Archaeologica.org

"If you lived in that basin it would have seemed like the whole world had flooded."

But....clearly not EVERYONE was killed.

I seem to recall from the book that they did some caculations on how fast the water would come up at any given point.
Eventhough it was a lot of water coming fast, the basin was big enough for an orderly retreat to be done.

Ryan & Pittman's hypothesis puts the flooding rate at about 2 meters per week at full tilt.

It might not seem too fast a rise, but those folks had no idea what was happening. By the time many of them realized the seriousness of the water rise, they might already be cut off. Land is never perfecltly level.

With their farms flooded many would have died of starvation after the retreat.

It may be that some fellow who lived well inland was aware that people were fleeing from the rising waters. He may have had plenty of time to build a large raft for his family and some of his goats, etc.

These stories come from somewhere.

Why not just drive the goats inland...along with his family? Gotta be quicker than building a raft with stone age tools.

Some areas, those closest to the original Euxine lake level, would have flooded very quickly. But most of the bottom of the west end of the Black sea is submerged Danube delta. And as the water spread out across that, the net rise every day would have dropped dramatically.

then, as the difference in water level between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara diminished, the rate of rise would have slowed to imperceptible levels. A lot would have depended on what time of year it all came down. If during the spring snowmelt, it would've been much worse.

It'd be interesting to see the grasses in the sapropel, to determine what stage of growth they were at when flooded. None of Ryan & Pitman's debunkers have shown me an explanation for why this grass is under the mud of marine deposits. Any of the other water level changes in the 6th mil were too gradual to prevent the biodegredation of the grasses, or the deposition of the mud that sealed them off from oxygen.

I do not deny that other floods may have happened in the region from the Caspian spilling over or whatever. And to go into them does not refute where Ryan and Pitman are coming from. I bought "Noah's Flood" 7-8 years ago, and was soon online discussing it, and getting flamed for my trouble. It is noteworthy that those defending Ryan & Pitman have been able to do so without, to my knowledge, resorting to ad hominum.

From diverse sources, among which I mentioned here was the founding of many agrarian communities in Iran in the late 6th mil, I've seen what this report says- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071118/sc_ ... .X8wIE1vAI
And I am grateful of the link showing that those with more academic credentials have finally gotten the testicular tissue to weigh in on this.

Several of the birdseye view of the Sea of Marmara show a long narrow bay going off to the ENE that is 1/3 the length of that sea, but nobody looking at the images has picked up on it. It is on the axis of the rift valley that lies at the bottom of the Sea of Marmara, and the east end of that valley has, in recent times, seen several severe earthquakes because of ongoing uplift.

If you could sink that back down to what it was in the 6th mil, you'd see what Ryan & Pitman were writing about, how the Sarkarya river valley, which still makes a dent in the South Coast of the Black Sea, is several times larger than what a such a small river would carve, and that after going south for 20 miles, the Euxine lake outlet bent west to dump into the Sea of Marmara.

Had the Bosporus been open during the Ice Age run off, it would not be what we now see, a narrow channel, but a broad valley like the lower Sakarya, eroded at on both sides by the relentless flow across many more millennia.

Had the Bosporus been open during the Ice Age run off, it would not be what we now see, a narrow channel, but a broad valley like the lower Sakarya, eroded at on both sides by the relentless flow across many more millennia.

Regardless, there are two deltas on the Mediterranean side of the Bosporus, one dated to circa 10,000ya and the other to circa 14,000ya. That does not debunk the Ryan & Pittman hypothesis except for their claim that the rising Mediterranean created the Bosporus in the first place. Aren't we looking for a quick, catastrophic flood to create the Bosporus cut?

If there are these deltas, they didnt have much water in them. There were, no doubt, small rivers and creeks in the area before the Bosporus opened to the Black Sea.

Yet again Cognito. if the Bosporus had the full outflow of the Danube, Dneipr, Dneistr, and Don, and had it for 10,000 or years or whatever, then why is that channel so narrow and there not the same kind of wide valley which these rivers all created when full of glacial ice meltwater?

The deltas you refer to on the bottom of the Sea of Marmara are not nearly as big as *any* of the deltas of the rivers that flow into the Black sea.

And as I have been saying, since reading Ryan & Pitman, and now the Brits also have said, there was a massive exodus in the era of the great flood. How do the deltas in the bottom of the Sea of Marmara explain this?

I have cited several different sources that indicated a cataclysmic event in the mid 6th mil, and will gladly consider any other event that would have caused it. i have yet to see anyone propose any other explanation.

I have an advantage in that I am not a Christian, none of my family or closer associates are, and I dont have call to speak with any Christians in my ordinary dealings that I have to worry about disturbing their sensibilities.

If you have to be accommodating to Christian sensibilities, I can understand that, and dont mind if you reject the whole idea of the Great Flood. Nor do I blame you for not delving into many other aspects of the cultures that were affected by this. their sexual and social values also disturbed Christian sensibilities.

Just last nite, I read of the discovery of the oldest mining community yet found, in Serbia, which shows up suddenly in 5400 BC. They dont mention the Great Flood at all, but here again, we see how the disruption of traditional ways of life created the opportunity for whole new technologies- right after the Great Flood. http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/article ... ALKANS.xml
Many of us remember the gesture of authority in grade school, of the teacher with her elbows stuck way out, hands on her hips or lap. Here we see that same posture.

