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Summary: Science scores again!
Review: An unfortunate title for an excellent book, since many people may assume this is just another creationist rant. It's most definitely not -- instead, it's a highly readable account of 30 years of scientific work that describes the Black Sea flood that occured about 7500 years ago -- milllenia after any Noah, but at a time when human civilizations did inhabit the shores of that sea. The authors are actively involved in this work, and bring together many different scientific fields, along with discussions of anthropology and myth. I've read widely in all the fields covered here, and the authors did an incredible job of getting it all down in less than 300 pages. I only wish it were longer!I've seen many misuses of this book by fundamentalists and creationists in newsgroups, so it's well worth seeing what the authors REALLY are saying. There's much more interesting things in the book than whether the bible got this one right, but in any case, this book demonstrates that at best, the Bible copied its flood myth from Gilgamesh and other Sumerian myths that might have been based on a much older oral tradition. In almost any detail, the bible story is still wrong (all the earth covered, all life destroyed, one family saved, all animals riding a small boat, etc, etc)...
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Summary: Do science and religion meet?
Review: I took a history course once where we used the Bible as one of our textbooks. I won't get into the issues of this any more than to say that if that offends you, then this book will, too. If it intrigues you to use the Bible as an anthropological lens, then Noah's Flood is for you. Walter Pitman and William Ryan put together a convincing narrative, first using the tools of geology and oceanography to prove that not only did a severe flood once occur in or near the Mediterranian Sea, but that it occurred well within the time of Homo sapiens. Completing this, they use archeology and anthropology to investigate the possibility that people actually witnessed this event, and to consider whether this catastrophic event may be the source for flood legends. Intelligent comparisons are made to flood stories in other religions, historic accounts, and legends. Mechanically, the book is well constructed. The language is complex, but not at all inaccessible; a college student would have no trouble with this book, and many high school students would be equally at ease. I had to read this book piece-meal over a month, and found that the meaning or location of many of the terms used in the summation had to be deduced or looked up in the earlier chapters; if I had been able to read the book in a few sittings this might not have been the case (I don't know.) Additionally, since the authors are key players in the events they report, it is worth mentioning that the book refrains from excessive praise upon its authors. I found this book to be enlightening and well constructed, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in the creation of cultural mythos and is willing to consider that there may be more to human prehistory than the Bible might suggest.
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Summary: Too far removed from Mesopotamian/Biblical worlds
Review: I am teaching Gilgamesh in relation to the Bible this term so decided to look at what was out there concerning Flood motifs. It is a sobering spectacle to see two geologists clearly so knowledgeable in their own field stumble when they assay other areas of which their knowledge is far more uncertain: history, anthropology, linguistics, and also comparative religion and, most glaringly, literature. The authors are not at all Biblical fundamentalists, but seem in some way biased towards the 'reality' of the flood, as if a belief that Ryan and Pitman are unable to profess in God becomes displaced onto history as empirical 'datum'. The epistemological status of empirical data are very different, of course, in history and geology; differing as well in their mode of interpretive representation. None of this seems to register. The Indiana Jones quality of the authors' personal narration which some previous reviewers found annoying does occasionally grate, but on the other hand it at least represents some form of actual experience and is not just an ideological projection backed up by an authority sometimes scientific, sometimes historical, seldom religious, and only sporadically convincing. The Black Sea may well have been a modest freshwater lake whose inundation by salt water caused a catastrophic reordering of the marine life of the region and the human communities beginning to cluster around it. What this has to do with Mesopotamia and the Biblical world, whose remaining literary evidence barely mentions the Black Sea, remains mystifying. Ryan and Pitman also heavily Indo-Europeanize the cultural situation, and imply that the Indo-Europeans are the fount of all the other linguistic groups in the region. This is to say the least not prudent. They also read very selectively in twentieth-century scholarship, really preferring nineteenth-century material that is more evolutionary and organic in its approach. Sadly, after over fifty years Heidel's rudimentary, often inadequate, but sober book on Gilgamesh and its Biblical parallels (Chicago UP) remains the best single volume on compaerative Flood motifs, to be supplemented by Tigay and Damrosch--but not this book.
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Summary: TLC Program led me to this Book
Review: I watched the program "In search of Noah's Flood" on TLC and that led me to this book. The work of these authors truly sheds light on a subject that has puzzled everyone for years. Was Noah's flood story based on a real event, and if so where did it occur? Various sites have been proposed by scholars over the years, but Ryan and Pitman's work dramatically changes everything. Other workers including the one who found the Titanic, are starting to confirm what these scholars have done. It must have been the most dramatic, most catastropic event in human history, to have lived to see the Black Sea rise 400 feet in just a week, and to destroy all the civilizations that existed there. There is no doubt that this flood was the "mother of all floods," and the origin of the various flood legends of the world including that of Noah and his Ark. Raja Bhat
Rating:
Summary: Noah's Flood
Review: The book was very enjoyable to read. Though I am not an expert in any way, the theories set forth seem plausable.
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Summary: Recommended it to everyone I know...
Review: Frankly, I am hard to fascinate, but this did the trick! I have a general grip on science and had no difficulty following the background, and I feel that without the "unneccessary background" the book would have been much less rich. Science is built on the shoulders of those who went before and a simple statement of the conclusions without crediting or illustrating those who laid the foundations and supplied the answers clue by clue would have been less than honest. I would have liked photos, but I enjoyed the drawings. Science books don't have to be all the same... And this is the best argument for continued collaboration across national, discipline and establishment borders I have seen in a while...how far would the researchers have got if they had to keep everything to themselves just in case they found something patentable? Well worth the read.
