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Why do you think so many of these ancient stories have the same themes and ideas? What does this say about the state of the world thousands of years ago? What can we learn from these similarities?

A favorite saying of one of my history teachers was "history always repeats itself;" there might be different circumstances each time but essentially it's all the same. These ancient stories may seem the same is, since they're taught orally, people hear these stories and apply it to their own lifetime. In order to do so, they tweak the stories and adjust them to how it would be relevant to their time period, religion, and culture. It's a good thing people have done this because we get to learn about how different societies in different parts of the world were. An example would be the flood in both Gilgamesh and the Book of Genesis; One being from Mesopotamian literature and the other from Christian scripture. They were both events that happened because of man's wrong doing and to rid the world of all that was considered bad. Also, the Quran has a story in it that tells about a great flood brought by Allah. Although we don't necessarily know if all accounts are 100% true, they do have a similar concept: the flood. The flood that saved all animals and the few people that were aboard. We can assume there was some type of natural occurrence that had such an impact that they're stories all over the world with it's example in it.