The Origin of Stories of a Great Flood
From Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law
We have still to ask, What was the origin, of diluvial traditions? how did men come so commonly to believe that at some time or other the earth, or at all events the whole inhabited portion of it, had been submerged under the waters of a mighty flood in which almost the entire human race perished? The old answer to the question was that such a catastrophe actually occurred, that we have a full and authentic record of it in the Book of Genesis, and that the many legends of a great flood which we find scattered so widely among mankind embody the more or less imperfect, confused and distorted reminiscences of that tremendous cataclysm.
A favourite argument in support of this view was drawn from marine shells and fossils, which were supposed to have been left high and dry in deserts and on mountain-tops by the retiring waters of the Noachian deluge. Sea-shells found on mountains were adduced by Tertullian as evidence that the waters had once covered the earth, though he did not expressly associate them with the flood recorded in Genesis.
When excavations for repairing the city of Verona, brought to light a multitude of curious petrifactions, the discovery gave rise to much speculation, in which Noah and the ark of course figured conspicuously.
Yet they were not allowed to pass unchallenged ; for a philosophical Italian naturalist, Fracastoro, was bold enough to point out difficulties in the popular hypothesis. " That inundation, he observed, was too transient: it consisted principally of fluviatile waters ; and if it had transported shells to great distances, must have strewed them over the surface, not buried them at vast depths in the interior of mountains. His clear exposition of the evidence would have terminated the discussion for ever, if the passions of mankind had not been enlisted in the dispute."
Towards the end of the seventeenth century the field of geology was invaded by an army of theologians, recruited in Italy, Germany, France, and England, who darkened counsel and left confusion worse confounded. " Henceforward, they who refused to subscribe to the position, that all marine organic remains were proofs of the Mosaic deluge, were exposed to the imputation of disbelieving the whole of the sacred writings. Scarcely any step had been made in approximating to sound theories since the time of Fracastoro, more than a hundred years having been lost, in writing down the dogma that organised fossils were mere sports of nature. An additional period of a century and a half was now destined to be consumed in exploding the hypothesis, that organised fossils had all been buried in the solid strata by Noah's flood. Never did a theoretical fallacy, in any branch of science, interfere more seriously with accurate observation and the systematic classification of facts.
In recent times, we may attribute our rapid progress chiefly to the careful determination of the order of succession in mineral masses, by means of their different organic contents, and their regular superposition. But the old diluvialists were induced by their system to confound all the groups of strata together, referring all appearances to one cause and to one brief period, not to a variety of causes acting throughout a long succession of epochs. They saw the phenomena only, as they desired to see them, sometimes misrepresenting facts, and at other times deducing false conclusions from correct data. In short, a sketch of the progress of geology, from the close of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, is the history of a constant and violent struggle of new opinions against doctrines sanctioned by the implicit faith of many generations, and supposed to rest on scriptural authority."
The error thus stigmatized by Sir Charles Lyell died hard Less than a century ago, when William Buckland was appointed Reader in Geology at Oxford, he could still assure his hearers, in his inaugural address to the University, that " the grand fact of an universal deluge at no very remote period is proved on grounds so decisive and incontrovertible, that had we never heard of such an event from Scripture or any other Authority, Geology of itself must have called in the assistance of some such catastrophe to explain the phenomena of diluvial action."
And within our own lifetime another eminent geologist wrote and published as follows : " I have long thought that the narrative in Genesis vii. and viii. can be understood only on the supposition that it is a contemporary journal or log of an eye-witness incorporated by the author of Genesis in his work.
The dates of the rising and fall of the water, the note of soundings over the hill-tops when the maximum was attained, and many other details, as well as the whole tone of the narrative, seem to require this supposition, which also removes all the difficulties of interpretation which have been so much felt."
But if the story of the flood in Genesis is the contemporary log-book of an eye-witness, how are we to explain the remarkable discrepancies it contains with regard to the duration of the flood and the number of the animals admitted to the ark ?
Such a theory, far from solving the difficulties that beset the narrative, would on the contrary render them altogether inexplicable, except on a supposition alike injurious and unjust either to the veracity or to the sobriety of the narrator.
