_Traditions of other Aryan Peoples._--Among the Iranians, in the sacred
books containing the fundamental Zoroastrian doctrines, and dating very
far back, we meet with a tradition which must assuredly be looked upon
as a variety of that of the Deluge, though possessing a special
character, and diverging in some essential particulars from those we
have been examining. It relates how Yima, who in the original and
primitive conception was the father of the human race, was warned by
Ahuramazda, the good deity, of the earth being about to be devastated by
a flood. The god ordered Yima to construct a refuge, a square garden,
_vara_, protected by an enclosure, and to cause the germs of men,
beasts, and plants to enter it, in order to escape annihilation.
Accordingly, when the inundation occurred, the garden of Yima with all
that it contained was alone spared, and the message of safety was
brought thither by the bird Karshipta, the envoy of Ahuramazda.[47]
A comparison has also been made, but erroneously as I think, between the
Biblical and Chaldean Deluge and a story only found complete in the
_Bundahesh-pahlavi_;[48] though, as a few of the older books contain
allusions to some of its circumstances;[49] it must date further back
than this edition of it, which is recent. Ahuramazda determines to
destroy the Khafctras--_i.e._, the maleficent spirits created by
Angromainyus, the spirit of evil: Tistrya, the genius of the star
Sirius, descends at his command to earth, and, assuming the form of a
man, causes it to rain for ten days. The waters cover the earth, and all
maleficent beings are drowned. A violent wind dries the earth, but some
germs of the evil spirit's creation remain, and may reappear, therefore
Tistrya descends again under the form of a white horse, and produces a
second Deluge by another rainfall of ten days. To prevent him
accomplishing his task, the demon Apusha assumes the appearance of a
black horse, and engages in combat; but he is struck with lightning by
Ahuramazda, as well as the demon Cpendjaghra, who had come to his aid.
Finally, to bring about the complete destruction of evil, Tistrya
descends the third time under the form of a bull, and produces a third
Deluge by a third rainfall of ten days, after which the waters divide to
form the four great and the twenty-four small seas. Now all this relates
to a cosmogonic fact, anterior to the creation of man. The Khafctras,
from which Tistrya undertakes to purge the earth, are the hurtful and
venomous beasts created by Angromainyus which fervent Mazedans make it a
duty to destroy in our actual world--such as scorpions, lizards, toads,
serpents, rats, &c. There is no allusion here to humanity, or the
punishment of its sins. If we were bent on finding in our Bible any
parallel to this first rain falling on the surface of the earth--which
both destroys the hurtful creatures by which it was infested and renders
it productive of a fertile vegetation--we should turn, not to the
account of the Deluge, but to what is said in Gen. ii. 5, 6.
The Greeks had two principal legends as to the cataclysm by which
primitive humanity was destroyed. The first was connected with the name
of Ogyges, the most ancient of the kings of Boeotia or Attica; a quite
mythical personage, lost in the night of ages, his very name seemingly
derived from one signifying deluge in Aryan idioms, in Sanscrit _Angha_.
It is said that in his time the whole land was covered by a flood, whose
waters reached the sky, and from which he, together with some
companions, escaped in a vessel.
The second tradition is the Thessalian legend of Deucalion. Zeus having
worked to destroy the men of the age of bronze, with whose crimes he was
wroth, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, his father, constructed a
coffer, in which he took refuge with his wife, Pyrrha. The Deluge came,
the chest or coffer floated at the mercy of the waves for nine days and
nine nights, and was finally stranded on Mount Parnassus. Deucalion and
Pyrrha leave it, offer sacrifice, and according to the command of Zeus
re-people the world by throwing behind them "the bones of the
earth"--namely, stones, which change into men. This Deluge of Deucalion
is in Grecian tradition what most resembles a universal Deluge. Many
authors affirm that it extended to the whole earth, and that the whole
human race perished. At Athens, in memory of the event, and to appease
the manes of its victims, a ceremony called _Hydrophoria_ was observed,
having so close a resemblance to that in use at Hierapolis in Syria,
that we can hardly fail to look upon it as a Syro-Phoenician
importation, and the result of an assimilation established in remote
antiquity between the Deluge of Deucalion and that of Khasisatra, as
described by the author of the treatise "On the Syrian Goddess."[50]
Close to the temple of the Olympian Zeus a fissure in the soil was
shown, in length but one cubit, through which it was said the waters of
the Deluge had been swallowed up. Thus, every year, on the third day of
the festival of the Anthesteria, a day of mourning consecrated to the
dead,--that is, on the thirteenth of the month of Anthesterion, towards
the beginning of March--it was customary, as at Bambyce, to pour water
into the fissure, together with flour mixed with honey, poured also into
the trench dug to the west of the tomb, in the funereal sacrifices of
the Athenians.
