Customer Reviews

Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History

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Archeology is not one of my major interests, yet I found this book both fascinating and compelling; Pitman has created a compelling narrative, combining historical, archeological and scientific discoveries. The story begins with the discovery and translation in the early 19th century of the ancient Persian histories and legends. One of these- the legend of Gilgamesh, an ancient Persian king- stunned the Western world with its tale of a great flood that closely paralled the Biblical flood told of in Genesis.

The second piece of the puzzle came from geological research in the 1960s and 70s. This was the stunning discovery that the Mediterranean was once a desert that had been turned into a sea in one cataclysmic event. This in turn suggested that there may well have been other such events during the time of human habitation, including one massive flooding that was the basis of all the flood stories found in all the cultures of Europe and Asia.

Starting from that discovery, the authors explore the geological, historical and linguistic data in search of the event or events that became the basis for all flood legends of the Mideast, and explore the possibility that it was just such a flood that motivated a great exodus of people that eventually populated areas as far away as Western Europe and China.

The authors have been deeply involved in this research from the beginning, with one (Ryan) having been aboard the Glomar Challanger in the 1970s when the evidence of the great Mediterranean deluge was discovered. They do an excellent job not only of explaining the scientific data, but of sharing the real excitement of discovery that they have felt. Highly recommended for students of geology, archeology, ancient history, classics and biblical studies, as well as the casual educated reader looking for an excellent tale of scientific and historical discovery.

Near the end of their chronicle of the discovery of the catastrophic Black Sea flood, authors Pitman & Ryan quote another researcher's wonder at the power of the oral tradition. The quote, from Albert Lord's analysis of the Trojan War epic, speaks to Pitman's and Ryan's research and their part in the oral tradition.
In truth, the story of the Black Sea covers more than plate tectonics, glaciation, human evolution or ten cubic miles of water flowing through a narrow channel in less than a day over seven thousand years ago. The neat trick with this book is that the authors have managed to include all that and more.
There are really two stories here. One is about the evolution of the human species from the Pleistocene to the present day, told in scientific language with scientific explanations for the actions & discoveries of the story's scientific participants. The other story is an epic tale of crafty researchers, cooperating scientists, story-tellers, myths and legends, told in skillfully written & documented prose that sweeps the reader along in the current of human successes, failures & terrors.
Beginning with Rawlinson's work in 1835 on a monument in Persia, Pitman & Ryan weave the reader through a fabric of time that is, as Lord is quoted saying, a past "of various times . . . assembled into the present performance." Using this motif, the authors introduce themselves only as two participants in a story of discovery, narrated by a fictive bard who is present only in the words. However the authors' parts in the discovery of the Black Sea flood event deserves respect. Meanwhile they have written a book that shows the respect they have for all who have been part of the story. Most importantly, they also have not forgotten the story itself.
In the final chapters Ryan & Pitman review the Black Sea's effect on history from the geological, genetic, linguistic and archeological evidence. They then compare this evidence with the numerous universal flood legends. Ryan & Pitman show how the power of the historical and geological event that created the Black Sea is the power behind the oral tradition. They then close the last chapter with the final lines of the story of Atrahasis: "I shall sing of the flood to all people! Listen!"
Most intriguing of all the information in this book is a dedication that includes a quote from the Gilgamesh epic. The dedication reveals the epic nature of the science and the mythos involved the Black Sea. It shows the sensitivity that the authors have for a legend and event that made humanity the species smart enough to wonder why and sensitive enough to pursue the wonder of life itself.
Whether you're interested in the science or the myth, Noah's Flood is a marvelous read. Clearly written, scientifically concise, sensitive to the human heritage in the rise of agriculture, language & story, it is worth the time you'll take in reading it. And you'll gain a sense for timeless wonder of the story within the words.

Imagine standing on a the crest of a long hill. To one side is a broad, deep valley, a lake glistening in the morning sun. On the other side is the sea, the wind whipping the surf against the hill. One large wave sweeps up the beach into a cleft. Seawater pushes over the top, cascading into the valley, 150 metres below. Following waves enlarge the opening - within hours there's a steady flow of seawater. In days, the cascade is a deafening roar and the distant lake is rising 15 cm per day. People are fleeing as villages and fields are swept away or drowned forever. It's an event you will recount to your grandchildren.

