Deluge

Deluge (through the French, from Lat. diluvium, 'a flood'). There is scarcely any considerable race of men among whom there does not exist, in some form, the tradition of a great deluge, which destroyed all the human race except their own progenitors. The classical story of Deucalion and Pyrrha is but a typical example of similar myths found everywhere, and savages and fathers of the church alike have argued that the shells, corals, and other marine objects often found on the tops of mountains, offered distinct proof of the historical reality of a deluge. That the Noahian deluge recorded in Scripture covered the whole earth and destroyed all mankind save one family, was the universal opinion until towards the close of the 18th century, and is maintained even in Dean Buckland's Reliquiae Diluvianæ (1823). The organic remains, on which the science of paleontology is now founded, were regarded as its wrecks, and were held to prove that it had covered every known country, and risen over the highest hills. In the progress of geology, it soon became evident that most of the stratified rocks demanded an earlier origin than a few thousand years, and the influence of the deluge was consequently restricted to the slightly altered superficial deposits; but many of these were, after a few years, found to belong to a period vastly anterior to any historical epoch, and to have been produced by long-continued and persistent agencies, differing totally from a temporary cataclysm. The more common modern opinion regards the flood of Noah as partial and local, although the universality seems fairly enough to be implied in the biblical description, and although the old theory has been revived by Sir Henry Howorth in his work, The Mammoth and the Flood (1887). M. Lenormant, the most brilliant as well as erudite of orthodox scholars, in his great posthumous Histoire Ancienne de l'Orient, argues the partial character of the flood from the absence of all record of a deluge among the black races of the world, as the negroes and Papuans; and another Catholic scholar, M. l'Abbé Motais, in his interesting and learned work, Le Déluge Biblique (1885), maintains that this opinion is quite consistent with the exegesis of Scripture, with tradition, and the doctrine of the church, while it is the only theory that avoids all the ethnological and linguistic difficulties presented by the existence of the great negro and yellow races marked off so distinctly from the Noahian type. The deluge traditions of many primitive races are connected with religious mysteries, and it is scarcely true, as has often been asserted, that it is the Old Testament alone that gives a moral reason for the deluge sent upon the world. The Chaldean account discovered by George Smith presents a striking resemblance to the Genesis story, and agrees with it also in making the flood distinctly a divine retribution for human sin, although it of course differs from the Jewish account in being polytheistic instead of monotheistic. The vessel in which Xisuthros, the Chaldean Noah, sails, is a ship guided by a steersman, and others beside his own family are admitted into it. The flood is seven days at its height, and Xisuthros sends out in succession a raven, a dove, and a swallow. The ship finally rests on Rowandiz, the highest mountain of Eastern Kurdistan, and the peak which supports the heavens, instead of upon Ararat, the northern or Armenian continuation of the range. Babylonian tradition also confounds Noah with Enoch, for Xisuthros is taken to the skies immediately after coming out of the ark. Two deluge poems were amalgamated together in an Akkadian epic, in twelve books, describing the adventures of Gizdhubar. A translation of Hamt's version is given by Sayce in his Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments; and see Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena belonging to the Close of the last Geological Period (1895).