Flood Myths Around the World: Why So Many Cultures Tell of a Great Flood

TL;DR

• Flood myths are found on every inhabited continent, but not in every culture. They are dense in Eurasia, the Americas, Southeast Asia and Oceania, and comparatively rare in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The famous versions (Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim, Noah, Deucalion, Nūḥ) form one literary family that spread from Mesopotamia. Missionaries and antiquarians later spread its details, and some “native” flood myths in popular lists are their inventions.
• Outside that family the stories differ: sibling survivors in a gourd in southern China and Southeast Asia, earth-divers in North America, serpent floods in Australia, successive world-ages in Mesoamerica.
• Real floods supply the imagery, but no single flood explains the myth. The Black Sea theory has mostly failed; post-glacial sea-level rise is real and sometimes remembered, but only locally.
• A flood myth is a creation myth told a second time: water is what the world was made from, so a flood returns it there. Many of these myths also say the people after the flood were a new kind of people.
• The best overall explanation is that flood myths remember the end of the Ice Age, when coasts drowned and a self-aware, toiling humanity emerged. The theory has real weaknesses, but it is the only one that accounts for the water, the survivors and the transformation together.

In December 1872 George Smith, a self-taught assistant at the British Museum, read a paper to the Society of Biblical Archaeology. He had pieced together a cuneiform tablet from Nineveh in which a man named Utnapishtim is warned by a god, builds a boat, loads it with living things, rides out a flood that drowns humankind, grounds on a mountain, sends out birds, and offers a sacrifice whose smell draws the gods. The parallels to Genesis were too close to be chance. Newspapers treated it as a sensation, and the comparative study of flood myths began in earnest.

Half a century later James Frazer’s Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918) had collected flood stories from Greece and India to Burma, Borneo, Polynesia and both Americas. The accepted answer to “why do so many cultures have flood myths?” has swung between two poles since then. Either the stories share an origin, or they record real floods that happened in many places. Both answers are partly right. Neither explains the most basic fact about the stories: nearly all of them use the flood to explain how the present world and the present human race began, and many insist that the humans who came after the waters were different from those who drowned.

What counts as a flood myth #

A flood myth, in the strict sense, tells of a flood sent to destroy most or all of humanity, a few survivors, and a new population descended from them. Many traditions add a warning, a vessel, animals, a mountain, bird scouts, a sacrifice and a sign that the destruction will not be repeated. Those additions come mostly from one Near Eastern family. The core pattern is simpler: destruction by water, survival, and repeopling.

That core is widespread but not universal. Folklorists have long noted how rarely it turns up in sub-Saharan Africa. Hermann Baumann’s 1936 survey of African myths found few cases, and many of those look borrowed. The Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel has pushed back, collecting African, Melanesian, Andamanese and Australian cases. He found them scattered “in pockets” rather than absent. The current picture is uneven. The motif is thick along the Eurasian and Pacific rim and through the Americas, and thin across much of Africa. The site’s survey of African flood myths sets out the regional evidence.

Any explanation has to account for that pattern: very wide spread, uneven density, and a sharp difference in detail between the Near Eastern family and everything else.

The Near Eastern family: one story, many copies #

The oldest written flood stories are Mesopotamian, and they are all related.

A Sumerian tablet from Nippur, copied around 1600 BCE, tells how the gods decided to destroy humanity and how Enki warned the pious king Ziusudra, who survived in a great boat for seven days and nights and was then granted eternal life (ETCSL 1.7.4). The Akkadian Atrahasis, whose best-preserved copy dates to the seventeenth century BCE, sets the flood inside a longer story. The gods create humans from clay and a slain god’s blood to do their labor. Humans multiply and become too noisy. Enlil tries plague, drought and famine, then the flood. Enki warns Atrahasis. Afterward the gods impose limits on human fertility (Lambert and Millard 1969). Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh retells the episode through Utnapishtim, adding the grounding on Mount Nimush and the three birds: dove, swallow, raven.

Genesis 6–9 is a version of this story. The shared details are specific: a divine decision to destroy humankind, one warned man, a sealed vessel with his family and animals, a mountain landing, birds sent to test for dry land, a sacrifice whose smell pleases the deity, and a divine promise afterward. Biblical scholars have also long recognized that Genesis combines two accounts. One has forty days of rain and seven pairs of clean animals. The other has a flood lasting 150 days and single pairs. Two Israelite writers each drew on the Mesopotamian tradition, and an editor merged them.

