Over the millennia, the legend of a great deluge has endured in the biblical story of Noah and in such Middle Eastern myths as the epic of Gilgamesh. Now two distinguished geophysicists have discovered a catastrophic event that changed history, a gigantic flood 7,600 years ago in what is today the Black Sea.
Using sound waves and coring devices to probe the sea floor, William Ryan and Walter Pitman revealed clear evidence that this inland body of water had once been a vast freshwater lake lying hundreds of feet below the level of the world's rising oceans. Sophisticated dating techniques confirmed that 7,600 years ago the mounting seas had burst through the narrow Bosporus valley, and the salt water of the Mediterranean had poured into the lake with unimaginable force, racing over beaches and up rivers, destroying or chasing all life before it. The rim of the lake, which had served as an oasis, a Garden of Eden for farms and villages in a vast region of semi-desert, became a sea of death. The people fled, dispersing their languages, genes, and memories.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Contents
List of Maps
Note to the Reader
Prologue: Witnesses
ONE: THE DISCOVERY OF THE FLOOD STORY
1 Deciphering the Legend
2 Conversions
3 Visions of Palaces
4 The Face of the Deep
5 Ur of the Chaldees
TWO: THE DISCOVERY OF A REAL FLOOD
6 Hidden River
7 Gibraltar's Waterfall
8 Vanished Deserts
9 Pontus Axenus
10 Red Hill
11 Aquanauts
12 Immigrants
13 Close Encounter
14 Beachcombers
15 Back of the Envelope
THREE: WHO WAS THERE, AND WHERE DID THEY GO?
16 Anybody There?
17 The Diaspora
18 Family Trees
19 The Guslar's Song
FOUR: THE FLOOD STORIES TOLD
20 On a Golden Pond
21 Other Myths
Epilogue: A Telling of Atrahasis
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
List of Maps
Mesopotamia and the Levant
The voyage of the Chain up the Bosporus in 1961
The Glomar Challenger drilling the floor of the Mediterranean Sea in 1970
The Atlantis II mapping and sampling the seabed of the Black Sea in 1969
The Kerch Strait and the path of the ancient Don River
The path of meltwater delivered from the Eurasian ice sheet, beginning around 12,500 B.C.
The historical connection of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean
Anatolia at the time farming began to spread
Inferred human migrations west and northwest into Europe in the wake of the Black Sea flood
Inferred human migrations northeast into Asia and southeast into the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia
The Takla Makan desert of western China with the shoreline of the giant lake that formerly filled the Tarim Basin
A Sumerian map of their world
