Flood lament from 1784

The winter of 1783/1784 was extremely cold in central Europe. When the unusually large amount of snow and ice melted in the spring, many German cities witnessed severe floods. These flood events are now considered one of the most severe natural disasters in continental Europe in the early modern period.

The scribe of the Jewish community of the city Bonn, a man named Simon of Copenhagen, wrote an extensive and lively report titled “Flood Lament” (Sipur Bechi Neharot). The text was printed in original Hebrew in Amsterdam the same year, 1784. It starts with the following exclamation:

“Hear me brothers and my people. Open your ears and listen to my words. These were days when my hair turned white and I was made better.”

Unfortunately I could only find an excerpt of a German translation of the text. I translated it roughly into English, using DeepL.

“It was January 25, 1784, and there was a heavy frost. People began to cross the Rhine on foot and with carts. You could walk across the river to our cemetery and bury the dead. That was a great miracle. God was merciful, he let the people cross and the water didn’t hit the people, he didn’t want to wipe them out. It stayed that way until well into February.

Then the feast of Purim approached, and suddenly a month of joy turned into a month of mourning. The Souls of the people were broken and their hearts melted. Everything became rigid.

After 31 days of heavy frost, the ice suddenly split and swallowed everything on it. God’s will was difficult to understand. Many did not come back and the water threatened to kill us all. At first the water stood in our alley up to our ankles, then up to our knees, then up to our hips. People could no longer get out of the houses, it was a curse.

The water was endless, wave followed wave. It became the sea and rushed like the sea. Nobody could leave the house. In the morning, the water rose even higher and people had to retreat to the upper floor of the house or the roof. Not a soul had any peace. Many brothers rescued small children. People jumped from roof to roof to save themselves. They tried to reach the other side of the street. You could no longer put your feet on the ground because you could no longer see it.

Everyone screamed for help. Our community pleaded with the Court to send barges to take the inhabitants to dry places. God heard them cry out and sent help.”

I found the German text on the extensive website of the Brückenhofmuseum in Königswinter (North-Rine Westpahlia).

Venexia

Eventually I will have to stop collecting comics about Venice – there are simply too many. It’s no wonder comic artists are attracted to Venice. As Kia Vahland has recently written in a German newspaper article: “The principle of resilience through beauty has a long history in Venice, which is the only reason why it still works so amazingly today.”

Here is a recent example from the legendary Asterix series. “Astérix et la Transitalique” is a comic issued in 2017 and it features only a very short sequence about Venice. This snippet is from my German edition:

The captions read: “We are building our city Venexia. The area is a bit swampy, but the view is belissima! And so peaceful!” “But your city is sinking!” “It’s only the water of the lagoon rising! The climate is not what it used to be!”

It would be worthwhile to investigate how the topic of flooding gained prominence in depictions of Venice in comics over the last 100 years and when flooding started replacing the other iconic features of La Serenissima. (I am sure Venice popped up in the Asterix series before, but I did not check.)

The Melt Down (1977)

The Man from Atlantis was a TV series that cashed in on the popularity of underwater films in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though the series didn’t run for long, it was impressive enough to birth multiple adaptations as comic books and novels. From today’s perspective the whole project seems a bit silly with questionable character drawing and superficial visual attractions. I was however impressed by the great emphasis on scientific details in the story lines. The episodes are also a bit like disguised lessons in popular ocean science.

The episode “Melt Down” written by Tom Greene deals with a sudden global sea level rise caused by melting of the polar ice, intentionally induced by the series’ super-villain Mister Schubert. You could call it prophetic, but then of course, the reason for the meltdown here is not collective political failure but individual roguery. The depiction of the effects of sea level rise are spooky nevertheless. Looking at it today, 50 years later, this little dialog seems to recapitulate perfectly the absurdity of the current situation along the coasts of the USA. “Hey, aren’t you from that Ocean Institute? You know what’s causing all of this?”

It’s quite funny – if only it wasn’t quite as sad…

Thanks to my comic dealer at the fantastic Fantastic Store for the lead!

The Last Wave (1977)

This is a 1977 Australian movie about a series of freak storms in Sidney. It was Peter Weir’s second major film after the success of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” two years earlier. Both films depict the arrival of supernatural or unexplainable occurrences in otherwise totally orderly lives. In “The Last Wave” the plot picks up Aboriginal nature philosophy, according to which time moves in cycles with some kind of extreme natural event to usher in the end of each cycle. The protagonist, who is not an aboriginal but a white Australian, has foreboding dreams of a major flood.

