Ancient and ArchaeologyΒ permalink
Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
This discussion has been closed.
-
Message 1.Β
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Thursday, 23rd June 2011
Hi - I remember a fairly recent TV programme about the neolithic era, and it talked in some detail about the flooding that occurred across the Bosphorus sill.
But the programme said the flooding was west to east, ie, the med flooding into the Black Sea area, and creating the modern sized sea - it said the water came from a vast lake in Northern Canada that had been walled in by an ice wall which, when it melted in the post-glacial period, released a massive swell of water that surged south out into the Arctic and then down the Atlantic, through the pillars of hercules and thence to the Aegean and finally poured over the Bosphorus sill.
But when I looked this up there seemed to be talk of a reverse flood caused by the Black sea overfilling from all the river systems emptying into it, and then flooding westwards over the sill into the Med.
Any enlightenment on this would be welcome!
(Black sea seems a very odd sea, with all those vertical layers and fresh/salty reverse currents etc, and 'dead' anoxic lower depths.)Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 2
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Thursday, 23rd June 2011
Jenny,
as I remember it it was the Mediterranean which flooded the Black Sea after the breach of the land bridge at Istanbul.
From a quick look at internet:
page 21/22
Of course you meet a lot of Bible thingies too...
Kind regards and with full esteem,
Paul.Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 3
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 24th June 2011
Is there not some kind of theoterical model link with the Jordanian Sea which owes its high saline levels to the fact that it is below "sea level" in a land-locked fragment of the "great rift" that comes all the way up from the "Valley" of that name in East Africa?
The Mediterranean Basin was similarly a deep valley though there were rivers flowing into it (like the plain of the North Sea region).. As has been stated it seems that the rising sea levels eventually made a breach at the Straits of Gibraltar.
Now it is possible that the Black Sea already existed as an inland sea fed by rivers, in the same way as the Caspian Sea not too far away in global terms, until the Dardanelles were formed. And it would seem likely that the action of the greater expanse of water- the Mediterranean- would have been more important than that of the Black Sea waters.
But- as Paul points out- these were lands of great floods at times of great rains, as in the Biblical story of Noah and the Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh..
But even river floods are affected by the seas hence the special importance attached to the moon goddess by the people of ancient Ur. Whether or not the Moon produces a high tide or not is often crucial to just how quickly the river water can flood out to sea.
But the Japanese tsunami footage shows very clearly that double effect of the inward surge in all its violence shattering and weakenning things, followed by the outward surge that just drags them away with a slower and more relentless process. Anyone who has stood on a beach with great waves breaking has experienced the powerful undertow effect. So the great floods into the Mediterranean and then into the Black Sea may similarly have had this "washing basin" action -that happens every day less spectacularly as the Moon rocks the waters of the Earth.
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 4
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Friday, 24th June 2011
As ever, thank you both so much for your answers!
I do think one of the saddest things about plate tectonics is that the Mediterranean is gradually closing. The world will be have lost the most interesting sea it possesses!Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 5
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Friday, 24th June 2011
However, the Atlantic is widening, so America and Europe are getting further apart. Look for the silver lining ....
Wouldn't the Eurasian ice cover melting at the end of the last ice age have lead to massively increased flows of melt water from the Danube and Don systems pouring into the Black Sea? What was their effect?Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 6
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
"However, the Atlantic is widening, so America and Europe are getting further apart"
One of my "love to do's" would be to visit Iceland and stand astride the rift with one foot in America and one in Europe.Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 7
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
Ur-Lungal
Regarding the flood waters from the melting icefields, as floods they would broken out widely.
I think that one might look for their impact at the huge loam deposits in the rich "black earth" regions to the north of the Black Sea that made this a "bread basket" of Imperial Russia and Nineteenth Century Europe. The vast silt deposits might well have also done much to create the deltas in the Black Sea.
Perhaps the bread-basket nature of Silesia, which inspired Frederick the Great to invade and seize it was also part of that- so much of the Great German plain around Prussia being sand and pebbles.
At the far end of Asia there are the deep yellow loams of the Yellow River leading into the Yellow Sea.
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 8
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
As ever, the thesis 'geography is history' is impossible to refute!
It's what makes the Grande Anneles (sp?) school of history with its focus on 'la longue duree' (Sp? Sp??) so appealing to me.
