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  1-2-Oscar

  Dec. 1, 2006, 12:44 p.m.

  There is ample evidence that such tsunamis have occured in many parts of the world, although they are thankfully infrequent. But these events may account for the near universality of "flood traditions" around the globe. The Etna tsunami, eight thousand years ago, may actually provide an historical basis for the Biblical account of Noah's Flood, while a similar occurence in the Indian Ocean 10,000 years ago may serve as the basis for a nearly identical story in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
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  swasdiva

  Dec. 1, 2006, 1:15 p.m.

  That's what I thought, too, 1-2-Oscar. It would make perfect sense. Did you ever see the show "Megatsunami" on Discovery channel? It detailed something very similar concerning the Canary Islands. Apparently (and I'm heinously going to botch this) the lava chambers in one of the Canary islands are brittle and will eventually split the island in two. The half that falls in the water could trigger a megatsunami that would decimate the U.S. Eastern Seaboard up to 15 miles inland. It was Ca-razy.

  It's interesting to think of this in context with global flood traditions because of the many ways different cultures have interpreted the same or a similar event.

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    1-2-Oscar

    Dec. 1, 2006, 1:25 p.m.

    There is substantial archeological evidence of such events in many places around our planet. Often we have only a layer of mud to go on, but do not know what event actually deposited the mud. Successive Meso-American cultures--the Olmecs, Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs--believed that an earlier human civilization was destroyed by a great flood. None of them were early enough to have experienced such an event, but archeologists have discovered a layer of mud which proves that a great flood did occur. I believe that the "social memory" of these people allowed a bare account of the actual event to be passed down orally, through hundreds of generations, until finally a written language was developed which allowed the story to be written down.

    (cont)

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      1-2-Oscar

      Dec. 1, 2006, 1:33 p.m.

      Much the same sequence probably occured in Palestine, where it was not recorded until the Hebrew "prophets" began to write down the history of the Jews in the sixth century B. C. E., and in Mesopotamia, where the Gilgamesh texts date from the eighteenth century B. C. E.

      These earliest "histories" were largely drawn from oraal tradition. While not as accurate as modern texts, they do give us the earliest information about our human past, and they should be regarded as having both great value and some basis in fact.

      Factual history was really a Greek invention. Although Homer and Hesiod had rendered compilations from oral tradition as early as the ninth century B. C. E., it was not until the fifth century B. C. E., when Herodotus began to write, that men began to formulate rules which demanded verification, whenever possible, and plausibility in the relating of history. Thus it is hard to separate fact from fiction in earlier works.

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        1-2-Oscar

        Dec. 1, 2006, 1:37 p.m.

        If this is an area which interests you, I might recommend that you find a copy of Geoffrey Bibby's book, "Looking for Dilmun," which delves into the actual location of the "Garden of Eden." Bibby explains how evidence is analyzed by historians, and arrives at a plausible explanation for both the Mesopotamian and Hebrew versions of the Eden legends.
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    1-2-Oscar

    Dec. 1, 2006, 4:31 p.m.

    As I recall, the giant Alaskan wave was in a relatively narrow waterway--similar to a fjord. Estimates of the wave which might be generated from a Canary Islands landslide vary, but range as high as 1100 feet at Miami. The actual size of a tsunami wave depends not only upon the event which generates it, but also upon the configuration of the sea bed as it approaches land. A wave which travels through very deep water then crosses a wide, shallow shelf, as at Miami, would be much taller than the same wave striking at other places along the coast.

    A projected Canary Island tsunami would certainly impact a much wider area than we saw in Alaska, and probably even more than the recent Indian Ocean event.

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