Every serious student of the Bible knows that there are other flood stories from the ancient Near East, particularly from ancient Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria. One brief account from Ugarit, but interestingly, none from Egypt. T. Longman & J. Walton, The Lost World of the Flood (IVP 2018), 53.
If Noah's flood happened, why are there no Egyptian accounts? Even if it was a regional rather than global flood, should we expect a notice in Egyptian records?
i) We only have a random sampling from Egypt. Most records never survived. And even if some records survived, there's a lot that has yet to be discovered, excavated, deciphered, and published.
ii) Egypt is located in Africa, separated from Western Asia by the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Perhaps the flood didn't reach Egypt. And if it happened in prehistoric times, traditions might only be passed down by survivors and their descendants in affected areas–assuming a local flood.
ii) It might also depend on when Egyptians think it happened. The ancients have a poor sense of relative chronology. If they thought it happened in Pharaonic times, royal historians might not record it because an ecological disaster like that would reflect a failure on the part of the "divine" Pharaoh to protect his country.
After doing some (light) digging out of curiosity:
ReplyDelete1. According to the entry on "Tem" in The Facts on File Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Legend (3rd ed.) by Anthony S. Mercatante and James R. Dow: "Tem (Tum, Temu, Atem, Atum, Atmu) In Egyptian mythology, a primeval, creator god; one of the most ancient deities worshipped in Egypt...Tem appears in The Book of the Dead as the evening or setting sun (Khepera is the morning sun and Ra the noonday sun). In the Theban recension of the book, Tem is identified with Osiris as being one of the gods whose flesh never saw physical corruption. Many of the attributes of Tem were absorbed by Khepera, who was also a creator god. In later times the Egyptians named a female counterpart of Tem, calling her Temt or Temit. According to one myth, Tem was responsible for the primeval flood, which covered the entire earth and destroyed all of mankind except those in Tem's boat."
However, the problem seems to be the papyri which form the Egyptian flood myth are damaged and thus disputed.
2. I wonder if "The Destruction of Mankind" might hint at the flood? It doesn't talk about a flood of water, but it does talk about a flood of beer.
3. The ancient Egyptians evidently found marine fossils in the deserts of Egypt as well as on higher ground (e.g. mountains). I suppose the question is whether these marine fossils reflect prehistoric paleontology or whether they could reflect a regional or global flood? It's possible it's a combination, depending on the particular fossils, but if it's a combination, then that's evidence for a flood. For instance:
a. Herodotus 2.12: "As for Egypt, then, I credit those who say it, and myself very much believe it to be the case, for I have seen that Egypt projects into the sea beyond the neighboring land, and shells are exposed to view on the mountains".
b. Strabo 1.3.4: "in ancient times Egypt was covered by the sea as far as the bogs about Pelusium, Mt. Casius, and Lake Sirbonis; at all events, even today, when the salt-lands in Egypt are dug up, the excavations are found to contain sand and fossil-shells, as though the country had been submerged beneath the sea and the whole region round Mt. Casius and the so-called Gerrha had once been covered with shoal water so that it connected with the Gulf of the Red Sea; and when the sea retired, these regions were left bare, except that the Lake Sirbonis remained; then the lake also broke through to the sea, and thus became a bog. In the same way, Strato adds, the beaches of the so-called Lake Moeris more nearly resemble sea-beaches than river-banks. Now one may admit that a great part of the continents was once covered by water for certain periods and was then left bare again; and in the same way one may admit also that the whole surface of the earth now submerged is uneven, at the bottom of the sea, just as we might admit, of course, that the part of the earth above water, on which we live, is subject to all the changes mentioned by Eratosthenes himself; and therefore, so far as the argument of Xanthes is concerned, one cannot bring against it any charge of absurdity."
4. Of course, te ancient Egyptians relied on the flooding of the Nile each year for their agricultural prosperity. In such a context, I wonder how notable a flood would have been?