The Rise and Fall of the Deluge

Abstract

A Mesopotamian flood of ca. 3200 B.C. is the oldest recorded geological event. Through legend, history, and the Bible, it remained central to geological speculations for five thousand years. Renaissance and later theorists seriously endeavored to understand the causes, extent, and consequences of the Noachian Deluge. But as evidence and arguments accumulated, explanations became tenuous, increasingly specific, and more easily controverted. By the mid eighteenth century skeptics began to reject the Deluge altogether. Successive episodes of flooding were then proposed. Such diluvialistic assumptions dominated geological thinking throughout the earlier nineteenth century, only to be discredited in turn by stricter proofs. After 1840, even those deposits most plausibly explained by the Deluge were usually attributed to continental glaciation instead.