The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized prehistoric flood that occurred when the Black Sea rapidly filled, possibly forming the basis for some Great Flood myths. The theory made headlines when it surfaced in The New York Times December 1996. Map of the Black Sea. ... The Deluge by Gustave Doré The story of a Great Flood sent by God or the gods to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution is a widespread theme in myths. ...

In 1998, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geologists from Columbia University, published evidence that a massive flood through the Bosporus occurred about 5600 BCE. Glacial meltwater had turned the Black and Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes, while sea levels remained lower worldwide. The fresh water lakes were emptying their waters into the Aegean. As the glaciers retreated, rivers emptying into the Black Sea reduced their volume and found new outlets in the North Sea, and the water levels lowered through evaporation. Then, about 5600 BC, as sea levels rose, Ryan and Pitman suggest, the rising Mediterranean finally spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosphorus. The event flooded 60,000 mile² (155,000 km²) of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and east. Ryan and Pitman wrote: Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. ... This article is about the strait; Bosphorus is also a university in Turkey. ... Caspian Sea viewed from orbit The Caspian Sea is a landlocked endorheic sea between Asia and Europe (European Russia). ... Greece and the Aegean Sea The Aegean sea in Greece as seen from the island of Greek: Αιγαίον Πέλαγος, Aigaion Pelagos; Turkish: Ege denizi) is an arm of the Mediterranean Sea, located between the Greek peninsula and Anatolia (Asia Minor, now part of Turkey). ... Aletsch glacier, Switzerland A glacier is a large, long-lasting river of ice that is formed on land and moves in response to gravity. ... The North Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean, located between the coasts of Norway and Denmark in the east, the coast of the British Isles in the west, and the German, Dutch, Belgian and French coasts in the south. ... Fatih Sultan Mehmed Bridge over the Bosporus seen from over Rumelihisarı This article is about the strait; Bosphorus is also a Turkish Boğaziçi or İstanbul Boğazı) is a strait that separates the European part (Rumeli) of Turkey from its Asian part (Anadolu), connecting the Sea of Marmara (Marmara Denizi) with...

Black Sea today and in 5600 BCE according to Ryan's and Pitman's theories

"Ten cubic miles [42 km³] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls. …The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days."

Although neolithic agriculture had by that time already reached the Pannonian plain, the authors link its spread with people displaced by the postulated flood. It has been suggested that the survivors' memory of this event was the source of the legend for Noah's Flood. Initial resistance came from those who looked for more detailed correlation with the Book of Genesis (see Noah's Ark and Mount Ararat) or preferred as prototype the similar marine ingression that formed the Persian Gulf in the lower Tigris and Euphrates valley. Image File history File links Black Sea shape today & in 5600 BC Created using XaraX by User:Bogdangiusca. ... Image File history File links Black Sea shape today & in 5600 BC Created using XaraX by User:Bogdangiusca. ... The Neolithic (or New Stone Age) was a period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age. ... The Pannonian plain is a large plain in central/south-eastern Europe that remained when the Pliocene Pannonian Sea (see below) dried out. ... Noah or Nóach (circa 2104 BCE according to the chronology of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh) (Rest, Standard Hebrew נוֹחַ (Nóaḥ), Tiberian Hebrew (); Arabic نوح ()), is a Biblical figure who, according to Genesis, built an ark to save his family and each species of the worlds animals from the Deluge... Genesis (Greek: Γένεσις, having the meanings of birth, creation, cause, beginning, source and origin) is the first book of the Torah (five books of Moses) and hence the first book of the Tanakh, part of the Hebrew Bible; it is also the first book of the Christian Old Testament. ... Michelangelo Buonarroti In the Hebrew Bibles account (Gen. ... Mount Ararat (Turkish Ağrı Dağı; Armenian Արարատ; Kurdish Çîyayê Agirî; Persian آرارات Ararat; Hebrew אררט, Standard Hebrew Ararat, Tiberian Hebrew ), the tallest peak in modern Turkey, is a snow-capped dormant volcanic cone, located in the far northeast of Turkey, 16 km west of Iran and 32 km south of Armenia. ... Map of the Persian Gulf. ... Tigris River in Mosul, Iraq The Tigris (Kurdish: Tîj / Tûj / Tîr , Old Persian: Tigrā-, Pahlavi: Tigr, Syriac: ܕܩܠܬ; Deqlath, Arabic: دجلة; Dijla, Turkish: Dicle, Hebrew: חדקל; ḥiddeqel) is the eastern member of the pair of great rivers that define Mesopotamia, along with the Euphrates, which flows from the mountains of... The Euphrates (the traditional Greek name for the river, which is in Old Persian Ufrat, Aramaic Prâth/Frot, in Arabic Al-Furat الفرات, in Turkish Fırat and in ancient Assyrian language Pu-rat-tu) is the westernmost of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia (Bethnahrin in Aramaic), the...

