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The Deucalion’s flood story is first attested in the fifth century in Epicharmus and Pindar. According to the myth, Zeus decided to wipe out the human race, because of its wickedness. He sent torrential rains, and according to Ovid Neptune assisted by bidding all the rivers to overflow and by triggering an earthquake to tip them out of their beds (Metamorphoses 1.163-166). The water rose until only a few mountain peaks remained uncovered. Deucalion, who is a king in central Greece, is forewarned and advised by his father Prometheus, and constucted a chest (larnax) large enough to accommodate himself and his wife Pyrrha, and in it they floated for 9 days and nights until they fetched up on Mt. Parnassus. Deucalion climbed out and sacrificed to Zeus Phyxios. Zeus granted him a boon. He asked for the means to produce a new human race, and was instructed to take up stones and throw them over his shoulder. The ones that he threw turned into men, the ones that Pyrrha threw turned into women (Apollodorus 1.7.2). This Flood story is not independent of those known from Mesopotamia and from the Hebrew Bible.
1. The flood results from an initiative of the highest god (Enlil, Yahweh, Zeus). In the Sumero-Akkadian versions his plan is announced and ratified in the divine assembly, and so it is also in Ovid’s account.
2. The god’s purpose is to destroy human race.
3. A flood is not the only option that comes into question. In Ovid’s version Jupiter first considers setting the earth aflame with his lightning bolts, but then settles for the flood, like in Atrhasis the flood is only the last of a series of attempts to destroy mankind.
4. The man who is to survive the flood receives divine forewarning and practical advice. In Mesopotamia he is Ea/Enki who gives advice to the hero, in the Greek story he is Prometheus, the wise and cunning god, who gives away the secret contrary to Zeus’ wishes.
5. The favoured hero is istructed to build, not a regular boat, but a large rectangular container.
6. The hero is accompanied by his wife in all versions. In the oriental accounts he takes an extended family, and ‘seed of all living things’. In the Greek myth, according to all the older sources, Daucalion and Pyrrha are alone.
7. The flood is brought about by violent and prolonged rainstorms in all versions.
8. The duration of the flood varies in different sources.
9. The container comes to rest at the top of a high mountain in all versions of the myth.
10. After emerging, the hero makes a sacrifice. In Berossus, Genesis, and some of the Graeco-Roman versions he builds an altar or a shrine.
11. Although in all versions the sole or principal survivors of the flood are a married couple, in no version do they repopulate the earth by having (further) children.
Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.7.2
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.163-166
Bibliography
| West 1997, 489-493 | West, Martin L. The East Face of Helicon. West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997. |
Amar Annus
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