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Summary: I WISH I HAD READ IT 20 YEARS AGO
Review: Yes the book is at times hard to read if you are not interested in Geology or Oceanography, the book should be re-edited for the non scientist but with none of that information removed. My advice is to read this book back to front because if you don't you may give up on it before you are able to synthesize all the valuable information in it into the wonderful revelation that the book provides on pre-history. Combined with other sources such as the bible thoughtfully read, and info on Sumerian and Indian Mythology its a book which can change the way you see the world and your place in it.
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Summary: Fascinating story, somewhat marred by whiz-bang tone
Review: This book presents and supports a startling but fascinating thesis in three parts: The oceanographic part: that a remarkable natural event took place some 7,500 years ago, when the waters of the Mediterranean spilled over a natural dam and poured into the Black Sea basin, at that time containing a fresh-water lake which had evaporated to some 300 ft. below sea level. The first archaeological part: that the Black Sea basin at the time was home to an early Indo-European culture, later than the Catal Huyuk culture, and that the catastrophic flood dispersed an Indo-European diaspora to the four winds. The second archaeological part: accounts of this event gave rise to the Mesopotamian flood accounts such as that in Gilgamesh, and ultimately to the story of Noah in the Book of Genesis. The authors make a case for all this which is convincing at least on the surface. Their own background is geologic/oceanographic, and probably by consequence the first part is the most convincing. (Or it may just be because a submerged beach is easier to find than a drowned culture.) Well, if indeed there is a submerged canyon cut in bedrock at the northeastern end of the Bosporus, leading INTO the Black Sea, then at some time a lot of water must have flowed in that direction; and if there are salt-water shells overlying a layer of fresh-water shells, and radiocarbon shows the lower shells to be 7500 years old; then their case seems pretty strong. The archaeological stuff is presented in a considerably more disjointed way; there is a long discussion of the Tocharians, a Caucasian people who lived in central Asia until the Takla Makan dried up, who were interesting enough people, I suppose, but the discussion does nothing much for their argument. Still, once you have granted that there was a huge flood in the Black Sea basin as recently as 7500 years ago, then there's nothing very improbable about supposing that it displaced Neolithic people, or that it has something to do with the later flood stories that popped up in the general vicinity. Or so it seems to me anyway. It is hard to spoil a story like this, but the authors, unfortunately, almost manage it. Somehow they hit on a very bad idea about how to tell this story. They concluded that the raw science was not exciting enough, so they had to jazz it up by telling it as a series of anecdotes about scientists, making them all seem like Indiana Jones. It's as if it's written for an audience with the education of college graduates and the sensibility of high school boys. The book is illustrated with charcoal drawings of these Exciting Adventures. Thus, the first picture in the book is "Henry Creswicke Rawlinson falling down the face of the Behistun rock." I personally would rather have a nice photograph of the Behistun rock. Later on, we are given a breathless account of how Jiri Kukla got into the Eighth Congress of the International Association for Quarternary Research without paying. I don't mind the anecdote, but it's irritating to have these anecdotes frame the whole account. In accord with the general plan of being exciting, we are given dramatic reconstructions (stories) of witnesses and survivors of the flood, and of "Nur-Aya, the renowned scribe and storyteller", telling a version of the Flood Story in Assyria. These would work better if the tone of the rest of the work were more neutral. This stylistic flaw leads to a more serious flaw. By turning the whole thing into a whole series of Amazing Stories, the authors never allow themselves time to step back and look at the response to their theses in the field as a whole. As I say, the evidence they present is convincing to ME. But then who am I? I'm no expert on oceanography or archaeology. It's easy to spin a yarn that will fool me. What I want to know is whether these theses are convincing to other people in the fields. Is there acceptance? Are there objections or reservations? What's the next place to look for supporting evidence? Instead, the reader may be left with the nagging worry: is this accepted science, or is this a crackpot scenario, or a mixture of the two? However, while I am bugged by these problems, I am not as bugged as some; I think the theses is exciting enough, and the science convincing enough, that the book is still well worth reading anyway.
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Summary: Noah's Fluff
Review: This book was disappointing. It did provide some scientific evidence for Noah's flood. But that information was encased in a great deal of unnecessary details on how that information was acquired. It's a lot of slow reading to glean a few facts regarding the evidence that the Black Sea was a fresh water lake until it was inundated by sea water several thousand years ago.
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Summary: Worth Reading, With A Grain of, uh, Salt
Review: While the authors' attempts to connect the Black Sea flood of 7500 BP with the Biblical flood and the Epic of Gilgamesh were completely misguided, the book is worth reading just to get a glimpse of their research into this catastrophic event. While not the only such event in human times, even in that region, this research has already increased awareness of the role of sudden, unique events in the history and prehistory of our world. On the other hand, the origin of agriculture is at least 14,000 years BP, long before this flood. Mary Settegast's "Plato Prehistorian" is an excellent survey work for those interested in "Noah's Flood" or prehistory in general, as well as being the best half-book written on the subject of Plato's tale of Atlantis. The town of Catal Huyuk predates this flood, but as Settegast writes, this very old town sprang up as if from nothing, indicating that its founders came from elsewhere. That origin place is probably now under water. The melting glaciers forced the human inhabitants of the world's coastlines to higher ground, such that the sites with the roots of stone-age culture are now drowned. This is not a book that explains the Biblical flood, and contrary to the slapdash treatment given that particular flood story in this book and elsewhere, its source doesn't lie in a Sumerian epic. There are literally hundreds of flood stories, and while all have certain common elements, each is unique.
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