Flood Myths of the Mediterranean Near East

A flood made of noise

In the Babylonian poem Atrahasis the human race is created to do the gods’ work, and it succeeds too well. The people multiply, the land grows wide, and the land bellows like a bull. What reaches heaven is not sin and not violence: it is rigmu, uproar, racket, the sound of a species at full volume. Enlil cannot sleep. He sends plague, and the noise returns. He sends drought and famine, and the noise returns. At last he takes the flood, and binds the other gods by oath not to tell anyone.

Ea keeps the oath and breaks it in the same breath. He does not speak to the man. He goes to the reed hut where Atrahasis sleeps and addresses the building—Reed hut, reed hut! Wall, wall!—and delivers his instructions to the fabric of the house while the man inside listens. In the Sumerian version the same trick is preserved almost intact, and the wall is left standing in the poem where the warning belongs:

A voice with no visible speaker, arriving through a barrier, telling one man what nobody is supposed to know: a voice from behind a screen is this atlas’s own subject, and in the oldest flood text there is, it is doing the largest job it will ever be given. The whole human line comes through a wall. When Berossus retold the story in Greek for a Hellenistic readership, he kept the disembodied voice and moved it to the end. After Xisuthrus and his family vanish from the mountain, the people left in the vessel call for him and get an answer out of nowhere: they see him no more, Berossus says, but they could distinguish his voice in the air, instructing them to honour the gods and to walk back to Babylon and dig up the writings he had buried at Sippar before the water came.

And when the water dries, the poem writes its settlement. Enki has the birth goddess establish death for all peoples. He puts a third kind of woman among the people, the one who does not bear; he sets the pašittu loose to snatch the baby from the lap that bore it; and he institutes the high priestesses who are forbidden children, to cut childbirth down. Barrenness, infant death and celibacy all date from the morning after the flood, and they are there to keep the noise within limits. The oldest flood in writing already ends the way the youngest ones on this map do — by instituting something. What it institutes is a category of women.

The Mesopotamian flood is a family, not an event: Ziusudra in Sumerian, Atrahasis and Utnapishtim in Akkadian, Xisuthrus in Berossus’ Greek, Noah in Genesis and Nūḥ in the Qur’an. They share a shoreline as well as a plot. At the glacial minimum the Persian Gulf was not a sea but a long low basin with rivers running down it, and the water that eventually filled it came in fast enough, at times, to move a coastline kilometres within a lifetime. Jeffrey Rose’s Gulf Oasis model reconstructs that habitable country and its loss. One drowned country stands behind them all, and the aftermaths run separately: kingship restarted at Kish, learning dug back up at Sippar, covenant and food law at Ararat, the vessel on al-Jūdī.

When the Black Sea entered the Aegean

Diodorus of Sicily preserves a story the Samothracians told about their own island, and it is unusually physical. The Black Sea was once a closed lake. Its rivers went on pouring in until the water forced the Bosphorus, crossed the Sea of Marmara, forced the Dardanelles too, and came down on the Aegean coast. The low ground of Samothrace went under. The people ran uphill, and when the water finally stopped they built altars along the line it had reached and sacrificed there ever after—altars that were still in use, Diodorus says, in his own day. Fishermen working the drowned country afterwards brought up the stone capitals of buildings in their nets.

Two published studies place that tradition beside the real remaking of the Black Sea, Marmara and northern Aegean at the end of the Ice Age: Compatangelo-Soussignan on Samothrace itself, Lancini on the wider Greek cluster. Samothrace did become an island; the plains around it did go under; the passages between the two seas did open. The tempo is still argued over. The correspondence is not.

The far shore of the same sea keeps a mirror-image story. On the Turkish Black Sea coast, people around Çarşamba and Terme said the plains they farm had once been under water, and that the fort at Eğri Kale had stood beside a ship’s pier; then the ground broke open, the Bosphorus formed, the water ran out, and the Samsun plain was left behind. They pointed to the shells and sea sand turned up beneath the soil. The plain is real and young and its soil does contain the coast’s history—but it was built outward by river sediment over the last several thousand years rather than exposed by a drain, so the tradition has the right country and the wrong plumbing.

Refuge mountains

Around the same seas the Greeks kept a belt of survivors, each on his own summit. Deucalion is warned by Prometheus, rides out nine days in a chest with Pyrrha and grounds on Parnassus. Megaros, near Megara, hears cranes calling above the rising water and follows them up Mount Geraneia. Cerambus is given wings by nymphs and lifts off Othrys as Thessaly goes under. On Rhodes the Telchines, the island’s first inhabitants, see the flood coming and simply leave, abandoning the lowlands to the sea.

