CREATION, CIVILISATION AND THE FLOOD
CHAPTER XXXV
part III - Freemasonry, Religion and Civilisation
THE SQUARE AND COMPASSES
W.
M. Don Falconer PM, PDGDC
A flood of immense magnitude and
duration, that overwhelmed an advanced civilisation, is an essential
element of most of the world's mythologies that supports the
Biblical account.
Conventional wisdom implies
that modern civilisation is the culmination, by the process of
selection and absorption, of the viable elements of the ethnic
civilisations that have preceded it since the sporadic rise of the
earliest known settlements in the Near East. They were the
settlements that came into existence when the hunter-gatherers
living around the Mediterranean Sea ceased having a nomadic
existence about 10,000 years ago. They gradually formed communes and
introduced rudimentary animal husbandry and dry farming in those
areas that are usually called the twin cradles of
civilisation. The two areas referred to are the "fertile crescent" in
the alluvial basin of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia
and the fertile banks and delta of the Nile River in Egypt. Those
early primitive civilisations gained additional impetus when simple
forms of irrigation were developed in the region about 8,000 years
ago, which enabled agricultural pursuits to be organised more
effectively in arid climates. The important ethnic civilisations
that usually are considered to be the direct antecedents of our
modern civilisation include those of the Sumerians, the Babylonians,
the Egyptians, the Greeks and lastly the Romans. Other ethnic
civilisations that arose contemporaneously with the civilisations of
the Near East and the Mediterranean are usually regarded as
derivatives of those civilisations, in which respect ethnic
civilisations that have survived as entities are usually looked upon
as components of modern civilisation rather than as its
antecedents.
The occurrence of a flood of
immense magnitude and duration, when an advanced civilisation was
already in existence, are essential elements of most of the world's
mythologies. The Hebrew account of the creation of man and the
evolution of an early civilisation, from the primitive existence of
Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to the acquisition of manual arts
and crafts before the time of Noah and the flood, is narrated in the
book of Genesis, beginning in the seventh verse of the second
chapter and ending in the fourth verse of the sixth chapter.
According to the chronology established by Archbishop Ussher, whose
work is discussed later, this series of events took place over a
period of about one thousand seven hundred years. On the basis of
presently available evidence, the Genesis Flood
probably took place during the period of exceptionally heavy
precipitation that is known to have occurred during the melt down of
the polar ice caps towards the end of the last great Ice Age. This
precipitation was very intense for almost 8,000 years, from about
15000 BCE to about 8000 BCE. Archaeological investigations
have not found any extensive remains from a flood of cataclysmic
magnitude in the land areas occupied by the present civilisation,
which had its beginnings about 10,000 years ago. This lack of
evidence almost certainly is because the earlier civilisations had
occupied areas of land that were flooded after the last great Ice
Age, forming a substantial part of the extensive submerged
continental shelves now bordering the world’s great land masses.
Nevertheless, evidence is steadily accumulating to prove that there
was an advanced civilisation before the flood.
Stephen Oppenheimer has
examined, in considerable detail, events that relate to the drowning
of all archaeological evidence of those coastal cultures that once
dwelt on land that now forms part of the great continental shelves,
especially the land that connected the Indonesian Archipelago and
New Guinea with the continent of Southeast Asia during the last
great Ice Age. In the process he has correlated those events with
the Genesis Flood and the many other flood stories
that feature in myths from around the world. In his recent book
Eden in the East, subtitled The Drowned
Continent of Southeast Asia, Stephen Oppenheimer discusses
three dramatic ice-melts that raised the level of the world’s oceans
and drowned the coastal cultures of Sundaland that had occupied a
land area as large as India. At the height of the last great Ice
Age, between 20,000 and 18,000 years ago, Sundaland had a total area
about twice that of India. He explains how the last of those abrupt
sea-floods, which occurred about 8,000 years ago, was compounded by
super waves set off by cracks in the earth’s crust when the northern
ice-plates finally collapsed, thus initiating mass migrations of the
population by land and sea, north into Asia, east into the Pacific,
south towards Australia and west into the Indian Ocean.
The compelling information
provided by Stephen Oppenheimer is supported by the results of
geological, archaeological, linguistic and genetic investigations.
