial globe; whole species destroyed; all the monuments of human industry reversed: such are the disasters which a shock of a comet would produce.
