Before the Flood: The Biblical Flood as a Real Event and How It Changed the Course of Civilization

by Ian Wilson

Book Overview

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. The great Biblical flood so described in Genesis has long been a subject of fascination and speculation. In the 19th century the English archbishop James Ussher established it as having happened...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312304005
• ISBN13: 9780312304003
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 3.7" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

The real origin of civilization?

This fascinating book investigates a lost culture that thrived in northern Turkey before an inundation in 5600BC turned a freshwater lake into what is now the Black Sea by connecting it to the Mediterranean. Such a cataclysmic event must have caused major destruction and caused the death of thousands of people. It would also not have been restricted to the area under consideration. By looking at the archaeological evidence brought to light by Robert Ballard's submarine explorations and by comparing the flood myths of the world, Wilson connects this disaster with the Biblical account of the Great Flood. He demonstrates that the Biblical account is composed of two different texts that were integrated, texts that he calls J and P. The opening part of original separate strands are displayed side by side. I found this very interesting; each of them is coherent in its own right but has a different emphasis. Both are in fact more coherent on their own than integrated as in the Bible.Wilson suggests that Turkey and the Black Sea area may be the real cradle of civilization. It was the first Post Ice Age civilization and it flourished until about 6000BC. The metropolis of this culture was what is today called Çatal Hüyük, a city that was abandoned around this time, most probably because of climate change. It gets really interesting when he looks at the diaspora caused by these natural disasters; Wilson points out shared characteristics of the Minoan culture and the megaliths on the islands of Malta and Gozo. This includes the worship of bulls and the prevalence of the Mother Goddess which is found over an even larger geographic area. There are far flung cultures displaying similarities to traits found at Çatal Hüyük, including in Egypt and Sumeria. I found his discussion of loan words in Sumerian very enlightening. Although Wilson is not a linguist, I would have liked a deeper exploration of historical linguistics to cast more light on the matter. He does look at the work of Indo-Europeanists Marija Gimbutas and Colin Renfrew. According to the consensus, the original Indo-European language is considered to have broken up into daughter languages between about 5000 and 4000BC. Another puzzle is why the Indo-European and Semitic parent languages share so many common vocabulary items. Looking at the bigger picture of the Nostratic (or Eurasiatic according to Joseph Greenberg) language family, one finds that there is a great structural similarity between Indo-European, Uralic-Yukagir and even Eskimo, but relatively few shared vocabulary items, the fewer the further North and Northwest you from the Black Sea/Caucasus area. Semitic (a member of the large Afro-Asiatic family) and Indo-European display fundamental structural differences, but share certain phenomena that are clearly linked across their family lines, including key words for concepts like "full, horn, ear, eye, bull, earth." Wilson refers extensively to the work of Dr James Mellaart, the excavator o

Modern, enjoyable, and organized.

This book is good reading for understanding some of the recent advances of research pertaining to the Biblical flood. It focuses on the history of the Black Sea area and how a plausible flood in this area had far reaching implications in the world. I liked how the author provided various links, some speculative, between the migration of the people of the Black Sea area as a result of rising water, to the development of human civilization. I'm sure the notion that the cradle of civilization not being in Egypt will get some unwelcome reviews, but they are presented as theories that warrant investigation and not as fact. I like a book that stretches accepted knowledge. The die hard 6000 year old Earth believers will be irritated that the "global" flood didn't happen in the literal sense, but they are descended from those who excommunicated the people who believed the Earth revolved around the Sun. Finally, the book is an overall easy read and written in a logical fashion that is non-flammatory.

Decoding a myth

This is a good upgrade/progress report on the work of Ryan and Pittman attempting to find the historical source of the long tradition of myths of the Flood in the Black Sea rise in the sixth millennium. To what degree the thesis is still mixed with speculation is still not entirely clear, but, taken with caution, the case overall is convincing, and extremely interesting. Worth checking out.

Interesting

I am neither an expert in Bible Archeology nor science. However, this book struck me as having a well thought out hypothesis. It is backed up by much research and evidence. The author was able to write convincingly and to keep my interest at the same time. There was much information and the book could easily have become mired down in facts and proof and could easily have become boring. This did not happen. THe author was able to present the facts and research and keep it interesting. Although his theory does not back up a world flood as depicted in the Biblical story of Noah, the theory is none the less interesting and believable. Well worth reading. Enjoy.

Another advanced antediluvian civilisation?

Before the Flood, is in the main, a good read. The central hypothesis of the book is that, there was a great antediluvian civilisation in ancient Anatolia (modern day Turkey, in close proximity to the Black Sea). This hypothesis is intriquing for three reasons: Firstly, conventional academia and archaeology doesn't recognise that there was such an advanced civilisation before the Sumerian civilisation (which was only a couple of thousand years B.C); secondly, it eats away at the fibre of the corpus of beliefs of the Egyptologists - that Pharaonic Egypt was the first great civilisation; thirdly, it leaves the advocates of an alternative ancient history - that a great civilisation reigned called Atlantis - shell-shocked and rudderless.Using Plato's famous account of the fall and submerging of a great continent called Atlantis (circa 9,000 B.C.), and ancient chronicles of a great flood as his base, Wilson then branches out to examine the evidence for such occurences. He outlines the continual discoveries being carried out by the diver, Robert Ballard, around the area of the Black Sea, determining and concluding that there was an advanced civilisation dwelling in Anatolia in the distant past. Much of the archaeological artefacts that have been discovered around the Black Sea do seem to back up this belief, though where I would slightly disagree, is his contention that the Flood was a local event. In addition, he traces the commonality of female deities around the eastern Mediterreanean and Black Sea, connecting them to a root in Anatolia, from which they all sprouted forth; this part I found intriquing.Where the book is slightly monotonous, is that it tends to recant a lot of the discoveries and underwater explorations of Ryan and Pitman and recently Robert Ballard. These have been well documented in the media - National Geographic even covering it as his 'Search for Noah's Ark' - so he rehashs and repeats a lot of that. Accepted is the fact that this ground-breaking work had to be covered but perhaps it is covered at too great a length? Also, his premise that the Black Sea is the only part of the world that has suffered extensively from sea erosion and was massively inundated isn't really true, as more and more places are being found that bear the halmarks of this occurence. Nonetheless overall, the main impression is that Wilson has demonstrated originality of thinking and fresh ideas; as the opening paragraph infers, this theory or angle of ancient history has never been touched on before. For this alone, Wilson deserves much credit. 'Before the Flood' is in itself, a new theory in the whirlpool of ancient history.