Nor need we linger long over another explanation of flood stories which has of late years enjoyed a good deal of popularity in Germany. On this view the story of the flood has really nothing to do with water or an ark ; it is a myth relating to the sun or the moon or the stars, or all three of them together ; for the learned men who have made this surprising discovery, while they are united in rejecting the vulgar terrestrial interpretation, are by no means agreed among themselves as to all the niceties of their high celestial theory. Some of them will have it that the ark is the sun ; l another thinks that the ark was the moon, that the pitch with which it was caulked is a figurative expression for a lunar eclipse ; and that by the three stories in which the vessel was built we must understand the phases of the lunar orb The latest advocate of the lunar theory seeks to reconcile all contradictions in a higher unity by embarking the human passengers on board the moon, while he leaves the animals to do the best they can for themselves among the stars. It would be doing such learned absurdities too much honour to discuss them seriously. I have noticed them only for the sake of the hilarity with which they are calculated to relieve the tedium of a grave and prolonged discussion.
But when we have dismissed these fancies to their appropriate limbo, we are still confronted with the question of the origin of diluvial traditions. Are they true or false ? Did the flood, which the stories so persistently describe, really happen or did it not? Now so far as the narratives speak of floods which covered the whole world, submerging even the highest mountains and drowning almost all men and animals, we may pronounce with some confidence that they are false ; for, if the best accredited testimony of modern geology can be trusted, no such cataclysm has befallen the earth during the period of man's abode on it. Whether, as some philosophers suppose, a universal ocean covered the whole surface of our planet long before man had appeared upon it, is quite a different question.
Leibnitz, for example, imagined the earth " to have been originally a burning luminous mass, which ever since its creation has been undergoing refrigeration. When the outer crust had cooled down sufficiently to allow the vapours to be condensed, they fell, and formed a universal ocean, covering the loftiest mountains, and investing the whole globe." A similar view of a universal primeval ocean, formed by the condensation of aqueous vapour while the originally molten matter of the planet gradually lost its heat, follows almost necessarily from the celebrated Nebular Hypothesis as to the origin of the stellar universe, which was first propounded by Kant and afterwards developed by Laplace Lamarck, too, " was deeply impressed with a belief prevalent amongst the older naturalists that the primeval ocean invested the whole planet long after it became the habitation of living beings." But such speculations, even if they might have occurred to primitive man, are to be clearly distinguished from stories of a deluge which destroyed the majority of mankind, for these stories presuppose the existence of the human race on the earth and therefore can hardly refer to a time earlier than the Pleistocene period.
But though stories of such tremendous cataclysms are almost certainly fabulous, it is possible and indeed probable that under a mythical husk many of them may hide a kernel of truth ; that is, they may contain reminiscences of inundations which really overtook particular districts, but which in passing through the medium of popular tradition have been magnified into world-wide catastrophes. The records of the past abound in instances of great floods which have spread havoc far and wide ; and it would be strange indeed if the memory of some of them did not long persist among the descendants of the generation which experienced them. For examples of such disastrous deluges we need go no farther than the neighbouring country of Holland, which has suffered from them again and again. In the thirteenth century " the low lands along the Vlie, often threatened, at last sank in the waves. The German Ocean rolled in upon the inland Lake of Flevo.
The stormy Zuyder Zee began its existence by engulfing thousands of Frisian villages, with all their population, and by spreading a chasm between kindred peoples. The political, as well as the geographical, continuity of the land was obliterated by this tremendous deluge. The Hollanders were cut off from their relatives in the east by as dangerous a sea as that which divided them from their Anglo-Saxon brethren in Britain."
Again, early in the sixteenth century, a tempest blowing from the north, drove the waters of the ocean on the low coast of Zealand more rapidly than they could be carried off through the Straits of Dover. The dykes of South Beveland burst, the sea swept over the land, hundreds of villages were overwhelmed, and a tract of country, torn from the province, was buried beneath the waves. South Beveland became an island, and the stretch of water which divides it from the continent has ever since been known as " the Drowned Land." Yet at low tide the estuary so formed can be forded by seafaring men who know the ground. During the rebellion which won for Holland its national independence, a column of Spanish troops, led by a daring officer, Colonel Mondragon, waded across the ford by night, with the water breast high, and relieved a garrison which was beleaguered by the rebels in the city of Tergoes.