Sakellariou and Lykousis make the strongest published case for Deucalion, setting the tradition beside the rapid drowning of former glacial lakes and low basins around the Gulf of Corinth; Lancini gathers the rest into the same Aegean cluster. What all four share is a shape: high ground is not scenery but the mechanism of survival, and the story ends by explaining who lives there now.

Deucalion’s does it most bluntly. He and Pyrrha come down from Parnassus into an empty country and are told to throw the bones of their mother behind them. They understand the riddle—the earth is the mother, the stones are her bones—and the stones they throw over their shoulders stand up as people. Their son Hellen gives his name to the Hellenes. The flood is the reason there are Greeks at all.

Lesbos gives the whole sequence in civic form. In Diodorus, Deucalion’s water leaves the island empty; Macareus arrives later with a mixed company drawn from several peoples and settles the good ground. The land is divided among them, Mytilene and Methymna are named for members of his family, colonies go out to the neighbouring islands, and he lays down a law that later Greeks still remembered for its usefulness. Depopulation, resettlement, land tenure, place-names, colonies, constitution—the flood is the first chapter of a founding charter, and the rest of the chapters follow immediately.

Western Greece keeps a smaller and better-anchored version of the same transformation. Five river nymphs slight the river god Achelous during a sacrifice, and he answers by tearing their farmland off the bank, carrying it out to sea and breaking the former mainland into the Echinades islands. Palaeogeographic reconstructions of that coast show rising water isolating hills there between roughly 18,000 and 6,000 years ago. Mainland genuinely became an island group here, and the river’s own sediment has since welded some of the islands back onto the delta, so the coast has run the story forwards and then partly backwards.

Behind all of them stands an older and vaguer one. Greek writers remembered a flood earlier than Deucalion’s, in the time of Ogyges around Boeotia and Athens, and the surviving notices are so brief and so inconsistent that even the country affected is uncertain. What the fragments preserve securely is the word: Ogygian came to mean primeval, the far edge of anything anyone could remember. The Greeks kept a name for the flood beyond the flood.

At Argos the aftermath is a boundary marker. Poseidon and Hera go to arbitration over who owns the country; the judges give it to Hera; Poseidon floods almost all of it in return. When Hera talks him into withdrawing, the Argives build a sanctuary at the precise point where the sea stopped and call the god Prosklystios, the Flooder. The water is gone. Its edge is a permanent civic monument.

Four places that marked the water’s edge

That instinct at Argos is not local. Four places around the eastern Mediterranean, in four different traditions, do the same thing: they find the mark the water left and make it a place of offering.

Inside the precinct of Olympian Zeus at Athens the bedrock splits open, a gap about a cubit across. Athenians said this was where the flood in Deucalion’s time had drained away. They showed visitors his grave beside it and said he had built the old sanctuary. Once a year they threw wheat meal kneaded with honey down the crack. Pausanias saw the hole and saw the offering go in.

At Hierapolis—Manbij, in northern Syria, a day’s march west of the Euphrates—Lucian found the same idea running on a larger budget. The first human generation had been destroyed by water; the pious Deucalion, whom the locals also called Sisythes, came through it in a great ark with his household and paired animals; the water drained into an opening in the ground, and the temple was built on top of it. Twice a year priests and pilgrims from Syria, Arabia and beyond the Euphrates carried seawater inland and poured it through the sanctuary into the little chasm. Lucian looked at the hole, thought it too small for the job, and reported the rite anyway.

Argos sets its sanctuary at the ebb line; Samothrace sets its altars at the highest reach. Athens feeds the drain; Hierapolis feeds it seawater fetched from the coast twice a year. Four traditions with no common text, agreeing on what to do with the last line the water touched.

Athens does all of them one better, because Athens kept a piece of the water itself. When the gods were taking possession of the cities where each would be worshipped, Poseidon reached Attica first: he struck the middle of the acropolis with his trident and produced a sea there, the one they call the Erechtheis. Athena came after him, called Cecrops to witness her act of possession, and planted an olive. Twelve gods arbitrated the quarrel and gave her the country, because Cecrops testified that the olive had come first — and Poseidon, in a hot rage at the verdict, flooded the Thriasian plain and laid Attica under the sea. The salt water never left the rock. Inside the temple on the acropolis there is a well of sea water sunk in the ground that sounds of waves when the wind is in the south, and the olive stands beside it. The two things Athens keeps as evidence of the quarrel are a tree and a captive piece of sea — the flood not marked but impounded, and still audible.

