The Flood of the Black Sea.
National Geographic’s voyage with explorer Robert Ballard posted a headline dispatch on September 13, 2000 upon finding a cedar structure 311 feet (95 meters) below the surface of the Black Sea. If you have read our Raising Up Pharaoh blog from Post 1 until now (all posts can be reached using the tool at the bottom of our Blog tab), you will already know from the NASA graph in Post #2 that the world’s seas rose 120 meters over the past 20,000 years—since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). If we use that NASA graph, sea level rose those 95 meters over the past 14,000 years, since 12,000 BC. Sometime during that period, the sea rose high enough near what is now Istanbul to break through the land bridge then existing between Asia and Europe, and it flooded a valley the size of Costa Rica that was 95 meters below today’s sea level. A landlocked lake below sea level is not strange, e.g. the Dead Sea today is 427 meters, 1,401 feet, below sea level. But the Black Sea is important to our exploring some of man’s cultural experiences during the Global Warming since the LGM. The Black Sea’s rise to sea level produced major cultural changes that lasted for millennia.
According to the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis of Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman (supported by other data) cited in the National Geographic website, Ballard & The Black Sea (B&BS), that flooding began 5,500 BC, i.e. 7,500 years ago. From the NASA graph (see link above) in 7,500 BP, the sea level was only 10 meters below where it is today when it first poured over the land bridge.
Freshwater lake 5600 BC and areas that flooded ca. 5500 BC (in white) to become today’s Black Sea. Source.
What started as a trickle would have quickly eroded a path and became a torrent. The B&BS website’s tab “The Theory” estimates the flow raised the lake at the bottom of that valley six inches per day, overflowing its banks. The residents would initially have had a few days to evacuate their homes and go to higher ground. One can imagine the people thinking, at first, that some river feeding the lake had flooded, so they probably moved several times over the next year or two until their seashore had stabilized. By that point, we can imagine that their previously confident views of nature and the gods had been firmly destabilized. Perhaps, as they retreated from the relentlessly rising water for a couple of years, many thought their gods intended to wipe them out. The folks on the North Shore would have migrated into what is now called Bulgaria, Romania, the Crimea, Ukraine, the Caucuses Mountains, central Russian uplands, and the Steppes. Folks on the South Shore would have migrated into Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Zagros Mountains, and what is now called Iran, Pakistan, and India. Wherever they went, you can bet they talked about their flood.
The B&BS website’s tab “The Legends” cites several of the many legends of massive flooding in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. That cataclysmic Black Sea event happened just 2,200 years before the setting of my novels. The novels are set at the end of prehistory, when the first oral traditions of the Gilgamesh epic were likely to have begun. The Gilgamesh epic includes a man, Utnapishtim, who survived a big flood—The Big Flood as far as he was concerned. There are other versions of this Mesopotamian flood myth, with heroes named Atrahasis, Ziusudra, and Noah. In one or in a composite of these many versions, there is that important germ of truth: there was a big flood for those living around the “Black Lake,” many floods–some severe–over the Mesopotamian alluvial plain, and the 120 meter rising of the sea up the erstwhile valley that filled to become today’s Persian Gulf. The survivors’ worldview included those floods, and their legends are still with us.
Many Big Floods.
I want to revisit a fact I introduced in my Post #2: the movement of the water produced by the melting of the ice above sea level since the Last Glacial Maximum. That melt water raised the global sea level 120 meters over the past 20,000 years. The seas now cover about 70% of the earth’s surface of 5.1 x 10E8 km² and have risen 0.120 km since the LGM. That comes out to (see Endnote) 10 million cubic miles of melt water flowing downhill to enter the sea. As it did so, that water would form rivers where it could flow directly to the sea, form lakes in depressions until they overflowed forming more rivers, and some lakes would burst natural land bridges causing rapid flooding. Moreover, with temperatures above freezing after the LGM, rains would add to the melt water runoff an additional flow of water equal to the everyday flows of existing rivers in North America, Europe, and Asia (as noted in blog #2). Remember, the 10 million cubic miles of melt water is added to the flows of rivers, which recycle the rain to the sea. This melt and rain runoff would only happen on the three continents that had glaciers which melted: northern North America, Europe, and Asia. All three were populated during the LGM. Contributing to the flood legends in North America was the periodic draining of the world’s largest-ever melt water Lake Agassiz. In Europe, there were likely smaller but similar flash floods, but the relentless rise of the sea flooded huge tracts of land to this day. In the map below, note the dotted lines of present coastlines and note the land that was flooded. If portions of the terrain were flat–say the Channel between England and France–then the advance of the rising sea level could have been swift enough to create legends, not just of the threat to human life, but also a nostalgia for beautiful meadows and lakes that were submerged and forever lost to those who survived.
Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum. Credit to Don’s Maps.
These and other types of floods would create a cultural memory of cataclysmic flood stories among descendants of the survivors on all three continents. Such memories were verbally passed on, eventually codified in memorized myths in prehistory, and finally recorded in historic (literate) times. The same process applies to other circumstances creating floods all over the world, such as tsunamis resulting from earthquakes and, perhaps, celestial objects crashing into the sea. A common thread of many flood legends is the causative role of the deities in bringing about the floods, the deities’ reasoning, and the deities willingness to save some faithful man and his nearest and dearest, and start mankind over from that man’s seed. What this common thread reveals is a generalized perception, dating back over 5,000 years: that deities are concerned about man’s behavior; deities judge some behavior as bad and some as good; deities hold those who despise the deities and their moral commands as guilty of a summary death sentence–without limit on the number to be condemned. That’s a very old idea that still has legs today.
Thanks for visiting. Hope you enjoyed this post, and take something away to think about.
Endnote
Calculation of 10 million cubic miles of melt water. (0.70 sea/surface x (5.1 x 10E8 km² surface) x 0.120 km high) = 0.43 x 10E8 km³ x 0.24 miles³/km³ = 0.1 x 10E8 = 10E7 = 10,000,000 cubic miles of melt water