"Ryan and Pitman are marine geologists and geophysicists at Columbia University who are equally at home with the most advanced carbon-14 dating techniques as with constructing the sequence of events in the last Ice Age. Readers hoping for an account of an expedition to Mount Ararat to find the remains of Noah's Ark will not find it here. Instead, this is a scientific account of the evidence for a great flood which took place about 7,500 years ago, joining the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea. The Black Sea was transformed from an isolated freshwater lake with very ancient early civilisations encamped around it, into a 6,000-feet deep salt sea connected to the Med via the Bosphorus. Those who escaped with their lives, whoever they were, lived to transmit the event to latter ages via oral and literary legends.
The science is interesting throughout, both in the techniques used and the evidence presented, and amounts to a good case for the event that later became the Genesis Flood and part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. (Mount Ararat as a resting place for the ark remains understandable as it is in Armenia, south-east of the Black Sea, and north-east of the head of the Tigris-Euphrates region, a generally flood-prone area.) The illustrations are helpful and user-friendly, even where not strictly informational. But I have to confess that I had difficulty taking in the book as a whole, even though I read it twice.
I had two main difficulties, the first being that of the style. The technique veers between that of the historical novel, journalistic reportage, and Hemingway realism. None of these is done well. I laboured to pick out the strict science and follow their lines of reasoning. The second problem was with the scope of subjects tackled; the picture is simply too large for the canvas. If they had drawn the line at the geology and marine biology, I certainly would have coped and they would have got away with the aspirations of Hemingway. But trying to integrate brief overviews of other specialist research such as processes of oral transmission of legends, literary analysis of the legends, linguistic family trees, assorted mummies, and so on, and present it in a seamless quasi-narrative, defeated me, and I feel it defeated them too. The paperback text is also littered with minor typesetting errors, which somewhat lowers confidence in the whole.
If you are in a hurry to get to the heart of the matter, just read chapters eleven to seventeen ('Aquanauts' to 'Diaspora'). These hundred pages are really all you need. There is an index and set of notes on references."
Michael JR Jose, Resident Scholar
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