Again, "towards the end of the year 70, still another and a terrible misfortune descended upon the Netherlands. An inundation, more tremendous than any which had yet been recorded in those annals so prolific in such catastrophes, now swept the whole coast from Flanders to Friesland. Not the memorable deluge of the thirteenth century, out of which the Zuyder Zee was born ; not that in which the waters of the Dollart had closed for ever over the villages and churches of Gröningen ; not one of those perpetually recurring floods by which the inhabitants of the Netherlands, year after year, were recalled to an anxious remembrance of the watery chaos out of which their fatherland had been created, and into which it was in daily danger of resolving itself again, had excited so much terror and caused so much destruction. A continued and violent gale from the north-west had long been sweeping the Atlantic waters into the North Sea, and had now piled them upon the fragile coasts of the provinces.
The dykes, tasked beyond their strength, burst in every direction. The cities of Flanders, to a considerable distance inland, were suddenly invaded by the waters of the ocean. The whole narrow peninsula of North Holland was in imminent danger of being swept away for ever. Between Amsterdam and Meyden, the great Diemer dyke was broken through in twelve places. The Hand-bos, a bulwark formed of oaken piles, fastened with metal clamps, moored with iron anchors, and secured by gravel and granite, was snapped to pieces like packthread. The ' Sleeper,' a dyke thus called, because it was usually left in repose by the elements, except in great emergencies, alone held firm, and prevented the consummation of the catastrophe. Still the ocean poured in upon the land with terrible fury. Dort, Rotterdam, and many other cities were, for a time, almost submerged. Along the coast, fishing vessels, and even ships of larger size, were floated up into the country, where they entangled themselves in groves and orchards, or beat to pieces the roofs and walls of houses.
The destruction of life and of property was enormous throughout the maritime provinces, but in Friesland the desolation was complete. There nearly all the dykes and sluices were dashed to fragments ; the country, far and wide, converted into an angry sea. The steeples and towers of inland cities became islands of the ocean. Thousands of human beings were swept out of existence in a few hours.
Whole districts of territory, with all their villages, farms and churches, were rent from their places borne along by the force of the waves, sometimes to be lodged in another part of the country, sometimes to be entirely engulfed. Multitudes of men, women, children, of horses, oxen, sheep, and every domestic animal, were struggling in the waves in every direction. Every boat, and every article which could serve as a boat, were eagerly seized upon. Every house was inundated ; even the graveyards gave up their dead. The living infant in his cradle, and the long-buried corpse in his coffin, floated side by side. The ancient flood seemed about to be renewed. Everywhere, upon the tops of trees, upon the steeples of churches, human beings were clustered, praying to God for mercy, and to their fellow-men for assistance. As the storm at last was subsiding, boats began to ply in every direction, saving those who were , still struggling in the water, picking fugitives from roofs and tree-tops, and collecting the bodies of those already drowned.
Colonel Robles, Seigneur de Billy, formerly much hated for his Spanish or Portuguese blood, made himself very active in this humane work. By his exertions, and those of the troops belonging to Gröningen, many lives were rescued, and gratitude replaced the ancient animosity. It was estimated that at least twenty thousand persons were destroyed in the province of Friesland alone. Throughout the Netherlands, one hundred thousand persons perished. The damage done to property, the number of animals engulfed in the sea, were almost incalculable."
On these and other occasions the floods which have laid great tracts of Holland under water have been caused, not by heavy rains, but by risings of the sea. Now it is to be observed that in not a few diluvial traditions the cause alleged for the deluge is in like manner not the fall of rain but an incursion of the ocean. Thus we have found a rising of the sea assigned as the cause of the flood by the natives of the islands of Nias, Engano, Rotti, Formosa, Tahiti,6 Hawaii,7 Rakaanga, and the Pelew Islands, by Indian tribes on the west coast of America from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Alaska in the north, and by Eskimo on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The occurrence of such stories far and wide on the coasts and among the islands of the Pacific is very significant, for that ocean is subject from time to time to great earthquake-waves, which have often inundated the very coasts and islands where stories of great floods caused by the rising of the sea are told. Are we not allowed, nay compelled, to trace some at least of these stories to these inundations as their true cause? All the probabilities seem to be in favour of a causal rather than of an accidental connexion between the two things.