Two ways to make a strait

Where the sea narrows, the stories turn technical. Ovid runs through a catalogue of remembered transformations of the Mediterranean—islands becoming mainland, mainland becoming island, streets visible under clear water—and at the Strait of Messina he is exact: Zancle was part of Italy until the sea cut it off. Justin tells it with more violence: Sicily hung from Calabria by a narrow neck until the upper sea tore it away. Antonioli and colleagues reconstruct the sill that carried a walkable land bridge between Sicily and Calabria during the last glacial lowstand, dry for at least five centuries around 21,500 to 20,000 years ago. No text dates the Roman story; what the geology supplies is the before-and-after that the story describes.

At the other end of the sea the Greeks could not agree whether their strait had been made or unmade, and Diodorus prints both versions in the same paragraph. On one account Heracles built the headlands of Europe and Libya out towards each other to narrow the gap, so that the monsters of the Ocean could not get into the inner sea. On the other the two continents were a single piece of ground and he cut them apart, after which the Ocean came in and never left. Diodorus declines to choose. The disagreement is the valuable part: two schools, one arguing that the strait is an obstruction someone installed and the other that it is a wound someone opened.

One Greek got the mechanism right, and he was not telling a myth. Strato of Lampsacus, who ran Aristotle’s school in the early third century BC, argued that the Black Sea originally had no outlet at all: its rivers kept raising it until the water forced its own passage at Byzantium, and the Mediterranean, filling the same way, then broke out at the Pillars of Heracles. Ground that had been under water was left dry, both breaches stayed open, and Strato expected the process to repeat—given enough silt, he said, the Black Sea will fill up completely in the end. Strabo preserves the argument. Twenty-three centuries before anyone put a corer into the Marmara, a natural philosopher had a lake overflowing into the Mediterranean and opening its own strait; his water runs the opposite way to the catastrophic-inflow model that made the modern quarrel, which is precisely what makes him worth reading rather than recruiting.

The Argonauts supply the mythic version of the same passage. At the mouth of the Black Sea the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks, crush anything that tries to get through. Jason sends a dove ahead, follows it in the Argo, and once the ship is through the rocks are rooted where they stand and the strait stays open forever after. Whatever else that story is, it is an account of a permanently opened gate between two seas.

The northern shore keeps the strangest version of the opened passage, and gives it a motive. In the Ossetian Nart tradition, when Bora, forefather of a Nart line, died, his companions buried him on the shore of the Endless Sea. The water beings wanted the grave for themselves, under the sea, but their own sea had too little water in it — so at midnight their elder opened the shut passage to the Eastern Sea. The two seas joined, Bora’s tomb went under with the shore it stood on, the water was remade and stayed that way, and people named the darkened water the Black Sea. A shut passage deliberately opened, two seas joined, a coastline drowned for good: the event the Samothracians dated from their altars, told from the far shore — where what the joining of the seas took was the grave of a great ancestor, and the sea’s own name is the stain of it.

Shells on the hills

Herodotus went to Egypt and was told that the country was young. Under the first king, Min, everything except the Thebaid was swamp, and nothing north of Lake Moeris stood above the water at all. He tested it the way a Greek of the fifth century tested things: he had the lead dropped a day’s sail off the coast and it came up muddy. Then he made his case from what was lying about—shells out on the hills, salt sweating through the stone of the pyramids, the whole Delta plainly built out of river mud—and concluded that the sea had been there before the country was, and that every field an Egyptian works is land the river handed him.

The reasoning is good and the clock is wrong. The Faiyum did hold a far bigger lake in the early Holocene, and the Delta really is river sediment; but his informants put it in dynastic time and he argued it from silting rates rather than from anything remembered. It is ancient observational science, roughly right about the process, badly wrong about the age.

The oasis of Siwa shows the same instrument failing harder. Eratosthenes, quoted by Strabo, reports that travellers on the desert road to the oracle of Ammon, three thousand stades inland, walked over mussel, oyster and scallop shells, salt beds and springs of brine, and came across the timbers of seagoing ships; the local people said the wreckage had been thrown up out of a chasm. The shells are real and marine and tens of millions of years old. Read as a recent shore, they made Siwa a beach, and the sacred envoys of Cyrene went out into the middle of the Sahara and dedicated dolphins there on little columns, inscribed with their office.

