However, if all these legends were exclusively related to local catastrophes, it would be strange that they should appear and be almost similar in a certain number of localities at a great distance from each other, and only where the Polynesian race has taken root, or left indubitable traces of its passage;—this race, indigenous in the Malay Archipelago, not having migrated thence till about the fourth century of the Christian era—i.e., at a time when, in consequence of the communication between India and a portion of Malaysia,[69] the Flood-tradition under its Indian form might well have entered in. Without, therefore, deciding the question one way or other, we do not think that that opinion can absolutely be condemned which finds in these Polynesian legends an echo of the tradition of the Deluge, much weakened, much changed, and more inextricably confused than anywhere else with local disasters of recent date.
The result, then, of this long review authorizes us to affirm the story of the Deluge to be a universal tradition among all branches of the human race, with the one exception, however, of the black. Now a recollection thus precise and concordant cannot be a myth voluntarily invented. No religious or cosmogonic myth presents this character of universality. It must arise from the reminiscence of a real and terrible event, so powerfully impressing the imagination of the first ancestors of our race, as never to have been forgotten by their descendants. This cataclysm must have occurred near the first cradle of mankind, and before the dispersion of the families from which the principal races were to spring; for it would be at once improbable and uncritical to admit that at as many different points of the globe as we should have to assume in order to explain the wide spread of these traditions—local phenomena so exactly alike should have occurred, their memory having assumed an identical form, and presenting circumstances that need not necessarily have occurred to the mind in such cases.
Let us observe, however, that probably the diluvian tradition is not primitive but imported in America; that it undoubtedly wears the aspect of an importation among the rare populations of the yellow race where it is found; and lastly, that it is doubtful among the Polynesians of Oceania. There will still remain three great races to which it is undoubtedly peculiar, who have not borrowed it from each other, but among whom the tradition is primitive, and goes back to the most ancient times; and these three races are precisely the only ones of which the Bible speaks as being descended from Noah, those of which it gives the ethnic filiation in the tenth chapter of Genesis. This observation, which I hold to be undeniable, attaches a singularly historic and exact value to the tradition as recorded by the Sacred Book, even if, on the other hand, it may lead to giving it a more limited geographical and ethnological significance. In another paper I propose to inquire whether, in the conception of the inspired writers, the Deluge really was universal, in the sense customarily supposed.
But as the case now stands, we do not hesitate to declare that, far from being a myth, the Biblical Deluge is a real and historical fact, having, to say the least, left its impress on the ancestors of three races—Aryan or Indo-European, Semitic or Syro-Arabian, Chamitic or Kushite—that is to say, on the three great civilized races of the ancient world, those which constitute the higher humanity—before the ancestors of those races had as yet separated, and in the part of Asia they together inhabited.
François Lenormant.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] The date of the termination of the works undertaken by Yu, in order to repair the damage done by this flood, lies between 2278 and 2062 B.C. according to the chronological system adopted.
[32] This work of Berosus was already out of existence in the fourth century of our era, when Eusebius of Cesarea, to whom we owe such fragments as we possess, wrote. Only two abridgments remained, due to later polygraphers, Abydenus and Alexander Polybistor. Eusebius gives the version of each editor, the one I quote is that of Alexander.
[33] Abydenus says, "all that composed the scriptures."
[34] He is provisionally called Izdhubar or Ghirdhubar, transcribing for want of a more certain method, according to their phonetic value, the characters composing the ideographic spelling of his name.