The movie leaves it open whether such a flood is really taking place eventually. But in this sequence the protagonist has a vision of a totally submerged Sidney while sitting in his car.

What else I found noteworthy is that the movie depicts the metropolis Sidney as a site of ancient Aboriginal rituals and forces despite its appearance as a “white” and “modern” city. This other cultural and spiritual layer in the foundation of colonial cities like Sidney or New York is a topic that is also picked up in other movies of that era like the horror movie Wolfen from 1981.

Colonial and native Tall Tales

Extraordinary natural occurrences and appearances were traditionally explained in myths, legends or so called Tall Tales. They fall in the larger genre of folklore and different from myths or legends they are relatively young or have known or contemporary authorship. An example from European Antiquity would be the “Alexander Romances“, fictitious accounts of the life of Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BCE) that exist in over 100 known versions and several languages. In the USA a popular figure of Tall Tales is the giant Paul Bunyan. Tales about Paul Bunyan first appeared in the mid 19. Century and include among others explanations for the existence of the Grand Canyon and Minnesota’s Thousand Lakes.

In a facebook post I recently came across this humorous first nation version of a Paul Bunyan tales. It’s a great example how natural science, political satire and ancient mythology intersect. And it also shows how closely connected and intertwined the folklore of US-American white settlers and the folklore of first nations in the Americas is.

Believe it or not, us Ojibwe also have a story about Paul Bunyan. He came to the area known as Red Lake and tried his de-forestation BS, but Nanaboozhoo – The Greatest Ojibwe who ever lived – obviously wasn’t having none of that. They got into a fight that lasted 3 days, and finally our hero picked up a giant walleye and slapped the outlander silly with it. Paul got knocked on his ass in a mud puddle, so hard it left an imprint of his buttcheeks there in the wet ground…that’s why the lake is shaped the way it is and why we were able to keep our forest.
You’ll never hear this story in a book, but that’s basically how I heard it from my father when I was young – after coming home from kindergarten in Bemidj (Paul’s favorite town, mwahaha!) and talking about him.
That’s the story behind the Paul/Babe & Nanaboozhoo statues in that town. This used to be a sign at the rez line, I remember the chimooks didn’t like it and kept cutting it down. But the story lives on, and now you know.

Material and spiritual barriers

Sculpture of fish god from Lepenski Vir, likely to have been part of the people’s spiritual responses to flooding. Credit: Mickey Mystique/Wikimedia Commons

In a beautiful article from 2019, Patrick Nunn gives a couple of examples for protection architecture that serve both material and spiritual purposes. I would argue, that this is the case for any protection structure also today, at least if it is visible. The interesting question here is not, whether a spiritual barrier was or is working today, but rather what functions it fulfills for the well being of the community and thus its protection in a broader sense.

Here are some excerpts with examples from Brittany (France), Serbia and the UK:

“Take the stone lines at Carnac, in Brittany, some of which extend for kilometres and involve thousands ofmenhirs, once regarded as boundary markers or memorials to fallen warriors. The idea of Serge Cassen that these stone lines represent “a cognitive barrier” between the physical and metaphysical worlds intended to halt the disastrous impacts of rising sea level in the Gulf of Morbihan more than 6.000 years ago is in keeping with what we are learning elsewhere.

“Neatly arranged deposits of once-valuable objects such as stone tools, even human remains, may have been intentionally created as votive offerings to divinities to stop the ocean’s rise. Cemeteries may have been intentionally situated on coasts, symbolically stabilising them in the minds of local peoples. Sandstone sculptures of fish gods from Lepenski Vir inSerbia may have been totems intended to prevent inundation.”

“Even physical barriers, long recognised as useless against the encroaching ocean, may have become symbolic; an example of wooden structures from Flag Fen near Peterborough in the UK was interpreted in this way by Francis Pryor.”

Qingyuan flooded, April 2024

These images are from news reports from the metropolis in the Guangdong province, Southern China. The region experienced massive floodings in April 2024 once more due to intense rain. It’s not a coastal city, instead Qingyuan has been repeatedly flooded by water from the Bei Jiang river.

