The Great Flood

[Lexicus]

If you believe an oral tradition and aspects of it get proven right afterwards, you were accidentally correct.

I've posted what I think is pretty strong evidence of real geologic events being remembered in myths and oral traditions. I think there is good reason to consider the coincidences between aspects of the myths and the real geology to be more than mere accident.

This is a good article talking about the specific case of the Pacific Northwest peoples and the Cascadia fault:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._pacific_northwest_native_american_myths.html

 

[Synobun]

I've posted what I think is pretty strong evidence of real geologic events being remembered in myths and oral traditions. I think there is good reason to consider the coincidences between aspects of the myths and the real geology to be more than mere accident.

This is a good article talking about the specific case of the Pacific Northwest peoples and the Cascadia fault:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._pacific_northwest_native_american_myths.html

Definitely, but the article you're linking to is a good example of what I'm talking about as well. Realistically, the only accurate piece of information from their oral traditions is the fact that earthquakes and tsunamis happened. In the bigger picture we didn't need those oral traditions in order to prove that, and the other details within the tradition are fictitious. The article makes the mistake of assuming that scientists would have figured things out faster if they had only believed the indigenous people and their stories. An oral tradition's premise is a place to springboard off of but it is difficult to utilize it in any serious capacity. You'll still be reliant on other methods of investigation, primarily empirical observation and statistics. "These people were aware of terrible geological events" is mostly useless from a scientific perspective.

Culturally, it's meaningful. But that doesn't seem to be the running argument here? At least by Berzerker. I'm totally on-board with studying oral tradition in a cultural context, even with a backdrop of scientific verification of any traditional claims.

 

[Hrothbern]

Here an example of a high quality oral story, two centuries later written down by Herodotus on the (clockwise) circumnavigation of Africa by Egyptians (with Phoenician support).
The obvious first scientific question is ofc: did that really happen or just a story.
I guess we will never find remains of ships, or confirming findings of South African tribes to get archeological harder evidence.

Yet... purely from the oral story it is extremely certain that this circumnavigation took place....
because the oral story contains an element that decreased the credibility at the moment it was told
but exactly that same element is what we, with our modern scientific insight, would expect for people being south of the equator.
I made that element bold in the write down from Herodotus.

oh..... and don't get confused by the word Libya. That was Africa.

Herodotus' story
"Libya is washed on all sides by the sea except where it joins Asia, as was first demonstrated, so far as our knowledge goes, by the Egyptian king Necho, who, after calling off the construction of the canal between the Nile and the Arabian gulf, sent out a fleet manned by a Phoenician crew with orders to sail west about and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by way of the Straits of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians sailed from the Arabian gulf into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year's harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Heracles in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right - to northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered by sea"

from: http://www.livius.org/sources/content/herodotus/herodotus-on-the-first-circumnavigation-of-africa/

 

[uppi]

A thousand years ago was post-Viking discovery of North America. While the Romans tended to reckon time as the whatever year of when so-and-so was Consul in the reign of Emperor Whatsisname (or alternatively from the year in which Rome was founded), there were plenty of people who could count higher than 563.

Yeah, sorry, I wanted to write 10000 years, but a zero got lost during typing.

 

[Berzerker]

Well, we don't really even need to go there. The OP doesn't present us with any kind of millennia-long oral tradition to treat as historically accurate. It rather speculates that such traditions may exist and may go back to an event which is only speculated to have occurred.

The OP was mainly about the comet, but I did mention two oral traditions that might be connected. You posted the best evidence of a lasting tradition (albeit the Alaskan flood myth is good, but that was just a date). A nearly 8,000 year old story about a volcano blowing up and forming Crater Lake. Wouldn't it be nice if we could travel back in time and listen to the original version to compare with todays? I'd bet it hasn't changed much... Nicer to go back with enough time to warn the people

The link in the OP contains zero evidence to support your speculation of an impact-driven tsunami event giving rise to flood myths around the world.

