Before the Flood: The Biblical Flood as a Real Event and How It Changed the Course of Civilization

331 Pages·2002·3.3 MB·English

by  Ian Wilson

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Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
INTRODUCTION What’s in a Date?
CHAPTER 1 When the Ice Melted
CHAPTER 2 The Noah Family of Flood Stories
CHAPTER 3 Modern-day Flood Myths
CHAPTER 4 The Black Sea ‘Burst-Through’
CHAPTER 5 Amazing Finds
CHAPTER 6 Verdant Landscapes
CHAPTER 7 The First Geneticists
CHAPTER 8 The First Accountancy
CHAPTER 9 A Stone Age Metropolis
CHAPTER 10 Double Catastrophe
CHAPTER 11 Whither the Diaspora?
CHAPTER 12 Who Had the Ships?
CHAPTER 13 Who Stayed at Home?
CHAPTER 14 An African Interlude
CHAPTER 15 Empire of the Goddess
CHAPTER 16 When Patriarch Met Matriarch
CHAPTER 17 Atlantis: Fact or Fiction?
CHAPTER 18 The Lingering Memory
CHAPTER 19 The Continuing Quest
NOTES AND REFERENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDIX: SOME KEY DOCUMENTS
INDEX
COPYRIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Fig 1: Map by Ian & Judith Wilson modified from data & a more detailed map in
Frank Press & Raymond Siever, Earth (4th ed.) New York, W.H. Freeman, 1986,
p.254; Fig 2: Based on a graph reproduced on the website of Claude Lantz, after
Jacques Labeyrie, L’homme et le climat, Denoël, Paris; Fig 4: From a
photograph of the 1920s in the University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives;
Fig 5: Supplied courtesy of Prof. Ian Plimer of the University of Melbourne; Fig
7: From the website of the Institute for Exploration, Mystic, Connecticut,
reproduction permission kindly granted by Dr. Fredrik Hiebert, University of
Pennsylvania Museum; Fig 8: Map by Ian & Judith Wilson based on data and a
map in Tjeerd van Andel’s scientific paper ‘Late Quaternary sea-level changes
and archaeology’ Antiquity 63 (1989) pp.733–45; Fig 9: From a painting of the
Henri Lhote Tassili expedition; Figs 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21 (right), 22 & 23:
Drawings and photographs supplied by kind permission of Dr. James Mellaart;
Fig 11: Drawing supplied courtesy of Dr.Denise Schmandt-Besserat and the
University of Texas; Fig 17: Map by Ian & Judith Wilson based on data and
maps in William Ryan & Walter Pitman’s Noah’s Flood, New York, Simon &
Schuster, 1998, pp.189 & 194; Fig 19: (left) N.Vlassa, (right) Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford; Figs 20 & 26: photos by Ian Wilson; Fig 21 (left): Photo
Mario Mintoff, courtesy M.J. Publications, Malta; Fig 24: Ankara Museum; Fig
25: Map by Ian & Judith Wilson based on a map in Keith Muckelroy (ed.)
Archaeology Under Water New York, McGraw Hill, 1980, pp.162–2; Fig 27:
Directorate of Antiquities, Baghdad; Figs 30 & 31; Heraklion Museum, Crete;
Fig 32: Ekdotike Athenon; Fig 33: Max Hirmer; Fig 34: Archaeological
Museum, Damascus. Fig 12: Drawing from Alastair Hull’s Living with Kilims,
Thames & Hudson, 1988, p.35, courtesy Thames & Hudson.’
Whilst every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright owners, the
author & publishers apologise in the case of any that have been untraceable and
will be pleased to insert appropriate acknowledgement in future editions.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
‘The days are long gone when one, or even two scholars, could master as many
diverse fields as this book covers’.1 With those words Mark Rose, managing
editor of the admirable American journal Archaeology, dismissed the undeniably
daunting hypothesis ventured in William Ryan and Walter Pitman’s Noah’s
Flood.
Rose published his remarks in January 1999, and was not to know that by
October of the same year Dr Robert Ballard of Titanic fame would find the first
serious evidence of the truth of Ryan and Pitman’s hypothesis. Or that this would
be followed in September 2000 by Ballard finding the most astounding proof of
this same.
This said, there is a very real sense in which Rose was right. Today
archaeological work has become so specialised, so high-tech and so tightly
focused on perhaps one site, the evaluation of which may become one or more
scholars’ lifetime’s work, that few professional archaeologists will dare to pull
back and try to see a bigger picture.
But this is a catastrophe that happened eight thousand years ago, that affected
huge areas of dry land, that touches on the work of climatologists,
oceanographers, geologists, archaeologists and biblical scholars. It also spawned
myths that have spread as far afield as Greece and India. Trying to see the bigger
picture is then not only unavoidable, but also extremely important.
This book, which unashamedly follows Ryan and Pitman’s most inspiring
lead, is one such attempt. By training a historian, prehistory has frankly never
had much appeal for me. Yet the task of a historian is to try to determine, from
often very varied and conflicting types of evidence, what happened in the past,
from mere decades ago, to several thousand years ago. And that is certainly the
assignment here. In recent decades archaeology has made immense strides in
being able to retrieve many minutiae from thousands of years ago that previous
generations would have supposed gone forever. But in writing about such
matters archaeologists all too often speak in a technical jargon that loses sight of
what their discoveries mean about the lives of people from the past. In order to
make matters simple there are instances in which scholars may feel that I have
gone too far in the opposite direction. For instance, rather than use the term
‘Neolithic’ I have opted for ‘late Stone Age.’ Rather than use the usual terms
‘Anatolia’ or ‘Asia Minor’ when referring to Turkey as it is existed in ancient
times I have kept it as Turkey, while making clear that this is its modern name.
The idea of writing this book came when researching my earlier The Bible is
History, and my very special thanks are due to agent Daniela Bernardelle of
David Higham and publisher Trevor Dolby of Orion for greeting it with
immediate support and enthusiasm. In the course of my researching the book a
mutual friend, Gillian Warr, kindly facilitated an introduction to Dr James
Mellaart, excavator of Çatat Hüyük, and I am deeply grateful to Gillian for this,
also to Dr Mellaart for reading the manuscript, granting many most helpful
insights, and allowing use of several of his fine illustrations. Geologists
Professor Ian Plimer of the University of Melbourne and Dr Edward Rose of
Royal Holloway College, University of London also generously contributed
further help and expert knowledge, likewise archaeologists Dr. Fredrik Hiebert,
John Romer and Denise Schmandt-Besserat. I am most grateful to Andrew
George of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, also to
Penguin Books, for kindly allowing me to reproduce relevant portions from his
excellent recent translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Special thanks are also due
to Griselda Warr for helpful information-gathering; to Kay Macmullan for
patiently tolerating some excessive authorial changes in the course of her copy-
editing the manuscript; to Pandora White of Orion for most unflappably steering
the book through to production; and above all to my ever-supportive wife Judith
for spending countless hours unstintingly helping me on every aspect, including
checking every word of the manuscript and preparing many of the maps and
other illustrations.
Ian Wilson
Bellbowrie, Queensland, Australia
June 2001