this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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The rising sea levels in lower Mesopotamia would have been visible on a human timescale. It's not hard to get from "my grandfather lived in a house which is now 100m out to sea" to a mythology that a flood drowned the old world.
Again, catastrophic floods happen all the time. The theory suggests that the Black Sea flood happened in 5600 BCE. The earliest version of the Epic of Gilgamesh we have is from 2000 BCE and the king it was likely based upon lived in 2700 BCE.
Now what is more likely, that a big flood happened not all that close to Sumeria and people kept talking about it for thousands of years or they just lived on the Tigris, which floods all the time and that's where the story came from?
If nothing else, Sumeria was nowhere near the Black Sea. It doesn't even make sense geographically.