In a series of expeditions, a team of marine archeologists led by Robert Ballard identified what appeared to be ancient shorelines, freshwater snail shells, drowned river valleys, tool-worked timbers, and man-made structures in roughly 300 feet (100 m) of water off the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Radiocarbon dating of freshwater mollusk remains indicated an age of about 7,000 years. Dr. Robert Duane Ballard (born June 30, 1942) is a famous oceanographer most noted for his work in underwater archaeology. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

Scholars of the Proto-Indo-Europeans have also pointed out that the Black Sea deluge would have flooded what was probably the right place, at roughly the right time^{[citation needed]}, to set into motion the massive diaspora of the Proto-Indo-European people throughout Europe and Asia. The region just north of the Black Sea is the favorite candidate for the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as put forth for example by J. P. Mallory, and there is strong evidence that their scattering was underway by 4000 BCE. The Black Sea deluge occurred well in advance of that date, but is entirely consistent with it. There are a number of flood legends in many Indo-European cultures, including Celtic legend as well as the more familiar Greek, as well as in non-Indo-European cultures like the Semitic cultures of the Levant and Mesopotamia. The Proto-Indo-Europeans are the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, a prehistoric people of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. ... World map showing Europe Europe is conventionally considered one of the seven continents which, in this case, is more a cultural and political distinction than a physiogeographic one. ... World map showing Asia. ... JP Mallory is the nom-de-plume of Irish-American archaeologist and Indo-Europeanist Prof. ... This article is about the European people. ... Semitic is a linguistic term referring to a subdivision of largely Middle Eastern Afro-Asiatic languages, the Semitic languages, as well as their speakers corresponding cultures, and ethnicities. ... The Levant Levant is an imprecise geographical term historically referring to a large area in the Middle East south of the Taurus Mountains, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the west, and by the northern Arabian Desert and Upper Mesopotamia to the east. ... Sumerian list of gods in cuneiform script, ca. ...

Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, claims that "all modern critical Bible scholars regard the tale of Noah as legendary. There are other flood stories, but if you want to see the Black Sea flood in Noah's flood, who's to say no?" Conservative Bible scholars and Christians however claim that "Noah's Flood was not a local flood in the Black Sea area, but a world-wide flood that has left its mark on every continent on this planet," [1] and that the timing was wrong, although this claim is not compatible with science, since it would require the sudden production and then disappearance of three times more water than is contained in the Earth's oceans, and for millions of locally endemic land-dwelling species to have been collected from and then returned to their endemic habitats. The Biblical Archaeology Review (illuminating archaeology and the Bible) is the organ of the non-denominational Bible Archaeology Society which has been combining the excitement of archaeology and the latest in Bible scholarship since 1974 [1]. The Societys founder and editor-in-chief is Hershel Shanks. ...

Earth scientists also disputed the conclusions. More recent examinations by oceanographers such as Teofilo A. "Jun" Abrajano Jr at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his Canadian colleague Ali Aksu of Memorial University of Newfoundland have cast some doubt on this catastrophic flood theory. Abrajano's team, finding sapropel mud deposits in the Sea of Marmara, have concluded that there has been sustained interaction between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea for at least 10,000 years: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI, is a private university in Troy, New York, near Albany, founded in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer. ... Memorial University of Newfoundland, popularly known as MUN, is a comprehensive university located in St. ... Map of the Sea of Marmara Satellite view of the Sea of Marmara The Sea of Marmara (Turkish: Marmara Denizi, Modern Greek: Θάλασσα του Μαρμαρά or Προποντίδα) (also known as the Sea of Marmora or the Marmara Sea) is an inland sea that connects the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea, thus separating the...

"For the Noah's Ark Hypothesis to be correct, one has to speculate that there was no flowing of water between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea before the speculated great deluge. We have found this to be incorrect."

According to a report in New Scientist magazine (May 4, 2002, p. 13), the researchers found an underwater delta south of the Bosporus. There was evidence for a strong flow of fresh water out of the Black Sea in the 8th millennium BCE. This article is about the strait; Bosphorus is also a university in Turkey. ... Map of the Black Sea. ... (9th millennium BC – 8th millennium BC – 7th millennium BC – other millennia) Events The south area of Çatalhöyük. ...

The hypothesis remains an active subject of debate among archaeologists.

References

• John Noble Wilford, "Geologists Link Black Sea Deluge to Farming's Rise," The New York Times, December 17, 1996, pp. B5 and B13.
• W.B. Ryan and W.C. Pitman, Noah's Flood: The new scientific discoveries about the event that changed history 1998

External links

• Why the Black Sea is not the Site of Noah's Flood by G. R. Morton
• Press release June 14, 2002, concerning Abrajano's report in Marine Geology, 2002