Beautiful Area. Many pictures of the site here.
Noah's Flood:
The New Scientific Discoveries
About The Event That Changed History
by William Ryan
Walter Pitman
hardcover
Where Europe VanishesEven before it did in Mesopotamia, civilization may have taken hold in the Caucasus, where there is an abundance of both water and vegetation, allowing for domesticable animals and agriculture. The mountainous terrain shelters miniature tribal worlds lost in time. The Greek geographer Strabo (64 B.C.-A.D. 23) noted that in the Greek Black Sea port of Dioscurias, now in the northwestern-Georgia region of Abkhazia, seventy tribes gathered to trade. "All speak different languages," he wrote, "because ... by reason of their obstinacy and ferocity, they live in scattered groups and without intercourse with one another." It was on Mount Caucasus, in Georgia, that Prometheus, punished by Zeus, was chained to a rock so that an eagle could continually peck at his liver. Prometheus, who created man out of clay, represents the pre-Olympian authority that Zeus toppled; the very antiquity of the Prometheus story, which is part of the creation myth of the Greek world, could be further evidence that the Caucasus was a cradle of civilization. One theory holds that the word "Georgia" comes from the Greek word geo ("earth"), because the ancient Greeks who first came to Georgia were struck by the many people working the land.
by Robert D. KaplanExperts Face Off on Noah's FloodSAN DIEGO, Jan. 8 -- Two marine geologists from Columbia University in 1996 advanced the idea that a flood of water from the Mediterranean, rushing through the Bosporus with the force of 20 Niagaras, entered the Black Sea 7,600 years ago. In months, at most two years, the Black Sea rose, inundated surrounding plains and attained its present dimensions. As a consequence, the geologists suggested, people in the region had to flee, and this could explain the rapid spread of early agriculture into eastern and northern Europe. It was even possible, they said, that the cataclysm became a part of folk memory, inspiring the Babylonian flood myth in the epic of Gilgamesh and, in time, the biblical story of Noah. Although many fellow geologists have found the research persuasive and the Black Sea flood plausible, and still do, archaeologists and historians were skeptical from the start.
by John Noble Wilford
Dr. Stephanie Dalley, a historian at Oxford University in England and a specialist on Babylonian mythology, concluded that Dr. Ryan and Dr. Pitman "have misunderstood the meaning of the flood myth in Mesopotamia, and its use in the hypothesis should be abandoned." Then she added, "But the rest of the hypothesis is fine, as far as I'm concerned."