The family kept spreading. Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing in Greek in the third century BCE, called the hero Xisouthros, a Hellenized Ziusudra. The Greek flood of Deucalion and Pyrrha is at least partly an eastern import: a sovereign god sends the flood, a trickster-creator (Prometheus, in Enki’s role) warns his son, the survivors ride a chest (larnax) for nine days, land on Parnassus, and sacrifice (Apollodorus 1.7.2). Lucian’s version from Hierapolis in Syria even brings the animals aboard in pairs. The Qur’an’s Nūḥ carries the story into Islam, and Christian and Muslim teaching carried it around the world.

This is the clearest case of diffusion in comparative mythology. Its detail comes from texts copied, translated and adapted over two thousand years, not from an independent memory of a worldwide flood.

The other families #

Outside the Near Eastern chain, the stories fall into several regional families. They share the core pattern but little else.

India. The earliest Indian flood, in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (1.8.1), is spare. A small fish asks Manu to protect it, grows huge, warns him of the flood, and tows his ship by a rope tied to its horn to a northern mountain. Manu survives alone. He makes an offering of butter and curds in the water, and from it a woman, Iḍā, is born, and through her he fathers the new human race (Eggeling translation). Later texts add the seven sages and seeds of all things. The Mahābhārata identifies the fish with Brahmā and the Purāṇas with Vishnu’s Matsya avatar. Whether the Indian story ultimately derives from Mesopotamia is debated; trade contacts make it possible, and the fish-savior makes it distinct.

China. Chinese flood myths are rarely about punishment. In the classical tradition the flood simply exists: under the sage-king Yao the waters overspread the world, Gun fails to dam them, and his son Yu succeeds by dredging channels and dividing the land into provinces. Mark Edward Lewis argues that these myths are about separating and ordering things: land from water, humans from beasts, one domain from another. The flood is chaos, and taming it is the founding act of political order (Lewis 2006). A second tradition makes Nüwa the repairer of a broken world, patching the sky with five-colored stones and piling up reed ashes to stop the flooding waters.

Southern China and Southeast Asia. Among the Miao, Yao, Hmong and many neighbors a different story dominates. A brother and sister survive the flood inside a gourd or a drum. They are reluctant to marry and test the will of heaven by rolling millstones down two hills or chasing each other around a tree, and when the tests say yes they marry. Their first child is often a shapeless lump or a gourd, which they cut into pieces that become the peoples of the earth. Chinese scholars, beginning with Ruey Yih-fu and Wen Yiduo in the late 1930s and 1940s, connected these gourd siblings with Fuxi and Nüwa, the serpent-bodied first couple of Han art (see Nüwa and Fuxi). In the Lao tradition of Khun Borom, a gourd vine grows after the flood from the nostril of a buffalo sent by the sky god, and when the giant gourd is pierced, the ancestors of the region’s peoples emerge from it. The sibling-survivor motif recurs in Taiwan, the Philippines (Wigan and Bugan among the Ifugao) and eastern India.

The Americas. North American flood myths are frequently fused with the earth-diver. In the Anishinaabe version recorded by Edward Benton-Banai, Waynaboozhoo floats on a log with the animals. Loon, otter and others dive for mud and fail, and muskrat dies bringing up a pawful. Spread on the back of a turtle, the mud becomes Turtle Island. Mesoamerica sets its floods inside a sequence of destroyed world-ages. In the Nahuatl Leyenda de los Soles (1558), the Sun called 4-Water ends in a flood that turns people into fish. Tata and Nene survive in a hollowed cypress. They disobey Tezcatlipoca by roasting fish, and he turns them into dogs. The K’iche’ Popol Vuh destroys the wooden people with a flood because they had no minds and did not remember their makers. In the Andes, colonial sources record an Inca flood, unu pachakuti, “water that overturns the world,” sent by Viracocha before he made a new humanity at Lake Titicaca. The Mapuche tell of two serpents, Caicai Vilu raising the sea and Trentren Vilu raising the mountains to save people.

Australia and the Pacific. Witzel’s study of the “Gondwana” flood myths finds a consistent character in Australia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands. The flood is retribution for a mistake or a broken rule, and it often comes from rain or a rain spell (Witzel 2010). In northern Australia the agent is the Rainbow Serpent. In the Yolŋu Wawilak story recorded by W. Lloyd Warner, two sisters pollute the python’s waterhole, and the serpent rises, floods the country and swallows them. In the Andamans the deity Biliku floods the world when people offend her. Polynesia has both types. The Māori know Te Tai a Ruatapu, the flood raised by the chants of the humiliated Ruatapu, which only people on the mountain Hikurangi survive.