Egypt also keeps the region’s two great cosmic versions. The oldest surviving Egyptian story of any length begins with a wave: 120 picked sailors go down in a storm and one man is thrown up on an island of inexhaustible fruit and fish, ruled by a golden serpent who is himself the last of a destroyed family. The serpent tells him a ship will come, and that once he leaves he will never find the place again, because it will become waves. He goes home with incense, ivory and marvels, is presented at court, receives rank and attendants and reaches his children; the island drops out of the sea. And in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, painted in the tomb of Seti I, the sun god grows old, hears what people are saying behind his back, and sends his Eye out as a goddess to kill them. She kills until she likes it. To stop her he has seven thousand jars of barley beer brewed and dyed red as blood and poured over the fields in the night to a depth of three palms; at dawn she sees her own reflection in what she takes for blood, drinks until she is drunk, and forgets her errand. The people alive that morning are the people alive now. Sick of them, the god climbs onto the back of the sky-cow and withdraws upward, and in going he sets heaven above, earth below and the land of the dead beneath—the world in the shape it has kept ever since. The flood here is beer on farmland, but the move is the one the whole region makes: near-extinction followed by a permanent rearrangement of the universe, with the survivors installed in it.

And Egypt keeps the one text in this essay that runs the flood the other way. In spell 175 of the Book of the Dead, Osiris arrives in the necropolis and finds it insupportable—no water, no air, very deep, very dark, nothing to do but lie quiet—and complains to Atum, who answers that he has given blessedness instead of water and air, and quietness of heart instead of bread and beer. Osiris asks how long a lifetime of life is. Millions of millions, Atum tells him, and then: I will destroy all that I have made, and this land will go back into the Deep, into the flood, as it was before. Only I shall survive, together with Osiris, after I have taken my other shapes—snakes that men do not know and gods do not see. Every other flood on this map founds something: a people, a shrine, a law, a shoreline. This one repeals. Nothing is founded and nothing is repopulated; the two who are left are not a couple in a boat but the creator and the dead god, coiled and invisible in the water that was there at the beginning. The deluge that everywhere else opens the world is here how the world will close—and the survivors are serpents.

The Greeks are always children

At Sais in the Delta, an old priest told the Athenian lawgiver Solon that his people had no memory. The world, he said, is wrecked over and over, most often by fire and by water, and each kind of ruin sorts the survivors differently. When the fire comes, the people down by the rivers and the sea live. When the flood comes, the herdsmen high in the hills live and everyone in the cities drowns.

Follow the mechanism through and it is devastating. The people who drown are the ones who keep records; the people who live are the ones who cannot write. So the towns, the archives and the names go under together, and the country restarts from illiterate shepherds who know nothing of what came before—which is why, on this account, the Greeks were forever telling one flood story as though it were the only one. Egypt is the exception because the Nile rises from below instead of falling from the sky, and the temples kept writing straight through.

Plato is constructing an argument, not filing a report, and the speech exists to set up Atlantis in the next breath. But the argument he constructs is this series’ own thesis, stated by an ancient author in the fourth century BC: catastrophe is repeated, memory is the first casualty, and what survives a flood is not the record but the people furthest from it. Every point on this map is a story that came down that filter.

Atlantis and its many shores

Plato’s Atlantis is the flood story that never settled on a shore. In the Timaeus, its first appearance belongs to an Athenian conversation and an Egyptian priest’s rebuke; its narrated island lies beyond the Pillars of Heracles, normally read as Gibraltar. On this map its point sits beside the Greek traditions because that is where the story enters the world—through Solon, Athens and Plato.

Readers have put Atlantis in and around the Aegean, especially at Thera after the Minoan eruption; beyond Gibraltar in the Atlantic and near the Azores; on the Spanish Atlantic coast; and, much farther north, beneath the North Sea. The French mining engineer Jean Deruelle made the last case in his Dogger Bank project: a drowned plain, he argued, became Plato’s great island, and the encircling ditch was a prehistoric dyke system. The Doggerland reconstruction shows the North Sea plain before it drowned.

Four mountains, one ark

Once the vessel exists, four mountains put in a claim to where it landed.

