The ark offered Jacob Bryant (1715–1804) a way to explain why distant peoples told similar stories. If humanity descended from the family that survived the Flood, those descendants would have carried memories of the catastrophe wherever they went. In A New System, or, an Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–76), he searched for those memories among the gods, rituals, names, and images of the ancient world. The diversity of pagan religion became the result of a shared history gradually misunderstood.
Bryant gave particular importance to the descendants of Ham, whom he called Amonians or Cuthites. He credited them with spreading arts and learning while also carrying forms of worship that had departed from the original truth. Noah and his family could acquire divine honours, their stories becoming associated with the sun and with sacred vessels. A ship in a religious image might consequently preserve the ark even where no surviving account named Noah.
The argument needed a channel that did not run through Moses, and Bryant found one in a book no one had seen. Defending the coin of Apamea that showed Noah’s ark, first in 1775 and again in the last edition of the New System, he insisted that the pagan memorials of the Flood “came by a different channel” from Genesis, as family histories handed down among the descendants of Ham. His witness was a line in Clement of Alexandria, where a second-century Gnostic teacher claims that Pherecydes of Syros took his allegories from a Prophecy of Ham. “Among the Egyptians were the prophetic books of Ham,” Bryant wrote, “from whence Pherecydes Syrus borrowed his Mythology.” They were not prophecies “according to our acceptation of the term” but “sacred records, and memorials of antient date,” possibly from Ham himself. Samuel Bochart, whose Geographia Sacra Bryant cited throughout, had printed the same Greek sentence in 1646 and dismissed the prophecy as a Gnostic fabrication. Bryant read the verdict and chose the other way. One sentence became a library, and the library became the independent witness his system required.
Words helped him connect the scattered evidence. A name that could be traced to a proposed eastern root might identify the people who had carried a story, and similarities in the story could reinforce the derivation. This was a serious ambition in a period when the relations among languages were still being explored. Bryant’s confidence nevertheless took him well beyond what the comparisons could securely establish.
The engraved illustrations gave readers another way into the argument. Coins and religious images placed vessels, divine figures, and other supposed recollections of the Flood before the eye, beside the passages that explained them. The image often remained memorable when the proposed word origins became difficult to follow. It also remained available for another author to reproduce under a different explanation.
The volumes remained useful even to readers who rejected his explanations. Their texts and engraved images brought together material that would otherwise have required an extensive library. A later writer could borrow an example, challenge a word origin, or rebuild the account of the Flood with new reports from Asia. Bryant’s influence depended as much on this availability as on assent to his conclusions. He had made a large collection of ancient religion accessible through a history that kept returning its readers to Genesis.