MYTH OF ZEUS

SPEAKER 1: A son battles his father for control of the universe and seizes more power than any
God ever had. This is the story of Zeus, Greek mythology Supreme Commander. To us it's a
myth. But to the ancients, it was reality, a way to make sense of a terrifying world. Some Greeks
believed Zeus was the one true God, centuries before Christ, and that nature's worst catastrophes,
what a sign of His wrath. This is the myth of Zeus, as it was originally told, and The Surprising
Truth Behind it if you control the sky, you control the world. In Greek mythology, that power
belongs to one guy, Zeus, he reigns as the enforcer of Justice, the master of men, and God.
SPEAKER 2: Zeus was the king of the gods, but he was also responsible for dispensing justice,
both to the gods and to mortals on the earth.
SPEAKER 3: This is something really cool about Greek mythology. Because one of the things
that you were supposed to do as a Greek when you worship the gods, was simply to do what was
required to keep the gods from squashing.
SPEAKER 1: As Commander of the skies, Zeus has the power of nature at his disposal. That
gives him the most devastating weapon of all.
SPEAKER 4: The most powerful symbol of Zeus is the lightning bolt. This is what Zeus carries.
It's his main accoutrement. And it's the thing that makes him the most powerful of all the
divinities.
SPEAKER 1: Attributing lightning to Zeus was a way for the Greeks to explain the
unexplainable. In a time before science, mythology put faces on the forces that shaped the world.
SPEAKER 5: The Greeks use mythology to try and figure out why the world operates the way
that it does. They didn't have scientific explanations yet for how the world came into existence,
or why lightning strikes here, but not there or why it strikes then and not some other time.
SPEAKER 2: The natural world was very frightening to them. So they associated it with the
divine. You know, these were symptoms of the Gods power that they could use to punish people
who hadn't worshipped them properly.
SPEAKER 1: Zeus, his command over nature would make him Greece's most feared God. But
how did he get there? What we know of Zeus begins with the writings of the ancient Greek
author, he said, around 700 BC. His book, called the agony was the ancient Greek story of
creation. What the book of Genesis is to our own world.
SPEAKER 4: theogony is hayseeds attempt to make sense of the world to bring order to it by
telling the story of a dynastic family rivalry that winds up in a well ordered cosmos that is the
world that you and I know today.
SPEAKER 1: In the midst, Zeus doesn't start out as the king of the gods, he rises from obscurity
to challenge his father for control of the universe. And that won't be easy. His father is Kronos.
He is King of the Titans, the most powerful gods in the universe.
SPEAKER 4: The Titans are an older order of Greek god, they're pretty rough around the edges.
They're not too bright. They're also not very well civilized.
SPEAKER 1: As leader of the Titans Cronus is expected to produce offspring. So he mates with
his own flesh and blood. His sister, and fellow Titan rare.
SPEAKER 5: Inset shows up quite a bit in mythology. Among the gods, there's really nobody
else at the beginning for them to have sex with so they ended up marrying one another.
SPEAKER 4: There's an old time aristocratic idea that says that no one else is good enough for
our family except only our family and the Greek gods. definitely seem to ascribe to this kind of a
principle.
SPEAKER 1: These two titans siblings, Cronus and Rhea, produce the next generation of Greek
gods mythologies, household names, the Olympians, among them are Hades, Poseidon, and
Zeus. But they will not simply inherit the earth. They must fight for it.
SPEAKER 2: Chronos is very worried about having children because he was concerned that his
son would be greater than him and would supplant him,
SPEAKER 3: the father fears being replaced by the son, that's human psychology and go to
Freud, and actually Freud founded in classical mythology. So this, this fear of losing your power
to the next generation was real. If you had a kid and you had something worth taking, at some
point, you needed to keep an eye on the kid.
SPEAKER 2: So his solution to this problem was to swallow alive all of his offspring. As soon
