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Gareth E. Rees (Elliott and Thompson)

FOR many people, the most famous story of a great flood is that of Noah and his ark filled with animals, two by two. But it isn’t the only one. There are more than 2000 myths about flooding in cultures around the world, from tales about the lost city of Atlantis to the epic Mahabharata from India and the legend of the submerged kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod in west Wales.

“Floods linger deep in our cultural memory,” writes Gareth E. Rees in his book Sunken Lands: A journey through flooded kingdoms and lost worlds. “They ripple through songs, prayers and stories about a time of great disaster.” This time, he says, could be as far back as the end of the last glacial period around 10,000 years ago, when the huge rivers of ice that covered large swathes of the northern hemisphere melted, flooding low-lying land, forests and Stone Age settlements.

In this meditation on sinking land and rising seas, Rees relates these myths and the events that may have inspired them to our current climate crisis. Watching news reports of catastrophic flooding and hurricanes, he writes that “it was suddenly easy to see how the experience of similar climate disasters in prehistory might give birth to epic myths and legends”. With each discussion of the past, he sees similarities with today: the formation of the Isles of Scilly in the UK and rising sea levels around Fiji and Tuvalu, the end of the last glacial maximum and the first climate refugees in the US evacuating from Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, the flooding of ancient Rome and the continued building of housing on floodplains in the UK.

Rees is at his best when linking myths with the archaeological record, using these to bring to life the people who lived through the changes and the environments they inhabited. Often uncovered during storms or via fishing nets, the underwater remains of Stone Age settlements have changed our understanding of the people who lived then, showing more sophistication than we assumed. Just off the Isle of Wight, UK, for example, divers found the world’s oldest boat-building site, “indicating the use of crafting technologies far beyond the capabilities expected of that time”.

Rees also examines the folly of our exploitation of nature. He wanders the Fens in eastern England, a marshy region drained in earnest in the 17th century to make space for agriculture, which has caused the peat to dry out and the land to sink by 4 metres. He also visits Louisiana to see the effects of the oil industry on this sinking landscape. As he writes: “Our incessant drive to control the natural world… had created an ecological disaster and placed millions of people at risk of suffering terrible floods.”

Part travelogue, part history, part science, Sunken Lands is hard to define. Each chapter opens with a short story, often a retelling of a myth or folk tale, setting the scene for what is to come. Rees is a magpie, hopping between things he finds interesting: the occult, epigenetics and David Bowie all make an appearance. While these diversions can be fun, I would have liked to read in depth about the stories and archaeology beyond Europe and the US. For example, the flooding of northern Australia after the last glacial period that Aboriginal peoples incorporated into their oral lore, called the Dreaming, was disappointingly only brought up in passing.

The collected flood stories serve as a warning. They don’t tell us how to stop climate change, says Rees, but they do warn against over-reliance on technological fixes: “In these tales, arrogant cultures dismiss warnings that they must mend their decadent ways and live harmoniously with the natural world, only for their walls to collapse and the seas to roll in.” Quite. We have forgotten we are part of nature, he argues, and only once we rethink our place in the world will we be at peace in it.