258 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Sura and Nakao
Flood heroes of the Ami tribe, dwellers of central Taiwan. They alone
survived a world-class deluge in a wooden vessel, which landed them safely
atop Mount Ragasan after the waters abated. From Sura and Nakao descended
modern mankind.
The catastrophe from which they escaped was said to have begun during a full
moon accompanied by the sound of loud explosions coming from the sea, suggesting
volcanic and/or meteoric origins for the flood, which had been brought about by the
gods to destroy human beings for their impiety. This moral imperative, together
with the landing of Sura and Nakao on a mountaintop, is likewise found in the
distant deluge traditions of the biblical Noah and the Greek Deucalion. The Ami
myth is underscored by the discovery of underwater ruins off the western shores
of Taiwan.Surid
In Arab histories, the pre-deluge king of Egypt, who built the pyramids of
Giza specifically to preserve the written knowledge of his time. This information
included texts on astronomy, a history of the world, and prophecies for the future.
Surid foresaw that the Earth was about to be incinerated by “a fiery planet” with
resulting universal destruction by water. He appears in several Arab accounts of
the Flood, in Masoudi (1000 A.D.), and the Akbar Ezjeman Collection, at Oxford.
Surid may be the same as the Atlanto-Egyptian Thaut.
(See Siriadic Columns)Susa-no-wo
Japan’s god of the ocean and natural destruction. Susa-no-wo battled a gigantic
sky-dragon, who had devoured seven sisters and was about to dine on an eighth,
when he was slain by the hero. In so doing, the dragon’s blood gushed over the
Earth, but the souls of the consumed maidens were freed to rise among the heavens,
where they became a constellation known in the West as the Pleiades.
Even here, on the other side of the world from Ancient Greece, the stars
were regarded as sisters connected with a cosmic-induced deluge after it has done
its worst. The great antiquity of such historical myth is emphasized by its appearance
among the Ainu, an aboriginal people, originally Caucasoids, whose presence on
the islands goes back beyond the fourth millennium B.C.Sykes, Edgerton
Trained as an engineer, he was an invaluable foreign correspondent for
the British press because of his quadrilingual fluency. During his long life in