A Neolithic Flood for the Genesis of the Holy Land? 

New research into Noah’s flood has identified an archaeological link with Israel in the form of a catastrophic deluge that swept the land over 7,000 years ago. For the first time the oldest story in the world can be transported back to the Bible Lands. Drowned beneath Mediterranean waves lie six Neolithic villages – the foundations of houses, temples, graves, water wells, workshops and stone tools. Could the traumatic destruction of these settlements be the real-life inspiration behind the immortal words of the book of Genesis? 

The lost villages cluster opposite the Carmel Mountains in central Israel in depths of 12 metres. Some 10 kilometres south of Haifa and 400 metres north of the ruined Knight’s Templar castle of Atlit, at 60,000 square metres Atlit-Yam is the largest submerged Neolithic village in the Mediterranean Sea. Over 9,000 hours of underwater surveys and keyhole excavations directed since 1984 by Dr. Ehud Galili of the Israel Antiquities Authority have produced a dramatic picture of everyday life between 8180 and 7300 BP, from rectangular houses with paved interiors to a 5.5 metre-deep water well, a flint workshop and a round megalithic temple with seven standing stones up to 2.1 metres tall. Atlit’s villagers specialised in diving and fishing for triggerfish, sea bream, mullet and shark. As the fishermen went about their work, they were accompanied by domesticated dogs, which still resembled wolves. 

But around 5300 BC life came to an end. Fresh fish stored next to 26,000 cereal seeds were abandoned alongside the bones of 90 ancestors. Despite this 'catastrophe', the survivors re-settled further inland along the risen shoreline in five new settlements at Kfar Samir, Kfar Galim, Tel Hreiz, Megadim and Neve Yam. But some 6300 years ago, the sea rose once more, wiping out a 2,000 year-old way of life. Houses, silos, hearths, flints, obsidian blades, pottery, basalt grinding stones, fish and bird bones and the earliest cemetery in the Near East were all inundated. The thousands of olive stones found underwater at Kfar Samir and dated to c. 6500 BP are the oldest regional traces of an olive oil ‘factory’. 

This evidence is by far the most compelling archaeological evidence for a flood or rather floods of biblical proportions exposed to date. Despite decades of research in the Black Sea leading to the prevailing theory that its inundation c. 5600 BC inspired the story of Noah and his ark in the book of Genesis, not one flint, house, skeleton or village from a deluge is yet to emerge from this inland ocean. The people of the flood are nowhere to be seen in the Black Sea. 

 

Drowned villages are only one side of a complex picture. Dr. Sean Kingsley of Wreck Watch has argued that the fishermen of the Carmel stubbornly refused to leave this environmentally unstable landscape because it was a spiritual heartland. Long before the Greek gods settled on Mount Olympus and Solomon’s Temple graced Mount Moriah, the Carmel Mountains was the home of the ancestors and their prehistoric gods. Looming over the Carmel coast mankind evolved, uninterrupted, in the caves of the Wadi Mearot for over half a million years. 

Precisely opposite Atlit-Yam, in the Abu Usba and Nahal Oren caves, extraordinary dwellings date back between 30,000 and 6,800 years. In proto-villages and cemeteries built along terraces, you can literally see where the forefathers came out of their caves and abandoned the dark, lonely life of the hunter-gatherer in favour of agriculture and communal stability. In every sense this is a real-life landscape of creation, a physical genesis. And opposite this landscape are a string of drowned villages. 

The mysterious loss of Neolithic man’s liberty was triggered by a very modern fear – global warming. Around 19,000 years ago the Laurentide Ice Sheet, at 35 million kilometres-square the largest glacier in the northern hemisphere, cracked open and discharged an imaginable volume of meltwater into the world’s oceans, raising sea levels by dozens of metres. Between the sixth and fifth millennium BC, the Carmel coast witnessed a 16-metre sea level rise, reclaiming over a kilometre of seashore during several tipping points. 

The precise timing of this localised flooding still needs to be worked out, but there is no doubt that the villages of the Carmel were lost not to earthquakes or tectonic movements, but to rising waves. While the myth of a righteous man called Noah and his ark was subjected to epic literary spin in the royal court of Jerusalem around the 8th century BC, the flood itself may have been an authentic trauma and distant memory based on at least two dramatic rises in sea levels.

 

caves & burials, a real-life landscape of beginnings and genesis.  

Archaeologists across the globe are starting to realise that rising seas triggered by the end of the last Ice Age did create a ‘global’ terror, with villages being wiped out as far a field as Britain, Italy, Serbia and the Far East. What is more, Neolithic canoes found in submerged sites in China and Italy, and parts of boats dug up in Kuwait, show that this era ushered in a nautical revolution. The symbol of the ark may have been based on this era of technological maritime wonder. With our own fears of modern global warming, we are far closer to the people of the Flood than we can ever have imagined. 

Foundation myths rooted in flooding would have been part of the whole world’s rich oral tapestry at the end of the last Ice Age. It just so happened that Israel and the Middle East reached statehood and a level of literacy long before the rest of the world. The story of Israel’s flood was preserved not through the uniqueness of its environmental nightmare, but by a combination of intelligent design and good fortune. If it was not for the ascendancy of the Israelite State in the 8th century BC and Judaism in the 6th century BC, and the preservation of its legends in the Bible, Genesis’ literary echo of a real-life Neolithic flood would have been lost to mankind too. 

E. Galili, B. Rosen, A. Gopher and L.K. Horwitz, ‘The Emergence and Dispersion of the Eastern Mediterranean Fishing Village: Evidence from Submerged Neolithic Settlements off the Carmel Coast, Israel’, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 15.2 (2002), 167-98. 

S. Kingsley, ‘From Carmel to Genesis: A Neolithic Flood for the Holy Land?’ Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008), 75-93. 

Also see, ‘The Search for Noah’s Ark’ in Into the Unknown (Discovery Channel US 2008; UK 2009).