The OP links researchers claiming a comet broke up hitting the Earth. They dont mention flooding, I'm assuming it. There's a ~7 in 10 chance a comet would hit water, and with multiple pieces I'd say the odds are good water was hit. A bunch of the land was covered by ice sheets so if they were hit a massive release of water vapor in addition to the comet would provide the deluge aspect of the flood myth too. Not all flood myths describes waves, but some do. I think a researcher looked into mapping the various flood myths to see if the tsunami element might lead to ocean impact sites. The lack of apparent craters on land properly dated also suggests the comet mostly hit water or ice sheets or ended up as air bursts.

Minor correction, he says he never believed in a great flood until he saw information that he interpreted as evidence for it. I suspect that this is not exactly accurate, because he's presented zero independent scientific evidence of any worldwide flood in the threads you mention, but no way to know for sure.

I didn't know you were keeping track of all the links I've posted on the subject. I suspect that is not exactly accurate. I've posted a number of links in my threads dealing with the scientific evidence in support of flood myths, including this one. But thanks for that 'minor' correction. I'm glad it wasn't too incoherent for you.

EDIT: am currently reading the paper I posted above on Australian aborigine folklore surrounding impact craters in Australia. It is pretty interesting, though so far there aren't any clear examples of oral traditions preserving the memory of impacts that occurred in prehistoric times. There is discussion of the possibility that oral traditions around these craters may have been influenced by Western science, in fact.

Researchers apparently found a couple candidates off Australia's northern coast, two scars on the ocean floor about 7 and 11 miles in size. But I dont know if they've been dated yet. As Hrothbern (?) mentioned, the Rainbow Serpent might be describing a comet so myths about it could be related.

 

[Berzerker]

A correct premise isn't useful in the modern era, because at that point actual scientific data will reveal and tell you more than anything an oral tradition ever (accurately) could. Regardless of how right (or wrong) an oral tradition ends up being, it requires scientific data to be relevant.

If you believe an oral tradition and aspects of it get proven right afterwards, you were accidentally correct.

Troy wasn't found accidentally, someone followed a tradition. Now if your argument is the myth is meaningless until the science confirms it, meaningless for you maybe. Not for researchers...

The article makes the mistake of assuming that scientists would have figured things out faster if they had only believed the indigenous people and their stories.

If there was a unique flood, wouldn't it be figured out faster by studying myths for clues to past events? Why is that a mistake? If I were to look for evidence of tsunamis within our time frame, wouldn't I ask the people living along coasts about their tsunami legends? I imagine some of them could take me right to the place it hit.

I'm totally on-board with studying oral tradition in a cultural context, even with a backdrop of scientific verification of any traditional claims.

The OP is about possible scientific verification of traditional claims... Studying the flood myths will clue us in on what happened. Was it an impact? Was it sea rise from melting ice? Did it cause the Younger Dryas? Or just the memory of a local flood largely unrelated to other events ongoing in the world? Yes, studying the myths will help researchers find the scientific corroboration faster.

 

[Lexicus]

The article makes the mistake of assuming that scientists would have figured things out faster if they had only believed the indigenous people and their stories.

Well, I think this is actually, to some degree, true. Scientists would have known to look for evidence of earthquake activity in the Pacific Northwest sooner (not that much sooner, like ten or fifteen years probably) than they did, if they had paid some attention to those stories.

If you're a geologist, getting some shortcuts to know where to look for evidence - where to observe, so to speak - can be quite helpful. The practical problem would be that it requires specialist knowledge to collect and then interpret the oral traditions of indigenous peoples. And those specialists need to know what to look for. Specific details, like those found in some of the stories told by the Pacific Northwest peoples affected by earthquakes on the Cascadia fault (ie, the sea receded strangely before surging in to cover the land - an obvious description of a tsunami) would be best. I agree that my link probably exaggerates the practical usefulness of this kind of material to scientific inquiry.

But that doesn't seem to be the running argument here? At least by Berzerker.

Nothing I say should be construed as support for any position taken by Berzerker anywhere.

EDIT: That sounded kind of mean, I actually kind of enjoy Berzerker's Ancient Aliens thing (it's a cool genre) and I think this thread is nicely framed as speculation and has produced a lot of interesting discussion and made me do a bunch of research.

