by Harald Franzen

"...So the gods in their hearts were moved to let loose the deluge; but my lord Ea warned me in a dream. [...] tear down your house and build a boat. [...] then take up into the boat the seed of all living creatures."

If this sounds familiar, you might want to take a look at the bible. The similarities to the story of Noah's ark are striking. But the passage above is taken from the Gilgamesh Epic, a Middle Eastern literary work, roughly 4,000 years old. It describes the adventures of Gilgamesh, king of the ancient city of Uruk. Its translation in 1872 started the search for a natural flood of catastrophic proportions that may have inspired writings in both the Gilgamesh Epic and the Old Testament. After decades of unsuccessful research, two American marine geologists may have finally found the site of the legendary deluge.

George Smith, an assistant at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, first deciphered the Gilgamesh Epic in 1872. His discovery and the striking resemblance between God's word and this possibly far older book were a sensation and immediately sparked questions. Could the Israelites have heard this story during the Babylonian Captivity and incorporated it into the Bible? (During the Babylonian Captivity from 597 to 538 B.C. Jews were deported from Palestine and taken to Babylon by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II). Or had a real flood occurred, which both peoples had recorded?

So scientists set out to find this mythical flood. Because the story appears both in the Gilgamesh Epic and the Bible, the most probable location for the flood was Mesopotamia, where the two peoples had lived together during the Babylonian Captivity (597-538 B.C.). Archaeologists went digging and in 1928 British archaeologist Leonard Woolley found a thick layer of homogeneous silt, a strong indication of a flood, in the ruins of Ur, another ancient city in Mesopotamia. Soon after, a similar layer was found in a nearby location. It seemed that at least Gilgamesh's deluge had been uncovered and the newspapers had their headlines.

Unfortunately, when scientists dug in other locations around Ur they found no further traces of a flood. The flood had apparently only been local, possibly from the nearby Euphrates River. For several decades following this disappointing blow, the quest to find the flood was forgotten.

This is where two American scientists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, come into the picture. Both of them had nothing to do with Biblical archaeology and were not even particularly interested in the Flood myth. They are marine geologists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, who had researched the formation of the Alps. In the process they had discovered that the Mediterranean had dried out about five and a half million years ago and had then been reflooded when water from the Atlantic Ocean broke through what is today the Strait of Gibraltar.

"Dewey laughingly said well, maybe that's the origin of the flood myths," recalls Pitman. "And of course we all laughed because there were no humans around five and a half million years ago." But the joking remark by John Dewey, one of Pitman's colleagues on the research mission, led the scientists to think further. "Why not look for another bottleneck-shaped basin like this that might have dried out during the last glaciation and been reflooded as sea level rose during glacial meltdown," asked Pitman.

During the last ice age, which began about 2.5 million years ago, more and more water froze, i.e. stayed on land, in the shape of glaciers, rather than flowing back into the sea, which led to a drop in sea level. The Mediterranean and other seas like it, are almost entirely cut off from the world oceans. In this case except for the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, our bottleneck. As the water levels fall, the shallow straight of such a sea can become a dam, corking the bottle, so to speak. The cut off sea then can dry out. As glaciers melted again, about 18,000 years ago, sea levels accordingly rose. The world oceans eventually would have swelled above such a natural dam and flooded the lower lying basin. At this point in history, there were humans around.

"So we looked at three enclosed basins," recounted Pitman. "Obviously the basin had to be near the Middle East because that's where the flood myths originated from. So we looked at the Persian Gulf and we looked at the Red Sea and on the basis of geology we could eliminate that." The third basin they looked at was the Black Sea, which had been off limits to western scientists during the Cold War. In the 1960s however, both an American research team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Soviet scientists took sediment cores in the Black Sea. Sediment cores are samples of the composition of the soil. They are obtained by pushing a long metal pipe into the ground and pulling up the soil stuck inside the pipe. This technique gives scientists an idea of how a place developed over time because they can read the difference between the layers of soil that settled on top of each other. The Soviet team was probing the ground in order to plan the construction of a bridge, but both teams made similar discoveries: The water levels in the Black Sea had once been considerably lower and the Black Sea had been a fresh-water lake.

But the researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution did not believe in a flood. They suspected that the exchange of water had been gradual. Ryan and Pitman were skeptical of this argument, however, and probed further. If water levels rise slowly, it is normal to find so-called beach deposits, layers of sand that are washed ashore by the surf, creating a gradual slope. This is a natural process on any shore. But Ryan and Pitman came across an abrupt drop off at the same level throughout the Black Sea."We thought wow! Maybe there really was a catastrophic flood here!" said Pitman.

To test their hypothesis, the marine geologists turned to biological evidence. They examined shells found both in upper and lower sediments. If the sea levels had risen gradually, the lower sediments had to be far older than those on the top which settled later. Carbon dating proved them correct: The shells were almost the same age, about 7,600 years. The sea level had to have risen quickly. An awesome flood must have occurred. But if it was the biblical flood and if so then how the story made its way from the Black Sea to Mesopotamia and Judea is yet to be determined.