THE OBSIDIAN REGISTRY · TEXT MIRROR · no images, no scripts · index · full site · mirrors
FILE 023 · VOL III · Older Than Scripture
Every Ancient Culture Remembers the Same Flood. Only One Remembers Why.
Every civilization believes it is the first. Every one of them was wrong.
Based on: Ancient Great Flood Myths
Intake record
| Recovered from | Museum storeroom, uncatalogued clay fragments, cuneiform collection |
|---|---|
| Contents | One baked clay tablet fragment (Old Babylonian period), graduate student's translation notes, conference recording |
| Finder | A. Osei, doctoral candidate, Assyriology |
| Status | Fragment returned to storage. Storage location now listed as empty. |
Recovered file
Here is something nobody explained to you in Sunday school.
The story of Noah is not unique. It is one of the most widely shared stories in human history. In Mesopotamia, the Epic of Gilgamesh tells of Utnapishtim, warned by a god to build a great boat, load it with his family and every kind of animal, and ride out a flood that drowned the world, then release birds to find dry land. That tablet is in the British Museum. [1] It was written down centuries before the Book of Genesis.
In India, the god Vishnu takes the form of a fish to warn a man named Manu of a coming deluge and tells him to build a ship. In Greece, Deucalion and his wife survive a flood sent by Zeus by floating in a wooden chest. In China, the hero Yu spends thirteen years taming a flood that covered the earth. The Hopi describe a world destroyed by water and a people who survived by climbing up into a new one. In Central America, in Australia, in Scandinavia, in Africa, there are flood stories. Hundreds of them, in cultures that never met. [2]
Scientists have explanations. Rising seas at the end of the last Ice Age, around twelve thousand years ago, when melting glaciers raised ocean levels by hundreds of feet and swallowed coastlines everywhere humans lived. Some researchers argue that something struck the earth around 12,900 years ago, at the start of a strange cold period called the Younger Dryas. They are still arguing about it. [3]
In 1929, the archaeologist Leonard Woolley dug down through the ruins of Ur, in southern Iraq, and hit a layer of clean, water-laid silt more than eight feet thick with no human artifacts in it at all. Below it lay the remains of an older settlement. He announced that he had found the Flood. [4]
But almost all of those stories agree on what happened. Only one of them is clear about why.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 023 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.