I believe Abraham and others of his day were mostly clueless about a round world. Aristarchus developed it much later. Yet the whole world flooding idea would have made sense if it referred to the first civilization of Mesopotamia when everything was destroyed. People probably evolved the round Earth flooding interpretation later. It’s like the Urartu-Ararat confusion with Mt. Ararat named for the Jewish transliteration of Urartu.
It might have been a very large flood that hasn't since recurred. I grew up where the largest known flood occurred in the U.S.A. where Lake Bonneville flooded Eastern Washington 15-20,000- years ago, yet probably few lives were lost compared to much smaller floods. I think evidence of Wisconsin ice age ending floods in Mesopotamia are difficult to find since the sea level has risen more than 200 feet since then and the entire upper Persian Gulf region that formerly was dry is underwater. The ancient kingdom of Urartu evidently was where the tidal surge reached high water mark and the Ark settled. Probably no sudden rise like that has occurred since, although I think the salient promise was that humanity would not nearly be wiped out except for a few again. One can interpret what group would not be wiped out in various ways too-it might mean the chosen people or the elect would not be wiped out etc. The era is not too distant from that of the protoevangelium-it is challenging to be precise about what everything is contextually.
Regarding 'probably'. In that particular instance I was referring to the Lake Bonneville flood. I believe there is an archaeological site in Eastern Washington that is one of the oldest in North America with Indian bones dating maybe 15,000 years. I suppose they moved there after the Bonneville flood (not the Biblical flood). North America was sparsely populated then and that is why I said probably few lives were comparatively lost in contrast to a flood in a densely populated region such as occurs even in the modern world as in Bangladesh in the past. Late Pre-Columbian America in the area that is today the U.S.A. had a population of fewer than 4 million souls.
As the remnants of Middle-Eastern Eden faded away, that may have been during the end of the Wisconsin ice age when Arabia became a desert and the Mid-east dessicated saving species that would have perished in a vast flood with deserts could be like saving species on one land mass surrounded by water. After the flood one could set them down again where the habitat was before flooding. I don't care much for physical geologist's paradigms that place a unified land mass 300 to 175 million years ago. It is named Pangaea, and I don't know about any of the plate tectonic mountain formations of that hypothetical continent. It probably wasn't flat and easy to flood. Besides, the creatures of that era would need to be of that era-not like today's, and would need to evolve to be like today's. Another theory is that the whole world was covered by water shortly after the formation of the Earth under gravity several billion years ago when space ice was gathered in too, melted and rose to the surface. yet no life is likely to have existed then besides maybe the kind they look for on Mars that is very tiny and doesn't fit the Bible descriptions. Those seem to fit a recent, comparatively, flood. While the world may have been entirely covered with water at some time in its history, I don't like to associate those with the Biblical flood.
