How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?
Tee hee, corny joke. (Noah had the ark) Sorry, but talking about flood myths, I couldn't resist.
Alright, seriousness now. Here's the lowdown of two of the major flood stories.
Biblical (Genesis 6-9): The whole world has turned into thieves, whores, that sort of thing. There are even women sleeping with (angels? demons?) and making crazy, evil giants, which is where Goliath comes from later on. But God is kind of pissed that His people are acting like this, so he decides to destroy the whole world. Our guy Noah is the only legitimately righteous guy in the world, so he, his wife, his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japeth, his daughters-in-law, and two of every kind of animal get to be saved by means of an enormous boat he builds. It rains for forty days and nights, then they float around and eventually end up on a mountaintop. After just over a year, it's safe to go out again, and God makes the rainbow as a promise to never flood the whole world again.
Ovid: Again, gods are pissed at their creation. At first they want to destroy the world in fire with thunderbolts, but they're worried heaven might get singed, so they decide to flood it instead. A man and a woman, Deucalion and Pyrrha, who are both siblings and spouses (yay incest!), randomly survive--not because they're particularly intelligent or faithful, but just because they got lucky. The gods take pity on them and tell them to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders, and eventually Pyrrha figures out this means rocks. The fact that they came to that conclusion is really weird. Then the water goes away and the earth spawns a lot of animals to repopulate.
If you remember, there was a Native American myth earlier where an angry sea monster flooded an entire world and then almost flooded the next one everybody fled to. I've also heard that there are a lot more flood myths, so I went to offer sacrifices to the great god Wikipedia. I learned that there are flood myths in Sumerian, Babylonian, Israeli, Greek, Germanic, Irish, Finnish, Indian (India), Chinese, Malaysian, Laotian, Australian, Polynesian, Native American, Mesoamerican, Inca, Mapuche, and Muiscan cultures. So what does that mean?
According to wiki, most of these myths are thousands of years old and had been told for generations before trade was established. In fact, the Native Americans and South Americans didn't have regular contact with Europe and Asia until a few hundred years ago! So with little to no contact, why is it that all of them have strikingly similar stories of the whole world drowning?
As far as I'm concerned, this means there was one heck of a flood.
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