This is the scenario postulated by Ryan and Pitman that transpired less than seven thousand years ago. The Ice Age, they remind us, tied up immense amonts of sea water, dropping coastlines and leaving lowlands isolated. The cold, dry air spilling off the glaciers swept over a freshwater lake northeast of the Mediterranean Sea. The lake evaporated faster than the rivers feeding it could replace. Ultimately, the lake's surface was far below sea level, but the sea was restrained by a land barrier. Once breached, the salty ocean water poured through what is now the Bosphorus to flood the lake's basin. At its height, the flow must have been ten times that of Niagra Falls and gushed through the break at over 70 kph. Evacuation of settlements scattered populations in many directions. The Tigris-Euphrates valley provided one major refuge. There, people settled and the story of the great flooding would have been paramount in their legends.

The revelation of how a flood myth became so important in the arid lands of Mesopotamia and Palestine was slow in exposure. The authors narrate the explorations of early researchers in these areas. Among the many revelations was that the Noachean Flood myth of the Hebrew Bible was actually taken from Babylonian sources during the Jewish Exile. Why should a desert people have a story about the inundation of the entire world? Ryan and Pitman relate how samples from the sea floor sediments indicate a bizarre and sudden shift in ancient sea life offered the first clues. It took high technology to reveal the details, the authors note, but hints were visible to those who knew how to look. Small boats still hang rock-filled nets deep into the waters of the Bosphorus because the deep, northward-flowing currents can pull small boats to the Black Sea against the surface water coming out of it.

This is an excellent account of how scientific detective work merged with innovative thinking. The methods of investigation are well-detailed and the analyses explained clearly. The writers even studied the methods of passing oral traditions and how basic themes persist even when presentation style and emphasis may change. There are excellent maps and the illustrations are "personalised" by transforming photographs into drawings. The footnotes are page-referenced, making sources easily understood by the reader new to the topics, although a full bibliography would have enhanced the work. Since this book was published, support for the thesis has come from the finding of human habitation deep underwater along the Turkish Black Sea coast. On the other hand, a research team has challenged the idea of the Aegean Sea flooding the Black Sea, proposing that the process was reversed. Such is the delightful experience of reading science! [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

For a long time now, linguistics has recognized that languages throughout a broad region of the world, from India through Western Europe, all shared a common root language. What was missing was a decent explanation for how this commonality came about.

Ryan & Pitman begin decades ago with a friend's suggestion that there might be an actual cataclysmic event behind the story of Noah's flood. No event known at that time seemed to fit the known facts. The first two-thirds of this book relates their story of how decades of seabed research by numerous scientists from several nations leads to the inescapable conclusion of just the right sort of cataclysmic flood of the Black Sea occurring about 7,500 years ago.

In the final third of this book, Ryan & Pitman collect the work of a diverse group of scientists far outside of their own areas of specialization. Taken together, the body of work summarized by Ryan & Pitman provides a convincing first theory of how the population dispersal caused by this flood could have led to the broad distribution of various common cultural elements, like the Indo-European language group, styles of pottery, methods of farming, and so forth.

Ryan & Pitman clearly indicate that this last third of their book is collected from the works of other scientists. Accordingly, it is totally unfair to criticize this part of their book as either "outside of their areas of expertise" or even "totally lacking in any scientific foundation." The scientists whose work is presented in this last third of this book are all well-respected experts in their own specialties. If further support is required for the theories presented in this part, an inquiring mind should look to the works of those clearly-identified scientists whose works are summarized by Ryan & Pitman.

In future times, anybody wondering just how we got to be who we are today will be forced to take into account the Great Black Sea Flood. It clearly had an incalculable effect on the development of nankind.

Ryan & Pitman are to be commended for their discovery and their overview of its probable impact. I'm sure future scientists will find Black Sea flood-related research to be a fertile ground for seeking even more insights as to exactly who we are and how we got to be here.

This book addresses one of the oldest mysteries in the world, the "flood" story from the Bible. Some people view the Bible quite literally, while others see the writings as metaphore or allegory. As a social scientist and former church school teacher, I have come to believe Bible stories have a mythical quality (in the sociological sense -- designed to instill a code of behavior and promote the cohesion of a people), but also have a basis in fact, however altered by time.

Archeologists have discovered evidence that many events depicted in the Bible do indeed have a basis in reality. Historians and linguists have shown written text reflects the writers' beliefs and interpretation of events, as well as the constraints of language. For example, it seems the city walls fell as a result of the 'Battle of Jerico' but they may have been demolished when the city was sacked. Those who told the story (likely scribes and priests, not soldiers) saw the hand of God at work and reflected this in their depiction of the events.

Many have searched for the remains of Noah's Ark, but the flood story has always seemed one of the most tenuous and least likely of Bible events to have left a material record. Evidence of past floods and shifting land masses, that might have formed a basis for the Bible story, reflect events that happened before humans were around to act as witnesses.

