this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Here's the thing, society formed around agrarian settlements. What do you need for crops, livestock, AND people? What makes transporting your goods easier? If you said water, you get a prize. Many of our settlements, both modern and historic, were near water sources. Water sources flood. Inevitably, water sources experience thousand-year flood events, and completely swamp a huge area, maybe even wiping out one or more settlements. As you start going back in history, you also start dealing with glacial dam rupture events, which also almost certainly scoured away everything downstream and would have seemingly come out of nowhere at all.

The phenomenon of the global flood myth is really just that people live near water, and when you live near water, shit happens.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Upvoting, b/c that too:-).

I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c "they made it up", but b/c it actually did really happen... and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.

Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie "Knowing" with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie "The Matrix" did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.

Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe "the world-wide flood event" to a child, it would be both "yes it actually did happen" (most likely) plus also "it wasn't quite like that".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't think you have to even assume that every Mesopotamian flood myth is referring to the same event. The Tigris and Euphrates were very prone to massive flooding.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Yes. I mentioned it as "supporting evidence", but good clarification.