Selects: Why Do Great Flood Myths Seem To Be Universal?

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1:14What is something you've had to unlearn about love? That it's earned. That I was unworthy of love. That it needs to be forever for it to count. February is the month of love. Whether you're in a relationship, casually dating, or proudly single, it's a great time to reflect on yourself and what you want. I'm Hope Woodard, host of the Boy Sober podcast, and each week we're looking at love from every angle. Listen to Boy Sober. That's B-O-Y-S-O-B-E-R. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and I have one word to describe this week's Select from 2021 on why there are so many myths about a great flood found in cultures around the world.

2:07That word is fascinating. But I'll add a few more words, I guess. This is one of those good old-fashioned Stuff You Should Know episodes where we find out that a thing that everyone just kind of takes for granted actually has a lot more to it than it seems. And I love those episodes. And I love this episode, which is why I picked it. I hope you love it too.

2:32Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

2:43Ahoy and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're the captains of this here ship called Stuff You Should Know. and that's all there is to it. Although I do think we need to allow for the fact that Jerry is rear admirable. And by that, of course, I mean rear admiral. And by that, of course, I mean it's going to be a long episode. Has there ever been a cutesy TV show called The Admirable Admiral? No, that sounds great. I think there was one, The Simpsons did one called Admiral Baby. Oh, all right. Well, that counts. Yeah. I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though.

3:25Could have been like a terrible person. So I have a cold, so I just want to apologize up front. Just a head cold. But I'm a little stuffy, so I'm sorry if it's coming across as untoward. I'm very proud of you for pushing through, Chuck, because lesser podcasters would not. They might just be like, I can't. I have a cold. People don't want to hear that. And you say, to heck with that. I'm going forward with it. Remember back in the day you had like a three-month cold that one year? Every year. Every year for a little while. I used to get so sick. Yeah, I know it was terrible, but we've gotten much better, haven't we?

4:01Yeah, I think, I don't know, maybe quitting smoking had something to do with that. Maybe. Just a touch. You don't get colds like that anymore. No. Good for you. I really don't. So yet another reason to quit smoking everybody who's out there on the fence. That's right. So we're talking today. the reason I said that we're captains is because I was making a play on a story that it seems like every single person Chuck knows about. At the very least, I can say with almost 100 % confidence that everyone that you and I have ever met, seen in passing, talked to, or been in the same country with probably, has heard of the story of Noah and the flood, where Noah was told to go ahead and build a boat because the earth was going to flood and everybody was going to be killed.

4:46And by the way, grab some animals, put them on board so that you and your wife and then the animals can all repopulate your respective species once the flood subsides, right? It's a classic story. Everybody loves it. We read it out loud just about every Saturday at dinnertime. And it's just a great story, right? Everybody knows this story. But it turns out, Chuck, that there's this idea that that actually happened. And it's long been an idea that what the Noah story is talking about happened in actuality, that there was a point in time where the entire world flooded. And there's been a lot of scholarly research into this, into how that's even possible.

5:33Yeah. And, you know, I guess if we're talking about this particular, because, you know, we've found after digging around and getting Ed to help us with this research that there are flood myths in not every culture, but a lot of cultures over the years. and we'll get into that in lots of detail, but as far as Noah's actual flood from the Old Testament, there was a gentleman in 1872 named George Smith who was a hobbyist of all things Assyrian and an amateur sort of historical sleuth, but a well-educated one nonetheless because he could do things like read cuneiform tablets. And he was doing that one day on, I don't know if it was an actual lunch break, Or if that's just apocryphal, but supposedly on a lunch break, went to a museum, was reading cuneiform, and came across a story of the Epic of Gilgamesh and read this, quote, build a boat, abandon wealth and seek survival, spurn poverty, save life, take on board all living things, seed, animals, the boat you will build, her dimension shall be equal, her length and breadth shall be the same.

6:43Doesn't say anything about cubits, but it's inferred. Right. Cover her with a roof like the ocean below, and he will send you a rain of plenty. And George Smith said, hey, this is strikingly familiar as the Christian slash Jewish Old Testament Noah's flood story, but this is several hundred years previous. Yeah, and instead of God telling Noah or an angel telling Noah, it's the God Enlil who's telling a guy named Utenapishtim to build this boat. Noah's nowhere to be heard. And for what reason? What do you mean? Well, I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where, like, earth is being punished, basically?