William Ryan and Walter Pitman tell the story of how they inductively arrived at their hypothesis, and then assembled a great deal of evidence to support it -- that a very big flood occurred in the area of the Black Sea about 7,5000 years ago (within the memory of humankind) and this flood may be the basis for the Noah story.

This book reads like a mystery novel. The main characters are the scientists themselves, first rate detectives taking note of odd coincidences, and then actively searching for answers.

I have stood on the southern coast of Spain near Tarifa and looked across at the mountains of Northern Africa -- so close you feel you could touch them. I can see how the pounding waves of the Atlantic eventually eroded the rock formations, and the cold waters rushed through into the Mediterranean Basin. It doesn't take much imagination to see the same thing could have happened where the Bosporus connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean -- especially if the ice caps had melted and raised the sea level.

A great deal of information not presented in this book supports the theory these scientists put forth. Undoubtedly, they will go on to assemble new material and hopefully write a second book.

This book is an absolute gem: a highly readable scientific detective story. During the last ice age, the fall in global sea levels cut the Black Sea off from the Mediterranean. With evaporation exceeding inflows, the level of the lake fell by perhaps as much as 500 feet. Fed by glacial melt water, overtime the Black Sea became a fresh water lake. Then some 7,500 years ago as global sea levels rose following the end of the ice age, the Mediterranean again breached the Bosporus Strait, and salt water poured into the fresh water lake, killing all life and raising the sea level to its current mark. The bulk of the flooding took place in a matter of weeks. If this were the whole story, it would be interesting enough, but Ryan and Pitman push it further. They argue that 7,500 years ago Neolithic farming communities that spoke the proto Indo-European language inhabited the Black Sea region. The rapid flood triggered mass migrations of early Indo-European farmers out of the region and gave birth to the flood myths found not only in the Bible, but also in many other cultures where flood myths pre-date the Old Testament version such as the Gilgamesh epic. If Ryan and Pitman are correct, the Black Sea may turn out to be the long sort for homeland of the Indo-European language

The first part of this story is now well-verified scientific fact. The second part is much more speculative, but it is speculation that is consistent not only with the flood mythology, but also significant archeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence. Ryan and Pitman do a wonderful job of documenting the mass of evidence is a manner that is engaging and accessible to the lay reader. The book opens with the discovery of pre-Biblical flood myths in the 1830s and proceeds in a temporal fashion through the gradual accumulation of evidence that ultimately, provides overwhelming support for the Black Sea flood hypothesis. At the end of the book, which was written in 1997, Ryan and Pitman state that their more speculative migration and myth hypotheses would be strengthened if evidence could be found of Neolithic farming communities on the sea floor of the Black Sea. That evidence is now at hand. In September 2000, Robert Ballard, famed as the discoverer of the Titanic, found the first evidence of well-preserved structures 300 feet below the current level of the Black Sea. With more evidence likely to follow, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the ancient world and its relevance to our civilization.

The authors' exposition of the geological evidence for the Black Sea flooding is excellent. Their exposition of the archaeological and historical evidence for its human impact is somewhat less so, although interesting nonetheless.

They have presented an interesting thesis regarding the impact of the flooding on early western history. Still, the balance of the evidence suggests that, although their thesis is plausible with regard to the north shore of the Black Sea and the migration of neolithic peoples to Europe and elsewhere, it is doubtful with regard to the south shore, the migration of peoples to Iraq and the Levant, and Noah's flood.

The problem is that, because the Black Sea's southern shore slopes steeply, a rather narrow strip of land, not highly suited to agriculture, was flooded there. It is hard to believe that the population dislodged southward could have been very large in comparison to the population already living southward. Sumerian origins are generally associated with an early farming culture in Iran rather than Turkey, and archaeology suggests that the homeland of the Semitic peoples was Arabia and adjacent regions rather than Turkey.

Then, too, it seems unnecessary to go all the way to the Black Sea for an explanation of an Iraqi flood story, as a massive Indian Ocean hurricane coming up the Persian Gulf is a more obvious candidate. The Sumerian and Biblical stories associate the flood with heavy rainfall, consistent with an Indian Ocean storm of some kind, and the Black Sea flooding was not caused by rainfall.

On the other hand, the ultimate association of the Black Sea flooding with the migrations of the Indo-Europeans or the Central European neolithic farmers or both seems quite reasonable. A much larger area of land was flooded, and archaeology does attest to substantial migrations from the Black Sea region into Europe beginning around that time.