Northern Europe. Norse tradition drowns the frost giants in the blood of Ymir. Only Bergelmir survives, placed on a lúðr, a word that may mean a box, a cradle or part of a mill; Snorri Sturluson makes it a boat. This is a creation story. The flood comes at the moment the gods build the world from the giant’s body.

The contaminated record #

Popular lists of flood myths mix these traditions with inventions. Missionaries, colonial ethnographers and romantic antiquarians looked for Noah everywhere, and where they found a partial parallel they often completed it. Several of the most quoted “independent” floods fall apart on inspection.

The Aztec Coxcox who survived in a boat with his wife, landed on a mountain, and whose mute children received their languages from a dove, is a European construction. The historical Coxcox was the fourteenth-century ruler of Culhuacan who appears in the Mexica migration history, the Tira de la Peregrinación, as overlord of the wandering Mexica. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, above all Francisco Clavijero and Alexander von Humboldt in Vues des Cordillères (1810), read pictographs of that migration as a flood, a Babel-like gift of tongues and the dispersal of peoples. The authentic Nahua flood is the one in the Leyenda de los Soles, with Tata and Nene, the fish and the dogs.

The Hawaiian flood of Nu’u, whose ark lands on Mauna Kea and whose god descends on a rainbow, belongs to the Kumuhonua genealogies. The Bishop Museum ethnologist Dorothy Barrère showed that these took shape in the late nineteenth century among Hawaiian scholars steeped in Genesis (The Kumuhonua Legends, 1969). Martha Beckwith had already noted the strain after biblical analogy in the version told to missionaries.

The Maasai Tumbainot, with his ark, dove, vulture and four rainbows, comes from Moritz Merker’s Die Masai (1904). Merker also argued that the Maasai were a lost Semitic people, which gave him every reason to find Genesis among them. The Welsh Dwyfan and Dwyfach, whose ark survives the bursting of Llyn Llïon, come from the “third series” triads published by Iolo Morganwg, a celebrated forger of Welsh antiquities. Ireland’s Fintan mac Bóchra is genuinely medieval, but he belongs to the monastic Lebor Gabála Érenn, whose purpose was to fit Irish history inside Noah’s.

These cases do not mean that every non-biblical flood is a copy. Most are not. Julien d’Huy points out that most of the world’s flood myths show no sign of Christian or Muslim contact. The errors do show where the familiar “universal” details come from. The boat, the pairs of animals, the bird scouts and the rainbow cluster in the Near Eastern family and in texts recorded after missionaries arrived. Take those away and the independent traditions look much less alike.

Explanation one: diffusion, near and deep #

The near diffusion is certain. Mesopotamian scribes, Israelite writers, Greek mythographers, and later missionaries and colonial collectors spread one flood story across the world.

The deep diffusion is the ambitious version. Witzel’s The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (2012) argues that the world’s mythologies descend from two great strata. An older “Gondwana” layer is preserved in sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea and Australia. A younger “Laurasian” layer, common to Eurasia and the Americas, tells a complete story from creation to the end of the world. The flood appears in both, and so, he argues, it may belong to a “Pan-Gaean” layer carried out of Africa by the first modern humans.

D’Huy has tested versions of this with phylogenetic methods borrowed from biology, applied to Yuri Berezkin’s catalogue of world folklore motifs (Berezkin and Duvakin). His three studies, summarized in English in 2021, point to a main core of flood motifs spreading from Southeast Asia into South America with an early migration, and a second, northern Eurasian complex reaching North America later (d’Huy 2021). The earth-diver belongs to the northern stream. D’Huy thinks it was originally about the primordial ocean and only later attached to the flood. The results do not support a single flood complex carried out of Africa. Flood motifs are too rare there, and no motifs reconstruct at both the African and Southeast Asian roots.

This work replaces impressions with counts, and it supports the antiquity of the flood as a Paleolithic inheritance. It reconstructs motifs, though, not whole stories, and d’Huy says his results “only reflect trends.” Deep diffusion explains why certain elements are old and why regional families cluster. It does not explain why so many cultures kept a story of this shape.

Explanation two: real floods #

Floods are the most common natural disaster, and people who live beside rivers and coasts see them. Every candidate for “the” flood behind the myths has been proposed at some point.