To take instances of such earthquake-waves in the Pacific, we may notice the dreadful calamities which have repeatedly overtaken Callao, the seaport of Lima in Peru. One of the most fearful of which we have any account happened on the oth of October 687. The earthquake " began at four in the morning, with the destruction of several publick edifices and houses, whereby great numbers of persons perished ; but this was little more than a presage of what was to follow, and preserved the greatest part of the inhabitants from being buried under the ruins of the city. The shock was repeated at six in the morning with such impetuous concussions, that whatever had withstood the first, was now laid in ruins ; and the inhabitants thought themselves very fortunate in being only spectators of the general devastation from the streets and squares, to which they had directed their flight on the first warning. During this second concussion the sea retired considerably from its bounds, and returning in mountainous waves, totally overwhelmed Callao, and the neighbouring parts, together with the miserable inhabitants." The same wave which submerged the city carried ships a league into the country, and drowned man and beast for fifty leagues along the shore.6
Again, on the 8th of October 76, Callao was over-whelmed by another earthquake and another sea-wave. "
At half an hour after ten at night, five hours and three quarters before the full of the moon, the concussions began with such violence, that in little more than three minutes, the greatest part, if not all the buildings, great and small, in the whole city, were destroyed, burying under their ruins those inhabitants who had not made sufficient haste into the streets and squares; the only places of safety in these terrible convulsions of nature. At length the horrible effects of this shock ceased : but the tranquillity was of short duration ; concussions returning with such frequent repetitions, that the inhabitants, according to the account sent of it, computed two hundred in the first twenty-four hours. . . . The fort of Callao, at the very same hour, sunk into the like ruins ; but what it suffered from the earthquake in its buildings, was inconsiderable, when compared with the terrible catastrophe which followed ; for the sea, as is usual on such occasions, receding to a considerable distance, returned in mountainous waves foaming with the violence of the agitation, and suddenly turned Callao, and the neighbouring country, into a sea.
This was not, however, totally performed by the first swell of the waves ; for the sea retiring further, returned with still more impetuosity ; the stupendous water covering both the walls and other buildings of the place ; so that whatever had escaped the first, was now totally overwhelmed by those terrible mountains of waves ; and nothing remained except a piece of the wall of the fort of Santa Cruz, as a memorial of this terrible devastation. There were then twenty-three ships and vessels, great and small, in the harbour, of which nineteen were absolutely sunk, and the other four, among which was a frigate called St. Fermin, carried by the force of the waves to a great distance up the country. This terrible inundation extended to other ports on the coast, as Cavallos and Guanape ; and the towns of Chancay, Guara, and the valleys della Baranca, Sape, and Pativilca, underwent the same fate as the city of Lima. The number of persons who perished in the ruin of that city, before the st of the same month of October, according to the bodies found, amounted to 1300, besides the maimed and wounded, many of which lived only a short time in torture. At Callao, where the number of inhabitants amounted to about 4000, two hundred only escaped ; and twenty-two of these by means of the above-mentioned fragment of a wall.
According to an account sent to Lima after this accident, a volcano in Lucanas burst forth the same night and ejected such quantities of water, that the whole country was overflowed ; and in the mountain near Patas, called Conversiones de Caxamarquilla, three other volcanoes burst, discharging frightful torrents of water."l From the last part of the foregoing account it appears that a flood of water may be caused by the eruption of a volcano alone.
More recent observations have proved that the oceanic disturbances set up by great earthquakes are not necessarily limited to a short stretch of coast, but that they may be propagated in the form of huge waves across the whole breadth of the Pacific.
For example, on the rd of December 8, Simoda in Japan was devastated by an earthquake, and the waves to which it gave rise crossed the North Pacific Ocean and broke on the coast of California.
Again, a violent shock of earthquake occurred near Arica, on the coast of Peru, on the th of August 868, and the agitation which it created in the sea was felt north and south along the west coast of America ; the waves rose in wild turmoil for several days about the Sandwich Islands, and broke on the Samoan Islands, the east coast of Australia, New Zealand, and the Chatham Islands The French frigate Néréide, bound at the time for Cape Horn, encountered in latitude ° S great packs of jagged icebergs, freshly broken off, which the mighty flood had set free as it penetrated beneath the Antarctic ice.