He deals comprehensively with flood myths, creation myths and all
aspects of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden
and other comparable stories and gives an absorbing comparison
between developments in the Far East and the Near East, effectively
negating the long held theory that civilisation in the Far East only
arose as a consequence of a migration of civilised people from the
Near East. The migrations by sea from Southeast Asia to Melanesia,
Polynesia and Australia give weight to the hypothesis that the
Sumerians, who were at the forefront of the development of
civilisation in Mesopotamia and also were a seafaring people,
originally came from the Far East. Many of the ancient myths of the
Near East describe the Sumerians as seafarers and all say that they
came from the east, which Genesis 11:2 specifically
mentions:
“And
it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a
plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.”
If the Sumerians were
migrants from Southeast Asia, which is highly feasible even though
at first sight it might seem improbable, this would explain why the
language of the Sumerians when they entered Mesopotamia differed
from those of both their Indo-European and their Semitic neighbours.
An early migration from the Far East to the Near East by sea would
not have been any more difficult than the regular trading that took
place by sea about 6,000 years ago between the ancient Indus River
settlements on the Indian subcontinent and the Near East. Nor would
an overland migration of civilised people from east to west have
been any more difficult than the original migration of primitive
people from west to east, which had taken place thousands of years
earlier more or less along what became the ancient Silk
Road used for trade for many millennia. The probability of a
migration of a civilised people from the Far East to the Near East
before the Genesis Flood is supported by the fact that
agriculture began in the Far East much earlier than in the Near
East. Furthermore, at least 26,000 years ago stones for grinding
cereal grains were used in the Solomon Islands, about 12,000 years
earlier than when first used in Egypt and Nubia and about 14,000
years earlier than when first used in Mesopotamia. Recent
discoveries that pottery was being made in China and South East Asia
from 2,500 to 3,500 years earlier than in India, Mesopotamia and the
Mediterranean also is relevant, especially as some of the first
pottery made in India and the Near East were decorated in a similar
way to the earlier pottery from the Far East.
The probability that the
original home of the Sumerians was in the Far East is supported by
recent investigations carried out in the Black Sea under the
direction of William B F Ryan and Walter C Pitman, two geophysicists
of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. In
their book Noah’s Flood, subtitled The New
Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History,
they give details of their underwater explorations carried out in
the Black Sea with the assistance of scientists from Bulgaria,
Russia and Turkey. They have uncovered evidence that about 7,600
years ago the Black Sea was a huge inland fresh water lake, which
had been formed by water flowing from the polar icecaps melting at
the end of the last great Ice Age. The lake was then about 150
metres below the level of the oceans, when the rising waters of the
Mediterranean Sea burst through the narrow Bosporus valley and
streamed into the low lying areas with catastrophic force, causing
the inhabitants to flee before the influx. They suggest that this
event is the basis of the Sumerian and Biblical stories of the
Genesis Flood, handed down orally until recorded by
the Sumerians in the epic of Marduk. They also
postulate that the original margins of the lake, surrounded by a
vast region of semidesert, were a Garden of Eden
inhabited by an advanced culture.
The following sequence of
extracts from Noah’s Flood by William Ryan and Walter
Pitman are especially relevant because they encapsulate the data
that support the hypothesis that the Sumerians were migrants from
the Far East who had settled around the Black Sea before the
Genesis Flood and moved into Mesopotamia when driven
out by the flood:
“In recent years
archaeologists have reported the sudden appearance of advanced
farmers along the Rioni River in Transcaucasia, midway between the
Black and Caspian Seas. With no precedent, with no roots and
seemingly without forebears, they built a town of mud-brick
buildings (some were dome shaped like those of the Halaf) and
planted fields with grains and pulses.
To the east of the great
Syro-Arabian Desert lie the fabled lands of Mesopotamia. Contained
within and between the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers,
this arid near-desert is said to have been the cradle from which
western civilisation sprang. It is a land of extremes. . . . . . The
annual rainfall on the alluvial plane is less than ten inches per
year in the north and as little as three in the south. Farming is
possible only with irrigation. . . . . . The people who arrived
later would turn the land into a breadbasket. Known as the
Sumerians, they went on to create one of the most impressive
civilisations the world has known.
