Editing Deucalion (section)

== Interpretation ==

=== Mosaic accretions ===
The 19th-century classicist [[John Lemprière]], in ''[[Bibliotheca Classica]]'', argued that as the story had been re-told in later versions, it accumulated details from the stories of Noah: "Thus Apollodorus gives Deucalion a great chest as a means of safety; Plutarch speaks of the pigeons by which he sought to find out whether the waters had receded; and Lucian of the animals of every kind which he had taken with him. &c."<ref>[[John Lemprière|Lemprière]], ''[[Bibliotheca Classica]]'' p. 475</ref> However, the Epic of Gilgamesh contains each of the three elements identified by Lemprière: a means of safety (in the form of instructions to build a boat), sending forth birds to test whether the waters had receded, and stowing animals of every kind on the boat.  These facts were unknown to Lemprière because the Assyrian cuneiform tablets containing the Gilgamesh Epic were not discovered until the 1850s.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=George |first=Andrew R. |date=2008 |title=Shattered tablets and tangled threads: Editing Gilgamesh, then and now |url=http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/7497 |journal=Aramazd. Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies |volume=3 |page=11 |access-date=12 September 2018}}</ref> This was 20 years after Lemprière had published his "Bibliotheca Classica". The Gilgamesh epic is widely considered to be at least as old as Genesis, if not older.<ref name="George2003">{{Cite book |last=George |first=A. R. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=21xxZ_gUy_wC&pg=PA70 |title=The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts |date=2003 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-927841-1 |pages=70– |author-link=Andrew R. George |access-date=8 November 2012}}</ref><ref>Rendsburg, Gary. "The Biblical flood story in the light of the ''Gilgamesh'' flood account" in ''Gilgamesh and the world of Assyria'', eds Azize, J & Weeks, N. Peters, 2007, p. 117</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Wexler |first=Robert |title=Ancient Near Eastern Mythology |date=2001}}</ref>  Given the prevalence of religious syncretism in the ancient Greek world, these three elements may already have been known to some Greek-speaking peoples in popular oral variations of the flood myth, long before they were recorded in writing. The most immediate source of these three particular elements in the later Greek versions is unclear.

=== Dating by early scholars ===
For some time during the Middle Ages, many European Christian scholars continued to accept Greek mythical history at face value, thus asserting that Deucalion's flood was a regional flood, that occurred a few centuries later than the global one survived by Noah's family. On the basis of the archaeological ''[[stele]]'' known as the [[Parian Chronicle]], Deucalion's Flood was usually fixed as occurring some time around 1528 BC. Deucalion's flood may be dated in the [[Chronicon (Jerome)|chronology]] of Saint [[Jerome]] to {{circa}} 1460 BC. According to [[Augustine of Hippo]] (''[[City of God (book)|City of God]]'' XVIII,8,10,&11), Deucalion and his father Prometheus were contemporaries of Moses. According to [[Clement of Alexandria]] in his [[Stromata]], "in the time of [[Crotopus]] occurred the burning of [[Phaethon]], and the deluges of Deucalion."<ref name="Book1">[http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02101.htm The Stromateis (Book 1)], Chapter 21.</ref>