7:26Oh, yeah. So the reason that Enlil gave to Udunapishtim was because the humans were too noisy and the gods were sick of humans. So they were going to flood the earth and kill off all humans. Whereas in the Bible, it was because humans had become too wicked to live. I think noisy and wicked are the same thing back then. I guess so. And it makes you wonder, like, did somebody misread the word? And they're like, noisy? Okay. And just barreled on. They're like, my lunch break is almost over. So George Smith just was like, noisy. They said noisy. There was also the idea of saving animals. And there was also the idea that afterward, birds were sent out to find dry land just as in Noah's story.

8:07Right. And so you just kind of say, whoops, because the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Old Testament by at least several hundred years, depending on what part you're talking about. And so you might say, OK, so the Noah story is adapted from this. But that doesn't mean that it undermines the veracity. They don't undermine the veracity of one another. In fact, if you stop and think about it, the fact that one of the first things that was ever written down after the invention of writing, cuneiform was the first written system humans ever devised. Yeah. And that the first literary work ever created, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contained this flood story.

8:53It kind of suggests that something actually may have happened. happened. Like it was a really important story that has stuck around for thousands and thousands of years. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written 3 ,400 years ago. That suggests that there might be some kernel of truth to it. Yeah. And over the years, a lot of people have tried to prove whether scientifically or otherwise that the Noah's flood really did take place. uh bible literalists is that what is that what we call them i think so okay bible literalists um bible historians because that would uh that would go a long way uh in christianity if you could say hey the bible is an actual historical document this stuff is really true and in the 18th and 19th century there was something called uh deluvialism deluvial meaning like relating to a great flood.

9:53But that was a big shaper of actual geology was basically saying, hey, this physical, literally the physical world that we're living in came about after this flood, what kind of reset things. And then the real geological record came along once science got serious and they proved that was not the case. And that kind of went the way of the dodo around, you know, the mid 1800s. Yeah, they kind of did it backwards. They said the Noah flood shaped the world as we see it, go find proof. And when they found proof, they were like, it's not really adding up. So there's no evidence that there was a global flood that inundated the world.

10:32And in fact, the geological record that these geologists, the early ones and, you know, up to modern day ones have been putting together, supports the exact opposite of that. That Earth wasn't created in a deluge. It was created over incredibly long distances of time, very, very slowly, layer by layer, right? That's right. But people still say, okay, well, why, number one, why have we been telling this flood story for so long? And then also, why is it, like you said, the idea of flood myth seems almost universal. Doesn't that like still strongly suggest that there was, even if the Bible doesn't quite have it right?

11:12And by the way, Noah's story also shows up in the Koran too. So it's in the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, and the Koran. And then there's the Epic of Gilgamesh story. Like why is this important story still around? Doesn't it still support the idea that something happened? Why would there be universal flood myths from cultures that had never even heard of Christianity before? And there have been like some attempts to explain that that I think are much more satisfying than the idea that we're just missing all of the evidence for a great worldwide deluge. that happened back in antiquity. Yeah, and there were, you know, it's more than just those.

11:46There were Chinese flood myths. There were flood myths in southern Canada, in the British Isles. So there was one study that picked out 50 cultures, and they all had their own flood myths, and it was related to some kind of punishment. So they started looking, like you said, of like, why is this happening? And there's a bunch of reasons, and they all kind of make sense to me, if I'm being honest. One of them is that there was a flood in these cultures, but it wasn't a global flood. But if all you know is a certain area and you never get to leave that area and it wipes out everything you know, then the story that you pass along orally through the years would sound like one that wiped out everything.

12:33Yeah, and like the whole idea is that this flood actually did happen way far back to one group. And then that group eventually kind of spread out and carried that flood myth with them. And so to those of us today, historians, anthropologists, looking at like all of these groups that are spread out all over the world, all sharing basically the same story, it would make it seem like a flood had impacted all of these groups that were that far spread out. So it must have been a really big flood. But this explanation says, no, the flood was actually really localized. It was the group that it happened to that eventually spread out.

