Over the millennia, the legend of a great deluge has endured in the biblical story of Noah and in such Middle Eastern myths as the epic of Gilgamesh. Now two distinguished geophysicists have discovered a catastrophic event that changed history, a gigantic flood 7,600 years ago in what is today the Black Sea.

ContentsList of MapsNote to the ReaderPrologue: WitnessesONE: THE DISCOVERY OF THE FLOOD STORY1 Deciphering the Legend2 Conversions3 Visions of Palaces4 The Face of the Deep5 Ur of the ChaldeesTWO: THE DISCOVERY OF A REAL FLOOD6 Hidden River7 Gibraltar's Waterfall8 Vanished Deserts9 Pontus Axenus10 Red Hill11 Aquanauts12 Immigrants13 Close Encounter14 Beachcombers15 Back of the EnvelopeTHREE: WHO WAS THERE, AND WHERE DID THEY GO?16 Anybody There?17 The Diaspora18 Family Trees19 The Guslar's SongFOUR: THE FLOOD STORIES TOLD20 On a Golden Pond21 Other MythsEpilogue: A Telling of AtrahasisAcknowledgmentsNotesIndexList of MapsMesopotamia and the LevantThe voyage of the Chain up the Bosporus in 1961The Glomar Challenger drilling the floor of the Mediterranean Sea in 1970The Atlantis II mapping and sampling the seabed of the Black Sea in 1969The Kerch Strait and the path of the ancient Don RiverThe path of meltwater delivered from the Eurasian ice sheet, beginning around 12,500 B.C.The historical connection of the Black Sea to the MediterraneanAnatolia at the time farming began to spreadInferred human migrations west and northwest into Europe in the wake of the Black Sea floodInferred human migrations northeast into Asia and southeast into the Levant, Egypt, and MesopotamiaThe Takla Makan desert of western China with the shoreline of the giant lake that formerly filled the Tarim BasinA Sumerian map of their world