I'm glad that's not the only scientific method since a worldwide flood couldn't really be tested with an experiment.
Let me get serious here. I know you're a geology professor and have a respectable knowledge base when it comes to the subject. But I hope you realize that much of science is still based on theories that have been around for so long that scientists eventually decide to treat those theories as facts since they have been accepted for so long. However, being accepted doesn't mean true.
The following reference is the most comprehensive I have found concerning the literary, historic and geologic evidence and the relationship of the Sumerian flood and the Noah's Ark flood myth with extensive references.
The assertion of some historians and archaeologists that a great flood devastated a region of Mesopotamia at the dawn of history and that this event was the origin of the biblical Flood story has become a curious backwater in the debate over creationism.
ncse.ngo
The Flood: Mesopotamian Archaeological Evidence
The assertion of some historians and archaeologists that a great flood devastated a region of Mesopotamia at the dawn of history and that this event was the origin of the biblical Flood story has become a curious backwater in the debate over creationism. The topic has not proved of major concern to either the advocates of recent-creationism or to their scientific opponents. It has, however, given considerable, if probably unwarranted, encouragement to day-age creationists, gap theorists, and those who hope to reconcile apparent contradictions between scripture and science.
Within a few months of one another during the 1928-1929 excavation season, archaeologists at two southern Mesopotamian sites, Ur and Kish, announced the discovery of flood deposits which they identified with the Flood described in the Hebrew scriptures and cuneiform sources. The famous and glamorous Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, after his deep excavations of the Early Dynastic royal tombs at Ur, had a small test shaft sunk into the underlying soil. He persisted through some eight feet of bare mud before finally coming to a layer bearing artifacts of late prehistoric date. It did not take Woolley long to arrive at an interpretation:
I . . . by the time I had written up my notes was quite convinced of what it all meant; but I wanted to see whether others would come to the same conclusion. So I brought up two of my staff and, after pointing out the facts, asked for their explanation. They did not know what to say. My wife came along and looked and was asked the same question, and she turned away remarking casually, "Well, of course, it's the Flood."
[1954, p. 27]
- page 15 -
Woolley's first test pit was very small, so during that and the next season he had dug a number of other test shafts, including an enormous pit, seventy-five feet by sixty feet and sixty-four feet deep. In this main pit, he encountered a deposit of clean, apparently water-laid soil up to eleven feet thick. Evidence of the Flood was absent from several shafts and uncertain or disturbed in a number of others. But in many, Woolley felt he had certain evidence of the Flood (1955).
Just slightly before Woolley's initial discovery, S. Langdon and L. Watelin encountered smaller flood levels at Kish (Watelin, 1934). Although the Kish discovery actually predated Woolley's find at Ur, Woolley published first (Woolley, 1929) and received the lion's share of the initial publicity. Woolley, moreover, produced a highly successful popularization of his work in which the Flood finds were recounted in a manner that is at once simple, authoritative, and filled with references to familiar biblical materials (Woolley, 1929, 1954, 1982). The finds from Ur achieved and maintain a predominant place in the public mind.
Initially, some assumed with great eagerness that the flood levels at Ur and Kish were identical and provided marvelous evidence for a historical kernel of the Genesis Flood story (Peake, 1930), but the enthusiasm could not be maintained. The level of the great flood at Ur was sandwiched between remains of the Al Ubaid cultural phase, the last purely prehistoric period of southern Mesopotamia, and a layer of debris from the early Protoliterate period. The great Ur flood, thus, can be dated with a high degree of certainty to about 3500 BCE. Kish, however, produced evidence of two floods at the end of the Early Dynastic I and beginning of the Early Dynastic II periods, around 3000 to 2900 BCE, and a still more impressive flood dating to the Early Dynastic III period, around 2600 BCE. All three of the Kish floods were much later than the great flood at Ur. Watelin argued that the earliest of these three was the deluge of the Bible and cuneiform literature.
Within a few years, excavations of a third Mesopotamian site, Shuruppak, also uncovered a flood stratum (Schmidt, 1931). It is of particular interest because, according to the Mesopotamian legend, Shuruppak was the home of Ziusudra, the Sumerian Noah. (The Sumerian Ziusudra means "life of long days." The Akkadian equivalent, Utnapishtim, is "he found life," while the alternative Atra-hasis means "exceedingly wise.") This flood level separated late Protoliterate and Early Dynastic I remains and dates from around 2950 to 2850 BCE. Perhaps, but not certainly, the Shuruppak flood may be equated with the earliest flood at Kish. No other Mesopotamian sites have produced flood remains of significance (Mallowan, 1964).
Read on . . .