13:14That's one explanation. It makes a lot of sense. And one of the groups that are usually kind of pinpointed as this flood happening to are the Proto-Indo-Europeans, who were known to have been around the, I think, the Caucasus Mountains to start and then just spread out as far as the British Isles, basically all over Europe, northwest, east, south, and that all of our languages, like English, Germanic, just a whole slew of languages developed out of this group. Yeah, and some more support for this is the fact that there aren't flood myths in sub-Saharan African cultures, and these were groups that when they left Africa, they didn't come back.

13:57So they would not have taken back with them a flood myth from Proto-Indo-Europeans. So it all kind of makes sense. Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of related one too that says that there were floods, just not a flood. That flooding is actually really common. So it happened to a lot of different groups. So it would make sense that all these different cultures would have flood myths. Sure. And again, if you live in your riverside village and you don't get to travel very far from there and everything you know of gets destroyed, again, it could be, you know, lend support to the idea that it gets translated as a worldwide flood.

14:42And if everyone's having these localized floods, which happened, you know, there's always been floods, then not necessarily of the 40 days and 40 nights variety, but when things are passed around orally and then they get rewritten, things get kind of mixed up. Yeah, and it's our bad, those of us alive today who are mistaking or laying our interpretation of the word world onto like these cultures' use of the word world. They're saying their world, which is much smaller than it is to those of us today. When we think the world, we think the whole globe, you know? Yeah, and speaking of laying your things on other cultures, the third one is Christian missionaries.

15:24And there is evidence of this happening. they would go and tell the story of Noah's great flood, especially when colonization was happening too. And between missionaries and colonization, all these other cultures picked up on that original biblical flood tale, or I don't know if we should call it a flood myth or flood tale at this point. What should we call it? I think most people call it flood myths or diluvian myths. Okay, diluvian myth. That sounds a little more academic. So yeah, so Christian missionaries did this. And I think this is also evidence in the fact that the South Pacific didn't really have one until 1814 when they came into contact with Christian missionaries.

16:08And then all of a sudden they had the Maori flood myths. Yeah, so they actually had a flood myth before, but apparently it was more tsunami-based. And then after contact with Christianity, it became much more of like a deluge. And it just bore some striking resemblances to the Noah flood myth of Christianity. And apparently that happened all over the South Pacific as well, where these cultures will have their own kind of flood myth, but it's always based on tsunamis. But then the Christians come and go and all of a sudden it's a deluge where the water rose after like, you know, 40 days and 40 nights of rain and stuff.

16:41So that creates a lot of headaches for anthropologists, but it also at the same time explains why a universal flood myth or a flood myth would seem universal to those of us around today and why they seem to bear such a striking resemblance to one another, you know? Indeed. I think we should take a break. And I'm going to go blow my nose. Okay. And then we'll come back and talk about geomythology right after this.

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20:39so Chuck that was nice of you to blow your nose at the break rather than during recording even though I still had to hear it it was uh you know what's funny I was listening to uh I don't know why I just thought of this but I was listening to Paul F. Tompkins his Stay of Homekins podcast he does with his wife Janie the other day, and he was talking about sneezing on stage, and that had happened to him once in his career. And Paul is someone who spent lots and lots and lots of time on stages. And I wonder if there's something to that, of the body withholding things like sneezes, because I've never seen anyone sneeze on stage.

21:16I've never sneezed on stage. Yeah. Isn't that weird? Yeah, I'm sure it's related to adrenaline and fight or flight. That's what I was thinking. I mean, there's got to be something to that. Yeah. Like your body's like, I don't have time to waste all that energy on sneezing. We've got to get out of here. We've got to put on a great show. It would be really weird to think about it if like, I don't know, Barry Manilow in Vegas was talking about setting up Mandy before he sings it and just lets out a big sneeze. Yeah. Well, thank you for setting me up to reminisce yet again about the time that you and me and I saw Barry Manilow front row center in Vegas.

21:49You would have been sneezed on with that big snozz. Yes, we actually would have been covered in his sneeze. All right, so we promised talk of geomythology. Here's the idea. Since science really got its act together, there have been a couple of different ways to look at things like flood myths. As either this is a story about our cultural values, there's a lot of religious metaphor involved, or this was an actual historical event. and geomythology came along to kind of say, hey, man, it can kind of be both. Like there could have been a real flood and it also took on metaphor and took on cultural values and was used as a story of, I can't think of the word I'm trying to think of, to teach you a lesson.

22:38What's that called? A fable? Yeah, like a fable. So this kind of, this field has emerged since I believe the 60s And actually, I was reading about this field of geomythology is like still really trying to establish itself in the field of geology. And most geomythologists are trained geologists. That's where you start out. Who play D &D? Probably. But they also are like, you know, they have to really defend what they're doing against their fellow geologists because they're basically saying all of these myths, all of these legends, all of these folk traditions, they actually contain eyewitness accounts of natural disasters, of weird events in Earth, of early finds of fossils.

23:27And yeah, they've cloaked them in the language of mythology and the terminology of mythology and monsters and weirdness and all this stuff That makes it just seem completely legendary to us today. But that's how these pre-scientific and often pre-literate cultures pass along really valuable information. And like we've been kind of foolish to just discount them as nothing but legend, as if there's no fact whatsoever in there. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Exactly. And so that's what geomythology is doing. They're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you just look at this the right way, we are covered up in historical accounts just waiting for us to unravel if we learn how to read these correctly and then also correlate with actual like known geological events that we've discovered through science.

24:22Yeah, like, hey, you see that story that seems completely crazy about a demon god who lives in a mountain and gets angry and spouts fire from its top? Like, that's a volcano, bros. And like, just because it sounds crazy doesn't mean we shouldn't look at the fact that an actual volcano eruption might have happened then. And let's kind of marry these two things and let's just all get along. Right. And so like that, that, that legend about the volcano with the angry God that sometimes spews like scary stuff forth. And if you ever hear the mountain starting to make rumbles, it means the God is waking up and you should run.

25:01Like, um, that's, that is a way for a culture that is aware that this mountain is actually a volcano and that volcano can sit dormant for generations at a stretch. So there will be people born in the future who aren't aware that that's a volcano. And this is the way that the culture passes down over deep time this really important information. If the volcano ever makes a sound, run because you don't want the fiery breath of that god that's trapped inside. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, I love this stuff. Like before science came along, all humans did from the moment they could sort of form thoughts was try and explain what was going on around them from rain and thunder to volcanoes and floods.

25:44And I don't know. I think it's super interesting. It's almost like these proto early warning systems. Right. Like nuclear semiotics. They just didn't really know how to explain the science of it. Exactly. Like nuclear semiotics. Remember we did an episode on that, on how to tell people 10 ,000 years in the future about steering clear of nuclear waste, right? It's the same exact principle. It's just, Chuck, somewhere along the way, we later generations became arrogant and just completely discounted any of those pre-scientific traditions because they didn't appear scientific. But it is exactly like what you're saying.

26:19It was the way that they made sense of actual stuff. And so there's plenty of stuff to learn from those accounts and those tales and those myths and legends. We just have to basically kind of eat a little bit of crow and go back and be like, well, we've been ignoring this to our own detriment. Yeah, and it's like you said earlier. It's a tough road to hoe, though, for scientists these days if they take this on because, you know, you have mixed results when you go back and you look at these tales. Some of them may just be folk tales and legends. and some may have kernels of truth, some may have a little more truth.

26:55So there's a lot to sort of parse through as a geologist these days if you're working as or with a geomythologist. Right. And so when you are laying this out and trying to figure out, okay, what is this myth describing? Again, you're a trained geologist if you're a geomythologist, But you're also working with people from other scientific fields. As far as trying to uncover the fact, the kernel of truth behind these flood myths, you would be working with paleohydrology or paleobathymetry, which is the study of ancient sea levels, like where they were at in the past. And so you're going to take the findings from these fields and then say, okay, let me see if I can correlate it with a myth.