this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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I'm not anything that can be remotely considered religious, but flood myths are fairly common in ancient folklore, so if anything from the Bible might have been true, then there might have been a great flood at some point.
There was. The Tigris and Euphrates flooded several times. Noah’s Ark is a retelling of an older Sumerian myth.
Isn't there also evidence the red sea was a below sea level valley at one point? Until the ocean eroded the barrier?
I'd heard this about the Black and Mediterranean Seas but not the Red. Maybe?
there definitely wasn't some earth-covering flood, since that would take a stupendous amount of water that later just vanished.
What is likely however is raised sea levels, drowning low-lying areas like the dogger bank. It's pretty insane how much more land we used to have, doggerland is/was about the size of the netherlands and since it would have been extremely fertile it's likely it was a very important area for people in the past, so frankly it could very well be the source for the atlantis myth even.
There are lots of flood myths because humans generally settle near large bodies of water. Large bodies of water tend to flood, sometimes catastrophically.
The Atlantis "myth" was made up by Plato to make a point about what would happen to Athens if they got too big for their britches.
Civilizations that arose around rivers that flooded annually had gods that were largely unconcerned with human matters.
Civilizations that arose around rivers that flooded randomly had angry gods who wanted to punish people.
Atlantis was a hypothetical society thought up for an argument that everyone immediately took way too seriously.
Noah's ark was probably originally a famine narrative.
After the Babylonian captivity we see the Babylonian flood mythos in the extant version of the story.
Sometimes similarities between world religions can be explained by common physical features, like stories of resurrection associated with snakes (who shed skin) or with the planet Venus (which dips below the horizon for several days before reemergence).
But sometimes it's because people are just plagiarizing.