On Flood Myths

[sdi]

I suppose it's awfully appropriate that the Age of Aquarius, associated as it is with a water-bringer, should be an Age that begins with a massive flood that inundates the world...

I'll also note that, assuming historical dating of Gilgamesh and Aga is accurate, the Sumerian King Lists put the great flood (the one associated with Utnapishtim) around 20,000 BC, not too far from the last Age of Aquarius...

Comments

[next_migration]

Have you ever read Stephen Oppenheimer's Eden in the East? He speculates that many flood myths derive from the flooding of Sundaland after the end of the Ice Age, with the first period of rapid sea level rise about 12,500 years ago, and that the Sumerians were among the cultures influenced by refugees from Sundaland. His thesis is speculative so probably heretical, but there's no real doubt that an occupied region comparable in area to present-day India went underwater, and people tend to notice and remember that kind of thing.

[sdi]

I haven't read the book, though I've heard the theory!

The Sumerian case is interesting, since they have a mythology of seven sagacious "fish-men" coming from the sea and teaching their earliest kings the arts of civilization, but they stopped coming once the deluge occurred. One wonders if these "fish-men" were sailors or explorers from a relatively advanced seafaring civilization, which ceased to be around the time a great flood was afflicting the near east...

(Indeed, echoes of this myth seem to have influenced the entire near east. One example that stands out is the figure of Enoch, the seventh of ten antediluvian patriarchs from Genesis, "who walked with God and was not, for God took him" and identified with Idris from the Quran "who was raised to a high place." These seem to me to be echoes of the Sumerian king Emmeduranki (which sounds suspiciously close to "Enoch"), who is called Euedoreschus by Berossus (which sounds suspiciously close to "Idris"), the seventh of ten antediluvian kings. He is said in the Uruk List of Kings and Sages to have been advised by the "fish-man" Utuabzu, who is said in the Bit Miseri to have "ascended to heaven." I think at some point the "fish-man" story was lost and Utuabzu was conflated with Emmeduranki, as there is a later myth of Emmeduranki himself ascending to heaven and bringing back various arts, particularly divination, to mankind—which are stories also told about Idris.)