Politics - let alone the banality of lobby politics - seem so instantly trivial in comparison.
I would love to see some programmes that looked at 'future history' of the coming century from a basis of the big, big 'longue duree' perspective (eg, impact of chronic overpopulation), and the big, big geopolitical perspective (eg future of Islam/China).Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 9
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
jenny
I think that the Nineteenth Century was a great age of "future history" with the increasing domination by the Germanic school of history as science, which was fought by the history as art school of British historians n.b. T.B. Macaulay and G.M.Trevelyan..
The trouble with that scientific approach is that it does seem to produce a natural tendency towards determinism,e,g,.geographical and racial. In place of artistry, craft and artisanship, that gives expression to the best of which human beings are capable, such future thinking tends to be based upon generic averages..
But as Roger Federer is reminding us at this very moment the highest human achievements do incorporate artistry, craftsmanship, artistry and masterpieces that exceed what people have a right to expect.
As I wrote at the end of a song "The stream of life" :-
"Like the salmon leaps the fall, we're swimmers all in the stream of life".
Any idiot species can "go with the flow". Successful ones learn the ability also to swim against the tide.
Such qualities have- I believe- been vital in human history past, present and future. And our daughter - who is a very successful Actuary and whose business therefore is to work as what Andrew Marr once called a "super-brain" , producing the best possible projections with the aid of mental capacity enhanced by computer technology- insists that she is not forecasting the Future.
I have argued in my latest "book" "History For Our Own Time" that the crucial thing for historians is that they should be able to reveal the history of the Present and not of the Past. In other words those dynamic elements in the Present that can be used to shape the kind of Future that might appear to be a "Promised Land". But only when the "life journey" seems not only theoretically possible but also worthwhile are people likely to maximise their efforts to realise it, individually and collectively.
Germanic determinism to some extent led naturally to the group and corporate approach of Nazism and Fascism, which expected the "people" to by-pass their humanity, intelligence and free-will in order to submit as pawns to a thinking of a small clique..
Dr Julian Huxley wrote pieces during the war arguing that Britain's democratic tradition should be able to harness the talents of all the people, in spite of the centralising and dominating tendencies of science at that time when scientists, and those literate in mathematics- the language of modern science, were hailed as the Prophets of the new Millennium.
We have a copy of a book called "The Way Ahead" produced a few years before the Millennium with contributions by about 50 people about what the Future had in store. Only about two of them were any kind of historian.
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 10
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
Cass - aren't the deep yellow soils you refer to loess rather than loams? (from dim memories of Geography lessons some 50 years ago plus) If so, they are wind blown rather than river deposited, surely?
Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 11
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
Cass,
you wrote:
"Germanic determinism to some extent led naturally to the group and corporate approach of Nazism and Fascism, which expected the "people" to by-pass their humanity, intelligence and free-will in order to submit as pawns to a thinking of a small clique.. "
Not so sure if "Germanic determinism" led to the group and corporate approach of Nazism and Fascism...
But yes you said cautious "to some extent"
About Italian Fascism seemingly the root to the later related "Fascisms"....
From the wikipedia link:
Doctrine of Italian Fascism: Gentile was intellectually influenced by Hegel, Plato, Benedette Croce and Giambattistata Vico. Is that Germanic determinism?
There seems to be a lot of Fascisms in the Europe of that time for instance the Hungarian and Rumanian Fascism, if I recall it well. Some in South America too. Were they all influenced by the Germanic determinism?
If I remember it well, there was even a Chinese kind of Fascist movement under Chiang Kai-Shek...I read about it in one of the 5 tomes of the Han Suyin biography that we both have read. One of her husbands was in the "Blue division?" some kind of Fascist organization? if I recal it well...you read recently the tomes again, you said. Do you remember the right context...?
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul.Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 12
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
Ur Lugal
Yes. I think that you are right. I stand corrected. Were not the almost troglodite dwellings of Mao Tse Tung's Communists at the end of the Long March dug into cliffs of the yellow loess? Easier for the wind to pile things up (like sand dunes) than water- in its liquid state, which is what we normally mean.
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 13
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
Addendum to previous message.
Cass,
looking to your answer to Urnungal I thought my preicous message was on teh wrong board. How we came from the Black Sea flooding to this...you are as bad as I always was about "meandering"...Urnungal (Gil) will endorse it...as he knows me already from the time of the "monsters"...
