Walter C. Pitman, William B. F. RyanNoah's FloodScientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed HistoryMonika says:
Everybody knows the story of the Flood and Noah’s Arc from the Bible, but it’s not so well known that this story in a very similar form is part of the mythology of various peoples around the world. The Gilgamesh epic is the oldest testimony of the Flood, only that the man who is told by God to build a ship and flee with his family is called Utnapishtim instead of Noah. The parallels with the Bible story are so obvious that it can’t be a mere coincidence. Is this the original version of the old myth that is based on an actual event? For the first time scientists managed to present conclusive evidence for a flood disaster that occurred 7600 years ago in the area of the Black Sea. The Black Sea is connected to the Mediterranean Sea by a narrow waterway called Bosporus. Drillings from this strait and from the coastal shelf of the Black Sea produced amazing results. Through the Bosporus runs an ancient underground river from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, i. e. against today’s surface current. Analysis of the sediments shows that the Black Sea used to be a giant fresh water lake with no connection to the open sea whose water level was more than 100 m below present sea level during the last ice age. When the level of the oceans rose again with the melting of the glaciers the Bosporus dam broke around 5600 BC and the Mediterrenean flooded the lower Black Sea basin in a giant spectacle of Nature that impressed eyewitnesses so much that the story of the Flood outlastet the millenia. The people who just began to settle down to farming and stockbreeding had to leave this Garden of Eden and scattered in all directions. The origin of the proto-Sumerians had been unknown to archeologists for a long time. Are they one of the surviving peoples who had to run from the Black Sea Flood? Another interesting fact is that the Indo-European languages originated in the area of the Black Sea just as the first predynastic Egyptians. Perhaps Pitman and Ryan discovered the cradle of Culture. At any rate many questions that were not explained by earlier interpretations may be answered by this new theory. Their book is a fascinating outlook on the early history of mankind, written in a factual but gripping style. Sheer pleasure for everyone interested in the subject matter. Published by Simon and Schuster, New York (1999) |
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Copyright 1999 Christina Gross & Monika Hübner |