as his wife gave birth, he would actually ingest them.
SPEAKER 4: Now, of course, since they're immortal, the children that Cronos swallows are not
dead, they are just locked away inside of his belly. He's trying to control them, and keep them
from developing a power base so they might be able to overthrow it.
SPEAKER 1: To the Greeks who told the myth, this was an appalling cannibalism was as
deplorable Then, as now.
SPEAKER 5: We see the Greek authors giving voice to their fears through mythology,
cannibalism, sacrifice were horrible taboos. But when you project these things on to the gods, it
gives you a safe place to explore the consequences what might happen.
SPEAKER 1: Rare is horrified. All five of her children have been swallowed alive. Now, she is
pregnant again. But this time she has applied.
she sneaks away and gives birth in secret to a son, the future king of the gods Zeus but Cronus is
expecting another child to swallow. So Ray wraps a rock in a baby blanket and presents it to him.
without thinking twice, he grabs the bundle and gulps it down.
SPEAKER 4: So the plan of Raya is put into place Kronos a swallow down the stone instead of
Zeus. Zeus, then as an infant is Spirited Away, and he's put in what the ancient myth tellers tell
us as the folds of the earth.
SPEAKER 1: Zeus has been saved by his mother's cleverness. It's a memorable story. But could
that secret cave at the heart of the myth really exist? It seems the insurance thoughts they
believed Zeus had been born on the island of Crete. In this mountain cave
SPEAKER 6: the cave on the island of Crete is perhaps the most important sanctuary for the
veneration of shoes. It was considered as one of the possible places where the baby shoes was
kept hidden from its own father.
SPEAKER 1: Excavations of the cave have revealed that it was a major pilgrimage site for
visitors from across the ancient world.
SPEAKER 3: It was a place that people would go to worship Zeus, how do we know we've
excavated 1000s of dedications to Zeus and ritual objects to Zeus from all over? The
Mediterranean?
SPEAKER 1: One find in particular ties directly into the myth
 SPEAKER 3: of Zeus. Amongst material remains were these cool shields that probably were
along the walls and were put up there to indicate the the claim of shields that the people
defending Zeus used to muffle his crying when he was a baby so that Cronus could not hear.
SPEAKER 1: A chosen son, hidden to save his life. For Christians and Jews, the story of Zeus
his birth is Are you familiar?
SPEAKER 2: Many religious and mythological traditions have stories of sacred or divine
children who are hidden away in order to protect them so that they can grow to adulthood and
fulfill their destinies. We think perhaps of Jesus who is hidden away in the manger, so that Herod
will not be able to get to him or have Moses who is hidden away in Egypt.
SPEAKER 1: In the myth, Zeus quietly comes of age inside the cave.
SPEAKER 4: He has a kind of training period there out of the eyes of Kronos and is able to
acquire his strength and develop into a man.
SPEAKER 1: Zeus spends his childhood preparing to fulfill the self-appointed destiny. To
challenge his father and the Titans for control of the universe. Zeus has escaped the fate of his
siblings, who were all swallowed alive by their father, the Titan Cronus. Inside a remote cave
hideaway, he has maturity to a fully formed God. Now he is ready to begin the epic power
struggle. He was born to age to avenge his father's Savitri. To liberate his five Olympian siblings
from his father's battle, and to seize control of the world from the Titans, who now rule it.
SPEAKER 4: The stakes for him are tremendously high. If he succeeds, he'll be master of the
universe. But if he fails, he may well be the one that winds up down Tartarus
SPEAKER 1: Tartarus the lowest level of Hades, and the ancient Greek equivalent of hell.
SPEAKER 2: Tartarus was the part of Hades where the damned wet, the people who were bad or
committed offenses against the gods on Earth would be sent to Tartarus.
SPEAKER 1: If Zeus fails in his attempt to seize power from Cronus and the Titans, he'll be
damned to this place for all eternity. But if he wins, he'll command gods and men from his throne
atop Mount Olympus. In Greek myth, Mount Olympus is the towering home of the gods, but it's