Mesopotamian river floods. In 1929 Leonard Woolley dug through a thick layer of clean silt at Ur and announced that he had found Noah’s flood. Later excavations found flood deposits at Kish, Shuruppak and other cities, but at different dates, and none covering the whole plain. Max Mallowan argued for a major flood at Shuruppak around 2900 BCE. That fits the Sumerian King List, which divides history into before and after “the flood” and makes Ziusudra’s father king of Shuruppak (Mallowan 1964). The most plausible reading is that the Mesopotamian myth grew from the experience of life on a floodplain, perhaps sharpened by one catastrophe remembered as the end of an era. That explains the Near Eastern family. It cannot explain Australia or the Andes.

The Black Sea. In 1997 William Ryan, Walter Pitman and colleagues proposed that the rising Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus in the early Holocene and filled a freshwater Black Sea lake, drowning its shores within a few years (Ryan et al. 1997). Their popular book Noah’s Flood (1998) made this the source of the Mesopotamian story. The hypothesis has not held up well. Liviu Giosan and colleagues found that the Black Sea stood about 30 meters below present before reconnection, not 80 or more, so any flood was a rise of a few meters rather than a catastrophe (Giosan et al. 2009). Other researchers dispute whether a sudden flood happened at all. Even the maximal version is 1,500 kilometers from Sumer and several thousand years earlier than the first texts.

Post-glacial sea-level rise. This candidate has the strongest geology. At the Last Glacial Maximum, sea level stood roughly 130 meters below today. Most of the rise came between about 16,500 and 8,200 years ago, with pulses when ice sheets collapsed (Lambeck et al. 2014). Continental shelves from Sundaland to Doggerland to the Persian Gulf went under, and people lived through it. Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid have shown that Aboriginal Australian traditions from 21 coastal places describe shorelines that were drowned between about 7,000 and 13,000 years ago (Nunn and Reid 2016). This is the best evidence that oral tradition can preserve a real inundation for that long.

But look at what those Australian memories are. They describe specific islands cut off and hunting grounds lost, not a world destroyed and repeopled. Sea-level rise was slow on the scale of a life, local in its effects and often reversible by moving inland. It explains why drowned lands appear in myth and why coastal peoples found flood stories believable. It does not supply the destruction of all humanity or the new race.

Other local catastrophes, such as glacial outburst floods, tsunamis and the Yellow River outburst that Wu Qinglong and colleagues dated to about 1920 BCE (Wu et al. 2016; its link to Yu’s flood is disputed), could each have fed particular traditions. The natural world supplied plenty of floods to remember, but no single flood lies behind the myths.

Explanation three: the mind and its images #

A third line of explanation looks inside the storyteller. Mircea Eliade argued that water, everywhere, is the formless matter that precedes creation. Immersion dissolves forms, and emergence renews them. A flood therefore returns the world to its seed state so that it can begin again (Patterns in Comparative Religion, 1958). Hans Kelsen read flood and catastrophe myths as expressions of a primitive principle of retribution. The world is punished because order must be restored. Géza Róheim, a psychoanalyst, traced them to dreams of waking with a full bladder. Alan Dundes, whose anthology The Flood Myth (1988) remains the best single introduction to the scholarship, argued that the flood is a male imitation of birth: creation through a body fluid by beings who cannot give birth.

The Freudian versions have few followers now. Eliade’s observation has held up because it is visible in the texts. The Chinese flood erases the boundary between land and water. Genesis 7 breaks open the “fountains of the great deep,” the waters held back at creation. Ovid writes that sea and land “had no distinction,” and the North American earth-diver re-enacts the first creation from the primordial ocean. Where a culture’s cosmogony begins with water, its flood myth undoes the world back to that starting point.

A creation myth told twice #

The explanations above are less opposed than they look. Real floods make the image available, near diffusion spreads the Near Eastern details, and deep diffusion carries old motifs across whole regions. None of them explains why the story keeps the same basic shape.

The shape comes from what the stories do. A flood myth is a creation myth told a second time. It explains why the present world and the present people exist, and it gives the second creation a cause. Humanity became too many, too noisy, too wicked, broke a taboo, insulted a god, or came to the end of an age. Water is the natural agent because in so many cosmogonies water is what existed before the world. To destroy the world is to return it to the primordial sea. To survive is to become the ancestor of everyone who follows.

