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Excerpts

Contents

List of Maps
Note to the Reader
Prologue: Witnesses

ONE: THE DISCOVERY OF THE FLOOD STORY

1 Deciphering the Legend
2 Conversions
3 Visions of Palaces
4 The Face of the Deep
5 Ur of the Chaldees

TWO: THE DISCOVERY OF A REAL FLOOD

6 Hidden River
7 Gibraltar's Waterfall
8 Vanished Deserts
9 Pontus Axenus
10 Red Hill
11 Aquanauts
12 Immigrants
13 Close Encounter
14 Beachcombers
15 Back of the Envelope

THREE: WHO WAS THERE, AND WHERE DID THEY GO?

16 Anybody There?
17 The Diaspora
18 Family Trees
19 The Guslar's Song

FOUR: THE FLOOD STORIES TOLD

20 On a Golden Pond
21 Other Myths

Epilogue: A Telling of Atrahasis
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

List of Maps

Mesopotamia and the Levant
The voyage of the Chain up the Bosporus in 1961
The Glomar Challenger drilling the floor of the Mediterranean Sea in 1970
The Atlantis II mapping and sampling the seabed of the Black Sea in 1969
The Kerch Strait and the path of the ancient Don River
The path of meltwater delivered from the Eurasian ice sheet, beginning around 12,500 B.C.
The historical connection of the Black Sea to the Mediterranean
Anatolia at the time farming began to spread
Inferred human migrations west and northwest into Europe in the wake of the Black Sea flood
Inferred human migrations northeast into Asia and southeast into the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia
The Takla Makan desert of western China with the shoreline of the giant lake that formerly filled the Tarim Basin
A Sumerian map of their world