Persian Gulf, The *

The Persian Gulf is just one of a variety of areas identified as having been mainly exposed land prior to the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age^(a).  Archaeologist Dr Jeffery Rose^(b) recounts how this land which contained a large oasis used by humans from at least 74,000 years ago was finally inundated by the Indian Ocean around 6000 BC^(c)(j) Rose believes that “there is compelling evidence to suggest that both the Flood and Eden myths may be rooted in these events around the Gulf basin.” His views are more fully outlined in the December 2010 issue of the distinguished journal Current Anthropology^(d) and can now be accessed on the Academia.edu website^(g). He also suggests that the flooding of the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf took place at the same time.

Kurt Lambeck has also studied the Persian Gulf and concluded that it had been a fertile valley that was slowly inundated as the last Ice Age was ending, forcing the inhabitants to move inland and leading to the establishment of intriguing Mesopotamian civilisations such as the Sumerians. This flooding of the Persian Gulf(b) may have inspired the Epic of Gilgamesh which contains a Deluge story accepted by many to be an earlier version of the Biblical flood of Noah.

In 2004, Jim Teller a geologist at the University of Manitoba and his team offered evidence for the inundation of the Persian Gulf at the end of the last Ice Age. Teller suggested that the devastation caused to the communities could have inspired the flood stories found in early historical documents^(h).

Trevor Palmer offers further evidence to support the association of the Persian Gulf inundation with the Uta-Napishtim/Noah Flood story(i).

It has also been speculated that the Gulf may have been home to Plato’s Atlantis^(e). This theory would place the Pillars of Heracles at the Strait of Hormuz.

A recent article^(f) by Marilyn Luongo placing Atlantis in Mesopotamia, also identifies Hormuz as the location of the ‘Pillars’.

However, the Gulf is just one of a number of sites such as Doggerland in the North Sea and Sundaland in the South China Sea that have been proposed as the location of submerged Atlantis. At this point we are only dealing with speculation as no coherent argument has been adduced to identify any of those locations with the possible exception of Sundaland, where at least a credible case has been put forward by researchers such as dos Santos and Lauritzen, but not without weaknesses in their contention.

^(a) https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-beneath-persian-gulf.html

^(b) https://bham.academia.edu/JeffreyRose

^(c) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208151609.htm

^(d) Ancient Desert Oasis Echoes Eden – Seeker 

^(e) https://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/The_Rise_of_Civilization_-_15,000_BC

^(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20200220020342/http://www.middle-east.mavericsa.co.za/history.html

^(g) https://www.academia.edu/386944/New_Light_on_Human_Prehistory_in_the_Arabo-Persian_Gulf_Oasis

^(h) NOAH’S FLOOD WAS IN ARABIAN DESERT: STUDY (nypost.com)  *

⁽ⁱ⁾ https://www.academia.edu/22814109/Catastrophic_Black_Sea_Floods_and_the_Story_of_Noah_Chronology_and_Catastrophism_Review_2009_pp_45_54

^(j) https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-beneath-persian-gulf.html