This probably helps explain the uneven map as well. The regions richest in re-creation floods, across Eurasia, the Pacific rim and the Americas, are also the regions where creation most often begins from a primordial ocean or an earth-diver. Many African cosmogonies begin instead with a sky god who withdraws from the earth, or with people emerging from below, and Africa is poor in floods. Australia and Melanesia fit Witzel’s distinction: their floods are mostly punishments that reshape a landscape, not the end and restart of the world. The re-creation flood is common where there is a watery first creation to undo.

That leaves the question the flood myths themselves keep raising. If the flood divides a first humanity from a second, what was the difference between them?

The flood that made us human #

This site’s answer, argued in The Flood That Made Us Human, is that the flood remembers the end of the Ice Age as the moment humanity became what it is now. Two upheavals were fused in memory. One was physical: the drowning of coasts, the loss of land bridges and hunting grounds, and the remaking of ecologies as the glaciers melted. The other was psychological: the spread of reflective, self-aware consciousness, which the Eve Theory of Consciousness argues was discovered, taught and ritualized rather than simply inherited, with women and the serpent at the center of the initiation. The old world drowned, and the people who came after it could watch themselves think, imagine the future and drive their bodies to work for it. Ovid’s line for the stone-born race after Deucalion’s flood states the result: “Hence we are a hard race, practiced in toil.”

This reading explains what the rival accounts leave out. The catastrophe theories explain the water but not the new people. The diffusion theories explain the routes but not why the story was worth carrying. The structural theory explains the shape but not its content. Yet the content is remarkably consistent. Flood myths repeatedly say that the humans after the flood are a different kind of human.

• In Ovid, the clay people made by Prometheus are replaced by people born from stones, hard and made for labor.
• In Atrahasis, humans were created to carry the gods’ work and endowed with a slain god’s intelligence. The flood ends with new limits on birth and death.
• In the K’iche’ Popol Vuh, the wooden people are drowned because they had no minds and did not remember their makers. The maize people who replace them see and understand so much that the gods must cloud their sight, as breath fogs a mirror.
• In the Nahua ages of the world, the flood people become fish, and a new sun rises over a new humanity.
• In the gourd-sibling myths of southern China and Southeast Asia, humanity restarts from one marriage that must first be tested and ruled lawful, the founding of kinship law.
• In Genesis, the world after Noah receives the first laws given to all humanity, on bloodshed and the eating of meat, and human life spans shrink in the generations that follow.

Several of these are independent of the Near Eastern family. The Popol Vuh in particular draws the line almost exactly where the Eve Theory would: the drowned people had bodies and speech but no reflective mind. The flood’s other companion across Eurasia and the Americas is the serpent, which floods and swallows in Australia, rises from the flood mud as Python in Greece, raises the sea in Chile and forms the intertwined tails of China’s first couple. The site’s essays on dragon-slayers and flood-stoppers and on Dionysus and the Deluge follow the Greek side of that connection, where the flood became a festival of the dead and of rebirth, a pattern that fits an initiation.

The timing also fits better than it first appears. Nunn and Reid show that oral traditions can keep the memory of drowned coasts for more than seven thousand years. D’Huy’s phylogenies place the spread of the main flood motifs in the Paleolithic, and Witzel’s Pan-Gaean flood is older still. The rise of the seas between about 16,500 and 8,200 years ago coincides with the building of Göbekli Tepe, the first farming villages and the explosion of symbolic culture in the Near East, the region that also produced the oldest flood texts. A memory of that period, compressed into a single catastrophe and a single new race, is what the myths look like.

The objections should be stated plainly. The richest “second humanity” texts, Mesopotamian, Hebrew and Greek, belong to one literary family, so they count as one witness, not three. Many flood myths mark no change in human nature at all: Manu’s descendants, Bergelmir’s giants and Waynaboozhoo’s world simply carry on. The dates are loose. Sea-level rise spans ten thousand years and every continent, so it can accommodate an awakening placed almost anywhere within it. And the thesis depends on the wider Eve Theory, which holds that recursive self-awareness spread recently and culturally. That claim is argued elsewhere on this site and is far from accepted.

Those objections limit the thesis without defeating it. Even the flood myths that mark no change of nature still describe a re-founding: a new race descended from a chosen few, a new order and new rites. The independent American and Asian cases make the “new humanity” theme more than a Mesopotamian literary habit. Loose dating is a limit of the evidence, not evidence against the reading. Of the explanations on offer, this is the only one that accounts for the water, the survival and the transformation together.

