Quote:
Originally Posted by Praxeas
From what I have heard most Semitic cultures had a flood story. In fact I think one reason why some believe in the flood so much and even a universal flood is they find flood stories in various spread out cultures. Though I don't know why that would prove a universal flood
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It's often been said that the stories of floods found all around the world don't point to a "Universal Flood" but rather they point out the fact that floods are universal.
Human beings have observed the effects of floods in every part of the globe - with each event being a "local flood."
Ancient civilizations all developed in river valleys. The Nile, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Huang Ho are the sites of the oldest civilizations - and they were all prone to devastating floods. Modern projects like the Aswan Dam on the Nile and the Three Gorges Project in China have altered the effects of their respective rivers so that the old bane of floods has been largely mitigated, but with trade offs such as loss of fertilizing sediments and severe erosion at the river mouths.
According the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are now 40,000 dams in the Mississippi/Missouri River Basin. This system has prevented many floods upstream, but it has left New Orleans and Louisiana even more vulnerable due to the loss of buffering wetlands (swamps). The Aztec were said to have originated as a people in the Gulf of Mexico area - their legends describe pelicans, storks and other wading bird as living in their original homeland so many associate these stories with the Mississippian mound building civilization.
And then there's Ballard's claims of a
Black Sea basin flood. We also have evidence of several similar floods in the Mediterranean basin.