The Sumerians were thought to
be descendants from a distant homeland to the north. In searching
for a linguistic affinity with modern dialects, Henry Creswicke
Rawlinson reckoned that their particular use of pronouns was more
like the language of Mongolia and Manchu than any other type of
Asian family. One of his most respected colleagues pointed out what
he believed were close ties with Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian. A
modern Assyriologist, J Bottéro, writing in 1987 on the literature,
reasoning and gods of the Sumerians, stated “we do not know anything
of their earlier ties, as they seem to have burned all bridges with
the country of their origin, from which they never received any new
blood, as far as we know.”
The Sumerian view of their own
alien past is expressed in their “Poem of the Supersage” in which
the Great Flood marked the end of mythological time and the
inauguration of historical time. It is intriguing that they believed
the seven sages appeared from the sea during the “first days” in
human form wearing fish skins. In the epic of Gilgamesh the seven
sages are credited with building the walls of Uruk and bringing the
arts of civilisation to the Sumerians – irrigation, farming and the
use of copper, gold and silver. The question of where the Sumerians
came from is still unanswered.”
Concepts of the Genesis
Flood have changed dramatically through the ages. From
ancient times the Genesis Flood was considered to be
an irrefutable fact until a Scottish geologist, James Hutton
(1726-97), introduced the theory of uniformitarianism in 1785. He
postulated that the entire history of the earth could be
interpolated on the basis of the then known geological processes,
which were assumed to have proceeded at a gradual and uniform rate,
which appeared to be supported by the fact that, until then, no
evidence of a worldwide cataclysmic flood had been found. In 1837 a
Swiss-born American naturalist and glaciologist, Jean Louis Rodolphe
Agassiz (1807-73), challenged uniformitarianism when he advanced a
catastrophic glacial theory for the cyclical formation and melting
of the huge polar ice caps. The reality of the cyclical behaviour of
the polar ice caps and the magnitude and importance of the
consequential worldwide floods is now well understood. In The
Genesis Flood, subtitled The Biblical Record and Its
Scientific Implications, John C Whitcomb, Jr and Henry M
Morris critically review archaeological and geological research
carried out in the Fertile Crescent that relate to the
Genesis Flood, revealing the inadequacies of
uniformitarianism and evolutionism as unifying principles. The
philosophic and scientific aspects of creationism and catastrophism
are carefully examined and opposing viewpoints are considered in an
endeavour to reorient the Biblical records in the light of available
scientific data.
The polar ice cap phenomenon
supports Stephen Oppenheimer’s concept that the drowned landmass of
Southeast Asia was in fact an Eden in the East, based
on a detailed study of the consequences of the three worldwide
floods caused by the rapid rises in sea level associated with the
last great Ice Age. Those floods occurred about 14,000, 11,500 and
8,000 years ago, when sea levels rose rapidly by about 45, 35 and 20
metres respectively, ultimately producing a total rise of 130 to 180
metres that peaked some 5 metres above the present sea level about
4,500 years ago. The long-term effect on the people in the
Garden of Eden around the Black Sea described by
William Ryan and Walter Pitman and on the people living in Stephen
Oppenheimer’s Eden in the East was similar, except
that the flood in the Near East inundated a huge inland region while
the flood in the Far East converted vast coastal plains into the
world’s largest archipelago some 4,000 kilometres long.
In his book entitled The
Seven Daughters of Eve, Bryan Sykes sets out the
investigations recently completed to determine the origins and
descent of mankind based on an extensive and detailed study of the
genetic codes of diverse groups of people revealed in their
mitochondrial DNA. Bryan Sykes presents a fascinating story of his
studies that lead to the discovery of seven clan
mothers and the seven Gardens of Eden they
came from in Eurasia, the lands of our ancestors. His study was then
extended to include the world clans and where they are found. His
book The Seven Daughters of Eve provides essential
background information for a proper understanding of the various
episodes of migration discussed by Stephen Oppenheimer in Eden
in the East and by William Ryan and Walter Pitman in
relation to the early inhabitants around the Black Sea and their
later dispersion after Noah’s Flood had inundated the
Black Sea. In this context the recent discovery of several 1.75
million years old hominid skeletons at the site of the ancient
village of Dmanisi, overlooking the old Silk Road
through the Caucusus region, are especially relevant. An
archaeological team led by David Lordkipanidze, a
paleoanthropologist of the Georgian State Museum in Tbilisi,
discovered the skeletons when excavating during the 1990s under a
grant from the National Geographic Society. It has been determined
that the Dmanisi hominids resemble the ancient Homo
habilis, not the Homo erectus who have long
been thought to have been the first intercontinental migrants.
