Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Zeus resolved to destroy the Bronze Race for its wickedness, he sent a great flood. Deucalion, son of Prometheus, had been warned by his father; he built a chest (larnax), provisioned it, and embarked with his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. The rains and the rising waters covered the plains; mountains alone stood above the sea. For nine days and nights they floated, then landed on Mount Parnassus (Apollodorus; other peaks in local variants). When the rain ceased, Deucalion sacrificed to Zeus Phyxios (the god of escape). Zeus sent Hermes, or Deucalion consulted an oracle of Themis, asking how to renew the human race. The answer was to cast behind them the “bones of their mother.” Pyrrha at first refused, fearing to violate her mother’s corpse; Deucalion understood that the mother was Earth (Gaia), and her bones the stones. They threw stones over their shoulders: those cast by Deucalion became men, those by Pyrrha women. Thus humankind was replenished after the flood—not from Titan soot (Orphic) nor from metallic ages alone (Hesiod), but from stone and earth under Zeus’s mercy. Deucalion and Pyrrha afterward begot Hellen and others (or Hellen is elsewhere son of Zeus by the same Pyrrha); from Hellen the Hellenes take their name. The flood–stones myth is the central classical bridge between primordial punishment and the heroic genealogies of Greece.