Why so many cultures tell of a great flood #

Flood myths are so common for three reasons. People everywhere have lost land to water. One Mesopotamian story traveled across the world through scripture and mission. And very old motifs of deluge and survival spread with the peoples who first settled Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Underneath all three is a single idea that made the story worth keeping: the present world began with an ending. There was a first humanity, the waters closed over it, and we are the people who came after.

The flood is where the myths put the line between the world as it was made and the world as it is. Read closely, many of them say what changed across that line. The people after the flood work, remember, obey laws, make offerings and see themselves. The best explanation of the world’s flood myths is that they remember, in the only language that could hold it, the time the old human world drowned and a self-aware humanity climbed out of the water.

Sources #

1. Smith, George. “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge.” Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2 (1873): 213–234. Paper read 3 December 1872.
2. Frazer, James George. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1918. Vol. 1, Part I, ch. 4, “The Great Flood.”
3. Dundes, Alan, ed. The Flood Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Includes essays by Kelsen, Róheim and Dundes, “The Flood as Male Myth of Creation.”
4. The Flood Story (Sumerian, ETCSL 1.7.4). Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, University of Oxford.
5. Lambert, W. G., and A. R. Millard. Atra-Ḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
6. George, Andrew R. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Tablet XI.
7. Genesis 6–9, Hebrew and English, Sefaria.
8. Apollodorus, Library 1.7.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.253–415; Lucian, De Dea Syria 12–13.
9. Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 1.8.1, trans. Julius Eggeling. Sacred Books of the East 12. Oxford, 1882.
10. Lewis, Mark Edward. The Flood Myths of Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
11. Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway. St. Paul: Indian Country Press, 1979.
12. Bierhorst, John, trans. History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Includes the Leyenda de los Soles.
13. Tedlock, Dennis, trans. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Rev. ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
14. Witzel, E. J. Michael. “Pan-Gaean Flood Myths: Gondwana Myths—and Beyond.” In New Perspectives on Myth, ed. Wim M. J. van Binsbergen and Eric Venbrux, 225–242. Haarlem: Shikanda, 2010.
15. Witzel, E. J. Michael. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
16. d’Huy, Julien. “At the Origin of Flood Mythologies: Synthesis of Three Papers.” RMN Newsletter 15–16 (2020–2021): 70–76.
17. Berezkin, Yuri E., and E. N. Duvakin. Tematicheskaya klassifikatsiya i rasprostranenie folklorno-mifologicheskikh motivov po arealam (Analytical catalogue of world mythology and folklore motifs). Online database.
18. Baumann, Hermann. Schöpfung und Urzeit des Menschen im Mythus der afrikanischen Völker. Berlin: Reimer, 1936.
19. Warner, W. Lloyd. A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe. New York: Harper, 1937.
20. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.
21. Tira de la Peregrinación (Codex Boturini). Facsimile, Internet Archive.
22. Humboldt, Alexander von. Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique. Paris, 1810.
23. Barrère, Dorothy B. The Kumuhonua Legends: A Study of Late 19th Century Hawaiian Stories of Creation and Origins. Pacific Anthropological Records 3. Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1969.
24. Beckwith, Martha Warren. Hawaiian Mythology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.
25. Merker, Moritz. Die Masai: Ethnographische Monographie eines ostafrikanischen Semitenvolkes. Berlin: Reimer, 1904.
26. Mallowan, M. E. L. “Noah’s Flood Reconsidered.” Iraq 26.2 (1964): 62–82.
27. Ryan, William B. F., Walter C. Pitman III, et al. “An Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf.” Marine Geology 138 (1997): 119–126.
28. Giosan, Liviu, Florin Filip, and Stefan Constatinescu. “Was the Black Sea Catastrophically Flooded in the Early Holocene?” Quaternary Science Reviews 28 (2009): 1–6.
29. Lambeck, Kurt, et al. “Sea Level and Global Ice Volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene.” PNAS 111.43 (2014): 15296–15303.
30. Nunn, Patrick D., and Nicholas J. Reid. “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago.” Australian Geographer 47.1 (2016): 11–47.
31. Wu, Qinglong, et al. “Outburst Flood at 1920 BCE Supports Historicity of China’s Great Flood and the Xia Dynasty.” Science 353 (2016): 579–582.
32. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. London: Sheed and Ward, 1958. Ch. 5, “The Waters and Water Symbolism.”