Interestingly, Bryan Sykes identified this region as the
Garden of Eden of the clan mother Xenia,
whose descendents moved eastwards in successive generations across
the steppes of central Asia and Siberia. About 6 per cent of the
present population of Europe are descended from Xenia.
The following books also
provide useful background information relevant to the concepts
developed by Stephen Oppenheimer, William Ryan and Walter Pitman.
Using the discoveries of archaeology, geology and astronomy, Graham
Hancock has comprehensively investigated the worldwide myths and
legends of humanity. His book, Fingerprints of the Gods - A
Quest for the Beginning and the End, gives evidence of an
unknown civilisation that existed during the last ice age. Two other
books, The Orion Mystery
by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert and Keeper of Genesis
by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, also provide evidence,
from an Egyptian perspective, of the existence of an advanced
civilisation before the flood. In The Great Pyramid
Decoded Peter Lemesurier sets out a detailed comparison
between the ancient beliefs held in Egypt and Central America,
highlighting the probability that they have a common basis. Rand and
Rose Flem-Ath have collated and reviewed the available information
on early advanced civilisations, setting out their logical
conclusions in a book entitled When the Sky Fell - In Search of
Atlantis.
The well-known Hebrew story of
the creation, the Garden of Eden, the rise of
civilisation, the fall of man and the great flood that is recorded
in the book of Genesis has already been mentioned. This story is not
unique, nor indeed is it the first record of these events in the
Near East. The earliest known inhabitants of the “fertile
crescent”, in the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers,
were Sumerians whose origins are uncertain. It is known they had
been a seafaring people and came into Mesopotamia from the tree clad
mountainous region of Asia Minor, but that they were not Semites and
their language was neither Semitic nor Indo-European. There is no
evidence that they came from Africa, but as noted earlier it is
possible that they migrated westwards from the vicinity of
Sundaland. Archaeological investigations have revealed that the
Sumerians had established a highly organised agricultural economy by
3000 BCE, after which they continued relatively undisturbed for
at least five hundred years. During that period the Sumerians
produced the earliest narrative literature that has been discovered
anywhere in the world. The lists of their early kings say that the
monarchy "came down from heaven"
and that the king, who also was the high priest, was a "tenant farmer of the
gods" whose holding of the land was renewed annually at the
New Year Festival. In Genesis of the Grail Kings,
Laurence Gardner describes the key personalities in the Sumerian
lists, as well as the myths that surround them and details of their
relationships to important biblical characters.
The essential elements of the
story in Genesis were first recorded by the Sumerians in the epic
of Gilgamesh,
which was adopted and adapted by their Babylonish successors in
about 2000 BCE. In the Sumerian version of the creation story
the central theme is that three gods created the universe. They were
Anu who was identified with the sky, Enlil who was identified with
the earth and Enki who was identified with water and the
subterranean abyss. Anu was accompanied by his consort Antu, later
identified with Ishtar, the goddess of love and war personified by
the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis. The similarities between the
Sumerian and Egyptian stories of the creation are interesting. In
the Sumerian story Marduk was chosen as the king of the gods, which
established an embryonic monotheism somewhat similar to that of the
Vedic religion of ancient India and also of the religion of ancient
Egypt. The Sumerian story of the creation and the flood is recounted
and embellished in later Assyro-Babylonian revisions of the epic
of Gilgamesh. The basic
elements of all of the stories of the creation and the flood from
the Near East are similar. However the account given in the first
and seventh chapters of Genesis reveals the religious genius of the
Hebrews, in their adaptation of the earlier Sumerian and Babylonian
mythologies for lofty spiritual purposes.
