The Bullroarer Atlas

← All essays

A series in nine essays

Myths of the Great Deluge

Flood traditions read against the coasts they remember: which sea rose, which plain went under, and who was standing on the shore when it did.

Begin with Sahul

The reading path

  1. August 10, 2026 Myths That Remember Sahul Ninety-five Sahul traditions hand back the coast, the island and the law, and one Arnhem Land python is at once the flood, the serpent and the roaring board. Read the essay →
  2. August 11, 2026 Flood Myths of Sundaland Fifty-seven Island Southeast Asian flood traditions hand back the harvest law, the moieties, the order the domains were founded in and the fire in the bamboo. Read the essay →
  3. August 11, 2026 Flood Myths of East Asia Seventy-two East Asian flood traditions end by handing back the present world, its surnames, its marriage rule, its coastline and the peoples living on it. Read the essay →
  4. August 14, 2026 Flood Myths of South Asia From Manu’s ship to the gourds of Bastar, the South Asian flood ends not in survival but in law: descent, marriage, craft, taboo, and three drained countries. Read the essay →
  5. August 11, 2026 Flood Myths of the Mediterranean Near East Fifty-one flood traditions from the Aegean to the Persian Gulf end one world and issue the next, handing back the ark, the sanctuary, the seating plan and the law. Read the essay →
  6. August 14, 2026 Doggerland: The Stories Around the Drowned Country Doggerland left no known myth of its own. Fourteen postglacial memories and four later North Sea legends show what the surrounding coasts remembered. Read the essay →
  7. August 11, 2026 Flood Myths of North America Eighty North American flood traditions hand back the world people still live in, the corn, the crests of a whole coast, and the red stone of the peace pipe. Read the essay →
  8. August 11, 2026 Flood Myths of South America Fifty-six South American traditions make the flood build a society. The drowned climb out of the mountain as the two Kaingang halves that still intermarry. Read the essay →
  9. August 14, 2026 Where the Flood Is Not Remembered South of the Sahara, Africa holds one Ice Age flood tradition; northern Asia three; Sahul ninety-five. The flood myth is not universal, and the gaps say why. Read the essay →

Read alongside

September 30, 2026 The Bullroarer and the Flood Across Australia and New Guinea, strikingly similar myths bind the bullroarer to catastrophic water, ancestral law and the making of the world. Read the essay → August 10, 2026 Twelve Drowned Worlds The front door to the flood series: twelve animated maps of the coasts rising water redrew, each wired to the essay that carries its traditions. Read the essay →