Flood

Flood, cataclysmic event in many religious and mythological traditions in which, in a remote time in the past, the world is destroyed or cleansed by fire or flood, often inflicted as a result of divine moral anger at the wrongdoings of humankind. In the biblical Book of Genesis, for example, human wickedness causes Yahweh (Jehovah) to regret that he created mankind and he resolves to destroy all living things. The virtuous, 600-year-old Noah, however, finds favour with Yahweh, who instructs him to build an ark in which both human posterity and other creatures will be preserved. The biblical Flood has its clearest antecedents in Mesopotamian mythology, recalling the geographical realities of a land subject to sudden flooding from the two great rivers Tigris and Euphrates. In the Gilgamesh Epic, a Babylonian heroic narrative ultimately of Sumerian origin, the high god Enlil sends a deluge to destroy mankind; one man, Utnapishtim, survives in a cube-shaped ark he has been instructed to build and to stock with the seed of all living creatures, and the description of his preparation and voyage closely anticipate the biblical story of Noah.

The motif of the Flood also occurs in the mythology of India and Greece. In Chinese myth a hero named Yu is charged by the Emperor Shun to bring floodwater under control; this task takes him 13 years of punishing toil, but he at last solves the problem by constructing canals. He is rewarded by the emperor's abdication in his favour. The Aboriginal Australian myth of the Great Flood, which both destroyed a previously existing world and initiated a new social order, may have a historical basis in the effects of rising sea-levels as temperatures rose after the last Ice Age. In several versions, the Flood is the work of the great serpent or rainbow-snake Yulunggul, who sends it in anger at pollution of his waterhole by the two Wawalag sisters, Waimariwi and Boaliri, whose travels play a major role in Aboriginal creation myths. Yulunggul devours the sisters and their two children, but after the Flood has abated he regurgitates them, creating the first inhabitants of the new world.

While Flood myths show the destructive power of water, creation myths often recount the origins of the world from a watery abyss or primal sea.