"In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the
seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains
of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights."
The great Biblical flood so described in Genesis has long been a
subject of fascination and speculation. In the 19th century the
English archbishop James Ussher established it as having happened
in the year 2348 B.C., calculating what was then taken as the age
of the earth and working backward through the entire series of
Biblical "begats." Proof of the flood, which is an element of so
many creation myths, began in earnest when archaeology started
connecting physical evidence with Biblical story. The dream of
proving the Bible as literal truth has proven irresistible,
producing both spurious claims and serious scholarship.
As best-selling historian Ian Wilson reveals in this fascinating
new book, evidence of a catastrophic event has been building
steadily, culminating in the work of William Ryan and Walter
Pitman. Several years ago Ryan and Pitman had posited that around
5600 BC there had an inundation in the Black Sea of such
proportions that it turned the freshwater lake into a saltwater
lake by connecting it to the Mediterranean. Were that true, they
estimated that there would be signs of civilization 300 feet below
the surface of the Black Sea. In September 2000, using his famous
underwater equipment, Robert Ballard (of SS Titanic fame) explored
parts of the Black Sea near the Turkish shore and found the remains
of wood houses. There had been a flood, and whether God's wrath or
not it had destroyed everything aroundit for hundreds of miles,
killing tens of thousands of people.
Exploring all the archeological evidence, Wilson explains how the
Black Sea flood and the Biblical flood have to be connected. In
particular, Wilson argues, learnedly and persuasively, that the
center of the civilized world was further to the West than
previously thought-not in Egypt or Mesopotamia but in what is today
Northern Turkey.
The earliest, antediluvian civilizations may have migrated east
into those places we have come to call the cradles of civilization,
forced by the Black Sea flood to create new settlements.
Scrupulous in its details and compelling in its sweep, "Before the
Flood" is narrative detective history at its most provocative,
contributing a vital new chapter to the debate about the Bible and
origins of the modern world.
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Review This Product
Nice Archaeological Detective Story
Fri, 4 Jul 2014 | Review
by: Tanya K.
Approximately 5600 BC the Mediterranean Sea burst through the Bosporus and inundated the Black Sea, turning a fresh water lake into a salt water lake and drowning any existing coastal dwellings. Ian Wilson describes the underwater, submersible-aided, Black Sea archaeological discoveries of William Ryan, Walter Pitman and Robert Ballard. Wilson hypothesizes that the Black Sea food and the Biblical flood may be connected and that the center of the civilized world was located around the Black Sea in Turkey.
The author has a clear, elegant writing style that avoids overly-technical jargon and repetitive waffling. Ideas are presented logically and there is a clear differentiation between archaeological evidence, specialist interpretation and author interpretation. There is no religion bashing and no religion preaching in this book. All in all, a very nice archaeological detective story.
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