^{78:7.1 (874.6)} The river dwellers were accustomed to rivers overflowing their banks at certain seasons; these periodic floods were annual events in their lives. But new perils threatened the valley of Mesopotamia as a result of progressive geologic changes to the north.

^{78:7.2 (874.7)} For thousands of years after the submergence of the first Eden the mountains about the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and those to the northwest and northeast of Mesopotamia continued to rise. This elevation of the highlands was greatly accelerated about 5000 B.C., and this, together with greatly increased snowfall on the northern mountains, caused unprecedented floods each spring throughout the Euphrates valley. These spring floods grew increasingly worse so that eventually the inhabitants of the river regions were driven to the eastern highlands. For almost a thousand years scores of cities were practically deserted because of these extensive deluges.

^{78:7.3 (874.8)} Almost five thousand years later, as the Hebrew priests in Babylonian captivity sought to trace the Jewish people back to Adam, they found great difficulty in piecing the story together; and it occurred to one of them to abandon the effort, to let the whole world drown in its wickedness at the time of Noah’s flood, and thus to be in a better position to trace Abraham right back to one of the three surviving sons of Noah.

^{78:7.4 (875.1)} The traditions of a time when water covered the whole of the earth’s surface are universal. Many races harbor the story of a world-wide flood some time during past ages. The Biblical story of Noah, the ark, and the flood is an invention of the Hebrew priesthood during the Babylonian captivity. There has never been a universal flood since life was established on Urantia. The only time the surface of the earth was completely covered by water was during those Archeozoic ages before the land had begun to appear.

^{78:7.5 (875.2)} But Noah really lived; he was a wine maker of Aram, a river settlement near Erech. He kept a written record of the days of the river’s rise from year to year. He brought much ridicule upon himself by going up and down the river valley advocating that all houses be built of wood, boat fashion, and that the family animals be put on board each night as the flood season approached. He would go to the neighboring river settlements every year and warn them that in so many days the floods would come. Finally a year came in which the annual floods were greatly augmented by unusually heavy rainfall so that the sudden rise of the waters wiped out the entire village; only Noah and his immediate family were saved in their houseboat.

The Real Flood

^{80:2.1 (890.5)} The early expansion of the violet race into Europe was cut short by certain rather sudden climatic and geologic changes. With the retreat of the northern ice fields the water-laden winds from the west shifted to the north, gradually turning the great open pasture regions of Sahara into a barren desert. This drought dispersed the smaller-statured brunets, dark-eyed but long-headed dwellers of the great Sahara plateau.

^{80:2.4 (890.8)} About the time of these climatic changes in Africa, England separated from the continent, and Denmark arose from the sea, while the isthmus of Gibraltar, protecting the western basin of the Mediterranean, gave way as the result of an earthquake, quickly raising this inland lake to the level of the Atlantic Ocean. Presently the Sicilian land bridge submerged, creating one sea of the Mediterranean and connecting it with the Atlantic Ocean. This cataclysm of nature flooded scores of human settlements and occasioned the greatest loss of life by flood in all the world’s history.

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The incredible violence of nearly a cubic kilometer a second of the Atlantic ocean pouring through the Gibraltar break could be heard, and the clouds of mist seen, for miles ahead of the coming water, but this great noise had no meaning to the unsuspecting inhabitants of the settlements in the first salt lake basin region. Then as the first area filled, the blocking Sicilian land bridge from Africa to southern Europe was eventually overwhelmed, and breaching this dam as can be seen by the sea floor gouges from near the island of Malta to the island of Pantelleria. The speed and violence of the overflow probably equaled that of the first Gibraltar breach. The shoreline inhabitants had nowhere to run. Higher ground was miles away.

This cataclysmic event proceeded to cause the Bosporus to flow backwards into the Black sea and quickly flood the many shoreline settlements there, as was recently discovered by researchers of the ancient Black Sea. This event appears to have happened sometime around 12,000 to 11,000 BCE.

The stories of the survivors of these events was passed along in the legends of the many cultures in the region that had Mount Ararat as their sacred mountain. Subsequently the story of the world wide flood wiping out all life, Mount Ararat, and the story of Noah and his animals kept on his houseboat when the floods came, got all blended into a biblical tale with Noah’s sons becoming the originators of the present day races of man.