Power and disaster

In Greek and Roman Antiquity extreme weather events and natural disasters like droughts, earthquakes and floods were a frequent occurrence. They also offered important stages for the display of political power. Political leaders would rush to the occasion to help the population out of their hardship and make sure that other powers and posterity notice. In fact, according to historian Holger Sonnabend, political power was recognized mainly by the ability to help and rebuild. This was even sometimes used by suffering cities to get as much support as possible from rivaling politicians.

Accompanying the imperative of help was the public display of grieve. Compassion was expected of those in power and it was common for leaders to require historians to write up their grieve in dramatic ways. Here is an example from the 7. Century CE by Georgios Kedrenos, who describes in retrospect the expression of grieve of emperor Justinian upon the earth quake in Antiochia in May 526.

“He threw aside his crown and his imperial clothes, and, dressed in dirty rags, wept for several days, and even on feast days he entered the church in pitiful robes because he could not bear to put on any signs of his power.”

The educator and historian Libanius (314 – 392 CE) on the other hand wrote in an eulogy on emperor Julian that the earth itself mourned with an earth quake and several tsunamis in the Mediterranean in 365 CE the loss of this great emperor the year before.

“Earth truly has been fully sensible of her loss, and has honoured the hero by an appropriate shearing off of her tresses, shaking off, as a horse doth his rider, so many and such great cities. In Palestine several; of the Libyans all and every one. Prostrate lie the largest towns of Sicily, prostrate all of Greece save one; the fair Nicaea lies in ruins; the city, pre-eminent in beauty, totters to her fall, and has no confidence for the time to come! These are the honours paid to him by Earth, or if you choose, by Neptune himself; but on the part of the Seasons, famines and pestilences, destroying alike man and beast, just as though it were not lawful for creatures upon earth to enjoy health now that he has departed! What wonder then is it, if such being the state of things, many a one, like myself, deems it a loss not to have died before!”

(full text in english)

For the disaster of 365 in the Mediterranean see also this post.

Noah’s Ark on a silver coin


This silver coin was printed in 1737 to celebrate the end of the flood and famine in Silesia in 1736/1737. The front shows the biblical scene of the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with a German text from Psalm 37, which translates as “Put your life in the hands of the Lord; have faith in him and he will do it.” The back side depicts a sacrifice and the Ark on Mt. Ararat in the back.

Ammianus Marcellinus on the tsunami of 365 CE

This is the famous section from the 28. book of the “Res Gestae”, the history written by Roman historian Ammianus who lived from around 330 – 400 CE. It describes the earthquake and tsunami of July 21. 365 CE which shook the whole Mediterranean. The scene described by Ammianus is most likely set at the coast of Sicily. As the author mentions, areas as far as the Egyptian shore were affected by tsunamis resulting from the earthquake which had its epicenter near Crete. The city of Alexandria was heavily destroyed and the event was publicly remembered in the city for at least a hundred years as the “Day of Fear”. As Egyptian researcher Yasmine Hussein explained to me, it takes less than 40 minutes for a tsunami from Crete to arrive in Alexandria.

“For a little after daybreak, preceded by heavy and repeated thunder and lightning, the whole of the firm and solid earth was shaken and trembled, the sea with its rolling waves was driven back and withdrew from the land, so that in the abyss of the deep thus revealed men saw many kinds of sea-creatures stuck fast in the slime; and vast mountains and deep valleys, which Nature, the creator, had hidden in the unplumbed depths, then, as one might well believe, first saw the beams of the sun.

Hence, many ships were stranded as if on dry land, and since many men roamed about without fear in the little that remained of the waters, to gather fish and similar things, with their hands, the roaring sea, resenting, as it were, this forced retreat, rose in its turn; and over the boiling shoals it dashed mightily upon islands and broad stretches of the mainland, and levelled innumerable buildings in the cities and where else they were found; so that amid the mad discord of the elements the altered face of the earth revealed marvellous sights.

For the great mass of waters, returning when it was least expected, killed many thousands of men by drowning; and by the swift recoil of the eddying tides a number of ships, after the swelling of the wet element subsided, were seen to have foundered, and lifeless bodies of shipwrecked persons lay floating on their backs or on their faces. Other great ships, driven by the mad blasts, landed on the tops of buildings (as happened at Alexandria), and some were driven almost two miles inland, like a Laconian ship which I myself in passing that way saw near the town of Mothone, yawning, apart through long decay.”

Original online source.

Thanks to Holger Sonnabend for the lead!