The story of the creation and
the flood is not only found in the mythologies of the Near East. The
ancient Peruvian myths relating to their great Creator God,
Viracocha, as well as the ancient traditions of the Aztecs of
Central America, of Vedic India and of the pre-dynastic period of
Egypt, all include similar stories of the creation, an early
civilisation and later catastrophic floods. The myths of Burma, Laos
and northern Thailand likewise refer to a catastrophic flood that
devastated the whole earth and destroyed civilisation, but they all
say that a raft was built which enabled a few men and women to
survive the deluge. The myths of Vietnam have a similar story,
except that the escape vessel was a huge chest, which also contained
two of every kind of animal. It is of particular interest to know
that several aboriginal tribes in northern Australia say that they
came into existence during their Dreamtime,
after a great flood had swept away all of the previous landscape and
society. The myths of many other aboriginal tribes in Australia say
that it was the cosmic serpent associated with the rainbow that
caused the deluge preceding their Dreamtime.
When comparing events that are
referred to in myths and legends with the events recorded in the
scriptures, as well as correlating both with the history of the
universe and the world as revealed by modern scientific
investigations, it is important to understand how the dates of those
events have been determined. The Chaldeans and the Egyptians devised
their calendars independently more than 5,000 years ago, by which
time the Sumerians had developed their pictographic script and the
Egyptians had developed hieroglyphics. It is reasonable to assume
that, since then, the dates of events that were recorded at the
times of their occurrence by the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians
should be fairly accurate. Because the Hebrew Scriptures do not
record the dates when events took place, the dates of Biblical
events must be deduced by correlating the genealogical records in
the Hebrew Scriptures with the dates of events that have been
recorded contemporaneously by others. An Irish archbishop, James
Ussher (1581-1656), was the first person who is known to have made a
serious chronological examination of the Septuagint version of the
bible, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures
inherited by the Christian church, with the objective of determining
the dates of Biblical events. James Ussher was born in Dublin, where
he became a fellow of Trinity College and later chancellor and
professor of divinity of St Patrick's College. He became Archbishop
of Armagh in 1625. His theology was Calvinistic and his ideas of
church government were moderate.
After moving to England in
1640, Archbishop Ussher preached at Lincoln's Inn for several years
before concentrating on research and writing. His best known work is
the Annales Veteris et Novi
Testament, in which he propounded a chronology of the Hebrew
Scriptures that established the date of the creation as
4004 BCE, which was accepted as an undeniable fact for almost
three centuries. When determining the chronology of the Bible,
Archbishop Ussher based his calculations on the genealogical
information recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, without reference to
other contemporaneous records. For events since about 1000 BCE,
which was during the XXIst Dynasty of the Egyptian pharaohs and
about fifty years before King Solomon completed the temple at
Jerusalem, Archbishop Ussher's dates are usually accurate to within
about a decade. Earlier events progressively become less accurate
and are in error by a century or more in 2000 BCE, during the
XIth Dynasty of the Egyptian pharaohs, which was about the time of
Abraham. The inaccuracies in those dates are partly because the
Hebrew genealogies are incomplete and partly because in the Hebrew
Scriptures the earlier events were not recorded contemporaneously,
but were passed down as an oral tradition from generation to
generation. Before the time of Abraham, Archbishop Ussher's dates
for Biblical events are entirely conjectural, so that recourse must
be had to other evidence to determine them with any accuracy. In
many early editions of the Bible, Archbishop Ussher's dates were
included as marginal notes and for almost three centuries they were
considered infallible.
If the creation of the
universe, the development of the solar system and our planet earth
and the subsequent evolution of mankind are to be understood in
their true perspective, all of these events must be visualised
within the time frame of the whole universe. Nowadays space is
usually taken for granted and is often regarded as a limitless void,
which is not correct. Indeed, there may be more than one universe,
each with its own time and space. The first to record their concepts
of matter and space seem to have been the Atomists of ancient
Greece. Leucippus, the Greek philosopher of Miletus who flourished
in the fifth century BCE, is regarded as the originator of atomistic
cosmology, which his pupil Democritus (c.460-c.370 BCE)
developed more fully. The theory is expounded in The Great World System,
a book usually credited to Leucippus, whose writings cannot be
reliably separated from those of Democritus. In 1755 a German
philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), was the first to suggest
that the earth had been formed from a nebula. In 1796 a French
mathematical astronomer, Pierre Simon the Marquis de Laplace
(1749-1827), was the first to suggest that the solar system had
developed in a slowly rotating mass of incandescent gas that had
been flung from the sun. Various other theories have been put
forward for the origin of the earth, including a collision or a near
collision of a comet with the sun, as well as the separation of a
double sun. However the nebula hypotheses of Kant and Laplace are
now generally accepted as the probable manner in which the solar
system was formed.