also a real location. It's the highest peak in Greece, rising nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. And
it's a natural setting for supernatural powers.
SPEAKER 2: The Greeks really believe that their gods actually lived physically on Mount
Olympus. It was important for them to actually have a sense of where heaven was, where the
gods actually resided.
SPEAKER 1: It is from his home base on Mount Olympus that Zeus engineers is rebellion
against Cronus and the Titans
SPEAKER 5: Zeus is going to have to get others to come in and help him out so that he can
achieve supreme power.
SPEAKER 1: This is the ultimate Family Feud. And so it is to his own flesh and blood that Zeus
turns first. He knows his strongest allies will be his five siblings, the Olympians, now fully
formed adults, but still trapped deep inside Cronus is stark. If they can be liberated, the
Olympians could tip the scales in Zeus His favor and help him destroy the Titans forever.
SPEAKER 2: He wanted to free his brothers and sisters so he concocted a potion.
SPEAKER 1: Quietly, Zeus enters Cronus his lair and slips the drug into his nightly cup of
mead. Cronus drinks and becomes violently ill. First you vomits up the stone whose wife had
given him in place of babies herbs. According to tradition, that raw is the cornerstone of ancient
Greece's most sacred site.
SPEAKER 5: Delphi is a sanctuary in Greece where people would come from all around to
consult with God it was a direct phone lining up to heaven to ask the answer to anything you
want it.
SPEAKER 1: To this day 1000s of years after the story was first told, is the stone that Cronus
supposedly vomited is still there.
SPEAKER 4: At the very center of the temple complex at Delphi is an egg shaped stone that was
understood to be the exact stone that play the role of being the substitute for Zeus that Chronos
swallowed. And if you go there today to the Temple of Delphi, the locals will still tell you that
the stone that's there is the actual one that was in Kronos his belly.
SPEAKER 1: In the myth, after throwing up the sacred stone Cronus regurgitates Zeus has five
siblings and they are ready to join Zeus is revolution.
SPEAKER 4: What marks Zeus has a different kind of leader from those that have come before
it is his intelligence, he's able to persuade and convince those around him that he should be
leader and he's able to build coalitions.
SPEAKER 1: Zeus now has his siblings by his side, but he still needs more muscle to take on the
Titans. And there are some other estranged members of the family who are out for revenge,
forgotten brothers of Cronus. The Cyclops and the 100 Hundreds. But to find them, Zeus has to
go to hell.
SPEAKER 4: Kronos had feared the powers of these 100 handers on the Cyclopses and he
locked them down into Tartarus. Zeus knew that if you get their power on his side, he could
Marshal it to his own ends. He goes down and talks to the 100 handers and says, I will pay you
great respect. And I know that my father Kronos has mistreated you. Now I've freed you and
now you owe me and even they are moved and they say yes, Great Zeus, we realize not only are
you very powerful, but you also know how to treat people well. So we appreciate that and we
will now fight on your side.
SPEAKER 1: In gratitude for being liberated, the Cyclops presents Zeus with a gift. The power
of Lightning
SPEAKER 7: Lightning is one of the most devastatingly powerful forces in nature. When
lightning arcs through the air the air is briefly raised to a temperature that can be more than
50,000 degrees, it's five times the surface temperature of the sun.
SPEAKER 4: The lightning bolt gives us the power to rule the universe. With this lightning bolt,
no one's going to be able to overthrow it
SPEAKER 1: the battle lines are drawn, the Titans will fight for Mount authors, the Olympians
from Mount Olympus between them allies, the plane of vessels. But this isn't just a mythical
battlefield.
SPEAKER 6: Festival is actually if we take into consideration the modern map of Greece is the
central parts of Greece it's the biggest plane the most fertile plain increase from ancient times to
today.
SPEAKER 1: Firstly has a long bloody history stretching from the Greco Persian Wars of the
