[mcv]

I think it's pretty obvious that Plato's literal description is complete nonsense. What makes these historical fables interesting is when you ask whether they could be based on real events. Because sometimes there are real historical events that match them in some central details, despite being completely off in others.

This is a field of speculation of course; there's never any hard proof that the author was influenced by those events, but the similarities are intriguing nonetheless.

Other, similar examples:

* King Arthur and Riothamus

* Noah's flood and the flooding of the Black Sea (or more likely a massive flood of the Tigris and Eufrates)

You can never prove that these events did influence the author, but it's intriguing to speculate that they might be.

[rmah]

There's no need to go searching for the "real" Noah and an "actual" flood in the distant past. It seems that most early civilizations that developed on alluvial flood plains come up with flood myths that explain the destruction and rebirth of civilizations because they saw floods and rebuilding on a fairly regular basis. Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the Noah myth. Sometimes even building a boat to save the animals because the gods told him. IMO, it's almost certain that the ancient Hebrews picked up on one (or more) of these myths and incorporated it into their own culture.

[hnfong]

> Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the Noah myth.

Not sure about the others, but at least the Chinese "flood myth", the legend of Yu the Great, is qualitatively different from the Noah myth. It involves non-cataclysmic, recurring floods that the "government" wanted to control. There was no saving animals on a big boat and restarting civilization. It basically involved a big engineering project of directing water flow to where it's needed.

The Noah flood myths seem to describe floods of a much scarier kind, the kinds that have the potential to wipe out civilizations, as opposed to ones happening on a "fairly regular basis". Given that sea water levels rose tens of meters during the Younger Dryas (that's what google tells me at least), it seems conceivable that the movement of such massive amounts of water during these periods would have given rise to such stories.

[rmah]

Civilization to early man was not global, it was local. And yes, the Chinese myth you mention doesn't include a guy saving animals on a boat. But the indian Manu and Matsya myth does. As does the Ziusudra myth and the Gilgamesh flood myth of the Sumerian. And the And the Videvdad of ancient Iran, and the Pu Sangkasa-Ya Sangkasi of ancient Thailand (though here it's a giant magical gourd rather that a ship), and many many more.

What is common is that "everything" gets destroyed, a few survive to rebuild.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths

[Attrecomet]

> It seems that most early civilizations that developed on alluvial flood plains...

I'd go even further: there is no human habitat at all where floods are not dangerous catastrophes. The coast and alluvial plains trivially so, but mountains and deserts, too.

[seanhunter]

I might be misunderstanding your point, but Egyptian civilisation was entirely based on the flooding of the Nile bringing fertility to the farmlands. It wasn't a dangerous catastrophe, it was a benevolent event that was celebrated with religious feasts etc dedicated to Isis iirc (long time since I read my Egyptian mythology).

[Attrecomet]

My point wasn't that each flood has always been detrimental, but that there has never been a collection of people living in a place where there aren't also dangerous floods that kill people, so wild stories of floods destroying the world aren't really far out for the lived experience (perhaps across a few generations) of any human ever.

Edited for clarity

[seanhunter]

Got it. Yes indeed. That makes total sense and I agree.

Also at some point in prehistory the rock formation that is now the strait of Gibraltar fractured and the Atlantic ocean rushed in and drowned the entire basin of the Mediterranean,[1] so that type of cataclysm has actually occurred, although before human experience

[1.] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/dec/09/mediterranea...

[Kevin09210]

>Exploration of the Black Sea shelf reveals two major shelf-crossing unconformities. The older unconformity separates mostly-barren deposits of late glacial age from overlying Neoeunxiain sediment containing fresh to brackish fauna. This unconformity can be traced over the shelf edge to depths beyond –140 m. The substrate below is dry, firm, and contains unchallenged evidence of subaerial exposure at least to depths of –110 m. The Neoeuxinian cover is present on the outer shelf and is preserved, though incompletely, in depressions on the middle and inner shelf. It is even found as subsurface valley fill in the coastal limans and Sea of Azov. The Neoeuxinian on the shelf represents a transgression leading to a highstand at ~ –20 m below today’s sea surface, which was reached by 10,000 BP (uncorrected). Sediments with marine fauna lie above the Neoeuxinian and are separated from it by a sand to gravel layer that represents a younger unconformity. In the limans, the hiatus between the Neoeuxinian and overlying Bugazian is called “peririf” and on the shelf a “washout.” Dune fields between –65 and –80 m and wave-truncated terraces with beach-like berms at –90 to –100 m contain shell material dated between 9500 and 8500 BP, suggesting that the younger unconformity represents a post-Younger Dryas regression that took the surface of the Black Sea’s lake below the level of the global ocean.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-5302-3_...

[BurningFrog]

I like the idea that the flood myths across the world come from the ice age melting 10k years ago.

[Attrecomet]

I find it so wholly unconvincing that it annoys me whenever it is presented as anything more than quite idle speculation, even if by academics (not here in this particular comment chain, mind you).

It fails to convince me because it rests on two basic claims that I just cannot make myself believe: that humans are incapable of inventing grand, exaggerated stories, and that word of mouth, so inferior to writing for conveying information through the ages, somehow suddenly becomes a gold standard that can hold the kernel of a story true for a multiple of the time span of history.

Occam's Razor just screams that actually, every civilization across the world having their version of flood myths means that humans live in places where floods are important, life-defining catastrophes. this is true of every single habitat I'm aware of, up to and including deserts. It's "7000 (or whatever exactly) years of oral tradition before some Sumerian writes it down that captures anything useful" vs "Listen 'ere, grandchildren, did I tell you tykes the story of when I was your age, and my grandpappy put us all in boat with the sheep because of the flood? I couldn't see no land no more, so much water it was. Sigh, even the floods where better in my time, you don't know how good yer got it (repeat and aggrandize for three more generations)", and knowing humans, only one is instantly believable.

