Deucalion

Summary

Deucalion is the survivor of the flood in Greek myth, son of Prometheus; his wife Pyrrha is the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, the first woman the gods made. He reigned in Phthia in Thessaly. His fullest account is in the Library ascribed to Apollodorus, Ovid tells it at length in the first book of the Metamorphoses, and Pindar mentions him before both in the fifth century BCE.

Zeus wished to destroy the men of the Bronze Age, so Prometheus advised his son to build a chest. Deucalion built it, stored it with provisions and embarked with Pyrrha. Zeus poured heavy rain from the sky and flooded most of Greece; everyone perished except a few who fled to the high mountains nearby, and the mountains of Thessaly split apart. The chest floated nine days and nine nights until it reached Mount Parnassus; when the rain stopped Deucalion came out and sacrificed to Zeus, god of Escape. Zeus sent Hermes to let him choose whatever he wished, and he chose to have people. At Zeus's bidding he took up stones and threw them over his head: the stones Deucalion threw became men, and those Pyrrha threw became women. That is why people were called λαός, laos, in Greek, from λᾶας, laas, a stone. Pyrrha bore him Hellen, after whom the Greeks were named Hellenes, Amphictyon and Protogeneia.

Ovid tells it differently. After the water only one man and one woman were left: no man was better than he, and no woman more reverent towards the gods than she. When the water went down Deucalion saw the earth empty and silent and wept, telling Pyrrha he wished he knew his father's art and could make people again from clay. They went to the shrine of Themis by the river Cephisus, and she told them: leave the temple, veil your heads, loosen your robes, and throw behind you the bones of your great mother. Pyrrha refused to harm her mother's bones, until Deucalion understood that the mother was the earth and her bones were the stones. They threw the stones behind them, and the stones softened, grew and took human shape little by little, like a statue roughed out in marble; what was moist in them became flesh, and what was hard became bone. Ovid says: that is why we are a hardy race that endures toil.

The idea his story turns on is that people were made twice. Prometheus made them first from water and earth; when Zeus drowned them, his son made them a second time from stones, by the hand of a man and a woman, and without marriage, as Pindar says. The survivor here carries in the chest only himself, his wife and his provisions, and remakes the people afterwards from the earth itself. From his son Hellen all the Greeks took their name, so in this story the whole people are the survivor's descendants.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the two Greek essays tell the story without reading the name. Δευκαλίων, Deukalion, ends in -iōn, a Greek name suffix as in Κρονίων, which leaves Δευκαλ-, and we divide it in two. Δευ- is Δεύς, the Boeotian form of the name of Zeus, and the project reads Zeus as dhū, "possessor"; Arabic dh regularly becomes Greek d. And -καλ- is kalaʾa. Lane gives kalaʾahu Allāh, "God guarded him, kept him safely"; kallaʾa al-safīna, "he brought a ship near the bank and moored it"; kallaʾa, "he detained, confined" a person; and kallaʾa, "he came to a place and stopped there". Hebrew כָּלָא, kālāʾ, is "to shut up, restrain, withhold", and the verb occurs in Noah's flood itself: "and the rain from heaven was restrained". So Deucalion is dhū al-kilāʾa, "the one in safe keeping", whom Zeus kept in a closed chest and whose water-borne chest came to a stop on Parnassus when the rain was restrained; his first act was a sacrifice to Zeus, god of Escape.

Linguistic Root

Deucalion and dhū al-kilāʾa

Lane: kalaʾahu, he guarded him, kept him safely; idhhabū fī kilāʾat Allāh, "go in the safe keeping of God"; kallaʾa al-safīna, he brought a ship near the bank and moored it; kallāʾ and mukallaʾ, a station of ships, "so called because it keeps the vessels safe from the wind"; kallaʾa, he detained or confined a person, which Lane takes to come from the mooring of a ship; and kallaʾa, he came to a place and stopped there. Brown–Driver–Briggs sets beside Hebrew כָּלָא Aramaic כְּלָא, kəlāʾ, Akkadian kâlû, and Arabic in the Qur'anic "who guards you" (man yaklaʾukum). Keeping, holding back and mooring are at root one sense: something held so that it does not go.

The sounds: Arabic dh answers Greek δ, k is k, l is l, the glottal stop drops as guttural sounds drop in Greek, and -iōn is a suffix.

The limit of this reading is that the division Δευ- / -καλ- is ours, and no ancient witness gives it. The scholia to the Argonautica have δεῦκος as a word for γλεῦκος, sweet must, and this is the word modern writers cite for his name, dividing it Δευκ- and -αλ-. The other Deucalion, son of Minos king of Crete in the Iliad, whose story touches Theseus, shows that the name was an ordinary heroic name, borne by men other than the flood survivor.

