Deucalion
In Greek mythology, Deucalion (; ) was the son of Prometheus; ancient sources name his mother as Clymene, Hesione, or Pronoia. He is closely connected with the flood myth in Greek mythology. Etymology. According to folk etymology, Deucalion's name comes from , "deukos", a variant of , "gleucos", i.e. "sweet new wine, must, sweetness" and from , "haliéus", i.e. "sailor, seaman, fisher". His wife Pyrrha's name derives from the adjective , -ά, -όν, "pyrrhós, -á, -ón", i.e. "flame-colored, orange". Family. Of Deucalion's birth, the "Argonautica" (from the 3rd century BC) states: Deucalion and Pyrrha had at least two children, Hellen and  Protogenea, and possibly a third, Amphictyon (who is autochthonous in other traditions). Their children as apparently named in one of the oldest texts, "Catalogue of Women", include daughters Pandora and Thyia, and at least one son, Hellen. Their descendants were said to have dwelt in Thessaly. One source mentioned three sons of Deucalion and his wife: Orestheus, Marathonios and Pronous (father of Hellen). In some accounts, Deucalion's other children were Melantho, mother of Delphus by Poseidon and Candybus who gave his name to the town of Candyba in Lycia. Mythology. Deluge accounts. The flood in the time of Deucalion  was caused by the anger of Zeus, ignited by the hubris of Lycaon and his sons, descendants of Pelasgus. According to this story, Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, had sacrificed a boy to Zeus, who, appalled by this offering, decided to put an end to the Bronze Age by unleashing a deluge. During this deluge, the rivers ran in torrents and the sea flooded the coastal plain, engulfing the foothills with spray, and washing everything clean. Deucalion, with the aid of his father Prometheus, was saved from this deluge by building a chest. Like the biblical Noah and the Mesopotamian  counterpart Utnapishtim, he uses this device to survive the deluge with his wife, Pyrrha. The fullest accounts are provided in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (late 1 BCE to early 1 CE) and in the "Library" of Pseudo-Apollodorus. Deucalion, who reigned over the region of Phthia, had been forewarned of the flood by his father, Prometheus. Deucalion was to build a chest and provision it carefully (no animals are rescued in this version of the flood myth), so that when the waters receded after nine days, he and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus, were the one surviving pair of humans . Their chest touched solid ground on Mount Parnassus, or Mount Etna in Sicily, or Mount Athos in Chalkidiki, or Mount Othrys in Thessaly. Hyginus mentions the opinion of a Hegesianax that Deucalion is to be identified with Aquarius, "because during his reign such quantities of water poured from the sky that the great Flood resulted." Once the deluge was over and the couple had given thanks to Zeus, Deucalion (said in several of the sources to have been aged 82 at the time) consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth. He was told to "cover your  head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder". Deucalion and Pyrrha understood that "mother" is Gaia, the mother of all living things, and the "bones" to be rocks. They threw the rocks behind their shoulders and the stones formed people. Pyrrha's became women; Deucalion's became men. The 2nd-century AD writer Lucian gave an account of the Greek Deucalion in "De Dea Syria" that seems to refer more to the Near Eastern flood legends: in his version, Deucalion (whom he also calls "Sisythus") took his children, their wives, and pairs of animals with him on  the ark, and later built a great temple in Manbij (northern Syria), on the site of the chasm that received all the waters; he further describes how pilgrims brought vessels of sea water to this place twice a year, from as far as Arabia and Mesopotamia, to commemorate this event. Variant stories. On the other hand, Dionysius of Halicarnassus stated his parents to be Prometheus and Clymene, daughter of Oceanus and mentions nothing about a flood, but instead names him as commander of those from Parnassus who drove the "sixth generation" of Pelasgians from Thessaly. One of the earliest Greek  historians, Hecataeus of Miletus, was said to have written a book about Deucalion, but it no longer survives. The only extant fragment of his to mention Deucalion does not mention the flood either, but names him as the father of Orestheus, king of Aetolia. The much later geographer Pausanias, following on this tradition, names Deucalion as a king of Ozolian Locris and father of Orestheus. Plutarch mentions a legend that Deucalion and Pyrrha had settled in Dodona, Epirus; while Strabo asserts that they lived at Cynus, and that her grave is still to be found there, while his may be  seen at Athens; he also mentions a pair of Aegean islands named after the couple. Interpretation. Mosaic accretions. The 19th-century classicist John Lemprière, in "Bibliotheca Classica", argued that as the story had been re-told in later versions, it accumulated details from the stories of Noah: "Thus Apollodorus gives Deucalion a great chest as a means of safety; Plutarch speaks of the pigeons by which he sought to find out whether the waters had retired; and Lucian of the animals of every kind which he had taken with him. &c." However, the Epic of Gilgamesh contains each of the  three elements identified by Lemprière: a means of safety (in the form of instructions to build a boat), sending forth birds to test whether the waters had receded, and stowing animals of every kind on the boat. These facts were unknown to Lemprière because the Assyrian cuneiform tablets containing the Gilgamesh Epic were only discovered in the 1850s. This was 20 years after Lemprière had published his "Bibliotheca Classica." The Gilgamesh epic is widely considered to be at least as old as Genesis, if not older. Given the prevalence of religious syncretism in the ancient Greek world, these three elements  may already have been known to some Greek-speaking peoples in popular oral variations of the flood myth, long before they were recorded in writing. The most immediate source of these three particular elements in the later Greek versions is unclear. Dating by early scholars. For some time during the Middle Ages, many European Christian scholars continued to accept Greek mythical history at face value, thus asserting that Deucalion's flood was a regional flood, that occurred a few centuries later than the global one survived by Noah's family. On the basis of the archaeological "stele" known as the  Parian Chronicle, Deucalion's Flood was usually fixed as occurring sometime around 1528 BC. Deucalion's flood may be dated in the chronology of Saint Jerome to 1460 BC. According to Augustine of Hippo ("City of God" XVIII,8,10,&11), Deucalion and his father Prometheus were contemporaries of Moses. According to Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata, "...in the time of Crotopus occurred the burning of Phaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion." Deucalionids. The descendants of Deucalion and Pyrrha are below: