From the first recorded deluge to JG Ballard’s reimagining of London as a tropical lagoon … six books that explore the devastating impact of flooding The earliest recorded stories of floods appear in the literature of Mesopotamia – the flood-prone territory of modern-day Iraq that the Greeks called the “land between the rivers”. “Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood, / the mayfly floating on the water,” says one couplet in THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, which encapsulates the idea of flooding as seasonal and sustaining. Yet it is also profoundly destructive. In an early version of the poem, inundation brings death into the world. Before it, men could die “from acts of violence, from disease and otherwise at the will of the gods, but not naturally from old age”, writes Andrew George in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. “From the time of the Deluge onwards, death is to follow life as a matter of course.” The final version of _Gilgamesh_ contains all the ingredients of the Noah myth: the deluge sent by a vengeful god; the righteous man who rides out the rising waters in an ark; the birds sent to look for land. Floods and storms would be read as confirmation of divine ill will for thousands of years. Daniel Defoe said the hurricane that struck Britain on 26 November 1703 would have forced the most devout atheist “to doubt whether he was not in the Wrong”. His account of that night in THE STORM is remarkable for its eyewitness reports of the devastation. Continue reading...
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