fifth century BC to the world wars of the 20th century AD. And it is here that the ultimate battle
of the gods will play out. Armed with a weapon of mass destruction, and an elite fighting force,
Zeus braces for an earth shattering battle. And to this day, a real place may still bear the scar.
mythologies defining moment is now at hand. The battle between father and son is about to
begin.
SPEAKER 1: It's the old guard of Cronus and his Titans versus the new blood of Zeus and the
Olympians. The outcome will determine who controls everything. From the top of Mount
Olympus, Xu sends a fury of lightning down upon his father's army. The fighting shakes the
earth to its code.
SPEAKER 5: The only way we can conceive of this battle is simply worlds colliding all the
forces in the universe smashing together at once.
SPEAKER 4: You've got the 100 handers over on one side that are ripping off huge hunks of
mountain and throwing mountains at the other side. From the Titans who've got a lot of just brute
force and brute strength. They're able to take a punch and keep coming back coming back
coming back.
SPEAKER 1: It's an apoco elliptic see, and not entirely a myth experts have recently determined
that a real event just as frightening actually happened in the ancient world. About 3600 years
ago, the Greek island of Santorini experienced one of the most devastating volcanic explosions
ever. Its effects were felt as far away as California.
SPEAKER 8: Volcanic blast was the single largest seismic event on Earth in the last 27,000
years. To give you an idea of how massive it was, imagine a mountain about three and a half
miles tall, being blown into the sky all at once.
SPEAKER 1: In 2006, scientists discovered that the center reading eruption was even larger than
originally believed. excavations uncovered deposits of volcanic ash piled 20 stories deep,
blanketing a 30 mile radius around the island. Based on this evidence, it's now believed the
eruption unleashed the equivalent power of 50,000, Hiroshima bomb. And explosion that
powerful would have annihilated much of the Greek world for the survivors, who knew little
about how volcanoes work, but could only have been the wrath of the gods.
SPEAKER 4: When the ancient myth tellers told the story of great cataclysmic battles that shook
the earth, they weren't doing so in a vacuum. There hadn't been massive seismic events that had
happened in the memory of some of the earlier generations of Greeks before these myth tellers
had written down their stories.
SPEAKER 1: As the clash of the gods plays out in the mess, it appears Zeus is finally about to
seize control of the universe.
SPEAKER 1: His powerful allies have tipped the balance, and the Olympians are closing in on
victory. But the Titans have one last weapon at their disposal. From the depths of Tartarus they
call forth a colossal beast, Python.
SPEAKER 4: Python is a tremendously strong, powerful monster that's challenging Zeus
himself. It's a last gasp effort in the final monster the final challenge he has to put down in order
to secure his reign over the universe.
SPEAKER 1: It is a supernatural deathmatch, a decisive struggle between good and evil. And it
will all come down to the ultimate weapon.
SPEAKER 4: As Zeus and Ty fine are engaged in this final epic battle, Zeus eventually gets the
upper hand and wins by his lightning bolt.
SPEAKER 1: With one final assault, Zeus drives Typhon and his titan allies down into Tartarus
where they are damned to spend eternity in a fiery of this.
SPEAKER 1: According to the ancients, it was across the Mediterranean on the island of Sicily
that Zeus his enemies descended into hell. Through the volcanic crater of Mount Etna, local
legends as Typhon is still inside, and has been behind all of the volcanoes eruptions over the
centuries.
SPEAKER 5: Greeks use this myth as a way of explaining why lava was constantly pouring out
of the volcano. They explain that as either the remnants of Zeus is lightning constantly shooting
out or of the flames of Tyco is still breathing just a little bit exploding flame out of the center of
the volcano.
SPEAKER 1: It is also said that Typhon causes destructive wind storms, in fact, is named as the
basis for the word typhoon. But in the myth, the storm clouds are broken. For the time being,
Zeus is victory over his father makes him the king of the gods, the Absolute Ruler of the
