Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
missionaries were often the first to record local stories, it can be hard to tell whether a flood
story predates Christian contact or just regurgitates Noah's story with local color added.
Anthropologist Alice Lee Marriott inadvertently discovered how rapidly stories can jump
from one culture to another while collecting Native American folklore in South Dakota in
the summer of 1936. One day an elderly informant challenged her to tell him one of her
people's tales. She told him a version of Beowulf as the story of a brave warrior and the
water monster. Afterwards, she was impressed with how he rounded out details to improve
the story in retelling it to his people. A few years later Marriott was amused to find her
story as the subject of a research paper in an ethnological journal documenting a Beowulf-
like myth among Native Americans.
A century before, in 1842, a missionary named Moffat told the tale of how he could not
find a flood legend among South Africans until one of the Khoikhoi (whom colonists called
Hottentots) told him the story of a great flood. The man assured Moffat that this was a tale
of his forefathers, and that Moffat was the first missionary he had ever met. Later, in com-
paring notes with another missionary, Moffat learned that his colleague had indeed told his
native informant the story of Noah's Flood. This shows how difficult it is to determine the
origin of many flood myths due to the potential for unrecorded cultural transmissions.
Unsurprisingly, people living in flood-prone estuaries are likely to have stories of a great
flood. The estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers receives its water from the moun-
tains of Turkey and Iraq, and a warm spring rainstorm falling onto a heavy snow pack can
submerge the whole floodplain under many feet of water. When the levees burst there is
nowhere to go as everything slips under water. Every now and then people living in this
region were forced to flee to higher ground or pack their possessions and animals onto a
boat or raft as their world sank beneath floodwaters. The lack of well-documented flood
myths from Egypt and the Nile River may be due to the fact that the Nile gets its water
from sources far to the south in equatorial Africa. Fed by a chain of great lakes in the East
African Rift, the river's annual discharge does not vary anywhere near as much as in Meso-
potamia. The predictably moderate annual flood was no threat, it was the source of life.
How long could stories of a great flood survive oral transmission from one generation
to the next? Examples of stories that have been passed down through oral transmission for
thousands of years have been reported from several continents. My favorite is a Klamath
