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The end of the Cold War enabled Ryan and Pitman to team up with oceanographers from
Bulgaria and Russia, as well as Turkey, to explore the Black Sea. Using sound waves and sophis-
ticated coring devices to probe the sea floor, they discovered clear evidence that this inland body
of water once had been a vast freshwater lake lying hundreds of feet below the level of the world's
rising oceans. Dating techniques indicated that no more than 7,600 years go the mounting seas had
burst through the narrow Bosporus valley, and the sea water of the Mediterranean Sea had poured
into the lake with unimaginable fury -- racing over beaches and up rivers, destroying or chasing all
life before it. The fringes of the lake, which had been a unique oasis, a veritable Garden of Eden
for an advanced culture in a vast region of semidesert, became a sea of death. The survivors fled --
never to return.

The Gilgamesh Account

Remarkable confirmation of Sir Charles Woolley's discovery in the Mesopotamian valley
came to light around the turn of the century -- long before his uncovering of the layer of clay. Re-
cords Werner Keller in The Bible As History --

From the dim recesses of the Ancient East an old mystery story came to light: a heroic epic, of 300 quat-
rains, inscribed on twelve large clay tablets, which told of the wonderful experiences of the legendary
King Gilgamesh.

The text was astonishing: Gilgamesh told a tale exactly like the Bible -- of a man who was said to have
lived before and after a mighty and disastrous Flood (1981: William Morrow and Company, New York.
P.50).

Discovered in 1853 among 20,000 other clay tablets in the ruins of an ancient library at
Nineveh, the Epic of Gilgamesh remained undeciphered for a number of decades. Then, shortly be-
fore 1900, Assyriologists heard for the first time the incredible story of Gilgamesh. Written in Ak-
kadian (the language of the court and of diplomacy in the time of King Ashurbanipal), it dates not
from the time when it was placed in the library at Nineveh but from at least 1,000 years earlier --
to the time of Hammurabi, the great king of Babylon.

Many details of this epic are strikingly similar to the Biblical account of Noah. Most
scholars think that the Biblical account is dependent on the Gilgamesh text, but there is a strong
possibility that both may depend on an even earlier common source.

According to N.K. Sandars in The Epic of Gilgamesh,

The Gilgamesh Epic must have been widely known in the second millennium BC, for a version has been
found in the archives of the Hittite imperial capital at Boghazkoy in Anatolia, written in Semitic Akkadian;
and it was also translated into the Indo-European Hittite, and the Hurrian languages. In southern Turkey
parts have been found at Sultantepe; while a small but important fragment from Megiddo in Palestine
points to the existence of a Canaanite or later Palestinian version... The Palestinian fragment comes from
the tablet which describes the death of Enkidu and is closest to the account already known from Boghaz-
koy. Excavation at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, on the Syrian coast has brought to life an independent epic
literature of which the written versions mostly date from the later part of the second millennium [BC], and
which was also known in the Hittite capital; it includes a fragment from a flood narrative that probably
stems from a version of the Gilgamesh flood (1987: Penguin Books. P.12).

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