India

Mohenjo-daro’, he noted, meant ‘the Mound of the Dead Men

Other historians, while conceding the importance of 3102 BC, have declared it to be not the date of the Flood but of the great Bharata war. A Trojan-style conflict fought in the vicinity of Delhi, the war involved both gods and men and was immortalised in the Sanskrit verse epic known as the Mahabharata, the composition of whose roughly 100,000 stanzas constituted something of an epic in itself. This war, not the flood, was the event that marked the beginning of our present era and must, it is argued, therefore belong to the year 3102 BC

Corroboration of the idea that it may, after all, apply to a Flood has since come from the excavations in distant Iraq of one of Mesopotamia’s ancient civilisations. There too archaeologists have found evidence of an appalling inundation. It submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak, and has been dated with some confidence to the late fourth millennium BC. In fact, 3102 BC would suit it very well.

This Sumerian inundation, and the local Genesis story in the Epic of Gilgamesh which probably derived from it, is taken to be the origin of the legend of the Flood which eventually found its way into Jewish and Christian tradition

Some historians have dated the Flood very precisely to 3102 BC, this being the year when, by elaborate computation, they conclude that our current era, the Kali Yug in Indian cosmology, began and when Manu became the progenitor of a new people as well as their first great king and law-giver. It is also the first credible date in India’s history and, being one of such improbable exactitude, it deserves respect.

Thus, in due course, the Flood became a symbol of order-out-of-chaos through divine intervention, and the fish (matsya) came to be recognised as the first of the nine incarnations (avatara) of Lord Vishnu