Others, on the contrary, limit Deucalion's flood to Greece, even declare
that it only destroyed the larger portion of the community, a great many
men saving themselves on the highest mountains. Thus the Delphian legend
told how the inhabitants of that town, following the wolves in their
flight, had taken refuge in a cave on the summit of Parnassus, where
they built the town of Lycorea, whose foundation is, on the other hand,
attributed by the Chronicle of Paros to Deucalion, after the
reproduction by him of a new human race. Later mythographers necessarily
adopted this idea of several points of simultaneous escape from a desire
to reconcile the local legends of several places in Greece, which named
some other than Deucalion as the hero saved from the flood. For
instance, at Megara it was the eponym of the city Megaros, son of Zeus
and of one of the nymphs Sithnides, who, warned by the cry of cranes of
the imminence of the danger, took refuge on Mount Geranien. Again, there
was the Thessalian Cerambos, who was said to have escaped the flood by
rising into the air on wings given him by the nymphs, and it was
Perirrhoos, son of Eolus, that Zeus Naios had preserved at Dodona. For
the inhabitants of the Isle of Cos the hero of the Deluge was Merops,
son of Hyas, who there assembled under his rule the remnant of humanity
preserved with him. The traditions of Rhodes only supposed the
Telchines, those of Crete Jasion, to have escaped the cataclysm. In
Samothracia the same character was attributed to Saon, said to be the
son of Zeus or of Hermes; he seems only to have been a heroic form of
the Hermes Saos or Socos, the object of special worship in the island, a
divinity in whom M. Philippe Berges recognizes with good reason a
Phoenician importation, the Sakan of Canaan identified elsewhere with
Hermes Dardanos, supposed to have arrived in Samothracia immediately
after these events, being driven by the Deluge from Arcadia.
In all these flood stories of Greece we cannot doubt that the tradition
of a cataclysm fatal to the whole of humanity--a tradition common to all
Aryan peoples--was mixed up, as Knobel rightly observes, more or less
precisely with local catastrophes produced by extraordinary overflows of
lakes or rivers, or the rupture of their natural embankments, the
sinking of some portions of the sea-coast, or tidal waves consequent
upon earthquakes or sudden upheavals of the ocean bed. Such events were
frequent in Greece, in the district between Egypt and Palestine, near
Pelusium and Mount Casius, as well as in the Cimbric Chersonese. The
Greeks used to relate how often their country had in primitive ages been
the theatre of such catastrophes. Istros numbered four of these, one of
which had opened the Straits of the Bosphorus and Hellespont, when the
waters of the Euxine, rushing into the Aegean, submerged the islands and
neighbouring coasts. This is evidently the Deluge of Samothracia; where
the inhabitants who succeeded in saving themselves did so only by
gaining the highest peak of the mountain that rises there; then, in
gratitude for their preservation, consecrated the whole island by
surrounding its shores with a belt of altars dedicated to the gods. In
like manner the tradition of the Deluge of Ogyges seems connected with
the recollection of an extraordinary rise of the Lake Capais, inundating
the whole of the great Boeotian Valley, a recollection amplified
later--as is ever the case with legends--by applying to the local
disaster all the details popularly told of the primitive Deluge which
had taken place before the separation of the ancestors of the two races,
Semitic and Aryan. It is also probable that some event that had occurred
in Thessaly, or rather in the region of Parnassus, determined the
localization of the legend of Deucalion. Nevertheless, it always
retained, as we have seen, a more general character than the others,
whether the Deluge be extended to the whole earth or limited to the
whole of Greece.
Be that as it may, the different narratives were reconciled by admitting
three successive Deluges, those of Ogyges, Deucalion, and Dardanos. The
general opinion pronounced the former the most ancient, placing it 600
or 250 years before that of Deucalion. But this chronology is far from
being universally accepted; and the inhabitants of Samothracia maintain
their Deluge to have been the earliest. Christian chronographers of the
third and fourth century, as, for instance, Julius Africanus and
Eusebius, adopted the Hellenic dates of the Deluges of Ogyges and
Deucalion, and inscribed them in their records as different events from
the Mosaic Deluge, which, for their part, they fixed at 1000 years
before that of Ogyges.
In Phrygia the diluvian tradition was as natural as in Greece. The town
of Apamea derived thence its surname _Kibotos_, or ark, and claimed to
be the place where the Ark had stopped. Iconium had the like
pretensions. In the same way the people of Milyas, in Armenia, showed
the fragments of the Ark on the top of the mountain called Baris; and
these were also exhibited in early Christian times to pilgrims on
Ararat, as Berosus tells us that in his day the remnants of the vessel
of Khasisatra were visited on the Gordyan range.
In the second and third centuries of our era, by means of the syncretic
infiltration of Jewish and Christian traditions even into minds still
attached to Paganism, the sacerdotal authorities of Apamea and Phrygia
had coins struck bearing an open ark, in which the patriarch and his
wife were seen receiving back the dove with the olive branch, and side
by side were the two same personages, having left the Ark to retake
possession of the earth. On the Ark is inscribed the name =NOE=, the
very form the name assumes in the Septuagint. Thus, at this time the
Pagan priesthood of the Phrygian city had, we see, adopted the Biblical
narrative, even down to its names, and had grafted it on the old native
tradition. They related that a short while before the Deluge there
reigned a holy man called Annacos, who had predicted it, and occupied
the throne more than 300 years, an evident reproduction of the Enoch of
the Bible, who walked with God for 365 years.
As to the branch of the Celts--in the bardic poems of Wales, we have a
tradition of the Deluge, which, although recent under the concise form
of the Triads, is still deserving of attention. As usual, the legend is
localized in the country, and the Deluge counts among three terrible
catastrophes of the island of Prydain, or Britain, the other two
consisting of devastation by fire and by drought.
"The first of these events," it is said, "was the irruption of
Llyn-llion, or 'the lake of waves,' and the inundation (_bawdd_) of
the whole country, by which all mankind was drowned with the
exception of Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who saved themselves in a vessel
without rigging, and it was by them that the island of Prydain was
re-peopled."[51]