After I wrote the blog post from two weeks ago, speculating that the “Ararat” of Genesis 8 might refer to Arrata in southwestern Iran, rather than Urartu in Anatolia, I stumbled over a very interesting article from 2014. The article is by Mohammed El Bastawesy, and it’s titled, “The Geomorphological and Hydrogeological Evidences for a Holocene Deluge in Arabia.”*
According to this article, during the late Pleistocene there was a massive lake occupying most of the southern part of the Arabian peninsula. At some point between 13,000 and 8,500 radiocarbon years ago the lake suddenly broke out of its basin – the article doesn’t explain why, but the entire region is geologically active. The water flowed north and east into what is now the Persian Gulf, which at the time, if you recall my earlier post about the Gulf Oasis, was dry and very likely habitable.
That makes three separate sources of flooding for the oasis: 1) Sea level rise, which is known to have happened but would not have happened suddenly without other conditions (such as breaking through a natural levee) that are not known to have been present. 2) River floods, which have not, to my knowledge, been conclusively shown to have occurred, but can nevertheless reasonably be assumed to have happened from time to time. 3) The emptying of this megalake, which is known to have happened and to have been sudden.
Before getting too excited, however, we need to remember that the very latest time period that all this could have happened is still a couple of millennia before anybody could possibly have written the story down. An oral narrative would only be passed down over that distance of time if each succeeding generation found it relevant to their own concerns. If not, after a few centuries the story would almost certainly be changed beyond recognition, if it survived at all. So, as I said earlier, this is wild speculation. But I think it’s interesting nonetheless.
*Published in Arabian Journal of Geosciences 8 (5): 2577-2586.