universe. So goes the myth, but what is the link to reality? In 2003, at the base of Mount
Olympus, a Lost Temple was discovered. It was the centerpiece of an ancient city known as Dion
and it was dedicated to Zeus.
SPEAKER 4: Dione was a city that was built at the base of Mount Olympus. And so it's very
close to the home of the Olympian gods and goddesses and whereas Zeus lived in Greek
mythology. In fact, the name of the town Dion means Zeus.
SPEAKER 1: The Dionne temple dates back to the fifth century BC, the golden age of Greek
mythology. Scattered around the site or marble blocks with unmistakable engravings. Eagles in
ancient Greece, eagles were the divine symbol of Zeus. But there's more. This headless statue
was found in a nearby riverbed carved into its 2400 year old base are three words, Zeus the
highest. There's a debate among experts about what this reference to the highest means. Some
believe this statue could be a missing link between Greece's worship of many gods, and the
single god philosophy of Christians and Jews. And that this find is proof that the Greeks were
embracing the idea of one God on their own. Before the arrival of Christianity,
SPEAKER 4: the Greek sometimes identified that highest god with Zeus, after all, the word Zeus
and its data form, this is where we get our word de o 's. So there's an etymological reason to
understand Zeus is the highest deity. Starting in about the third and second and first centuries BC
we have different philosophical and theological schools that arise and that start to propose a very
strong view that there is only one God and that all the ancient stories and all the ancient tales are
actually just metaphors that reflect different aspects of what this divinity is all about.
SPEAKER 1: For the people who worshipped at Dione, it's clear that Zeus was different from all
the other Greek gods. In fact, he may well have been the only one that mattered. In the myth,
Zeus has achieved the absolute power he has long song, but that power will soon be threatened
by an unexpected foe. The king of the gods is about to be betrayed by the person closest to him.
SPEAKER 1: Zeus has won his epic clash with the Titans. He knows it's atop Mount Olympus,
as king of the gods and master of mankind.
SPEAKER 1: The ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus above all others, even though he was fatally
flawed.
SPEAKER 4: The ancient Greek gods are very relatable, they have faults, they have strengths,
they have weaknesses, they have all the things that normal human beings would, in fact, when
the Greeks in these early times to think about their gods, one way to try and understand it is that
they see their gods as being a lot like you and I just really, really big.
SPEAKER 1: According to the myth, Zeus has one very human weakness that threatens to be his
undoing. an uncontrollable sex drive.
SPEAKER 4: Zeus likes the ladies, that's one of the most endearing and enraging things about
him is that he has this very, very human character that he just he never saw a girl that he didn't
like. Zeus
will stop at nothing to seduce his conquests. He even uses disguise.
SPEAKER 5: Zeus visits mortal women in various guises whatever it takes to consummate the
relationship. So in different tales we hear of Zeus turning into an eagle, turning into a salon,
turning into a bowl, turning in all these different shapes turning into human beings to mimic a
woman's husband's face. To trick the women as best you can into into having union with.
SPEAKER 1: A beautiful young goddess named Metis is the first to capture Zeus as attention.
He takes her as his wife.
SPEAKER 4: Medicine is a very attractive and appealing young woman and the quality that
really sets her apart is she has practical wisdom. In fact, her name in Greek means practical
wisdom. When Zeus spies her, he finds her very appealing.
SPEAKER 1: But Zeus has affection for medicine is overshadowed by a dark prophecy that
threatens his grip on power. He is told that she will bear him a child who will one day seize his
throne. Suddenly, Zeus like his father must fear his offspring.
SPEAKER 4: Zeus is representative of this awful tradition. And that starts literally from the
dawn of time of sons, destroying their fathers in order to take prominence.