Genesis says the mountains of Ararat, a region rather than a peak, and later readers fixed it on the great double cone above the Araratian plain. The Qur’an names al-Jūdī, which Islamic geographers identified with Cudi Dağı in southeastern Turkey; in that telling one of Noah’s sons refuses the ark because he trusts a mountain to save him, and drowns within sight of it. Berossus grounds his vessel in the Armenian highlands, where people were still scraping bitumen off its timbers for amulets.

The Yazidis of Mount Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, put the landfall in their own country and add the detail nobody else has. The ship came over Sinjar and struck; a rock went through the hull and the water started in; a serpent wound itself into a flat coil and jammed itself into the hole. The vessel floated off the mountain and carried on to Judi. The serpent was thanked and released, and bred until its offspring were biting people and livestock everywhere, so in the end it was caught and burned—and the fleas came out of the ash. The printed Meṣḥefa Reş that carries the story was transmitted through outsiders and its authenticity has been argued over; what is not in doubt is the black serpent carved beside the door of the sanctuary at Lalish, kept black, touched by those going in.

The fourth claimant is a landlocked city in Phrygia that had the by-name Kibotos—the Chest. Apamea Kibotos said the ark had come down on a steep dark mountain in its own territory, which it also called Ararat, with the river Marsyas running out from under it. Then it did something no other flood tradition in this region did: it put the claim on its money. From the reign of Septimius Severus onward the city struck bronze showing a box afloat with two figures inside, the name ΝΩΕ—Noah—lettered across the side of it, the same pair standing again on dry ground at the left, and a bird overhead. It is the oldest surviving picture of the ark, and it was small change.

North of them all, the Caucasus keeps its own landing, and it lands on ice. In the Ingush telling, God sends rain against a cruel world; an old man and his family shut themselves in a chest, and the water carries it to the ice summit of Bashloam-kort — Kazbek — where they live on the ice until the flood withdraws. His children go out afterwards and spread through the earth, all but seven sons, who stay behind in cells high on the mountain until they pass into the sky as a constellation — leaving mountain, people and stars in the order they hold now. Ararat’s ark leaves a covenant, Apamea’s leaves a coin; the chest on Kazbek leaves seven stars standing over the mountain that saved them.

Men to the east, women to the west

The sharpest thing on this map is not a drowned coast. It is a sixth-century Syriac book explaining why a congregation stands the way it stands.

In the Cave of Treasures, Noah does not board first. He goes into the cave where the patriarchs are buried and brings out the embalmed body of Adam, with gold, myrrh and frankincense, and lays the body in the middle of the ark like a raised stand. Then the passengers are arranged around it. Noah and his sons keep to the east side of the deck; the women keep to the west; and for the whole voyage neither side crosses to the other, so that no one sees the other’s face. Meanwhile the ark itself is steered: driven east to west and then north to south over the water, again and again, until its wake has drawn a cross on the face of the flood.

Then the text says what it is for. Men stand on the east of the church and women on the west because that is how they stood on the ark. Adam’s body, carried on afterwards to the middle of the earth, is laid in the ground at the place where the cross would later stand above it. A flood story is being used, explicitly and in so many words, as the charter for a rule about who may look at whom during worship. Most world-establishing myths have to be inferred from what they leave standing. This one hands over its derivation.

Anatolia makes the same move at village scale. Zeus and Hermes walk through Phrygia disguised as strangers and are turned away at every door but one: an old couple, Philemon and Baucis, feed them out of nothing. The gods walk the pair up the hill, and when they look back the whole community is under water and their own cottage has become a temple. They serve it as its priests for the rest of their lives and are turned at the end into two trees growing from one spot. A drowned district, an isolated righteous household, and a functioning cult with its founding staff—the sequence in miniature. At Iconium, modern Konya, the immensely old king Nannacus foresaw the deluge and gathered his people into a temple to weep and pray; after his death the water destroyed humanity, and Prometheus and Athena made new human figures. Ancient writers connected those images with the city’s old name, and “to weep for Nannacus” became a proverb for grief that changes nothing.

The same move runs through the eastern traditions. Under the Temple Mount, David digs the drainage shafts too deep, cuts into the Deep, and the water under the world comes up to drown it; the Name is written on a shard and thrown down; the water falls so far that the ground dries out, and David has to sing the fifteen Songs of Ascents to bring it back up and fix it a thousand cubits down—which is where the water table under Jerusalem has stood ever since. In the Zoroastrian Bundahishn the star Tishtar takes three shapes, man, horse and bull, and rains for ten days and nights in each; the drops come down the size of bowls, water stands a man’s height over the whole earth, the noxious creatures are killed and driven into holes. Then the wind sweeps the water off the land to the edges of the world and the wide-shored ocean is made out of it. That flood is not a punishment at all. It is where the sea came from.

