The Prologue begins by emphasising the importance of the story of Noah as the founder of humanity after the flood in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It also indicates that the story of Noah, the flood, and its aftermath had a highly important and much forgotten role, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, in the development of secular thought in an array of modern scholarly disciplines – biology, geology, geography, anthropology, demography, zoology, mythography, religious studies, and even naval engineering. It concludes with brief summaries of the chapters within this volume.