Pyrrha and fawr

Greek Πύρρα, Pyrrha, comes from πυρρός, "flame-coloured, red", from πῦρ, fire. We read it on the method as Arabic fawr: Arabic f answers Greek π as it answers Hebrew p, the long u answers υ, r stays, the doubled r belongs to the Greek adjective, and the final a is the feminine ending. In Lane, fāra is said of water that boiled and of water that welled up from the ground, and fawr is intenseness of heat. The reading meets the Greek sense, fire and heat, and the story: Pyrrha is the daughter of Pandora, sent to mankind as the price of Prometheus's fire. In the Greek version Lucian heard in Syria the flood begins when "the earth discharged a vast volume of water", and in the Qur'anic account of Noah it begins when "the oven boiled over". The earlier reading, barr, the dry land the couple return to, is weaker in sound, since π regularly answers Arabic f while Arabic b answers β.

Key Mythic Narratives

A people of stone in Pindar

Pindar says that Pyrrha and Deucalion came down from Parnassus by Zeus's ordinance and made their first home in the city of Protogeneia, that is Opus in Locris, and that without the marriage-bed they founded a single people of stone offspring, and the people took their name from the stones. He says the strength of the waters covered the dark earth, and then Zeus by his skill drew off the flood all at once.

Deucalion at Athens

Pausanias says that within the precinct of Olympian Zeus at Athens the ground opens a cubit wide, that the people say the water of the flood in Deucalion's time ran off down it, and that every year they throw into it wheat meal mixed with honey; the opening is in the precinct of Olympian Gaia. The Athenians say Deucalion built the ancient sanctuary of Olympian Zeus, and show his grave near the present temple as proof that he lived at Athens.

Deucalion at Hierapolis

Lucian of Samosata says that the people of Hierapolis in northern Syria, a city Pliny calls by its Syrian name Mabog, claim that Deucalion founded their temple; in the text of Strong and Garstang, "Deukalion or Sisythus". He tells the story as he heard it from the Greeks: the first race of men was wicked, keeping neither oaths nor hospitality, so the earth discharged a vast volume of water, the rivers of heaven came down and the sea rose, and they perished; Deucalion alone was saved for his wisdom and piety. He put his children and wives into a great chest and went in himself, and wild boars, horses, lions, serpents and all the other beasts came to him in pairs; he received them all and they did him no harm. Then he gives the local story: a great chasm opened in their land and swallowed all the water, and Deucalion built altars and a temple to Hera above it. He says he saw the chasm beneath the temple, a small one, and that twice a year the priests, all Syria, the Arabs and many from beyond the Euphrates go down to the sea, carry up its water, pour it out in the temple, and it runs down into the chasm. Garstang notes that "Sisythus" is Xisuthros, the flood survivor of the Babylonian Berossus, and that the animals coming in pairs have their parallel in the Babylonian account.

Another Deucalion

In Crete there is another Deucalion, son of Minos and father of Idomeneus, leader of the Cretans at Troy. In one of Plutarch's versions he demanded that Athens hand over Daedalus, and Theseus killed him at the gate of the labyrinth; in the Epitome he gives his sister Phaedra to Theseus in marriage.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" reads Deucalion's flood as a real event, the same flood as that of Mesopotamia, around 2900 BCE, or the Black Sea flood around 5600 BCE, whose memory reached the Greeks through the Phoenicians and Anatolia; for the essay Deucalion is Noah, Utnapishtim and Ziusudra under different names. It reads the throwing of stones as rebuilding after the catastrophe: stones are the foundations of houses, and their becoming people is a society rebuilt from the start. It sees in "the bones of the mother" metaphorical thinking: the earth is a mother, the stones are her bones, and people are the earth's children.

In the texts themselves the flood is tied to places people knew: a cleft in the precinct of Zeus at Athens into which meal and honey are thrown every year, and a chasm beneath the temple at Hierapolis into which seawater is poured twice a year. The water that destroyed mankind is remembered in a rite that returns it to the ground that swallowed it.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Deucalion is one of the best-known witnesses to the flood. The survivors closest to him are the Sumerian Ziusudra and the Babylonian Utnapishtim: at Hierapolis his name became "Sisythus", Berossus's Xisuthros, and the animals came into his chest in pairs as they come into Utnapishtim's ship. He differs from both in that his chest carries only the couple, and people are remade afterwards from stones.

He resembles Manu in India in that the survivor is left alone and people return through an offering or a divine command: Manu pours butter and milk into the water and Iḍā comes out of it; Deucalion and Pyrrha throw stones and they become people. The Chinese essay sets his flood beside that of Yu the Great: Deucalion escapes in a ship, while Yu tames the water by cutting channels.

The making of people from stones after his father Prometheus made them from clay places him in the making of the first humans.