Commonalities Of Accounts Of A Universal Flood?

We know the approximate date of when the Gilgamesh myth was enscribed on tablets, we do not know if the ones we have are the earliest or if there was an oral tradition that predated the written one. The best estimate of when the various Biblical myths were combined and written down is around the 5^th. Century BC, or at least 2000 years after the Epic was put in writing.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

this shows you know next to nothing about how these stories develop.
lets say you lived were it was common for your area to flood, now think about how little people know about the world and fear most of it.
the flood stories came about because of fear of water - namely the wiping out of their lives by floods natural or unatural
as because they had examples of this, from what the evidence shows us near the black sea
and they wanted to show the power and control gods had over humanity and to teach children to fear the gods, who for a reason might destroy them
most people who live near the sea have more water based myths, because they live near water and they live by fishingpeople would tell the differnece, but do you understand that not one of them is about current events? they all take place in some time before the tellers peoples existedby the way not all of the flood myths were about boats

wow they really edited the greek myth a lot, the story is wrong from that site
not only did the people in the chest survive but so did mountain people, which denies this flood myth being like the hebrew oneand T.O. has info on the chinese one CG202.2: Chinese Hihking flood story
its made up and not from chinathe Ojibwe one sounds like missionary influences rather than coming from the people the thing is claiming it to be fromthe inca one is wrong tooso is the toltec one
"One of the Tezcatlipocas (sons of the original dual god) transformed himself into the Sun and created the first humans to show up his brothers. The other gods, angry at his audacity, had Quetzalcoatl destroy the sun and the earth, which he did with a flood. The people became fish. This ended the first age. The second, third, and fourth Suns ended, respectively, with the crumbling of the heavens, a rain of fire, and devastating winds."
the toltec oneFlood Stories from Around the World
tell me faith does that really look to you like noahs flood? there are more floods that are nothing like the noah flood than there are floods that are like it

I think that is an important point when considering the universal flood myths, as well as when considering why they are so, well, universal. Also, most human settlements are coastal, along a river, or, like New Orleans, both. In the U.S., 53% of the population lives in a coastal county; the percentage that lives within a short drive of the coast is even higher. No other natural catastrophe has ever been more likely in human history than a flood.Further, one must consider the relatively smaller "size" of the ancient world. This was a world without any conception of the earth as a sphere. There was the land. There was the sky. There was the water.For example (chosen since I have known these flood waters), the flood plain of the region about the conflux of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers is 81 miles across. According to the superduper formula for distance to the horizon:1.17 times the square root of your height of eye=distance to the horizon in nautical milesA person clinging to a tree on that fully flooded plain, say 9 feet above the water, would see nothing but water, water everywhere, since the distance to the horizon would be approximately 3.5 nautical miles, or approximately 4 landlubber miles. Even a 100' perch would only let him see 11 nautical miles across the vast flood plain.So our survivor could float across the flood plain of a great river for many hours or days and never see anything but water in all directions. I don't know what the tribal mind would consider universal, but I suspect that would do. Also, since the feeding tributaries in great floods also themselves flood, the reports from afar would concur that the flood was everywhere.The universality of the flood myth springs from the universality of floods in the areas where humans choose to settle. Our size, and the size of those floods, would make the floods--especially the great 1000 year or 10,000 year floods--seem to have swallowed the world entire. Only the gods could explain events of this scale.

Faith specifically claimed (as quoted in the OP) that the flood reports all put the flood at about the same time. I can see no evidence for this in any of the links I've followed. Is there any basis for this claim?

I think there is good evidence that there was a massive flood at one time that wiped out many nations. Skeptics have conceded that a huge flood did strike the Mesopotamian region and attribute the stories about the Flood to the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, etc. Obviously the Epic of Gilgamesh is an attractive starting point after looking at the geological record. But to stop merely at the Mesopotamian valleys does no good when we see just how many stories concerning the Deluge exist, and how the cultures representing them are separated by oceans, mountain ranges, or other geological formations that would prohibit certain cultures intermingling.Though most of the stories have synthesized and distorted, there is a common theme that links them together. A righteous man, a vessel of some kind, a worldwide flood, the origin of the deluge was supernatural in origin. It would seem like a fantastic coincidence that so many cultures have reported on the same things unless they were all initially bound together at first. Decide for yourselves. The Flood is certainly, at the very least, has a measure of truth. How much are you willing to accept or reject? FLOOD STORIES