SPEAKER 2: But Zeus vows that this time will be different, and he takes a drastic step to make
sure if he swallows his wife alive. Once again, family love falls prey to power, its history
repeating. But this horrifying act will make Zeus stronger and wiser

SPEAKER 4: by swallowing her Zeus internalises Mathis are cunning and prudence all at once.
She becomes a part of Zeus, and essentially is probably imprisoned in his stomach, but he also
takes on these greater qualities of intellectual ability.

SPEAKER 5: This to us seems a little strange, but it's important to remember that for the Greeks,
one of the places that some Greeks thought that they carried their wisdom and their ideas was
actually in their stomach. So when Zeus swallows made to us, he actually takes her into the part
of himself, where really a lot of his best thinking was done.

SPEAKER 2: With metas God, Zeus is in need of a new wife. And like his father before him, he
finds one in his own family. His sister and fellow Olympian Hara. She's not like Zeus is earlier
conquests. She's mythologies, most powerful goddess, the king of the gods has met his match.

SPEAKER 5: between Zeus and Hera, we actually see a relationship which is between two
people who are on some level equals so some of the conflicts between Zeus and Hera, I think we
can see as the Greeks culturally working out, wow, what would it look like if you actually had
two people with equal power within a relationship. She's the

SPEAKER 4: queen of the goddesses. And she has wonderful beauty. She's supremely
intelligent, she's mighty, but she's also exceedingly jealous because Zeus is always running after
other women.

SPEAKER 2: The king of the gods continues to step out with an endless string of sexual
partners. he conceives well over 100 offspring, with a host of lovers, both divine and mortal.

SPEAKER 4: If I'm not mistaken, Zeus never has an encounter with a woman that does not
produce a child. So in that sense, it's extreme virility. It's extreme power,
SPEAKER 1: Zeus, his ability to sleep with anybody matches a kind of fantasy of what ancient
Greek males would hope or desire, their lives to be men fantasised about such things. And they
thought if there was an all powerful God out there, well, he would surely act on those fantasies.

SPEAKER 2: Zeus is promiscuity provided a perfect way for Greeks to connect themselves to
him. Every quarter of the Greek world boasted of having its own hometown love charm.

SPEAKER 1: As uses fame and power grow across ancient Greece, more and more cities and
towns want to be associated with him. And they therefore claim that there was some kind of
actual liaison between Zeus and some mortal woman within their family tree that then produces
the offspring that produces a local ruling families.

SPEAKER 2: Evidence of this connection can still be found in cities throughout the Greek
world, Athens, Thebes, magnesia, Macedonia, all are named after children of Zeus. But there is
one individual who isn't happy about Zeus has abundant fertility. In the myth, his wife Hera has
had enough. She vows to make the king of the gods pay dearly, but his chronic philandering, she

SPEAKER 1: doesn't like to be humiliated in front of the other gods, so she will take it out on
her husband.

SPEAKER 2: Hera gathers the other Olympians together and lays the groundwork for a
revolution.

SPEAKER 5: Tarah actually goes to the her fellow Olympian gods and says, Why is Zeus in
charge? He's a no more important or powerful than the rest of us. If we all get together, we can
kick him out. So in fact, they rise up and they bind Zeus with chains.

SPEAKER 2: Zeus awakes from enough to find himself tie down a prisoner in his own bed. It is
the ultimate betrayal, a conspiracy carried out by the siblings he once saved.

SPEAKER 5: God revolt was the greatest threat that Zeus ever faced. There was never any sense
that mortals could challenge his power. But the combined power of all of the Olympian gods
really could have defeated him.

SPEAKER 6: This was indeed one of the most horrifying moments in Zeus his career, he was
actually about to lose everything.

SPEAKER 2: But just when all seems lost, help comes in the form of an old

ally.

SPEAKER 2: The 100 handers when they hear Zeus is in trouble. They come to his rescue,
breaking his chains, as the Olympians run for cover.
SPEAKER 2: Zeus survives the coup attempt. Now it's time to exact his revenge. His wife Hara
is sentenced to hand from the sky by Golden James

SPEAKER 2: his son, Apollo and brother Poseidon, are condemned hardly. They are ordered to
build one of the ancient world's most iconic monuments, the massive walls of Troy it's another
example of myth explaining the unexplainable. To the ancient Greeks, the walls of Troy seem
too strong to have been built by man, Zeus as punishment of Apollo and Poseidon helped explain
their existence. The ruins survived to this day.

SPEAKER 5: In antiquity, people thought it actually had been built by the gods or some kind of
divine intervention on behalf of the Trojans.
SPEAKER 2: In the myth, Zeus has dealt justice to those who crossed him. But it will be human
beings who bear the brunt of His wrath. That wrath will arrive in the form of a massive flood,
one that may even be linked to the biblical story of Noah

SPEAKER 2: Greece's most powerful God has survived a coup attempt. He dealt with justice to
the conspirators, but he's not through yet. Now mankind will experience the full measure of his
rage. In ancient times, fear of Zeus is punishment kept a lot of Greeks have a trouble.

