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The Great Flood

The Great Flood was a world-wide disaster.

When I was young (in Britain) the only account we was the biblical one. People like me tended to treat it as just a good tale. However we occasionally got dark hints of myths and legends of a great flood, from all around the world. This was a complete mystery.

Black Sea world-wide floods Doggerland

Now however we know exactly what happened.

At the end of the ice age, around 10 thousand years ago, unbelievable amounts of ice started to melt from the northern continents. The melting ice lifted sea levels by around 120 metres or 400 feet. And vast amounts of inhabited land were inundated.

The Black Sea

One explanation of the Flood myth says that it occurred at the Black Sea. The Black Sea had previously been a freshwater lake that was below sea level. And it flooded very suddenly, as the rising waters outside overtopped the Bosporus and started to pour in. We have a bit of a mystery here. Normal freshwater lakes all have rivers running through them, to keep them flushed out. Normal lakes without an outlet are all salt.

There may be an answer to this. But I’ve now seen three theories, and they’re all different. Something catastrophic certainly seems to have happened at the Black Sea. But exactly what, and even how long ago it might have been, is still under debate.

World-wide floods

But in fact you don’t need a catastrophic folk-being-drowned-in-their-beds event to explain a flood myth. What certainly happened to coastal peoples all around the world was quite traumatic enough.

World-wide, the process was slow to begin with. The flooding doesn’t seem to have become serious until some 9 thousand years ago. It will never have been catastrophic. But in the flatter places, all round the world, vast areas will have been snatched away during a single lifetime. A similar amount will have been taken during the next lifetime. And the next, and the next, for hundreds (thousands?) of years. This will have been more than enough to generate a Great Flood legend.

Could a ‘flood legend’ have lived for thousands of years? Well it seems that non-literate societies often have a caste of trained story tellers, whose brief is to pass on myths and legends accurately. So it probably could. More recently we’ve heard of tsunami legends which saved the lives of the folk who knew it, when the tsunami struck again.

One place that was hard hit was the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of Mesopotamia. We discuss this elsewhere, because it’s where agriculture is supposed to have been invented. But I’ve not seem much about how much land was actually flooded – or where.

Doggerland

By contrast, the North sea, between Britain and Denmark has already been studied in remarkable detail. Our first map comes from a Channel 4 Time Team programme. It’s not very clear. But it shows that, just 10 thousand years ago, the southern North Sea was a great plain that stretched all the way from Britain to Denmark. Earlier than that, I’ve seen maps showing much more dry land still.

The territory has been called Doggerland, from the large area of sandbanks off Britain’s east coast – the Dogger Bank – which is now all that’s left of it.

The second map comes from the BBC website and covers the same time period. It only depicts western Doggerland, but it gives a better indication of the amount of detail that can already be put in. The two maps have slightly different coastlines, but that’s paleo-geography for you. Inevitably, there’s quite a bit of guesswork involved.

Huge amounts of archaeological material have been dredged up from the North Sea bed by fishermen. There are dinosaur bones, elephant bones, hippo bones, and many more.

During the depths of the ice age, the area was just tundra, like everywhere else around. But being lower, Doggerland warmed up a bit sooner than the higher ground. And the slowly rising waters kept the land moist, producing grasslands, forests, marshes and lakes.

Doggerland became an excellent place to live, and people flocked in. The archaeologists are currently trying to pin down places where folk were actually living. Then they hope to find out much more about how they lived. But underwater archaeology is a slow, dangerous and painstaking business. So we shouldn’t hold our breaths.

But it only remained like that for a couple of thousand years. By 8 thousand years ago, Britain was an island. And by 6 thousand years ago, the last vestige disappeared beneath the waves.