 

[warpus]

Troy is an exception, isn't it? The vast majority of myths are just that. Some happen to be based in fact here and there, but most people chasing myths end up nowhere

 

[Hygro]

Are you sure you want to go with this example? It explicitly proves what I've been saying in this thread. Even a society with a cult-like dedication to its oral tradition couldn't maintain original accuracy within a single century of outside observation. It is very easy to say "oh, the change was just a wording switch, it means the same thing" but not so easy when you're five hundred years deep and these inconsequential changes have snowballed. There are likely people alive in that society that were there when Perry first arrived. Awareness of the 'original' as Perry understood it did not prevent it from changing after 2-3 generations.

I've been very clear in saying that oral tradition is a poor method of propagating information over long periods of time. There is no way to correct for these "verbatim, except this ONE SINGLE WORD" changes. If a society hyper-focused on days-long oral tradition ritual can't prevent these changes within a singular generational cycle, it does not bode well for other societies with less focus and far greater time spans. The oral traditions being referred to in this thread would have needed to deal with enforcing accuracy over the course of generations. An 8,000 year old tradition, for example, would have needed to be propagated through at least 320 generations of people who needed to learn and then retell the tale. That humans are more capable of remembering musical constructs instead of speech constructs wouldn't prevent natural human limitations (memory is not infallible, whether you utilize all the tricks for retention or not), human malice, or extraordinary circumstances (like a society living through a disaster and losing the core of its sages/leaders).

If you have no other options, then sure, oral tradition is your best shot at preserving information. This was never called into question. And hell, it's possible for oral traditions to get things right. That also wasn't called into question. What was called into question was treating millennia-long oral traditions as distinct scientific documents that stand on their own to inform us about the factual, geological past. The resistance is mostly meant for Berzerker who is eager to utilize mythology as his hammer when it comes to science. He takes a story and then tries to prove it, instead of waiting to see if the story is supported by unrelated, objective data. Now because he read an interesting article he has the fuel he needs to make his Adam & Eve ravings as he has been wont to do in at least five separate threads at this point.

13,000 years. Let’s match oral tradition to 20 year generations? Naw let’s get gnarly and say 10. 1,300 iterations. Inconsequential filler words to maintain a rhyme structure change let’s one a generation. The epic poems recorded above are upward longer than the Iliad which is about 150,000 words. But the words that are getting mangled will be the same words mangled again, often, due to the structure. So say you have some mastodon hunters and an absurdly ambitious work you might have 1,300 changes of bad case scenario: “but” to “and” (which despite connotation logical just joins two things together aka both mean “plus”), and back and forth on some of the same words (because where the changes lie are where the structure and content is least reinforced) and we’re still talking about less than 1% over all content change over 13,000 years that only affects the words than don’t matter.

Purely within the model of the example you thought was a bad example.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Troy is an exception, isn't it? The vast majority of myths are just that. Some happen to be based in fact here and there, but most people chasing myths end up nowhere

Schliemann was determined to find Troy, and he was fortunate enough to find something. It's debatable as to whether he found the Troy, since the site he found has had more than 7 cities built one on top of another.

He didn't go about it in a properly scientific way, and looted the site instead of doing real archaeology.

He was a treasure hunter, not an archaeologist.

 

[Dachs]

Troy is an exception, isn't it? The vast majority of myths are just that. Some happen to be based in fact here and there, but most people chasing myths end up nowhere

Schliemann didn't chase a myth, either. While the Trojan War of the Iliad was a myth and undoubtedly did not happen as it did in the epics (if it happened at all), the existence of Troy was, to all intents and purposes, historical fact.

"Troy" here doesn't mean "the city of the Iliad". It can't, because the Iliad probably didn't happen. It means "the city the classical Greeks thought was the city of the Iliad". And the ruins of what the Greeks thought was Homeric Troy were a reasonably well-known classical tourist destination. They figured in the biography of Alexander the Great, for example. So historians and archaeologists were quite certain that there were some ruins in northwest Turkey that the ancient Greeks thought belonged to Troy. In looking for them (by following Frank Calvert's data), Schliemann was not chasing a myth so much as established historical fact.