The discoveries of modern
science indicate that the big bang,
which is believed to have resulted in the creation of our universe,
occurred about 15,000 million years ago. Our solar system began to
evolve about 4,500 million years ago, when gravitational forces
within one of the myriad nebulae of gas and dust in our universe
began to drag the spiralling material towards the centre of the
nebula, thus forming our incandescent sun. The remainder of the
nebula formed a vortex around the sun and the heavier elements
gradually coalesced to form Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, the four
inner planets now orbiting the sun. The lighter and more volatile
materials in the vortex also coalesced to form Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, the five distant planets orbiting the
sun. The gas and dust from which our solar system was formed was not
unique. It is now estimated that as much as 80 per cent of the
matter in the universe is composed of gas and dust that cannot be
seen. During this formative stage of the solar system, over about
700 million years, there were repeated cataclysmic collisions
between the orbiting bodies. The evidence of these events is still
clearly visible on the moon, although on earth it has largely been
obliterated by erosion. The recently observed collision of the
Shoemaker-Levy comet with Jupiter, which created fireballs the size
of the earth, characterise the formative period of our solar system.
A belt of residual debris from these collisions, comprising millions
of rocky asteroids, still occupies much of the region between the
orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This belt is similar in composition to
Saturn's three main and two faint rings that form a complete and
unbroken band around the planets equator, which are regarded as the
most beautiful in our solar system.
In the present context it also
is important to understand how the continents of the earth were
formed. In 1620 Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the English philosopher
who probably is best known for his Advancement of Learning
published in 1605, postulated the theory that all the continents
were once joined together. Various books and maps on the subject had
been prepared before the study of land mass formations became the
lifetime work of a German meteorologist, Alfred Lothar Wegener
(1880-1930), who developed the theory of continental drift. There is
now irrefutable geological, geodetic, geophysical, palaeontological
and palaeo-climatic evidence that the earth's land masses were a
single continent, now called Pangaea, until about the
end of the Paleozoic Era about 200 million years ago. Towards the
end of the Jurassic Period, about 135 million years ago, Pangaea began to
separate into two continents. The northern continent was Laurasia,
which comprised what are now North America, Greenland, Europe
and all of Asia except India. The southern continent was Gondwanaland,
which comprised South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and
Australia. Recently the developments in palaeomagnetism, which is
the history of the changing magnetic field of the earth, have also
provided evidence of the continental drift and have located the
positions of the various landmasses in successive periods on the
geological time scale.
The landmasses reached their
present positions during the last 50 million years, but are still
moving at measurable rates. The North and South America continents
are also rotating separately in a clockwise direction and the
continent of Eurasia is rotating anticlockwise. The basic concept of
continental drift is simple and is called plate tectonics,
describing the structural features of the earth that allow the land
masses to move. The concept is founded on evidence that the
comparatively rigid outer shell of the earth, called the lithosphere from the
Greek lithos that means stone,
is made up of about ten slabs or plates from 75 to 125 kilometres
thick, floating on a weak and partially molten layer from 100 to 140
kilometres thick that comprises the upper mantle of the earth. This
region of rock plasticity and flowage is called the asthenosphere from the
Greek asthenos meaning weak.
Beno Gutenberg (1889-1960), a German born American geophysicist,
discovered the asthenosphere when he
detected changes in the seismic wave velocities. Most of the
continental plate boundaries coincide with mid-oceanic ridges, but
the rim of the Pacific Ocean is a notable exception. Many plate
boundaries, especially those of the Pacific Plate, coincide with
major earthquake foci and regions of high volcanic activity. The
process of plate separation is called sea floor
spreading.
The earliest fossilised
microbes yet found date from about 3,800 million years ago, when the
earth was extremely hot. This was at the end of the early formative
period of the earth that ushered in the era in which we are now
living, in which events can be dated according to the geological
time scale. Hyperthermophiles, which are very similar organisms,
have recently been discovered flourishing in geothermally heated
rock strata, especially around the deep ocean vents. Compared with
the vast period of time since the big bang when our
universe was created, the tenure of all forms of life on earth has
been very brief, though relatively long in relation to mankind's
existence. Plants came into existence more than 600 million years
ago, in Precambrian times long before the first animals appeared on
earth. The first animals on earth were invertebrates living in the
sea in Ordovician times, 450 million years ago or earlier. The
earliest fossils that can be classified as mammals are from the
sedimentary rocks of the Triassic period, about 190 million years
ago. The first primates were the prosimians of the Palaeocene epoch
about 60 million years ago.
