2 Quotes Tagged: deluge

If we accept the generally agreed date of between AD 350 and 550 for the end of the — at least semi-historical — 'Third Sangam', then this gives us a fixed reference point on which to anchor the chronology of the myth [...]. The date of 9600 BC for the formation of the First Sangam (or 9800 BC or 9400 BC for that matter) coincides closely enough with Plato's date for the inundation of Atlantis — also 9600 BC — to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
And the question continues to be this: how could Plato less than 2500 years ago, or Nakirar less than 1500 years ago, have managed by chance to select the epoch of 9600 BC in which to set, on the one hand, the sinking under the waves of the Atlantic Ocean of the great antediluvian civilization of Atlantis and, on the other, the foundation of the First Sangam in Kumari Kandam — a doomed Indian Ocean landmass that was itself destined to be swallowed by the sea?
If Plato and Nakirar were pure 'fabulists' working independently of any real tradition or real events, then isn't it much more likely that they would have chosen different imaginary epochs in which to set their flood stories?
Why didn't they choose 20,000 or 30,000 years ago — or even 300,000 years ago, or three million years ago — instead of the tenth millennium BC?
And was it just luck that this slot turns out to have been in the midst of the meltdown of the last Ice Age — the only episode of truly global flooding to have hit the earth in the last 125,000 years?

The Younger Dryas impacts, and subsequent sustained cataclysm, changed the face of the earth completely and wrought particularly significant havoc across North America. We have considered the question of huge volumes of meltwater released into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the destabilized ice sheet and looked at the effects on global climate. But keep in mind that those enormous floods also devastated the rich North American mainland to the south, perhaps the best and most bounteous real estate then available anywhere.
This immense and extraordinary deluge, 'possibly the largest flood in the history of the world,' swept away and utterly demolished everything that lay in its path. Jostling with icebergs, choked by whole forests ripped up by their roots, turbulent with mud and boulders swirling in the depths of the current, what the deluge left behind can still be seen in something of its raw form in the Channeled Scablands of the state of Washington today — a devastated blank slate [...] littered with 10,000-ton 'glacial erratics,' immense fossilized waterfalls, and 'current ripples' hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet high.
If there were cities there, before the deluge, they would be gone.
If there was any evidence of anything that we would recognize as technology there, before the deluge, it would be gone.