And in the Vendidad, Ahura Mazda warns Yima of winters that will bring deep snow to mountain and plain and floodwater when the snow melts. Yima builds the Vara, a sealed refuge, and carries into it the seeds of the finest men and women, of cattle and birds, of plants and fruits, and red-burning fires. Inside there is no deformity, no disease, no falsehood and no shortage. It is the most exact cold-catastrophe story in the region and it is also a specification for a world: not a remnant that survives, but a curated inventory of everything the next world is permitted to contain.

The women who stopped the sea

Lycia keeps the one flood on this map that women end. Bellerophon had rid the Xanthian plain of the pirate Chimarrhus, whose ship carried a lion at the prow and a serpent at the stern, and driven out the Amazons besides, and Iobates gave him nothing for any of it. So he waded out into the water and prayed to Poseidon that the land be made barren and unprofitable, and turned back inland — and a wave got up and came after him, the sea standing high in the air and covering the plain as he walked. The men came out and begged him to stop it, and could not move him. Then the women came out to meet him with their skirts lifted, and he turned back toward the sea for shame, and the wave went back with him.

Plutarch, who preserves the story, keeps its consequence attached: the plain came out from under the water, and from then on the Xanthians took their names from their mothers and not their fathers. That is the reason given for the custom. Everywhere else on this map the flood’s charter is delivered by a survivor — kingship at Kish, a covenant at Ararat, a standing arrangement in church. At Xanthos the charter is won from the flood itself, by the women, with the one gesture the hero cannot face down; and the law that commemorates it writes the mothers into every Lycian’s name.

Lakes on the wrong clock

Some of these traditions describe real hydrology in the right order and the wrong epoch.

The plain of Pheneos in Arcadia is a closed basin: no river runs out of it, and the water leaves underground through chasms beneath two mountains, which the Pheneatians said Heracles had cut. When the chasms blocked, the plain filled and the old city went under. Pausanias was shown the marks high on the mountainsides where the water had stood, and walked the fifty-stade channel Heracles was said to have dug for the river Olbius—thirty feet deep in places and completely dry, because the river had gone back to its old bed. All of that is how the basin behaves. It has ponded and emptied repeatedly within historic time, and it will do it again; the marks are the sort of thing a filled basin actually leaves. It is simply Holocene karst on a repeating cycle rather than anything terminal-Pleistocene.

Boeotia runs the same machine with the polarity reversed. Where Lake Copais lay, Strabo says, there had been dry ground, tilled in all kinds of ways while the Orchomenians ran it; Diodorus supplies the culprit, Heracles again, blocking the outflow past Orchomenos to punish the Minyans. A worked plain becomes a lake and the district is ruined. Copais did alternate between lake and plain as its sinkholes clogged and cleared, and the Mycenaean drainage works at Orchomenos are archaeologically real, which makes the likeliest referent the collapse of a Bronze Age engineering scheme—far too late for this map. Thessaly belongs to the same family: Herodotus was told that the whole plain had been a lake shut in by mountains until Poseidon split the Tempe gorge and let it out to the sea.

The Caucasus tells the drained basin with a serpent in the plumbing. Kakheti, the Georgians say, was once a sea, brought there from another sea, and a serpent lived in it. Saint George’s calf came back from that water with bloodied horns, so the people armed its horns with diamonds and sent it in again, and this time the calf beat the serpent — which fled in panic and smashed through the Shiraki barrier between the Alazani and the Iori. The water ran out behind it, Kakheti was freed, and the people came down from the heights to settle the land. Heracles opens the Greek basins with tools; at Shiraki the barrier is broken by the beaten serpent’s own flight, and the drained floor is the settlement charter of the province.

The most tempting lake of all is in Tunisia. Greek writers describe a great Libyan lake called Tritonis, with an island in it and peoples living all round the shore—the Machlyes on one side, the Auseans on the other. Jason’s ship was blown off Cape Malea to Libya and grounded in its shallows, and the god Triton showed the crew the way out in exchange for a bronze tripod. Diodorus says the lake later dropped out of sight in an earthquake, when the side of it facing the ocean was torn open. What outlived the water was the rite: once a year the Ausean girls divided into two parties and fought each other with stones and staves in honour of Athena, whom they called the daughter of Poseidon and the Tritonian lake, and any girl who died of her wounds was declared to have been no virgin.

