Commonalities Of Accounts Of A Universal Flood?

It doesen't really look falsifiable to me. As a conceptual model it is certainly reasonable. It seems to fit all the available data. But so would a host of other models. You seem to be saying that it's reasonable that people may have thought like this, so based on that they may have concluded this, and therfore may have written this. Which is certainly reasonable, but I don't think really proveable one way or the other.It's also conceiveable that the legends are basically true. Not literally true in every detail of course. But instead of invented myth that explains fossils, perhaps the flood legends are remnants and "theologised" (my made up word) versions of ancient traditions and stories about a real catastrophic flood. We know there was a period of intense, probably catastrophic flooding at the end of the last ice age. This was worldwide, and rising sea level must have affected all coastal civilizations. Abraham, coming to Caanan from Mesopotamia, was no doubt indoctrinated in the Sumerian version of the legend. Who knows maybe there really was some crazy guy who built a huge boat and put a bunch of animals in it. It could happen!

Yes but universal in the sense that it encompassed "all" of the author's world. When we read all the earth we think of the entire planet. But they didn't even know what a planet was. They thought a planet was one of those little moving stars up in the sky.Also the use of universal language was appears to have been different in the ancient near east. Later in Genesis it says that "all the earth" came to buy grain from Joseph. I doubt the author even meant, or that his contemporaries understood, the entire known world. If written as late as some think (second half of the first millennium BC) that would include much of the eastern hemisphere. But even as early as the late second millennium people in the fertile crescent were aware of civilizations in Asia and northern Europe.

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Brent

That is really interesting with respect to the flood legends. Talk.Origins has an excenent article summarizing flood legends from around the world. There are several examples from tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Traditional archeology has placed humans in North America not before Clovis, about 12.5 thousand years. But now human occupation of N.A is thought to pre-date Clovis, by how much nobody knows. The Missoula floods were certainly an event that would be remembered by any population living there at the time. I had the impression the Missoula floods were not really "post ice-age" but happend when there was still some glaciation (correct me if I'm wrong), at a time when N.A. was supposed to be un-occupied. But of course there was still plenty of early Holocene flooding to inspire flood legends.