Although the Black Sea flooding seems hard to associate with the Sumerian and Biblical flood stories, its memory may have been preserved among the peoples most affected by it. There is an otherwise hard-to-explain story which apparently goes all the way back to when the Indo-Europeans had not yet split up. One version (Scandinavian) involves a pair of giants grinding salt at the bottom of the sea. Another version is the classical Indian myth of the churning of the sea of milk. The Indian story is the more elaborate of the two, but both stories are about the creation of a salty ocean through a grinding or churning process by supernatural beings, and are clearly related. Direct transmission from India to Scandinavia or vice versa can be ruled out, as can a Middle Eastern or Mongolian transmission, so the connection must be a very ancient one. Strangely, though, they are not the kind of stories that would usually be associated with an inland people like the early Indo-Europeans. The Black Sea flooding may provide an answer as to how they came into existence.

William Ryan and Walter Pitman are senior scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "Pitman is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and both authors have received the Shepard Medal for exemplary research in marine biology." However, this book is not about marine biology, but history and mythology. The main problem with this book is that the authors are clearly in over their heads.

The title makes it clear that these geologists--who are otherwise quite reasonable scientists--are seeking to "prove" their pet theory. This, together with the fact that these earth scientists are attempting to address questions of history, mythology, and archaeology that are well beyond their areas of particular expertise, makes their science especially suspect.

My principal problem with the book is that , but they never address the fundamental issue of how any useful information about a specific historical event can be transmitted orally across twenty five centuries in the context of small, politically decentralized Neolithic societies. If the Black Sea flood is the one recalled in Genesis, this means that the memory of this event was preserved for 2500 years before the appearance of any writing system and then another 2000 years before it was written down in Genesis.

The probability that any story could last this long among human populations seems to me extremely small. Think about the oral transmission of information about the Trojan War, which probably occurred (in some form) in the 13th century BC and evolved into the story as recounted by Homer over a period of four centuries. Or the story of the Exodus, which mostly likely occurred (in some form) in the late 13th century BC but wasn't recorded in the Biblical account until the 10th century BC. Both of these stories were conserved in the context of semi-literate cultures that are likely to have had formal specialists in "remembering" and the composition of epic poems and sagas. Any story of a "flood" that occurred 7500 years ago would have had to be conserved for SIX TIMES as long as the Iliad or TEN TIMES as long as Exodus in the context of much simpler societies that had NO written records at all! For how many generations can an oral tradition be conserved among non-literate peoples? The author's failure to address this key problem makes Ryan, Pitman, and now explorer Robert Ballard's identification of "Noah's Flood" a major interpretive leap that smacks of pseudoscience.

As an archaeologist, I've learned to be extremely skeptical about the claims of non-archaeologists about the human aspects of the ancient world. Another distinguished marine biologist who went off the deep end was Barry Fell, an expert on invertebrates at Harvard who abandoned all reason in his pursuit of "epigraphic" evidence for the presence of Celts, Phoenicians, Iberians, and other Old World explorers in the Americas. He treated as authentic dozens of objects that were widely recognized as fakes and hoaxes and promoted the worst kind of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. However, his popular book Saga America was identified as one of the best history books of 1976 and his writings have spun off a wide circle of disciples who continue to identify spurious runestones in Oklahoma and ancient naval academies in Arizona! Serious archaeologists consider Fell and his followers' claims as nonsensical as those of Creationists.

I suspect the Genesis Flood theory will not hold up well to criticism. The story of the Black Sea's dramatic rising and the possibility of well-preserved, submerged Neolithic settlements is exciting enough without the investigators resorting to sensationalistic interpretations.

Ryan and Pitman's thesis is that the Black Sea used to be cut off from its entrance to the Mediterranean, and was a great inland lake. Twenty thousand years ago the lake was filled to the brim by melt water from the last major ice age, and emptied through the Sakarya River, but by 13,000 years ago the ice had withdrawn so far to the north that the inflow to the Black Sea depression almost stopped. This coincided with a brief mini-ice age known as the Younger Dryas which lasted for about 1000 years and was simultaneously accompanied by both cooler temperatures and general drying.

During this cool, dry period the inflow to the Black Sea was reduced to the point that evaporation exceeded inflow and the lake level dropped to roughly 300-400 feet below its present level. Because of the dry conditions during the Younger Dryas many populated regions were abandoned, including Jericho and regions in and around the Fertile Crescent. The Black Sea, however, provided a point of respite, with fresh water and food from the lake and (because of its lower elevation) warmer temperatures. As a result, tribes crowded around the lake and it became an agricultural area.

The Younger Dryas ended about 11,400 years ago, but yet another mini Ice Age set in around 6,200 BCE. The climate reverted back to a warmer and wetter one around 5,800 BCE, and by 5,600 BCE ocean levels were higher than the Bosporus valley, which was 500 feet above the Black Sea Lake.