Now, Schliemann took it much farther. He believed, or chose to believe, that the ruins he found at Hisarlık weren't just the ruins the Greeks thought were Homeric Troy, but rather Homeric Troy itself. That's where he wandered into myth.

The fact that the Greeks believed that the ruins were Troy is almost incidental to the story. It certainly does not imply that myth is closely related to reality, or based off of it in some meaningful way. We still don't know if the Trojan War even happened, and we do know that if it did happen, it had basically nothing to do with the myth in the Iliad. The myth doesn't help us illuminate what has been excavated in Turkey, and, as we've seen with Schliemann, can actually make a rational explanation more difficult. I would agree wholeheartedly with your post, except to point out that not even Troy was an exception - it actually helps prove your point.

 

[Lexicus]

Schliemann was determined to find Troy, and he was fortunate enough to find something. It's debatable as to whether he found the Troy, since the site he found has had more than 7 cities built one on top of another.

I think one of those Troys is probably the Troy. I don't think the Trojan War happened as described in the Iliad, though. The story seems more like a pastiche of things from different historical periods than an embellishment of a discrete event.

 

[Berzerker]

Schliemann didn't chase a myth, either. While the Trojan War of the Iliad was a myth and undoubtedly did not happen as it did in the epics (if it happened at all), the existence of Troy was, to all intents and purposes, historical fact.

He went looking for it because of the Iliad and the existence of Mt Mazama was 'historical fact' to the people living nearby almost 8,000 years ago.

 

[Mouthwash]

@Dachs, surely Homer is referring to a specific Troy? Or if Homer never existed (what's the consensus on that these days?), one particular Troy had to be the first to enter the myth. So claiming the "Homeric Troy" never existed because the Iliad isn't historical is just semantic twisting.

It's also reasonable to say that the scholarly consensus on Troy was at least partially corrected by a man chasing the myth, no?

 

[Kyriakos]

^That seems likely, given the other cities in the Iliad are real anyway. Although for some of the smaller ones it isn't known if they were where it is thought they were.

 

[Dachs]

He went looking for it because of the Iliad and the existence of Mt Mazama was 'historical fact' to the people living nearby almost 8,000 years ago.

The regular intervention of the gods was historical fact to the Greeks 2,500 years ago, but that doesn't mean we should take it either as an indicator that the gods were real or that something like the gods (sorry, aliens????????) were real. Sometimes a story is just a story.

@Dachs, surely Homer is referring to a specific Troy? Or if Homer never existed (what's the consensus on that these days?), one particular Troy had to be the first to enter the myth. So claiming the "Homeric Troy" never existed because the Iliad isn't historical is just semantic twisting.

It's also reasonable to say that the scholarly consensus on Troy was at least partially corrected by a man chasing the myth, no?

The scholarly consensus on Troy in the eighteenth century was that it was a myth. After Schliemann's efforts to popularize his finds, many academics bought his Trojan fables hook, line, and sinker, and it took decades for even historians to get serious about pre-geometric Aegean archaeology again. Popular literature still hasn't caught up. I would say that chasing the myth undoubtedly set the field back and contributed to the current state of things, where people go around believing that Achilles and Hektor really were dudes who did things.

There is no consensus on the "real" Homer (zero, one, or multiple humans?). There is no possible way to know where the Iliad and Odyssey "came from" and to what they are referring. We lack the relevant sources. Insofar as there is scholarly consensus, it's that the Homeric epics' original composition - not "when the oral tradition was written down" (the Greeks at that time still didn't employ written language), but their actual date of composition - postdates the events that supposedly took place in them by four hundred years. This is one of the many, many reasons to believe that they don't have much (if any) historical value.

Even in archaeological investigations of sites within the sweep of recorded history, there's been a strong push to decouple archaeology from written sources and let the archaeological investigations speak for themselves. Written sources can be very wrong about things and cause people to make serious errors by only viewing the archaeology through the prism of written events. Even when the written sources aren't wrong, the way modern people interpret them can be wrong and lead archaeological inquiry into a dead end. A fair number of very good archaeologists have pointed out that their field is not just a matching game, where you desperately try to link each excavated artifact to something attested in a written source, no matter how tenuous the connection.

