Miti di diluvio in Grecia e in Australia e la resilienza in azione

Abstract

There are drowning stories spread all over the world and they have always been regarded as fictional. Anyway, there are some local flood myths that actually may have been inspired by a precise geological event. Recent geoarchaeological and geological studies have demonstrated that in certain regions during the Holocene there was sea-level rise and flood myths show us that people were aware of environmental and landscape changes. This research proposes the analysis of drowning stories from Ancient Greece (the well-known Deucalion flood, and other flood stories geographically confined like the Dardanus and Cerambos ones) compared to ancient aboriginal stories of coastal drowning in Australia, in order to understand the capacities of resilience of coastal populations and the process that makes them keep the memory of hazardous events and to encode the information in stories that are part of the traditional heritage of oral-based societies.