Again, during the earthquake which befell Iquique in Peru on the 9th of May 877, the Pacific Ocean rose in great waves on the opposite coast from Kamtchatka and Japan in the north to New Zealand and the Chatham Islands in the south At the Samoan Islands the waves were from six to twelve feet high ; in Japan the sea rose and fell from five to ten feet; in New Zealand the waves varied from three to twenty feet in height Indeed, on the coasts of South America and Japan these earthquake waves are often more destructive and therefore more dreaded than the earthquakes themselves In Japan, which is subject to very frequent movements of the earth, regular calendars of earthquakes are kept, and from them we learn that the eastern coasts of the country have often been devastated by sea waves which have carried off from one thousand to one hundred thousand of the people. On the night of th June 896, for example, such a wave swept over the north-west coast of Nipon for a length of seventy miles, causing a loss of nearly thirty thousand lives. At one place four steamers were carried inland, whilst a hundred and seventy-six vessels of various sorts lined the foot of the hills. Indeed, the ancient capital of Japan, which once numbered a million of inhabitants and included the palace of a Shogun, had to be abandoned in consequence of the inundations which broke over it from the sea in the years 69 and 9. The site is now occupied by the quiet village of Kamakura, sheltered by sand dunes and crooked pines. Only a gigantic bronze image of Buddha, fifty feet high, cast more than six centuries ago, rises in solemn majesty and peace to attest the grandeur that has passed away.
On coasts where the shock of an earthquake is commonly accompanied or followed by an inroad of the sea, it is natural that the first impulse of the natives, on feeling the concussion, should be to take refuge on a height where they may be safe from the dreaded rush of the water. Now we have seen that the Araucanian Indians of Chili, who have a tradition of a great deluge and fear a repetition of the disaster, fly for safety to a mountain when they feel a violent shock of earth-quake ; and that the Fijians, who have likewise a tradition of a calamitous flood, used to keep canoes in readiness against the recurrence of a similar inundation Taking all these facts into account we may accept as reasonable and probable the explanation which the distinguished American ethnologist, Horatio Hale, gave of the Fijian tradition of a deluge. Commenting on the statement that the Fijians formerly kept canoes ready against a repetition of the flood, he writes as follows :_
" This statement (which we heard from others in the same terms) may induce us to inquire whether there might not have been some occurrence in the actual history of the islands to give rise to this tradition, and the custom here mentioned. On the 7th of November 87, the Pacific Ocean was traversed from east to west by an immense wave, which, taking its rise with the shock of an earthquake in Chili, was felt as far as the Bonin Islands. At the Sandwich Islands, according to the account given by Mr. Jarvis in his History, p. , the water rose, on the east coast of Hawaii, twenty feet above high-water mark, inundated the low lands, swept away several villages, and destroyed many lives. Similar undulations have been experienced at these islands on several occasions. If we suppose (what is no way improbable) that, at some time within the last three or four thousand years, a wave of twice this height crossed the ocean, and swept over the Vitian [Fijian] Islands, it must have submerged the whole alluvial plain on the east side of Viti-levu, the most populous part of the group. Multitudes would no doubt be destroyed. Others would escape in their canoes, and as Mbengga is a mountainous island, in the neighbourhood of this district, it would naturally be the place of refuge for many."
A similar explanation would obviously apply to the other legends of a great flood recorded in the islands of the Pacific, for all these islands have probably suffered in like manner from the invasion of huge earthquake-waves. At least, in the present state of our knowledge, it seems safer to accept provisionally the view of the eminent American ethnologist than to adopt, the theory of an eminent German ethnologist, who would explain all these Polynesian traditions as solar, lunar, and stellar myths
If some of the traditions of a great flood caused by a rising of the sea may thus rest on an historical basis, there can be no reason why some of the traditions of a great flood caused by heavy rain should not be equally well founded. Here in England we who live in flat parts of the country are familiar with local floods produced by this cause ; not many years ago, for example, large tracts of Norfolk, including the city of Norwich, were laid under water by a sudden and violent fall of rain, resembling a cloudburst A similar cause inundated the low-lying parts of Paris a few years ago, creating anxiety and alarm not only among the inhabitants, but among the friends of the beautiful city in all parts of the world.
It is easy to understand how among an ignorant and unlettered population, whose intellectual horizon hardly extends beyond the limits of their vision, the memory of a similar catastrophe, orally transmitted, might in the course of a few generations grow into the legend of a universal deluge, from which only a handful of favoured individuals had contrived in one way or another to escape.
Even the tradition of a purely local flood, in which many people had been drowned, might unconsciously be exaggerated into vast dimensions by a European settler or traveller, who received it from savages and interpreted it in the light of the Noachian deluge, with which he himself had been familiar from childhood For instance, we have seen that stories of a great flood are reported to be told by the Indians of Guiana.
On this subject it is well to bear in mind the caution given us by Sir Everard F. Im Thurn, who knows these Indians well. " The calamity to which an Indian is perhaps most exposed is to be driven from his home by a sudden rise in the river and consequent flooding of the whole forest. His way to escape is to get into his canoe with his family and his live stock, and to seek temporarily some higher ground, or, as sometimes happens, if none such can be found, the whole party lives as best they may in the canoe until the waters disappear from the face of the earth.
It is well known how in all countries the proverbial ' oldest inhabitant' remembers and tells of the highest flood that ever happened. When therefore the Indian tells in his simple language the tradition of the highest flood which covered all the small world known to him, and tells how the Indians escaped it, it is not difficult to realise that the European hearer, theologically prejudiced in favour of Noah, his flood, and his ark, is apt to identify the two stories with each other, and with many similar stories from many parts of the world."
In this manner it has been proposed to explain the Babylonian and Hebrew traditions of a great flood by the inundations to which the lower valley of the Euphrates and Tigris is annually exposed by the heavy rains and melting snows in the mountains of Armenia. " The basis of the story," we are told, " is the yearly phenomenon of the rainy and stormy season which lasts in Babylonia for several months and during which time whole districts in the Euphrates Valley are submerged. Great havoc was caused by the rains and storms until the perfection of canal systems regulated the overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris, when what had been a curse was converted into a blessing and brought about that astonishing fertility for which Babylonia became famous. The Hebrew story of the Deluge recalls a particularly destructive season that had made a profound impression, and the comparison with the parallel story found on clay tablets of Ashurbanapal's library confirms this view of the local setting of the tale."
On this hypothesis, the great flood was brought about by an unusually heavy fall of rain and snow ; it was only an extraordinary case of an ordinary occurrence, and the widespread devastation which it wrought in the valley imprinted it indelibly on the memory of the survivors and of their descendants In favour of this view it may be said that in the Babylonian and the oldest form of the Hebrew tradition the only alleged cause of the deluge is heavy rain The theory may also be supported by the dangerous inundations to which the country is still yearly liable through the action of the same natural causes.
When Loftus, the first excavator of the ancient city of Erech, arrived in Baghdad, on the 5th f May 89, he found the whole population in a state of the utmost apprehension and alarm.
In consequence of the rapid melting of the snows on the Kurdish mountains, and the enormous influx of water from the Euphrates through the Seglawiyya canal, the Tigris had risen that spring to the unprecedented height of twenty-two and a half feet; which was about five feet above its highest level in ordinary years and exceeded the great rise of , when the river broke down the walls and destroyed no less than seven thousand dwellings in a single night, at a time when the plague was committing the most fearful ravages among the inhabitants A few days before the arrival of the English party, the Turkish pasha of Baghdad had summoned the whole population, as one man, to guard against the general danger by raising a strong high mound completely round the walls Mats of reeds were placed outside to bind the earth compactly together The water was thus prevented from devastating the interior of the city, though it filtered through the fine alluvial soil and stood several feet deep in the cellars Outside the city it reached to within two feet of the top of the bank.
On the side of the river the houses alone, many of them very old and frail, prevented the ingress of the flood. It was a critical juncture. Men were stationed night and day to watch the barriers. If the dam or any of the foundations had failed, Baghdad must have been bodily washed away. Happily the pressure was withstood, and the inundation gradually subsided. The country on all sides for miles was under water, so that there was no possibility of proceeding beyond the dyke, except in the boats which were established as ferries to keep up communication across the flood. The city was for a time an island in a vast inland sea, and it was a full month before the inhabitants could ride beyond the walls. As the summer advanced, the evaporation from the stagnant water caused malaria to such an extent that, out of a population of seventy thousand, no less than twelve thousand died of fever
If the floods caused by the melting of the snow in the Armenian mountains can thus endanger the cities in the river valley down to modern times, it is reasonable to suppose that they did so in antiquity also, and that the Babylonian tradition of the destruction of the city of Shurippak in such an inundation may be well founded. It is true that the city appears to have ultimately perished by fire rather than by water ; but this is quite consistent with the supposition that at some earlier time it had been destroyed by a flood and afterwards rebuilt.