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"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt

One interesting fact is that there may be common flood stories but no worldwide tower of babel stories.Hmmm I guess the question if there was a world wide flood is still out for debate, but I think we can safely say that if there was one it was not as decribed in Genesis. Without question you would also have tower of babel stories since the tower was a more recent event. Also this was the point when all the different civilizations bifurcated so this event would be prominent in the founding myth makers minds and the flood a distant memory.It is always good to narrow down the valid options in these sort of things.

If there was a worldwide flood that was observed by many different nations, then that would seem to refute the Genesis account -- for the Genesis account only allows 8 surviving observers.I think it more likely that the flood tale is a great story, so many cultures take it and adapt it to their own experiences when they first hear the tale.

A more interesting fact is that there is no common universal flood story. Of the flood stories that exist, most differ in essential aspects from the Biblical Genesis flood. For instance, in most the flood is not caused by an angry deity, nor a result of the general wickedness of humankind, in most the flood is not world wide, and in many the people escape by climbing a tall mountain or a tall tree.The existing flood stories that are similar to the Genesis account are either found in ancient Middle Eastern cultures (where they obviously can either borrow from one another or have inherited a common ancestral myth), or they are from individual localities that have been in contact with Christian missionaries.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

There are stories of both chronicled by Josephus. These were words were written nearly 2,000 years ago which gives him and his era a far greater insight to the histories of the world than you or I.ANTEDILUVIAN ERA:"Now all the writers of barbarian histories make mention of this flood, and of this ark; among whom is Berosus the Chaldean. For when he is describing the circumstances of the flood, he goes on thus: "It is said there is still some part of this ship in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans; and that some people carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away, and use chiefly as amulets for the averting of mischiefs." Hieronymus the Egyptian also, who wrote the Phoenician Antiquities, and Mnaseas, and a great many more, make mention of the same. Nay, Nicolaus of Damascus, in his ninety-sixth book, hath a particular relation about them; where he speaks thus: "There is a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the Deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore upon the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man about whom Moses the legislator of the Jews wrote."POSTDILUVIAN ERA"Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it was through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach! and that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers!

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Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them divers languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion. The Sibyl also makes mention of this tower, and of the confusion of the language, when she says thus: "When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon." But as to the plan of Shinar, in the country of Babylonia, Hestiaeus mentions it, when he says thus: "Such of the priests as were saved, took the sacred vessels of Jupiter Enyalius, and came to Shinar of Babylonia." -Flavius Josephus

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"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt

NJ writes: You must be joking, by such logic everyone who wrote 2000 years ago has grater validity than all modern historical analysis buttressed by archeological evidence and common sense.So you believe Caligula was Zeus, and therefore god? He said so according to Seutonius. Was Cortez Quetzacoatl? Did Thor make thunder? Did the first humans emerge from the 12th layer of the underworld through a reed? Did the sun stop in the sky? Does the Earth have four corners? Others closer to the time of the story said so.Josephus was a traitor who switched sides during the Jewish Rebellion in 68-70 AD that was crushed by Vespasian and his son Titus (both later deified :rolleyes. As a scholar, of course he knew the Jewish religious stories.Show us your ark and tower, then maybe the old writings will be better substantiated as has happened in the case of Troy and Vesuvius.

A middle-easterner. Chronicleing middle eastern tales. Whoopie.

No, not really. For one thing, his sources of information were limited to a small geographical area --- he didn't know that most of the world even existed. He says that these flood stories were known to the Phoenicians and the Chaldeans; Middle Eastern people. Chaldeans are just Babylonians; Phoenicians speak a Canaanite language like Hebrew.Here's a map showing Chaldea, Jerusalem, and Tyre (a Phoenician city).A modern ethnographer could find a much wider spread of stories about Santa Claus than Josephus produces to testify to the flood.

If it was a world wide flood, the water would still be there,
where would it go? where could it go?

welcome to EvC, shytot! Actually, thats a really good question.