Disasters destroy power structures. So- if the chiefs and shamen failed to foresee the Great Flood, the survivors would tend to create a whole new power structure, and in this case we see it is female. Likewise, the Great Flood destroyed the good old boy network and their 'not invented here' attitude about new ways of doing things. Which are abundantly shown in the report above.

A bit off topic I suppose, (about as far as the Serbian vincan settlement from the Black Sea,) I am a bit intrigued by the discussion of 6000+ year old metallugy using what seems to a be fairly sophisticated furnace. Very interesting stuff for me.

IMO the use study of the evolution of metallurgy can tell much about the migration and trading habits of ancients. Furnace and smelting technology is fairly high tech and yet seems to have developed almost simultaneously at different locations around the world. I have yet to find a study which attempts to explain this.

DB, I am not compelled to placate any Christian sensibilities on my end. The point I was making was that there were late Pleistocene floods just as catastrophic as Ryan & Pittman's and that there is no reason to believe that their flood was THE BIBLICAL FLOOD. Nor do I believe the Biblical Flood tale makes much sense in the first place (sorry Arch).

There are two deltas on the Mediterranean side of the Bosporus that were formed prior to the flooding of the Black Sea by Mediterranean saltwater. In addition, the Sea of Marmara contains Caspian mollusks. They didn't arrive there via Ryan & Pittman's Hypothesis.

http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2007AM/finalp ... 129196.htm

Glacial runoff during the late Pleistocene began as the Black Sea fresh water level was at -90m. I have read estimates of the rise in sea level from glacial discharge being as high as -20m, bringing with it the possibility of a quick breach of the Bosporus. Ryan & Pittman state that a quick and catastrophic breach of the Bosporus would create what we see today, a relatively narrow channel. However, the deltas are inconveniently located on the wrong end of the Bosporus to support their hypothesis. Having Caspian mollusks show up in the Sea of Marmara points instead to a catastrophic event coming from upstream (the Altai Flood).

http://www.mines.edu/academic/geology/f ... iFlood.pdf

I do believe the influx of saltwater into the Black Sea occurred about 5600bce and very likely dispersed agrarian communities to surrounding aras as you pointed out. However, I do not believe this event is the root of a "Biblical Flood" story. For all I know, that tale was lifted from earlier texts by scribes working in the library of Ashurbannipal. Makes for a terrific bedtime story, though.

Forum Monk wrote:A bit off topic I suppose, (about as far as the Serbian vincan settlement from the Black Sea,) I am a bit intrigued by the discussion of 6000+ year old metallugy using what seems to a be fairly sophisticated furnace. Very interesting stuff for me.

IMO the use study of the evolution of metallurgy can tell much about the migration and trading habits of ancients. Furnace and smelting technology is fairly high tech and yet seems to have developed almost simultaneously at different locations around the world. I have yet to find a study which attempts to explain this.

We've danced around this issue before and I've yet to be convinced that someone could accidentally drop a piece of copper ore into a camp fire and smelt copper. So I fully agree that the technology is fairly high tech affair and not something that is likely to be developed by accident.

So....HTH did they do it?

Myth does tend to combine events from different times and places.
But first off, the earliest written record we have, in Gilgamesh, was written in Mitanni Cuneiform. What's an upland Aryan horse culture doing with a Great Flood myth? Their problem is drought, not flood.

Then, we see Gilgamesh return in a canoe to a sacred site to dive down to retreive some magical object. Ergo, the water was not too deep. Which it would not have been in the weeks and months after the Bosporus broke open.

In genesis we see it refer to the fountains of the deep, ie, the springs becoming artesian wells. The Bosporus blowout would have put back pressure on the aquifers in the Euxine basin to do just that.

p103 R & P cite Pliny the Elder saying that the Black sea "swollowed up a large area of land which retreated before it."

They also report on a "Science" Oct 1970 article saying that salt water re-entered the Euxine basin 7000-12,000 BP. Wasnt the Caspian spillover much earlier?

We also have the sudden emergence of new agrarian communities in Iran, Serbia, and the Danube basin not long after 5600 BC.

The maps I've seen of the Sea of Marmara bottom do indeed show river deltas, but they are puny compared to the basins of the several great rivers flowing into the Euxine basin. that dont make any sense if they were caused by the combined outflow, and the map of the "bottom" now does not reveal what it was before tectonic uplift changed the way water flowed.

I am not saying that the Caspian didnt dump into the Euxine. Again, we would do well to have a topo map of the region... at the time. The Euxine basin itself has a kind of continental shelf drop off, from a hundred meters down to a thousand, I've not seen a report on what lays on that bottom.

Agreed that we have a very confusing set of data. Earlier floods mite have survived in racial memory. But its with the Proto-Indo-Europeans that we have a culture spread across enuf land, with enuf trade and exchange of reports to show us that something put those people on the move.

Its complicated by the fact the the domestication of the horse did just that 1500 years later. But that had little effect on the fresh water vocabulary of the Aryans who had been living on the shores of an Euxine lake. Had the Bosporus already been open, their nomenclature would have included terms for marine life. JP Mallory says its not there.

There has been a lot of conflicting reports, but in the years that I've watched this debate, the evidence has been building more to support Ryan and Pitman.

For Cogs & DB. Everything I've read assures me that catastrophic floods occurred at different times, and in different directions.

I've not seen any geologic studies on the Bosporus itself so I can't form an opinion about how it has the shape that it does.

The "Noahs Flood" part of the 5600 flood is a matter of personal opinion I guess. There are stories of catastrophic flooding in every culture, so I'm sure something very big happened, but that's almost a different discussion.