However, the theory which would explain the Babylonian and Hebrew tradition of a great flood by the inundations to which the country is annually exposed, may be combated by an argument drawn from the analogy of Egypt. For Egypt from time immemorial has been similarly subject to yearly inundations ; yet it has never, so far as we know, either evolved a flood legend of its own or accepted the flood legend of its great Oriental rival. If annual floods sufficed to produce the legend in Babylonia, why, it may be asked, did not the same cause produce the same effect in Egypt ?
To meet this difficulty a different explanation of the Babylonian story has been put forward in recent years by an eminent geologist, Professor Eduard Suess of Vienna. Regarding the regular annual changes in the basin of the Euphrates as insufficient to account for the legend, he has recourse to irregular or catastrophic causes. He points out that " there are other peculiarities of the Euphrates valley which may occasionally tend to exacerbate the evils attendant on the inundations. It is very subject to seismic disturbances ; and the ordinary consequences of a sharp earthquake shock might be seriously complicated by its effect on a broad sheet of water. Moreover the Indian Ocean lies within the region of typhoons ; and if, at the height of an inundation, a hurricane from the south-east swept up the Persian Gulf, driving its shallow waters upon the delta and damming back the outflow, perhaps for hundreds of miles up-stream, a diluvial catastrophe, fairly up to the mark of Hasisadra's, might easily result."
Thus Professor Suess would supplement and reinforce the comparatively slow and gentle pressure of rain by the sudden and violent shock of an earthquake and the bursting of a typhoon ; and in support of these two catastrophic causes he appeals to two features in the Hebrew version of the flood story ; or rather to one feature which actually occurs in that version, and to another which he would import into it by altering the text so as to suit his hypothesis. We will consider each of his arguments separately.
First, in regard to the earthquake, Professor Suess points out that in the Hebrew narrative one cause alleged for the deluge is the breaking out of subterranean waters " This rising of great quantities of water from the deep," he says, " is a phenomenon which is a characteristic accompaniment of earthquakes in the alluvial districts of great rivers. The subterranean water is contained in the recent deposits of the great plains on both sides of the stream, and its upper limit rises to right and left above the mean level of the river, its elevation increasing in proportion to the distance from the river. What lies beneath this limit is saturated and mobile ; the ground above it is dry and friable.
When seismic oscillations occur in a district of this kind the brittle upper layer of the ground splits open in long clefts, and from these fissures the underground water, either clear or as a muddy mass, is violently ejected, sometimes in great volumes, sometimes in isolated jets several yards high." For example, the young alluvial land about the Danube in Wallachia was rent by an earthquake in 88, and from the fissures water spouted out in many places fathoms high. The same thing happened when the alluvial plain of the Mississippi, a little below the confluence of the Ohio, was convulsed by an earthquake in January 8: the water that had filled the subterranean cavities forced a passage for itself and blew up the earth with loud explosions, throwing up an enormous quantity of carbonized wood in jets from ten to fifteen feet high, while at the same time the surface of the ground sank, and a black liquid rose as high as a horse's belly. Again, in January 86 a violent shock of earthquake affected the whole region south of Lake Baikal, and in particular the delta of the river Selenga which flows into the lake. In the town of Kudara the wooden lids of the fountains were shot into the air like corks from champagne bottles, and springs of tepid water rose in places to a height of more than twenty feet. So terrified were the Mongols that they caused the Lamas to perform ceremonies to appease the evil spirits which, as they imagined, were shaking the earth.
On this it is to be observed that the reference to subterranean waters as one cause of the deluge occurs only in the Hebrew version of the legend, and even there it is found only in the later Priestly narrative : it does not occur in the earlier Jehovistic narrative, nor in the still earlier Babylonian version ; nor, finally, is it found in the original Sumerian legend from which both the Babylonian and the Hebrew stories are derived. Accordingly it may be dismissed as a late addition to the legend on which it would be unsafe to build any hypothesis.
