Odp: Floods

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1711
Date: 2000-02-28

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Simona Klemencic
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 10:14 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Floods

Piotr wrote:

I've heard it rumoured recently that a Kazakh-Polish archaeological 
expedition has discovered strong evidence for another Great Flood 
(supplementing the Black Sea event) in the mid 6th millennium BC in what is 
now Kazakhstan and southern Russia -- apparently caused by the catastrophic 
emptying of a vast post-glacial lake in western Siberia into the Aral and 
Caspian seas. I'll believe it if I see the report published in Nature and 
corroborated by further research, but one has to get accustomed to 
archaeological and geological surprises which may render a lot of 
speculation invalid overnight.
------------------------------------

Okay, suppose such a catastrophic flood did happen. What would this be 
proving?
I've come across a number of not very well matching facts on the Deluge 
issue. I'm not trying to prove anything - just meditating:
It's surprizing enough that there's apparently no real evidence for THE 
Great Flood in Mesopotamia. The only evidence there is indicates that 
Euphrates and Tigris changed their beds and flowed for a time over parts of 
Ur and Kish that had previously been inhabited.
On the other hand, not only in Mesopotamian texts we find reports of the 
event, but also in stories and legends of China, Siberia, Kamchatka, the 
Americas, some parts of Africa.
The Universal Deluge theory doesn't seem to be very widely accepted as 
covering the whole world with water would require eight times more water as 
there is on the Earth at present.
If a report on an enormous pre-historical flood in Kazakhstan occured, one 
might at the first glance be tempted to believe that the craddle of the 
mankind has been found (but the flood would then have to be dated in a much 
earlier period).
On the other hand, the Weld Prism (2000 bc)in Sumerian gives an outline of 
the world history with the names of ten kings who ruled before the flood. No 
go. Who would remember ten kings from about 4000 years ago?
I'm only trying to figure out what such a discovery as Piotr mentions would 
mean for the IE studies - but have no idea. I hope someone can enlighten me 
a bit.

Lep pozdrav,
Simona
 
Dear Simona,
 
I hope you don't suspect me of being a Biblical literalist. I certainly do not wish to imply that anybody's "cradle" must be where the "Great Flood" was. I don't think either the Ryan-Pitman flood or the Kazakh one ought to be identified with Noah's Flood (pace Ryan and Pitman's own propaganda to that effect): "explaining" Genesis in this way is as stupid as trying to match the days of creation with geological eras.
 
The importance of such discoveries for the discussion of homelands lies in the fact that they undermine the assumption of geographical uniformitarianism which people tend to hold unwittingly and which stems from our unconscious belief that while people may come and go, the landscape they inhabit is eternal. A modern version of that belief holds that while landscape may change in the geological time scale, such changes are too slow for anything to have changed considerably since the end of the last glaciation. Hypothetical Neolithic homelands and dispersal routes are routinely plotted on modern maps as if sea levels, shorelines, river courses etc. had been the same ten or eight thousans years BP. Thus we are shown maps of the early spread of farming in Asia Minor and Europe with the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles in their present-day configuration. But up to the mid-sixth millennium BC (the early EUROPEAN Neolithic!) there was a landbridge connecting Asia Minor with Europe, the Black Sea was an isolated freshwater lake with half its modern area. One should not discuss Early Neolithic phenomena like the Vinca or the Painted Ware cultures ignoring those environmental differences. Future archaeologists will certainly become interested in the submerged settlements on the Blac Sea coast, but even now we should be aware that such "Atlantides" probably existed.
 
If the report I've heard of is substantiated, a vast "Steppe" area north of the Caucasus and between the Caspian and Aral seas was completely inundated and the waters took at least two hundred years to recede (even Noah would have lost his patience and run out of reconnaissance birds). This would exclude that region from any Urheimat speculations, as well as making any putative Transcaucasian migrations improbable at that time.
 
If at the same time the level of the Black Sea (perhaps refilled also from a Volga-Don spillway, not only from the Mediterranean!) rose by some 100 m, changes in the landscape and climate of the surrounding regions must have been disastrous especially for the sedentary farming populations already established on the Pontic West Coast. Such a crisis would have undercut their traditional subsistence and put a pressure on them to introduce changes and innovations. I leave the possible ethnolinguistic consequences for you to work out.
 
Piotr