Rex:
>I have a file, John..of little snippets of local flood myths and >folklore.
Cool stuff, Rex. I can't help but notice from observation that many of these
versions have the numerals "six" and "seven" repeated ad nauseum. Hmm. Now
this "flood" thing doesn't sound so weird. Oh, oh.
I could accept the following scenario and stop me if I've gone off the
conjectural deep end since I don't know much unfortunately about IE
mythos...
It's not too inconceivable that when a group of Semitic speaking people
based in the Balkans around the time of that teensy Black Sea flood were in
contact with the Early IEs trading goats, copper and wine, the story of a
catastrophic and a somewhat real disaster amongst the Semitoids could be
easily transmitted via story telling.
Hence, words like *swekse and *septem (and their possible numerological
symbolism) could be transmitted to Early IE via tales like these. Then,
after the IEs added twists to this Semitic legend, they spread it out into
some of the northern world. It would also spread southwards to the Sumerians
and westwards perhaps... even to the Basque?
This brings me to a question: Does anyone know any good Basque flood tales?
Of course, all this flood stuff is hardly the "GREAT" flood tale since there
would have certainly always have been such kinds of tales for aeons. Even
the Maya and Aztec have one. But perhaps this Black Sea thing along with an
ancient Semitic flood tale could have lent support to a particular version
of it, I will admit.
Does Pitmann and his buddy actually go into real detail in re of
mythological comparison or is this just archaeology with a little linguistic
fluff mixed in like I'm always afraid of?
Strange. I feel like a tall cup of tea now.
- gLeN
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