Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
pottery characteristic of the earliest settlements. Above the lowest layer containing cultural
debris, the pottery changed to a different style that he interpreted as belonging to a new
culture that arrived from the north. Woolley believed his Ur flood destroyed everything in
the delta except the largest towns, which had grown tall enough to rise like peaks above the
floodwaters.
From everything he'd seen, Woolley concluded that the story of this flood was part of
Abraham's cultural heritage from Ur. The district of Haran, where Abraham subsequently
lived, even had a version of the flood story in which the name of the hero was similar to
“Noah.” Woolley argued that Abraham's family had adopted the local flood story, purged
it of all references to false gods, and handed it down through oral tradition to become the
basis for the story recorded in Genesis.
In 1964, British archaeologist Max Mallowan, the husband of mystery writer Agatha
Christie, summarized the evidence for a prebiblical Mesopotamian origin for the story of
Noah's Flood. Mallowan considered the biblical story to have come from an oral account
of traumatized survivors of a regional flood. Sumerian scribes subsequently preserved the
story on clay tablets of the type George Smith would eventually reassemble and translate.
But none of the flood deposits that archaeologists were squabbling over had been large
enough to belong to a flood capable of wiping out all of Mesopotamian civilization. If one
account of flooding was the source of the biblical story, it was the tale of a local disaster
that developed into the myth of a global flood.
Although there was no consensus among archaeologists as to which, if any, of these de-
posits was from Noah's Flood, when the Tigris River flooded in 1954 and submerged the
floodplain for hundreds of miles around Baghdad, it alerted everyone to the reality that
enormous floods could submerge the area. Surely, some thought, such events could have
been recorded in Mesopotamian flood stories. Despite bitter arguments, archaeologists gen-
erally favored the idea that the origin of the strikingly similar Sumerian, Babylonian, and
biblical stories lay in catastrophic flooding along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This made
sense; after all, to the residents of Mesopotamia, their home was the entire civilized world.
It's nearly impossible today to understand how gargantuan ancient floods were, because
today so many of the world's rivers have been engineered to reduce floods. To imagine the
devastating effects of an unusually large flood on an ancient low-lying region, we can look