According to Ryan and Pitman the breach happened quickly, eventually reaching a flow rate of ten cubic miles of water each day. In the process the flood cut the straights of Bosporus, excavating a channel 280 feet deep into the topsoil and bedrock. The flood took only a year to substantially flood the Black Sea Lake and just a couple of years to bring it to the level we see today.

The flood engulfed a rich valley with an agrarian culture that fled to different parts of the surrounding country when their Black Sea Lake was inundated. Some, called Ubaids, who spoke a language later known as Sumerian, migrated into the middle of southern Mesopotamia. There they established a remarkable culture that retained its memory of the great flood through the telling of stories that grew into myth. This great flood myth was later adopted by the Israelites and included in their scriptures, eventually to become a key doctrine and rallying cry for millions of fundamentalist Christians, Mormons, and even a belief of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

Interestingly, if you do a Google search on the Black Sea and Noah's flood you'll find a plethora of fundamentalist organizations touting this scientific discovery as evidence for their un-scientific notions of a literal world-wide flood. To that extent, the title of this book is unfortunate, although the authors can't really be held responsible for intellectually disingenuous religious fanatics. I think a more appropriate (and more accurate) title would have been "Origin of the Myth of Noah's Flood." It's hard to say, but a more accurate title might have helped prevent such modern-day educational tragedies as the National Park Service including books about how the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood.

The book begins with a summary of early archaeological work that traces the origin of the Biblical flood and creation myths to Babylonia, and how these myths were borrowed by the Israelites and incorporated into the Bible. Early on, their working hypothesis was that the flood myth, though clearly not global, probably had its origin in some real, if not world-wide, event that left an indelible impression upon earth's ancient inhabitants. The story of the scientific discovery begins with the geological surveys and ocean core samples showing that the Mediterranean Sea had dried up and become a desert several million years ago, only to be filled again with the breach of the dam at Gibraltar.

Several million years ago is too far into the past to have served as the inspiration for the myth of Noah's flood, but the idea of salt water flooding a plain that lies below sea level inspired several scientists to look for other, more recent possibilities. All the evidence came together with scientific surveys of the Black Sea. Acoustic soundings showed the rubble from the breach at Bosporus. Carbon 14 dating confirmed the proper age of sediments associated with the saltwater that came gushing in, and of organisms that could only thrive in sunlight, found below those sediments at depths of several hundred feet. Indeed, the totality of the scientific evidence shows without doubt that the Black Sea was rapidly and permanently filled with sea water only a little more than 7,000 years ago.

Interestingly, the authors include a cautionary statement at the end of the book, which says: "Short of finding the remains of Neolithic settlements beneath the mud of the present Black Sea shelf, no archaeological observation can prove a human occupation of the now submerged landscape." The book was published in 1998; a time when the sought-after archeological evidence hadn't been found. However, in a September 13, 2000 article incorrectly titled "Black Sea Artifacts May Be Evidence of Biblical Flood," the Washington Post reported that manmade structures have been found 300 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea, dating to the inundation 7,500 years ago.

This is truly a great book. It's written somewhat like a scientific novel, describing a story with an amazing amount of endeavor and discovery. It's the sort of book that's hard to put down. I finished it in less than a week.

William Ryan and Walter Pitman took up an exciting scientific puzzle and in solving it have answered a biblical question. Was Noah's flood real and if so, how and when did it happen? With state of the art underwater probing tools and laboratory techniques they carefully reconstructed the story of the Black Sea, once a fresh water lake that dried out and sunk far below sea level. As the melt water of the last glacial age filled the Mediterranean to overflowing, the natural dam on the Bosporus burst. The resulting rush of salt water quickly filled the lake and flooded large portions of the surrounding area.

They have dated the event to 7,500 years ago when humans, already engaged in agriculture, would have thickly populated the area, in response to the drought. An overwhelming event like this would surely have been recorded in the oral history and eventually came down to us in the Bible. As Elizabeth and Paul Barber point out in "When They Severed Earth from Sky" there are numerous mechanisms that condense and shape such stories of real events into myths. They are too important to be forgotten but over millennia they become coded.

In a kind of Tower of Babel effect, Ryan and Pitman imagine that this event propelled the migrations that may have spread agriculture into Europe and started the Semites, the Proto-Indo Europeans and the pre-dynastic Egyptians, among others, on their way. While there must have been a ripple effect from such a disaster, I think that is a stretch. In any case I plan to read more about that era, and reread the book just in case they are right about that too.