In fact, the antiquity of the present Jordan-Arabah valley, as a hollow in a tableland, out of reach of the sea, and troubled by no diluvial or other disturbances, beyond the volcanic eruptions of Gilead and of Galilee, is vast, even as estimated by a geological standard. No marine deposits of later than miocene age occur in or about it; and there is every reason to believe that the Syro-Arabian plateau has been dry land, throughout the pliocene and later epochs, down to the present time. Raised beaches, containing recent shells, on the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean and on those of the Red Sea, testify to a geologically recent change of the sea level to the extent of 250 or 300 feet, probably produced by the slow elevation of the land; and, as I have already remarked, the alluvial plain of the Euphrates and Tigris appears to have been affected in the same way, though seemingly to a less extent. But of violent, or catastrophic, change there is no trace. Even the volcanic outbursts have flowed in even sheets over the old land surface; and the long lines of the horizontal terraces which remain, testify to the geological insignificance of such earthquakes as have taken place. It is, indeed, possible that the original formation of the valley may have been determined by the well-known fault, along which the western rocks are relatively depressed and the eastern elevated. But, whether that fault was effected slowly or quickly, and whenever it came into existence, the excavation of the valley to its present width, no less than the sculpturing of its steep walls and of the innumerable deep ravines which score them down to the very bottom, are indubitably due to the operation of rain and streams, during an enormous length of time, without interruption or disturbance of any magnitude. The alluvial deposits which have been mentioned are continued into the lateral ravines, and have more or less filled them. But, since the waters have been lowered, these deposits have been cut down to great depths, and are still being excavated by the present temporary, or permanent, streams. Hence, it follows, that all these ravines must have existed before the time at which the valley was occupied by the great mere. This fact acquires a peculiar importance when we proceed to consider the grounds for the conclusion that the old Palestinian mere attained its highest level in the cold period of the pleistocene epoch. It is well known that glaciers formerly came low down on the flanks of Lebanon and Antilebanon; indeed, the old moraines are the haunts of the few survivors of the famous cedars. This implies a perennial snowcap of great extent on Hermon; therefore, a vastly greater supply of water to the sources of the Jordan which rise on its flanks; and, in addition, such a total change in the general climate, that the innumerable Wadys, now traversed only by occasional storm torrents, must have been occupied by perennial streams. All this involves a lower annual temperature and a moist and rainy atmosphere. If such a change of meteorological conditions could be effected now, when the loss by evaporation from the surface of the Dead Sea salt-pan balances all the gain from the Jordan and other streams, the scale would be turned in the other direction. The waters of the Dead Sea would become diluted; its level would rise; it would cover, first the plain of the Jordan, then the lake of Galilee, then the middle Jordan between this lake and that of Huleh (the ancient Merom); and, finally, it would encroach, northwards, along the course of the upper Jordan, and, southwards, up the Wady Arabah, until it reached some 260 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, when it would attain a permanent level, by sending any superfluity through the pass of Jezrael to swell the waters of the Kishon, and flow thence into the Mediterranean.
Reverse the process, in consequence of the excess of loss by evaporation over gain by inflow, which must have set in as the climate of Syria changed after the end of the pleistocene epoch, and (without taking into consideration any other circumstances) the present state of things must eventually be reached—a concentrated saline solution in the deepest part of the valley—water, rather more charged with saline matter than ordinary fresh water, in the lower Jordan and the lake of Galilee—fresh waters, still largely derived from the snows of Hermon, in the upper Jordan and in Lake Huleh. But, if the full state of the Jordan valley marks the glacial epoch, then it follows that the excavation of that valley by atmospheric agencies must have occupied an immense antecedent time—a large part, perhaps the whole, of the pliocene epoch; and we are thus forced to the conclusion that, since the miocene epoch, the physical conformation of the Holy Land has been substantially what it is now. It has been more or less rained upon, searched by earthquakes here and there, partially overflowed by lava streams, slowly raised (relatively to the sea-level) a few hundred feet. But there is not a shadow of ground for supposing that, throughout all this time, terrestrial animals have ceased to inhabit a large part of its surface; or that, in many parts, they have been, in any respect, incommoded by the changes which have taken place.
The evidence of the general stability of the physical conditions of Western Asia, which is furnished by Palestine and by the Euphrates Valley, is only fortified if we extend our view northwards to the Black Sea and the Caspian. The Caspian is a sort of magnified replica of the Dead Sea. The bottom of the deepest part of this vast inland mere is about 3000 feet below the level of the Mediterranean, while its surface is lower by 85 feet. At present, it is separated, on the west, by wide spaces of dry land from the Black Sea, which has the same height as the Mediterranean; and, on the east, from the Aral, 138 feet above that level. The waters of the Black Sea, now in communication with the Mediterranean by the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are salt, but become brackish northwards, where the rivers of the steppes pour in a great volume of fresh water. Those of the shallower northern half of the Caspian are similarly affected by the Volga and the Ural, while, in the shallow bays of the southern division, they become extremely saline in consequence of the intense evaporation. The Aral Sea, though supplied by the Jaxartes and the Oxus, has brackish water. There is evidence that, in the pliocene and pleistocene periods, to go no farther back, the strait of the Dardanelles did not exist, and that the vast area, from the valley of the Danube to that of the Jaxartes, was covered by brackish or, in some parts, fresh water to a height of at least 200 feet above the level of the Mediterranean. At the present time, the water-parting which separates the northern part of the basin of the Caspian from the vast plains traversed by the Tobol and the Obi, in their course to the Arctic Ocean, appears to be less than 200 feet above the latter. It would seem, therefore, to be very probable that, under the climatal conditions of part of the pleistocene period, the valley of the Obi played the same part in relation to the Ponto-Aralian sea, as that of the Kishon may have done to the great mere of the Jordan valley; and that the outflow formed the channel by which the well-known Arctic elements of the fauna of the Caspian entered it. For the fossil remains imbedded in the strata continuously deposited in the Aralo-Caspian area, since the latter end of the miocene epoch, show no sign that, from that time onward, it has ever been covered by sea water. Therefore, the supposition of a free inflow of the Arctic Ocean, which at one time was generally received, as well as that of various hypothetical deluges from that quarter, must be seriously questioned.
The Caspian and the Aral stand in somewhat the same relation to the vast basin of dry land in which they lie, as the Dead Sea and the lake of Galilee to the Jordan valley. They are the remains of a vast, mostly brackish, mere, which has dried up in consequence of the excess of evaporation over supply, since the cold and damp climate of the pleistocene epoch gave place to the increasing dryness and great summer heats of Central Asia in more modern times. The desiccation of the Aralo-Caspian basin, which communicated with the Black Sea only by a comparatively narrow and shallow strait along the present valley of Manytsch, the bottom of which was less than 100 feet above the Mediterranean, must have been vastly aided by the erosion of the strait of the Dardanelles towards the end of the pleistocene epoch, or perhaps later. For the result of thus opening a passage for the waters of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean must have been the gradual lowering of its level to that of the latter sea. When this process had gone so far as to bring down the Black Sea water to within less than a hundred feet of its present level, the strait of Manytsch ceased to exist; and the vast body of fresh water brought down by the Danube, the Dnieper, the Don, and other South Russian rivers was cut off from the Caspian, and eventually delivered into the Mediterranean. Thus, there is as conclusive evidence as one can well hope to obtain in these matters, that, north of the Euphrates valley, the physical geography of an area as large as all Central Europe has remained essentially unchanged, from the miocene period down to our time; just as, to the west of the Euphrates valley, Palestine has exhibited a similar persistence of geographical type. To the south, the valley of the Nile tells exactly the same story. The holes bored by miocene mollusks in the cliffs east and west of Cairo bear witness that, in the miocene epoch, it contained an arm of the sea, the bottom of which has since been gradually filled up by the alluvium of the Nile, and elevated to its present position. But the higher parts of the Mokattam and of the desert about Ghizeh, have been dry land from that time to this. Too little is known of the geology of Persia, at present, to allow any positive conclusion to be enunciated. But, taking the name to indicate the whole continental mass of Iran, between the valleys of the Indus and the Euphrates, the supposition that its physical geography has remained unchanged for an immensely long period is hardly rash. The country is, in fact, an enormous basin, surrounded on all sides by a mountainous rim, and subdivided within by ridges into plateaus and hollows, the bottom of the deepest of which, in the province of Seistan, probably descends to the level of the Indian Ocean. These depressions are occupied by salt marshes and deserts, in which the waters of the streams which flow down the sides of the basin are now dissipated by evaporation. I am acquainted with no evidence that the present Iranian basin was ever occupied by the sea; but the accumulations of gravel over a great extent of its surface indicate long-continued water action. It is, therefore, a fair presumption that large lakes have covered much of its present deserts, and that they have dried up by the operation of the same changed climatal conditions as those which have reduced the Caspian and the Dead Sea to their present dimensions. [11]
Thus it would seem that the Euphrates valley, the centre of the fabled Noachian deluge, is also the centre of a region covering some millions of square miles of the present continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, in which all the facts, relevant to the argument, at present known, converge to the conclusion that, since the miocene epoch, the essential features of its physical geography have remained unchanged; that it has neither been depressed below the sea, nor swept by diluvial waters since that time; and that the Chaldaean version of the legend of a flood in the Euphrates valley is, of all those which are extant, the only one which is even consistent with probability, since it depicts a local inundation, not more severe than one which might be brought about by a concurrence of favourable conditions at the present day; and which might probably have been more easily effected when the Persian Gulf extended farther north. Hence, the recourse to the "glacial epoch" for some event which might colourably represent a flood, distinctly asserted by the only authority for it to have occurred in historical times, is peculiarly unfortunate. Even a Welsh antiquary might hesitate over the supposition that a tradition of the fate of Moel Tryfaen, in the glacial epoch, had furnished the basis of fact for a legend which arose among people whose own experience abundantly supplied them with the needful precedents. Moreover, if evidence of interchanges of land and sea are to be accepted as "confirmations" of Noah's deluge, there are plenty of sources for the tradition to be had much nearer than Wales.