So much for the earthquake; next for the typhoon, which Professor Suess would also extract from the Biblical narrative. He supposes that while the valley of the Euphrates was still rocking under an earthquake, a great sea-wave, driven by a hurricane up the Persian Gulf, suddenly swept over the land, completing the destruction of the doomed cities and their miserable inhabitants. This tremendous effect he produces very simply by altering the vowel-points of the Hebrew text in two passages so as to read " the flood from the sea " instead of " the flood of waters." The textual change, it is true, is very slight, for it extends only to the vowel-points and leaves the consonants unaffected. But though the vowel-points form no part of the original text of the Scriptures, having been introduced into it not earlier than the sixth century of our era, they are not to be lightly altered, since they represent the traditional pronunciation of the sacred words, as it had been handed down with scrupulous care, generation after generation, by a guild of technically trained scholars, the Massorets, as they were called, who " devoted themselves to preserving not only the exact writing of the received consonantal text, but the exact pronunciation and even the musical cadence proper to every word of the sacred text, according to the rules of the synagogal chanting."
Hence the proposed emendation in the two verses of Genesis has been rightly rejected by the best recent scholars, and with it the appeal to the Hebrew text for evidence of the marine origin of the great flood must be dismissed as unfounded.
It does not of course follow that Professor Suess's theory is false because the arguments by which he supports it are feeble. Fortunately for the world many a sound conclusion is reached from inadequate or even totally irrelevant premises, otherwise it is to be feared that for most men the chances of ever arriving at the truth would be infinitesimal. If the Biblical narrative rests, as seems probable, on a basis of fact, it is quite possible that the great flood which it describes may actually have been produced by an earthquake or a typhoon, or by both combined. But the theory that it was so produced derives extremely little support from the only authorities open to us, the Hebrew, Babylonian, and Sumerian traditions ; hence it hardly amounts to more than a plausible conjecture.
On a simple calculation of chances, it seems likely that the catastrophe was brought about by forces which are known to act regularly every year on the Euphrates valley, and to be quite capable of producing widespread inundations, rather than by assumed forces which, though certainly capable of causing disastrous floods, are not historically known to have ever done so in that region ; for, apart from the supposed references in Semitic tradition, I am aware of no record of a Babylonian deluge caused either by an earthquake-wave or by a typhoon.
On the whole, then, there seems to be good reason for thinking that some and probably many diluvial traditions are merely exaggerated reports of floods which actually occurred, whether as the result of heavy rain, earthquake-waves, or other causes.
All such traditions, therefore, are partly legendary and partly mythical: so far as they preserve reminiscences of floods which really happened, they are legendary; so far as they describe universal deluges which never happened, they are mythical. But in our survey of diluvial traditions we found some stories which appear to be purely mythical, that is, to describe inundations which never took place. Such, for example, are the Samothracian and Thessalian stories of great floods which the Greeks associated with the names of Dardanus and Deucalion. The Samothracian story is probably nothing but a false inference from the physical geography of the Black Sea and its outlets, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles : the Thessalian story is probably nothing but a false inference from the physical geography of the mountain-ringed Thessalian basin and its outlet, the gorge of Tempe In like manner the stories which describe the miraculous desiccation of the upland valleys of Cashmeer and Bogota are probably nothing but false inferences from the natural configuration of these mountain-girt basins Such stories, therefore, are not legendary but purely mythical: they describe catastrophes which never occurred. They are examples of that class of mythical tales which, with Sir Edward Tylor, we may call myths of observation, since they are suggested by a true observation of nature, but err in their interpretation of it.
Another set of diluvial traditions, of which we have found examples, also falls into the class of myths of observation. These are the stories of a great flood which rest on the observation of marine fossils found on mountains or in other places remote from the sea. Such tales, as we saw, are told by the Mongolians, the Bare'e-speaking people of Celebes, the Tahitians, and the Eskimo and Greenlanders. Being based on the false assumption that the sea must formerly have risen above the heights where the fossils are now found, they are mistaken inferences, or myths of observation ; whereas if they had assumed the former depression of these heights under the level of the sea, they would have been true inferences, or anticipations of science.
Thus, while there is reason to believe that many diluvial traditions dispersed throughout the world are based on reminiscences of catastrophes which actually occurred, there is no good ground for holding that any such traditions are older than a few thousand years at most; wherever they appear to describe vast changes in the physical configuration of the globe, which must be referred to more or less remote epochs of geologic time, they probably embody, not the record of contemporary witnesses, but the speculation of much later thinkers. Compared with the great natural features of our planet, man is but a thing of yesterday, and his memory a dream of the night.