SPEAKER 7: When people did something wrong, they would have to be very very careful that
disuse did not smite them with a thunderbolt, or many, many examples in prehistory of Zeus,
destroying entire cities and civilizations because he felt that they had overreached themselves
that they had to blaspheme the gods that they had become too proud to be allowed to live any
longer.

SPEAKER 2: The Greek author Hesiod wrote that without the fear of Zeus His wrath, humans
would live like beasts, and the weak would be in the hands of the strong.

SPEAKER 8: Zeus is the order Bringer. Zeus is the bringer of Justice and the bringer of
civilization.
SPEAKER 2: When natural catastrophes occurred in the real world, the Greeks believed that
they were sent by Zeus to punish evil men. Often stories were invented to explain what had made
the supreme god so angry. According to the Miss Zeus, his most frightening moment of rock
comes after he sees humans engaging Cannibalism.

SPEAKER 9: Cannibalism was as important as it was in ancient Greek religion because they
considered it to be so heinous. In fact, identification of eating human flesh is something that you
would attribute to wolves or to dogs, but hardly to human beings.

SPEAKER 2: Zeus is no stranger to cannibalism. His own Father Cronus, one swallowed all of
Zeus his siblings. When he is confronted with a site of mortals doing the same thing, he becomes
enraged and vows to destroy the human race with a catastrophic flood. Nine days and nights
pass, the rain is relentless, and the earth slowly dropped. The waters reached the peak of Mount
Parnassus, which stands over 8000 feet high. In all corners of the earth, the human race perish.
When the rain stops, only two mortals are still alive. Incredibly, they have survived the storm by
building an ark. A raging flood, and ark, and only two surviving humans. The parallels with the
Old Testament are striking.
It could be the Biblical Flood of Noah, it could be Zeus is deluge, it could be similar sorts of
giant watery disasters that we see figuring in in a wide number of different cultures around the
world.

SPEAKER 6: All these stories go back to a natural catastrophe that affected the collective
memory of peoples living in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea.

SPEAKER 2: A deluge like the one described in these myths would have devastated humanity.
But could such a flood have really happened? In the past decade, scientists have uncovered some
stunning clues that prove the dig. Researchers show that as the last Ice Age ended about 7000
years ago, runoff from melting glaciers surge into the Black Sea Basin, violently submerging
nearly 170,000 square miles of dry land.

SPEAKER 10: For these people, their entire world was flooding, and it surely must have seemed
like they might have angered the gods to have brought down this kind of disaster upon
themselves.

SPEAKER 2: Could this be the real life disaster that spawned the story of Zeus has flooded. In
the myth, Zeus has held on to power in the face of strong opposition. But there is one more
challenger he didn't count on. Jesus Christ. In the first century AD, his message would take the
world by storm and dethrone Greece's dominant God.

SPEAKER 6: When Christianity came and promised salvation in the afterlife, so gave people
something to believe in something that could happen to them. After their death. Christianity
founds many followers.
SPEAKER 2: Zeus is stranglehold on humankind faulted, as this new religions spread across the
Mediterranean world. Ultimately, the same civilization that worshipped him, would reject Him.

SPEAKER 1: In antiquity, there was no more powerful force than Zeus, except for one fate, not
even Zeus himself could overturn it as much as he wants to, on occasion, try to change fate or
redirect it, he himself is even subject to its dictates.

SPEAKER 2: Before the rise of Christianity, Zeus has myth captivated the Greek world for
1000s of years, and made him the most feared and respected of all the gods. But he was only one
of men from Greece and beyond, who would leave their mark on mankind. Some are still
familiar named Hercules at Medusa. And each of their stories is a window into a long lost world,
a code waiting to be deciphered.

SPEAKER 1: These myths reveal to us in a uniquely powerful way the hidden strata that lay
underneath our conscious awake lives, our understanding of the world, and like an archaeology
of the human mind, we can dig into them and see the deep recesses of human psyches. And I
think that's what makes these myths so powerful.