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Islands, something Frazer thought reflected the region's history of great earthquake-gener-
ated waves. In Frazer's view, flood stories arose independently from local experiences.
Not all localities, however, gave rise to flood stories. European flood traditions were rare
outside of Greece and Scandinavia. Frazer thought it remarkable that he could not find
a Chinese tradition that told of a universal inundation that killed off most of the human
race. Neither could he find clear cases of native flood stories in Egypt or the rest of Africa.
The lack of flood stories from along the Nile—where the annual flood is quite predict-
able—ruled out typical river flooding as a general source of flood myths. Droughts were
the real danger in ancient Egypt and along most other major African rivers where it was
failure to flood that would have been catastrophic.
Frazer suggested that while Christian missionaries almost certainly introduced some
flood stories, many indigenous flood stories were rooted in attempts to explain marine
fossils on mountaintops or in other high places. Missionaries delighted in describing how,
like Saint Augustine, native peoples around the world pointed to shells or whalebones
found high on mountainsides as proof of an ancient flood.
Given the rich variety of storylines and local detail, Frazer could not see how all the
world's flood traditions could be derived from the biblical story. In contrast, Frazer thought
it was easy to see how local stories of catastrophic floods would evolve into stories of a
universal deluge.
On the whole, then, there seems to be good reason for thinking that some and probably many diluvial traditions
are merely exaggerated reports of floods which actually occurred, whether as the result of heavy rain, earthquake-
waves, or other causes. All such traditions, therefore, are partly legendary and partly mythical: so far as they pre-
serve reminiscences of floods which really happened, they are legendary; so far as they describe universal deluges
which never happened, they are mythical.
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After Frazer's exhaustive study, only those uncritically seeking to legitimize a global flood
gave any credence to the argument that the global distribution of flood stories meant they
shared a common origin.
Those still trying to argue that the global distribution of flood stories is a legacy of a glob-
al flood have to consider how the rich collection of Chinese flood stories has very different
storylines from Mesopotamian flood stories. Historian Mark Lewis's
The Flood Myths of