So using an actual myth - which everybody agrees is at least 95% wrong - to inform archaeological inquiry is so much worse. It irrevocably shifts the cognitive terms of the excavations. Instead of viewing the ruins on their own terms, people look for comparisons with Bronze Age Greece; even if the comparisons aren't very good, they take over the terms of the investigation such that convincing people that other explanations are better is so much harder. There are still academics these days taken in by the notion of Hisarlık = Homeric Troy, or at least willing to entertain the notion in order to sell books. Once we strip away all of the things about the Iliad that we can conclusively prove were impossible and had nothing to do with the Hisarlık site, we are left with very little indeed, none of which has any explanatory power.

^That seems likely, given the other cities in the Iliad are real anyway. Although for some of the smaller ones it isn't known if they were where it is thought they were.

There are loads of places in the Iliad and Odyssey that don't work for Mediterranean geography, and most of the places that people did supposedly identify with real locations have been seriously questioned.

Fundamentally, trying to match the epic poems up to real locations is pointless. The Iliad and Odyssey were not historical texts. They were not contemporary works. They give very little insight into the way things worked for real people in the Bronze Age Aegean. They are hopelessly anachronistic.

 

[Berzerker]

The regular intervention of the gods was historical fact to the Greeks 2,500 years ago, but that doesn't mean we should take it either as an indicator that the gods were real or that something like the gods (sorry, aliens????????) were real. Sometimes a story is just a story.

The scholarly consensus on Troy in the eighteenth century was that it was a myth.

How does that mean Schliemann wasn't following a myth?

I would say that chasing the myth undoubtedly set the field back and contributed to the current state of things

So he was chasing a myth?

Regarding your other point, chasing myths isn't about believing every detail, just finding the site. A geologist hearing a story about Crater Lake doesn't go there looking for the underground spirit blamed for the eruption by witnesses. If researchers look for evidence of a flood, they dont have to believe in god(s) to make use of stories about the flood to identify its cause.

 

[Kyriakos]

There are loads of places in the Iliad and Odyssey that don't work for Mediterranean geography, and most of the places that people did supposedly identify with real locations have been seriously questioned.

Fundamentally, trying to match the epic poems up to real locations is pointless. The Iliad and Odyssey were not historical texts. They were not contemporary works. They give very little insight into the way things worked for real people in the Bronze Age Aegean. They are hopelessly anachronistic.

There is some qualitative difference between bothering with where the island of the Cyclopai is, and questioning if Achilles is from some fictional homeland. Likewise with Troy, another central location in the Iliad. All of the greek heroes hail from known entities, eg Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax (both of them, major and minor) etc. Many of the main characters are featured and/or tied to the archaic mythical circles (eg the theban, the aetolian, attic and so on). To present the Iliad as some one-off fantasy setting is just at odds with the existing literature.

 

[Mouthwash]

The scholarly consensus on Troy in the eighteenth century was that it was a myth. After Schliemann's efforts to popularize his finds, many academics bought his Trojan fables hook, line, and sinker, and it took decades for even historians to get serious about pre-geometric Aegean archaeology again. Popular literature still hasn't caught up. I would say that chasing the myth undoubtedly set the field back and contributed to the current state of things, where people go around believing that Achilles and Hektor really were dudes who did things.

How do you know they weren't? Archaeology can't tell you anything about individuals. The only way I can imagine disproving their existence would to show that they are copied characters from different myths, but we don't know of any.

Also, what's the point of reciting a couple dozen groups and their leaders if they weren't already known and memorized? Did the composer(s) just feel like making stuff up?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

How do you know they weren't? Archaeology can't tell you anything about individuals. The only way I can imagine disproving their existence would to show that they are copied characters from different myths, but we don't know of any.

Also, what's the point of reciting a couple dozen groups and their leaders if they weren't already known and memorized? Did the composer(s) just feel like making stuff up?

Achilles was supposedly invulnerable to every kind of attack except for his heel (since that's where his mother held on to him) and so that's where Apollo hit him with an arrow.

Please don't seriously suggest that Achilles - at least the version in the Iliad - was a real person.