Hi Hermione,
There are of course flood myths from all over the world - hardly surprising as we emerged from the most recent glacial cycle. Stephen Oppenheimer put forward the astonishing argument that 'Sundaland'in southeast Asia, rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed, was the lost civilisation that fertilised the great cultures of the Middle East 6 thousand years ago. His book (Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998) contains a good account of such myths.

It seems that the Hebrews picked up the bones of their version of the flood myth during their captivity in Babylon and developed it to become a sort of 'moral lesson'. Mesopotamian and Hebrew descriptions of 'arks' clearly bear no relation to actual boats; and their proportions and features, if in any way way meaningful, would relate to prevailing mythologies.

You state that -"there is no known Egyptian Deluge tradition absolutely parallel with the Near Eastern Deluge tradition and its Ark. The closest I've found is described in "The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple," E. A. E. Reymond". This sounds interesting but it seems a formidable work at 355 pages. I have read some new age material on the Edfu texts but was not impressed. All we are left with is Plato's claims about Atlantis supposedly coming from priests in Egypt but this lacks the essential 'saviour of humanity' aspect of the Noah myth.

One wonders how much Egyptians of Origen's generation knew or cared about pyramid geometry - there is no evidence one way or the other. Origen was an educated man and travelled a lot but was perhaps so obsessed with his theological work that he probably didn't give native (pagan) ideas much thought. He came up with a pyramid shape for his ark by battening together statements in the Old Testament in a rather awkward way.

15th.C artists used Origen's account to portray the ark. Ghiberti came up with a version that surprisingly corresponds to reality and my original question asked how he might have arrived at this - did he have a lost source or, as I concede, is it more likely that the resulting shape was the result of his own geometrical exercises? Incidentally, one of Ucello's portrayals contains the same elements found in Ghiberti, but his pyramid seems to be contained within a vesica? I could only find a low contrast print -



Meanwhile, returning to real Egyptology, has anyone come across any information that would help to resolve the Petrie/Gantenbribrink controversy?