If we are to look into
the myths of catastrophism throughout the world, the story is often
strangely similar. Of all the keepers of ancient knowledge Egypt and
Greece are the best known. In Plato's two last books,
Critias and Timaeus,Plato records the
story heard by Solon, the great Athenian law-giver. On his
visit to Egypt, Solon questioned the priests on early history. He
told them what his people knew about
the Flood
(Video in Real One Player).
One of them, an elderly priest known as Sonchis of Sais spoke
up and mocked Solon and his city-state's ignorance of the
ancient past. Sonchis explained the following:
"There have been and
there will be many and divers destructions of mankind, of which
the greatest are fire and water, and lesser ones by countless
other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country
as well as ours, how once upon a time Phaethon,
son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and,
because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his
father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself
perished by a thunderbolt - that story, as it is told, has a
fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence
of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the
earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce
fire, which recurs at long intervals."
"You remember
only one deluge, though there have been many... You and your
fellow citizens are descended from the few survivors that
remained, but you know nothing about it because so many
succeeding generations left no record in writing .The change in
the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies,
how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they
now rise, and used to rise where they now set... Of all the
changes which take place in the heavens this reversal is the
greatest and most complete ..There is at that time great
destruction of animals in general, and only a small part of the
human race survives."