The depression now filled by the Red Sea, for example, appears to be, geologically, of very recent origin. The later deposits found on its shores, two or three hundred feet above the sea level, contain no remains older than those of the present fauna; while, as I have already mentioned, the valley of the adjacent delta of the Nile was a gulf of the sea in miocene times. But there is not a particle of evidence that the change of relative level which admitted the waters of the Indian Ocean between Arabia and Africa, took place any faster than that which is now going on in Greenland and Scandinavia, and which has left their inhabitants undisturbed. Even more remarkable changes were effected, towards the end of, or since, the glacial epoch, over the region now occupied by the Levantine Mediterranean and the AEgean Sea. The eastern coast region of Asia Minor, the western of Greece, and many of the intermediate islands, exhibit thick masses of stratified deposits of later tertiary age and of purely lacustrine characters; and it is remarkable that, on the south side of the island of Crete, such masses present steep cliffs facing the sea, so that the southern boundary of the lake in which they were formed must have been situated where the sea now flows. Indeed, there are valid reasons for the supposition that the dry land once extended far to the west of the present Levantine coast, and not improbably forced the Nile to seek an outlet to the north-east of its present delta—a possibility of no small importance in relation to certain puzzling facts in the geographical distribution of animals in this region. At any rate, continuous land joined Asia Minor with the Balkan peninsula; and its surface bore deep fresh-water lakes, apparently disconnected with the Ponto-Aralian sea. This state of things lasted long enough to allow of the formation of the thick lacustrine strata to which I have referred. I am not aware that there is the smallest ground for the assumption that the AEgean land was broken up in consequence of any of the "catastrophes" which are so commonly invoked. [12] For anything that appears to the contrary, the narrow, steep-sided, straits between the islands of the AEgean archipelago may have been originally brought about by ordinary atmospheric and stream action; and may then have been filled from the Mediterranean, during a slow submergence proceeding from the south northwards. The strait of the Dardanelles is bounded by undisturbed pleistocene strata forty feet thick, through which, to all appearance, the present passage has been quietly cut.
That Olympus and Ossa were torn asunder and the waters of the Thessalian basin poured forth, is a very ancient notion, and an often cited "confirmation" of Deucalion's flood. It has not yet ceased to be in vogue, apparently because those who entertain it are not aware that modern geological investigation has conclusively proved that the gorge of the Penens is as typical an example of a valley of erosion as any to be seen in Auvergne or in Colorado. [13]
Thus, in the immediate vicinity of the vast expanse of country which can be proved to have been untouched by any catastrophe before, during, and since the "glacial epoch," lie the great areas of the AEgean and the Red Sea, in which, during or since the glacial epoch, changes of the relative positions of land and sea have taken place, in comparison with which the submergence of Moel Tryfaen, with all Wales and Scotland to boot, does not come to much.
What, then, is the relevancy of talk about the "glacial epoch" to the question of the historical veracity of the narrator of the story of the Noachian deluge? So far as my knowledge goes, there is not a particle of evidence that destructive inundations were more common, over the general surface of the earth, in the glacial epoch than they have been before or since. No doubt the fringe of an ice-covered region must be always liable to them; but, if we examine the records of such catastrophes in historical times, those produced in the deltas of great rivers, or in lowlands like Holland, by sudden floods, combined with gales of wind or with unusual tides, far excel all others.
With respect to such inundations as are the consequences of earthquakes, and other slight movements of the crust of the earth, I have never heard of anything to show that they were more frequent and severer in the quaternary or tertiary epochs than they are now. In the discussion of these, as of all other geological problems, the appeal to needless catastrophes is born of that impatience of the slow and painful search after sufficient causes, in the ordinary course of nature, which is a temptation to all, though only energetic ignorance nowadays completely succumbs to it.