The survivors of the Great Flood
Until the end of 1800 it was thought that the Great Flood was a sort of fable or religious myth of the Bible (Genesis 8,4) without any point in contact with reality but around 1880 the first copies of the translation from Akkadian of the Epic of Gilgamesh began to circulate. The Epic of Gilgamesh is an Assyrian text in which, with different names, an event similar to the biblical Flood is proposed. A story without contact with reality can exist, but two are starting to be a clue, the heroes of detective novels would say.
When we talk about the Flood there is a little confusion: we talk both about sudden rains that last for a very long time and we also talk about an enormous rise in the sea waters due to the rain. The rain is thought to have raised sea levels to the point of submerging all land. This is simply impossible: there is not enough water on the Earth and in the atmosphere to surround completely our planet. These are two different points in the story: a rain that lasted for a very long time and a (or more than one) wave that overwhelmed everything, where "everything" means what the few survivors knew.
If you find yourself on a boat lifted by a wave it will seem that "the whole" world (coast or other boats) is below, and the higher the wave the more it will seem that the world around you is swallowed up by the sea. There is nothing to be done, man is highly egocentric and as such he finds it easier to think that the world is being swallowed up by the waters rather than thinking of having risen from the surface on which he was just before.
In the early 1900s, the remains of Noah's Ark, or someone else's, were first sighted near a glacier on Mount Ararat in Turkey at a height of about 3,500 meters. Dozens and dozens of expeditions were carried out, some samples of fossil wood from the Ark were also brought back and photos were taken [1] .
The myth of the Flood has now taken on absurd connotations: it cannot be admitted that it rained so much as to carry a 110 meter long ship to over three thousand meters because there cannot be so much water on Earth, it cannot be thought that someone built a ship at that height and in a place where, with modern technologies, it is possible to resist for very few hours, yet the ship is there and shows that something "peculiar" must have happened.
In 497 BCE Plato wrote The Timaeus, the text most cited by Aristotle, which deals with the sphericity of the earth, its movement, the movement of the stars and planets, and in which an interesting statement appears to say the least.
An Egyptian priest from Sais (the ancient cultural, political and administrative capital of Egypt) speaking to Solon told him:
"You Greeks are young and know nothing of what happened [2] ... men have been destroyed and will be still in various ways. The greatest destructions took place from fire and water, but others of many other types occurred such as the legend that is told among you that Phaeton stole the chariot of the sun god and, failing to lead it to the normal path he set fire to everything on earth and died himself [3] ... The truth is this: sometimes there is a deviation in the movement of bodies circulating in the sky. At very large intervals of time everything present on Earth ends up in excess of fire. Those who live in mountains and dry places die more than those who live near seas and rivers. On the contrary, when the gods purify the world with water, all those who live near the rivers and seas are overwhelmed by the waters and only those who live on the high mountains are saved, thus only the rough mountaineers are saved and civilization must restart from the beginning. [4] "
There is no doubt that the priest was talking about destruction that occurred various times on the face of the Earth, generated by different factors, which occurred in ancient times but still during the existence of man. The Chinese writing which talks about floods due to rivers that reversed their course finds a precise correspondence in Plato when he reports the statement about destruction due to water. China and Egypt speak of similar destruction.
Agriculture
Twelve thousand years ago the Paleolithic revolution took place: men began to cultivate the land. This phenomenon occurred simultaneously throughout the earth. After more than one hundred thousand years of existence, homo sapiens suddenly begins to cultivate. Why not before, why not after, why all together and at the same time but above all why did men from all over the world begin to cultivate in the mountains? Everyone knows that it is less difficult to cultivate in the plains than in the mountains, no one would cultivate the mountainous terrain if he were not forced by necessity. The three most fertile places on earth are the Po Valley, the Yellow River valley and the Mekong delta, yet Paleolithic man who was able to create the greatest invention in history, agriculture,
The famous Russian botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943) discovered that agriculture began simultaneously throughout the world in plateaus above 1500 meters altitude. This discovery coincides extraordinarily with Plato's statements in the Republic in which he says that civilization was born on the highlands and with the statements of the Egyptian priest cited in Timaeus according to which after a water catastrophe only the mountain people are saved and civilization is born again. But that's not all, from the studies of Vavilov and JR Harlan it can be deduced that agriculture began around 11,600 years ago, the same date to which Plato dates the destruction of a mythical continent, Atlantis. Plato says that Atlantis was destroyed 9,000 years before Solon, if we consider that he lived 2,600 years ago we have that the end of Atlantis was in 9,600 before the Common Era, 11,600 years ago, exactly the date calculated by botanists.
To explain the reason for agriculture in the mountains, let's try to think about what could have happened when the earth's axis shifted.
Let's suppose that a large meteorite hit the earth, at the impact site and for several hundred kilometers everything was immediately destroyed by the impact and the energy released then the earth's axis began to move causing earthquakes, collapses and landslides everywhere, the water of the oceans at this point pushed by the mass of the moving continents began to flood the lands that moved towards it and to retreat from those that moved away from the previous position. After penetrating the plains, the retreating sea formed a wave of enormous dimensions which, drawn by the void left on the opposite side of the oceans, traveled across the land several times, destroying everything in its path. Once the destructive force was over, the lands below 1500 meters above sea level found themselves flooded, or in any case soaked in sea water which, being salty, did not allow cultivation until, centuries, millennia later, rain water completely washed away the salt allowing cultivation in lower areas. The first cultivations outside the plateaus and the first civilizations were located along the river valleys starting from the top. The few survivors of this cataclysm were, as written in Timaeus, the people who were in the mountains at that moment, above 1500 metres.
If something similar happened today, how many people would be saved? Very few, we don't know if they would be rough mountaineers as Plato writes, but they would certainly be very few and with difficulty and only at the cost of great hardship would they be able to get food and revive civilization starting from agriculture "on the plateaus".
Notes
- A "curiosity" fact is that the photos are identical to the drawing of the ark on Mount Ararat which appears in Grazioso Benincasa's map of the world in 1492. The cartographers of the 15th century knew the world better than the US astronauts of 500 years later!
- Plato, Timaeus, 20e.
- Plato, Timaeus, 22b
- Plato, Timaeus, 22d