Kind regards and with esteem to both,
Paul.
PS. Already too late to start my replies in the "globalization "thread on the French forum...Looking in my Collins paperback English dictionary from 1990 to see if it was with a "z" or an "es" I saw that the word didn't exist yet in that time, at least in that dictionary...I guess in English English with a "z" and in American English with an "es"? As I saw from other examples....Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 14
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 25th June 2011
Paul
Perhaps I should point out that I was using the term "German determinism" in a general, cultural and not nationalistic sense.. applying to the period when German thought and innovation seemed to be progressing much faster than British and, as I have recently commented on the Singapore thread, the Japanese judged that Germany supplied the best model on which to remodel itself.
So it was not just Germans- or even especially Germans- who accepted Marx's historical analysis and his assertions about "the inevitability of history", most of which apparently he developed in the reading room of the British Museum.
I have previously quoted from a piece on "The Muse of History" written by G.M. Trevelyan c1913 who seems to have assumed that the domination of British thought by the Germanic Schoolover the previous 40 years was finally on the wane, perhaps because the Agadir Crisis brought the Great Powers to the brink of war, and away once more..
G.M.T. wrote that generations of British children and students had been drilled and driven in Germanic style as the Anglo-Saxon contagion ( as Matthew Arnold had called it) had emphasized that the English were a Germanic people with the same Teutonic virties as those within the German Empire.
The work of von Ranke- often regarded as the greatest historian of the Nineteenth Century- the closest to a Voltaire- had brought out the way that Teutonic and Roman virtues combined very successfully in many parts of the Ancient and Medieval World, and it was a Germanised Britain that grapsed late Nineteenth Century Imperialism and the idea of a new Pax Romanum based upon Britain's status as the number one world power- for the moment.
As for the widespread resort to aggressive state power to which you refer, given the dependence upon various state systems which is an enduring fact of global politics, the Age of Catastrophe (1914-1945) with the two periods of World War and the World Chaos in the global economy surely determined in the state of Western Culture the search for strong governments led by special heroic individuals or superman, that seemed to be easier for some cultures to find credible than others.
As you mention Han Suyin, this is the centenary year of the great Chinese Revolution it is appropriate to note that, with the collapse of the four-five thousand year old Empire, the reality that Han Suyin was born into was one of war lords and general internal collapse, creating a power vacuum in the former Chinese Empire very much like the power vacuum in the Balkans as the Turkish Empire retreated and went through a modernising revolution.
And Han Suyin, as you say did marry a right-wing Nationalist as a young woman. In her teens she had rushed back to China when the Japanese launched their full-scale attack, as she describes in her novel "The Road to Chunking". This was the action of a patriot, but in the politics of the day the patriot was often a nationalist rather than an internationalist dedicated to international Human Rights, Liberalism etc.
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 15
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Sunday, 26th June 2011
Regarding the reverse action of tidal waves, someone posted their local diary of the impact of the Japanese tsunami on their part of the coast of California, where considerable damage was done by the receding tidal surge that dragged boats out of their harbours and a couple of people, who had gone to spectate, drowned through being sucked out to sea.
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 16
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011
Well, I guess if you pour water in one direction it has to come from somewhere.
I always remember, in respect of the Boxing Day tsunami, how some holidaymakers in India were saved because a little English girl, seeing the sea being dramatically sucked out from the beach that morning, and remembered her geography lessons and warned her parents it meant a tidal wave was coming.....
And, goodness knows when I heard this, as a little girl myself I think (possibly in a geogrphay lesson!!!), of a Japanese story about a wise old man who lived on a clifftop and was very poor and very good and very holy, and from his vantage point on the cliff he saw the sea sucked right back out,. but the villagers in the bay didn't notice, so he set fire to his crops - they came running up the cliff to save him (because he was so good and so holy etc), and thereby saved their own lives. (Thinking about it, this might have been a good story for RE classes!).Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 17
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011
jenny
What amazed me about the Boxing Day tsunami was that the local people seemed to have forgotten those tsnunami realities that I am sure that one learned at school, reinforced by visiting beaches like Western-Super Mare (and much later in my case the North of Brittany) where you have to be very careful because the sea goes out so much at low tide and is capable of racing back in inexorably.
