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I was listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast and one ep was talking about the huge areas that were covered by water post-Mini Ice Age and how rapidly that change occurred. I'll get the numbers wrong, so I won't try to quote it, but it was shocking. It made complete sense that people migrating from that area to higher ground would perceive the entire world flooding.
I believe this was around the time of the Sumerian culture, which gave us The Epic of Gilgamesh and the first flood. Very interesting stuff. Can't recall if it was the ep on Sumer or Assyria or another, as they often have a lot of overlapping events told from the point of view of the culture in question.
You don't need anything like that to explain it.
People settle near large bodies of water. Those bodies can flood, sometimes catastrophically.
This guy gets how myths form
Just listened to that one myself. Believe it’s the Sumerian episode. #8
Sumerian culture was many thousands of years after the end of the ice age. Even the last big cooling event was a couple thousand years before Mesopotamian cities, and that was just a cooling event, not something with big ice sheets that turn into floods when it warms up. What they had is the Tigris and Euphrates that did flood on a regular basis, sometimes catastrophically - the floods of the Nile brought fertilization from the upper terrains they covered and it was predictable like clockwork, but the floods of Mesopotamia were destructive and unpredictable. One thing it absolutely didn't do is cover the whole Mesopotamian plain, it just flooded the land surrounding the river. Unfortunately, people make cities near those rivers - but the mountains were WAY too far to run to them. Mesopotamia is just basically one gigantic flat plain, it doesn't have random mountains in the middle.
We have geological records of one big flood dated around 2900 BCE that destroyed most notably Shuruppak (it got better), which held a big cultural position at the time, and a few other cities in the area. What's funny is that by the time the Flood story was integrated into Akkadian / Babylonian culture, sometimes between 2000 and 1800 BCE, there were still people living in Shuruppak, which is named in those myths as having been destroyed.
I had not heard of Shuruppak, but now I've pulled up Wikipedia on it. Thanks for the info!
I love learning about history but hadn't focused on this aspect of human history until pretty recently, so I'm happy to learn more. It was when I got various dates put to farming and domestication that I began taking note of civs in this / these eras. I'd primarily focused before and after previously (evolution of hominids and post-middle ages). Again, thanks!