RexRed wrote:Noah's Flood
The Black Sea basin was a valley below the sea level of the Mediterranean.
If you were in the "valley" when the Black Sea began to fill you would have been below sea level if the waters were rising.
Seeing a water fall, the size of Niagara, would have seemed, from below, like it was pouring out of the sky.
You are either willfully ignoring, or failing to see the significance of a distinction between what your source refers to as the Euxine Lake and what is known as the Black Sea. It did not become the Black Sea until after that event. This could well be source of the flood stories, rather than the earlier glacial melt run-off to which i referred. This also would have made the event comparatively recent for the Meda and Pharsee who began to arrive in the Iranian plateau shortly thereafter, and could have then begun to spread their flood story, which became any one of several myths current among the Akkadians and other Semitic people of the region.
None of that alters the silliness of your contention about seeing the waterfall from below. Read your source again, and pay attention to the references to the expansion in the north and east regions of the Black Sea. Those areas remain shallow to this day. Your reference to a "valley" is extremely misleading, either because you want to ignore what your source says, or you failed to comprehend it.
Rex's source at Religious Tolerance-dot-org wrote:Warmth and rain returned once more. The New Euxine lake was still landlocked and fresh. But the Mediterranean Sea and Sea of Marmara had gradually risen to a level some 426 feet (130 meters) higher than the lake. It was held back only by a small rise of land at the Bosporus River -- now the Bosporus Straight near present-day Istanbul, Turkey. Eventually, the ocean level rose high enough to slosh over into the Euxine Lake. It would have cut a small channel down to the lake. "The rivulet became a gentle brook, flowing ever more swiftly, scouring and tugging more forcefully at the bottom and walls of its channel." In a short time, the flow would reach 10 cubic miles of water per day -- 200 times the flow of the present Niagara Falls. Its velocity would have reached 50 miles per hour (over 80 km/hour)! Its noise would have been audible 120 miles (200 km) away. The lake level would have risen about six inches a day. The shoreline would have expanded up to a mile each day in some areas. The effect on the multiple cultures who had settled on the lake shore would have been catastrophic.
Please note the reference to the process whereby the waters cut a channel from the Bosporus to the Euxine. Niagara Falls drops 170 feet from the level of the Escarpment to the valley of the river below, and does so abruptly. This desribes a new creek (the exact term used in the article) branching off from the Bosporus. That is not the same as standing at the base of the Niagara Escarpment and watching the waters from Lake Erie (and by extension, the other three of the Great Lakes) fall to level of Lake Ontario. You keep trotting out this standing at the bottom looking up, and how that would appear to be water pouring out of the sky. You're missing that your own sources describes a process which was gradual, and which accelerated over time to a huge volume flow of water. There is no good reason from reading your source to picture anyone standing at the bottom of a high cliff (such as the Niagara Escarpment), looking up at a gigantic waterfall.
I know this is dear to your heart, Rex, but you need to get a grip. You're so desparate to make the fairy tale plausible, that you're clutiching at straws. Have you ever seen the Niagara Escarpment? Try driving down the 403 in Ontario from Woodstock to the Queen Elizabeth Way in Hamilton Ontario sometime. When you reach the outskirts of Hamilton, and start going down, the descent is quite dramatic, even on a well-graded highway. There is not a similar terrain feature in the region of the Black Sea--you're making up stories again.
