Eyes wide Open
Love and peace is the ONLY foundation-to build....
It wouldnt be hard for someone to built a large boat and have animals on it for food after flood waters subsided, due to all the crops and the landscape being destroyed for many, many miles, and with little effective storage or warehousing of grain and cereals to take on board, animals would have been the only food source to live off. Humans could have easily have lived elsewhere but in smaller tribal communities where the risks of the below understandings happening would have been non existent.
The following is a snippet from Ronald Wrights book, A Short History Of Progress.
The Chiefs of Hawaii were warned by their elders against hording food or goods: The hands of Arii must always be open; on (this) rests your prestige. And it was said of the Chinese emperors that their first duty was to feed their people. The truth that china, like most Agrarian societies, lurched from famine to famine well into modern times. Effective food security was as rare in the past as it is today in the Third World. Most ancient states did not have the storage capacity or transport to deal with anything worse than a minor crisis. The Incas and Romans were probably the best at famine relief, and its no coincidence that both were very large empires spread over several climatic zones, with good warehousing, roads and sea lanes.
A small civilization such as Sumer, dependant on a single ecosystem and without high ground, was especially vulnerable to flood and drought. Such disasters were viewed, then as now, as acts of God (or gods). Like us, the Sumerians were only dimly aware that human activity was also to blame. Floodplains will always flood, sooner or later, but deforestation of the great watersheds upstream made inundations much fiercer and more deadly than they would otherwise have been. Woodlands, with their carpet of undergrowth, mosses, and loam, work like great sponges, soaking up rainfall and allowing it to filter slowly into the earth below; trees drink up water and breath it into the air. But whatever primeval woods and their soils have been destroyed by cutting, burning, overgrazing, or ploughing, the bare subsoil bakes hard in dry weather and acts like a roof in the wet. The result is flash floods, sometimes carrying such heavy loads of silt and gravel that they rush from steep ravines like liquid concrete. Once the waters reach a floodplain, they slow down, dump their gravel, and spread out in a brown tide that oozes its way to the sea.
Staggering alluvial forces are at work in Mesopotamia. In the 5000 years since Sumerian records began, the twin rivers have filled in eighty miles of the Persian Gulf. Iraqs second city of Basra was open sea in ancient times. The plains of Sumer are more then two hundred miles wide. In times of unusually great flood, the kind that might happen once a century or so, a king standing in the rain on a temple softening under his feet would see nothing but water between him and the rim of the sky.
Not only did Adam and Eve drive themselves from Eden, but the eroded landscape they left behind set the stage for Noahs flood. In the early days, when the city mounds were low and easily swamped, the only refuge would have been by boat. The Sumerian version of the legend, told in the first person by a man names Utnapishtim, has the ring of real events, with vivid detail on freak weather and broken dams. In it we may not only see the forerunner of the biblical story but the first eyewitness account of a man made environmental catastrophe.
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