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

by Ian Wilson

Paperback, 2004

Publication

St. Martin's Griffin (2004), 356 p.

Awards

BC and Yukon Book Prizes (Shortlist — Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize — 2000)
Amazon.ca First Novel Award (Winner — 1999)

Description

For centuries in the Near East archaeological evidence has been turning up of a major flood in the area's ancient history. In 1995, two marine biologists put forward evidence that showed that until almost 7500 years ago the Black Sea was a freshwater lake separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a small strip of land where Istanbul now stands. Their theory suggested that around 5600 BC the Mediterranean broke through the land barrier and salt water poured through with a force 200 times that of Niagara Falls inundating the Black Sea and raising its level by over 300 feet. In September 2000 marine archaeologist Robert Ballard discovered the wooden remains of houses 300 feet below the surface of the Black Sea 12 miles north of the present-day Turkish coast. Building on this evidence Ian Wilson puts forward the hypothesis that this catastrophic inundation - the biblical Flood - drowned tens of thousands of people and precipitated an exodus of people from Egypt and Mesopotamia, who formed the precursors of these great civilizations.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member reluctantm
This seemed like the exact sort of novel that I would love and maybe that's why I was harder on it than I needed to be. I didn't enjoy the episodic nature of the stories, nor did I find any of the characters in any way sympathetic. Samuel is so petulant and bitter; it makes it hard to care about
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what's happening to him and to his small New Brunswick town. I'm not, nor have I ever been, a teenage boy, so perhaps this is an accurate portrayal of what teenage boys are like. Even so, it's so unrelentingly peevish that the whole work was soured.
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LibraryThing member ShirleyMcLain930
I loved this book. It is full of intrique and danger. This book is about a young man who comes to be on this earth as a messenger from God. Even if your not a Christian you can read this book and enjoy it. I would recommend this book to anyone.
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
well i thought this book began well, with a description of the various Flood myths the world contains. then it proceeds to locate a very possible actual event that the myths could celebrate. So far, so good. then after a chapter on the Robert Ballard expedition to the Black Sea, and his remarkable
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findings of rectangular dwellings at the site of a former sea-shore, now 90M beneath the waves, it gets rather more cosmic. And that's when I start re-channelling the me that read a number of works by Emmanuel Velikovsky. The book becomes a survey of possible sites for a superior civilization, with iron-working as a common technology, spread across the Mediterranean basin, up the Danube, and perhaps as far as the Punjab. then it goes into hiatus for 1500 years, reverts to copper-working as its primary technology, and is responsible for the usual Sumerian and Egyptian format for the advance of civilization until now.
perhaps the book was written to raise enough furor to get a good deal more submarine exploration of the Black sea, and I hope it does, but it goes into Atlantean studies, and that's very dodgy, as far as I'm concerned. I think i'll go read a stodgier book, "Deep History" in the near furure.
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Language

Original language

English

ISBN

9780312319717

Rating

½ (15 ratings; 3.9)
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