Plato

In Plato's Timaeus we read of the Earth

overtaken by a tempest of winds.... alien fire from without, and with a solid lump of earth... the immense flood which foamed in and streamed out....

The Greek Solon visited Egypt and an old priest spoke to him as if to one of today's establishment figures:

You are all young in your minds which hold no store of old belief based on long tradition, no knowledge hoary with age. The reason is this. There have been, and will be hereafter, many and divers destructions of mankind, the greatest by fire and water, though other lesser ones are due to countless other causes. Thus the story current also in your part of the world, that Phaethon, child of the Sun, once harnessed his father's chariot but could not guide it on his father's course and so burnt up everything on the face of the earth and was himself consumed by the thunderbolt - this legend has the air of a fable; but the truth behind it is a deviation of the bodies that revolve in heaven round the earth and a destruction, occurring at long intervals, of things on earth by a great conflagration...

Any great or noble achievement or otherwise exceptional event that has come to pass, either in your parts or here or in any place of which we have tidings, has been written down for ages past in records that are preserved in our temples; whereas with you and other peoples again and again life has only lately been enriched... when once more, after the usual period of years, the torrents from heaven sweep down like a pestilence, leaving only the rude and unlettered among you. And so you start again like children, knowing nothing of what existed in ancient times here or in your own country... your people remember only one deluge, though there were many earlier...