It also solves the annoying conundrum of Native Americans also having flood myths, despite the Black Sea flood happening definitely well after they lost contact with the Old World.

[hnfong]

It may be unlikely, and perhaps "unconvincing", but honestly curious - why does it annoy you?

The idea that the flood myths came from an oral tradition ten thousand years ago doesn't even require the first assumption you mentioned (i.e. "that humans are incapable of inventing grand, exaggerated stories"). It may be that among the myths, most of them are grand exaggerated stories, but this one is real.

As for how long oral traditions can survive without writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?

I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually true, and I don't think anyone (including you) does either. So why be annoyed when people bring up a possibility, not disproven, just merely unlikely in your framework, a framework that's not indisputably valid at that?

[nologic01]

We have so thoroughly lost the art of oral information transmission it is hard to even have a gut feeling as to how it may have worked over generations.

For example did people distinguish "fact from fiction" as they were passing along stories (in some way we would recognize today)?

I somehow doubt that "fact checking" had to wait for Thucydides (in the Hellenic world) [1] as it seems like an important survival attribute, but how did they signal that the story coming up should be taken at face value or with a grain of salt?

[1] Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus

[Attrecomet]

That is a good question, and one where I had to do some self examination. I think it is because of the closeness of these claims to just-so stories, despite their posing as science ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story ). That is, stories that fit empirical data to an explanation of it, without ever considering at any point if there is any reason to discard it, or if your hypothesis can even be disproved -- like the famous "not even wrong" quip by Wolfgang Pauli.

> I mean, to be honest I have no idea what's actually true, and I don't think anyone (including you) does either. So why be annoyed when people bring up a possibility, not disproven, just merely unlikely...

I'd like to point out that I'm not at all annoyed at people talking about the possibility in potentia. I disagree that it's a good possibility, but I am only annoyed when this is presented by professionals, most probably scientific journalists*, as something we should expect to be probable. This also extends (a bit unfairly, I guess) to amateurs repeating that claim as truth -- this is just bad pop science.

I do think, however, that the two quoted sentences above do at least imply a logical fallacy: of course we don't know the truth in this case. This does not make any kind of speculation an equally valid hypothesis to any other, there are distinctions, as per Russel's Teapot. And a claim as maximalist as "all the worlds flooding myths come from the Black Sea" better have some actual evidence to back it up, or be preceded with "In further publications, it might be interesting to look for evidence that ..." in the paper.

> As for how long oral traditions can survive without writing -- it's up to anyone's guess isn't it?

Similarly, the logical conclusion of that is not "there are stories that have been passed down from our common time in Africa 200k years ago, because who knows how far oral history can go" but rather "until there is actual evidence to the contrary, oral tradition remains suspect as a carrier of stories". We do know that correct details, at least, can be transported over centuries: the Iliad contains descriptions of soldiering that are, in part, clearly Late Bronze Age Mycenaean, though by the time it was written down the authors were unable to disentangle these tidbits from descriptions more fitting to the Archaic Age. That is the upper bound that I'm aware of: a few hundred years, information strongly mangled, but still recognizable if you know what to look for. How do you propose to go from there to an order of magnitude more? Of course, you might reply "you can't disprove it", to which my reply stays the same: then there is absolutely no reason to believe it true.

* I checked the original paper about the deluge, the authors didn't mention all of the worlds flooding myths at all in there. The wild speculation wisely appears in a book they published, which I do not have and which seems to propose a connection of all Indo-European and Egyptian myths. This is a far cry from "the Chinese are unable to think of a flooding myth themselves".

Update: a bit of searching around has mainly offered up thinly-disguised young earth creationist sites or sites clearly pointing out the problems as well as the allure of the "all flood myths are from the Black Sea Deluge" speculation. Maybe I should go softer on science journalism here...

[aldonius]

Oral tradition can be pretty good, and it's not just the Black Sea that flooded, it's coastlines everywhere.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-...

[Attrecomet]

>Oral tradition can be pretty good

That's very vague. Oral tradition was replaced by writing because writing is better, and the information content decays far slower. Do you have evidence of information transmitted orally across thousands of years? Best I know of is a few measly centuries, from the Iliad, where some passages obviously show knowledge of Late Bronze Age Mycenaean gear, but mixed up with later Archaic stuff.

>and it's not just the Black Sea that flooded, it's coastlines everywhere.

Which wasn't the specific claim here, which is "all flood myths go back to the Black Sea Deluge".

[aldonius]

> Do you have evidence of information transmitted orally across thousands of years?

Australian Aboriginal oral tradition describes flooding to create islands or bays (modern science can date the corresponding event back 7000+ years). But in certain cases the level of detail is even better [see link]:

> The story describes several named landmarks with remembered historical-cultural associations that are now underwater.

https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...

[FFP999]

My theory about the Noah's Ark story is that Noah was a real person, who was a bit more skilled at reading the weather than his neighbors, and predicted a bad rainy season in time to build a boat large enough to save his family and some of his livestock. The rest is just the tale growing in the telling.

[Cthulhu_]

It could be literal survivorship bias too, one guy builds a boat in a flight of fancy, turns out to be correct and is the only survivor of a cataclysmic flood, literally lives to tell the tale.

[FFP999]

Or maybe he just had a boat because he liked to fish or whatnot, and that turned out to be really lucky for him.