While no-one could possibly condone that Islamic preacher who labelled the tsunami a punishment from God for people who had been seduced by the "tourist dollar" into producing a "Club Mediterranean" coastal resort in Thailland, I do think that it did rather sum up the way that an escapist leisure culture can lead people to believe that the fundamentals of Life on Earth do not still apply.
One of my wife's lecturers at University in France was the brother of Nicholas Montsarrat- a bilingual family- famous for "The Cruel Sea". French overstatement. But the sea is always to be treated with circumspection and respect. Still we see incidents in which tourists/visitors enter lion enclosures to get a better picture etc. .. My Swiss brother-in-law gets very angry about people going up into mountains without proper preparation and equipment appropriate for summer or winter.
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 18
Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011
I completely agree - I'm from the West Country, and the beaches all have safe bathing areas marked by flags etc, yet folk still try and swim outside those areas (where the rip currents are!).
And every year there always seems to be some idiot who takes their car on to those sands near Weston super mare where it inevitably gets drowned in the fast racing tide.
Maybe one issue with the tourist areas abroad is that so many of the 'locals' aren't actually local at all - they come to the coast to make money out of the tourists, then disappear when the season is over. I know when we holidayed in Greece it was accepted that most of the 'native' restaurants and shops were actually run by non-islanders who arrived from the mainland, took money from the tourists, then deserted the islands in winter.
Wasn't there a tribe in Indonesia who 'felt' the earthquake, and who all trekked inland out of the reach of the tsunami, and none were killed?
What always struck me with horror about the Boxing Day tsunami was that the local earthquake officials wherever they were couldn't get through to the 'head office' for hours ....so WHY WHY WHY didn't they get in touch with Reuters, or the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ, etc? That would have speeded things up immediately, and maybe saved thousands upon thousands of lives.Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 19
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011
Jenny
There may well have been a case in Indonesia-
But I certainly saw a piece in which a film crew went with a helicopter (Indian I think?) to go to visit a small and "primitive" island in the Indian Ocean. The population was only in the hundreds, and it was thought that they might all be dead.
"Pense-tu!"
The locals came to greet them on the open stretch by the beach where they could land. Asked about the tsunami they said that their ancestors had always warned them about the sea. The land and sea will always struggle and when the land really expands at the expense of the sea, they expect the sea to strike back. So, as you say, they took the warning and went up onto the highest land that they had.
Of course re people without local knowledge there was the recent tragedy of the Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecombe Bay.
But the aquisition of "local" or any other kind of knowledge seems to be a low priority in these days when it seems more important to make money or have a "good time".
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 20
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011
The same is true of the "standing wave" phenomenon which often accompanies a tsunami. If the geography is right, it happens, and only real local knowledge or extremely complex calculations (involving the resonant time of enclosed waters etc) will predict them, yet if not considered, they can lead to flood defences being overtopped.
Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 21
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011
Sorry Cass,
forgot you yesterday evening, when I started my globalization message. And today a hectic day. Just been 68 and not yet having time to do what I like! to do. How can you be so proliferic and still be on ease? Of course my editing in English and in French, with a dictionary at hand, is perhaps a bit more difficult.
Thank you very much for the extended reply. In some way you have some points. And thanks also for the enlightenment about Han Suyin's third tome.
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul.Link to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
-
Message 22
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011
Paul
So you are my senior by one year..
As for my being prolific, various reasons and interpretations have been put forward over the years.. But I think that there can be no contesting the fact that I am an obsessive thinker, with a strong compulsion to express ideas -especially in words and music.
After my post about "Germanisation" I remembered that Eric Heller in his book on "German literature" had a section on Franz Kafka because apparently he wrote in German and was part of a German literary heritage.
In my student days all science undergraduates were expected to be able to read German, and research and papers written in German were automatically regarded as by definition accessible to all serious scientists. It is perhaps 20 years now since a research scientist that I met in France told me that now all scientists like himself have to know "American". How long will this be an Americanised world.
Regards
CassLink to this forum: Bosphorus sill - which way did the floodwaters go (if any!)?
About this Board
The History message boards are now closed. They remain visible as a matter of record but the opportunity to add new comments or open new threads is no longer available. Thank you all for your valued contributions over many years.
or Β to take part in a discussion.
The message board is currently closed for posting.
The message board is closed for posting.
This messageboard is .
Find out more about this board's
Search this Board
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iD
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ navigation
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ links
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Β© 2014 The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.