Essay on the Theory of the Earth

by baron Georges Cuvier

Thus, not only should we not be surprised to find, even in ancient times, many doubts and contradictions respecting the epochs of Cecrops, Deucalion, Cadmus and Danaus; and not only would it be childish to attach the smallest importance to any opinion whatever, regarding the precise dates of Inachus[119] or Ogyges[120]; but, if any thing ought to surprise us, it is this,—that an infinitely more remote antiquity had not been assigned to those personages. It is impossible that there has not been in this case some effect of the influence of received traditions, from which the inventors of fables were not able to free themselves. One of the dates assigned to the deluge of Ogyges, even agrees so much with one of those which have been attributed to the deluge of Noah, that it is almost impossible it should not have been derived from some source, where this latter deluge had been the one intended to be spoken of[121].

As to Deucalion, whether this prince be regarded as a real or fictitious personage, however little we enter into the manner in which his deluge has been introduced into the poems of the Greeks, and the various details with which it becomes successively enriched, we perceive that it was nothing else than a tradition of the great cataclysm, altered and placed by the Hellenians in the period which they also assigned to Deucalion, because he was regarded as the founder of their nation, and because his history is confounded with that of all the chiefs of the renewed nations[122].

Each of the different colonies of Greece, that had preserved isolated traditions, commenced them with a particular deluge of its own, because some remembrance of the general deluge common to all the nations, was preserved among each of the tribes; and, when it was afterwards attempted to reduce these various traditions to a common chronology, different events were imagined to have been recorded, from the circumstance that dates, in reality uncertain, or perhaps altogether false, although considered as authentic in the countries where they originated, were not found to agree with each other. Thus, in the same manner that the Hellenes had a deluge of Deucalion, because they regarded him as the founder of their nation, the Autochtones of Attica had one of Ogyges, because it was with him that their history commenced. The Pelasgi of Arcadia had that which, according to later authors, compelled Dardanus to retire towards the Hellespont.[123] The island of Samothracia, one of those in which a succession of priests had been more anciently established, together with a regular worship and connected traditions, had also a deluge, which passed for the most ancient of all[124], and which was attributed to the bursting of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont. Some idea of a similar event was preserved in Asia Minor[125], and in Syria[126], and to this the Greeks would afterwards naturally attach the name of Deucalion[127].

But none of these traditions assign a very remote antiquity to this cataclysm; and there is none of them that does not admit of explanation, in so far as its date and other circumstances are concerned, from the variations to which narratives, that are not fixed by writing, must be continually liable.

The very remote Antiquity attributed to certain Nations is not supported by History.

Those who would attribute to the continents and the establishment of nations, a very remote antiquity, are therefore obliged to have recourse to the Indians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians, three nations, in fact, which appear to have been the most anciently civilized of the Caucasian Race, and having a remarkable similarity, not only in their temperament, and in the climate and nature of the countries which they occupied, but also in their political and religious constitution, but whose testimony this almost identical constitution ought to render equally suspected[128].

These three nations agreed in having each a hereditary caste, to which the care of religion, laws, and science, was exclusively consigned. In all of them, this caste had its allegorical language and secret doctrines; and in all it reserved to itself the privilege of reading and explaining the sacred books, the whole doctrines of which had been revealed by the gods themselves.

We can easily conceive what history would necessarily come to in such hands; but, without having recourse to any great efforts of reason, we may learn it from the fact itself, by examining what it has come to in the only one of these three nations which still exists, namely, the Indians.