The chotts did hold big lakes in the African Humid Period and the Gulf of Gabès coastline has moved a long way, so a great lake in southern Tunisia is not a fantasy. But Diodorus’s earthquake is an explanatory device, the ancients themselves could not agree where Tritonis was, and the nineteenth-century schemes to flood the Sahara left a century of bad literature attached to this exact basin. The tradition is carried. No identification is.

The island that had to be stopped

The Aegean’s real postglacial history is islands appearing where hills used to be. One tradition in the middle of it imagines the opposite problem.

Before Apollo was born the island was called Asteria and it would not stay put. It ran the straits of the Euripos, turned its back on the Chalcidian water and swam to Sounion in a day; sailors saw it on the way out and could not find it on the way home. When Leto, hunted by Hera, could find nowhere on earth that would dare take her in, this unfixed island took her. After the birth the wandering stopped. Callimachus says the island no longer floated unseen upon the water but planted the roots of its feet in the Aegean, and its name changed from Asteria to Delos—from the hidden to the visible.

Nothing in the Aegean ever drifted. But the region full of new islands produced a story about an island that had to be fastened down, and gave the moment of fastening the name of the god born there.

The Gulf and the restless Caspian

The Sumerian flood text ends with a relocation that is easy to read past. Ziusudra comes out of the vessel, prostrates himself, kills an ox and a sheep; An and Enlil give him life like a god’s because he kept the animals and the seed of humankind alive. Then they move him. They settle him overseas, in Dilmun, where the sun rises—so the one man who came through the flood ends his days on an island out in the Gulf, and southern Mesopotamia is repeopled without him.

Rose’s Gulf Oasis model describes that basin being drowned from Hormuz inward, and the poem sends its one survivor out to live in the middle of it. Of every ending in the Mesopotamian family, that is the one that puts a man where the country went.

The Caspian keeps a shorter memory and a sharper one. In the 1830s the physicist Emil Lenz recorded what people in Baku told him: the sea had once lain much further from the city, and four of the islands offshore had been part of the mainland until the water came up suddenly and gave the coast the shape it has now. The Caspian’s level does exactly that—it has swung many metres, repeatedly, well inside historic time—so the story may be remembering a medieval high stand rather than the end of the Ice Age. It is a genuine drowned-land tradition on a sea that drowns land often.

Mapped traditions

The world begins again

Line them up and the pattern is not really about water. In every one of them the flood is a hinge, and the far side of the hinge is the present arrangement of things.

Kingship comes down from heaven a second time and begins again at Kish. Xisuthrus’ people walk back to Babylon and dig the writings out of Sippar, so that learning survives its own civilisation. Noah offers sacrifice and gets covenant, rainbow and food law. Deucalion and Pyrrha throw stones and get the Greeks; their son gets them their name. Macareus divides Lesbos, names its cities, sends out colonies and lays down a law. Dardanus leaves flooded Samothrace with the sacred objects, the divine names and the rites in his baggage and carries them to Mount Ida, where they become the property of another people. The sun god withdraws on the back of the cow and leaves heaven, earth and the underworld separated for good. Tishtar’s rain runs off the land and becomes the ocean. David fixes the water table at a thousand cubits and it has not moved. And the congregation of a Syriac church stands men to the east and women to the west because the ark was loaded that way.

That is the same finding this series has been getting everywhere. In the Chinese southwest Wang Xianzhao counted 232 flood texts among the minority peoples and found that 79% of them end by instituting something—the clans, the surnames, the marriage rule, the division of the peoples and their languages. Around the inland seas the institutions are different but the grammar is identical: the water is what makes the story true, and the charter is what the story is for. A flood myth is a legal instrument with weather in it.

Which is why the noise at the beginning matters. The oldest version in the world does not open with rain. It opens with a god who cannot sleep for the racket people make, and it saves the human line by having another god talk to a wall so that a man can overhear what he has been forbidden to be told. The world ends because of a sound and continues because of a voice that comes through a barrier—and everything that follows, the altar on the high ground, the sanctuary at the ebb line, the honey thrown into the crack, the men on one side of the aisle and the women on the other, is people arranging themselves permanently around the memory of it.