ReViews

Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History

William Ryan and Walter Pitman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) 319 pp., $25.00 (hardback)

The story of a great flood figures prominently in the imagination of the West: The Bible tells of a deluge wrought by a displeased God who then gave humanity a chance to begin anew. But we now know that the story of a devastating flood was told in many ancient civilizations—some of these stories are even earlier than the Biblical account. The oldest of them involves a hero named Gilgamesh and was recorded by the Sumerians around 2700 B.C. It was probably retold by the Akkadians about a thousand years later, and it appears in the tales of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites and Canaanites. Moreover, old Hindu texts in ancient Sanskrit also contain an Aryan flood story called Rigveda, and a number of flood myths were recorded by the ancient Greeks.

During the 19th century, geologists sought proof of a universal flood throughout western Europe—to no avail. Geoscientists William Ryan and Walter Pitman, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, are the latest to undertake the search.