The earliest anthropoids were
the monkeys living during the Miocene epoch, about 20 million years
ago. The early apes, which possibly are the ancestors of the present
great apes and are classified as the genus Dryopithecus,
developed over the ensuing 3 million years or more. They were
followed by a hominid-like ape called Ramapithecus, whose
remains are found in the late Miocene and early Pliocene ages from
about 14 million to 8 million years ago. The next and more
human-like ape, Australopithecus,
appears to have lived from about 2 million years ago until about
700,000 years ago. Until several well preserved hominid skeletons
1.75 million years old were discovered during the 1990s in the
ancient village of Dmanisi in Georgia, mentioned in relation to the
investigations that Bryan Sykes carried out to determine the origins
and descent of mankind based on genetic codes revealed in the
mitochondrial DNA of diverse groups of people, the earliest known
hominid remains whose characteristics are similar to those of modern
humans were the skulls of Homo sapiens unearthed
in the Thames River valley in England and also near Steinheim in
Germany. They respectively date from about 250,000 and 200,000 years
ago. No other hominid remains have been discovered until those of Neanderthal man that
date from about 70,000 to about 40,000 years ago, during which
period their characteristics gradually changed to become more like
those of modern humans.
Some of the earliest remains
identical with modern humans were found in Borneo and are only about
40,000 years old. Other remains identical with modern humans have
been found in France and western New South Wales and are between
30,000 and 20,000 years old. The deposits of Lake Mungo, near the
western border of New South Wales, were laid down continuously from
as early as 68000 BCE until about 17000 BCE. They have
yielded the most ancient relics of human activity in Australia.
Several early dates from radiocarbon tests prove that humans had
occupied the Lake Mungo area by about 31000 BCE. However as
recently as 1999, using the latest dating techniques, a human
skeleton that was found at Lake Mungo in 1974 has been determined to
be at least 56,000 years old, which indicates that humans could have
arrived in Australia as early as 60,000 years ago.
The manner in which mankind
dispersed from the Garden of Eden around the world,
from one or even from several places of origin, is exemplified by
the epic journey made by the first inhabitants of Australia.
Previously it was believed that about 45,000 years ago, after
migrating overland for about 15,000 kilometres from the cradle
of civilisation in the “fertile crescent” of
the Near East, at an assumed average dispersal rate of about one
kilometre per year, the aboriginals finally arrived in Australia by
sea. However, the latest available evidence shows that the
Australian aborigines did not come from the Near East, but had their
origins in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless it is believed that their
migration from Southeast Asia probably did begin at about the same
time as it was previously thought that they left the Near East,
which is about 60,000 years ago. In any event, their final movement
by sea to the continent of Australia is certainly one of the
earliest known deep-sea voyages undertaken for migration. It
probably was in the vanguard of the migrations from Sundaland to
Melanesia and Polynesia.
It is now known that there
were several waves of migration to Australia, some of which must
have taken place during the last Ice Age. That was when the level of
the ocean was so low that New Guinea, the continental landmass of
Australia and the island of Tasmania were joined by land bridges,
forming the continent called Sahul Land. Nevertheless some
substantial deep-sea crossings were necessary to complete the
journey, because although most islands in the South China Sea and
what is now the archipelago of Indonesia were connected by land
bridges to the subcontinent called Sundaland, they were not
connected to Sahul Land. The archipelago islands of Sulawesi, Timor
and the Moluccas were much larger than they are today, but they were
still separated by deep ocean channels that were up to 100
kilometres across. Although it is conceivable that this episode of
human migration could have begun from the traditional Garden
of Eden, the evidence now strongly suggests that their
Garden of Eden was in Sundaland. In any event,
migration to Australia was significantly more difficult than
migration to the Americas, because the Americas were connected to
Asia by an extensive land bridge during the same period.
Every story of the flood
indicates that it was not a local event, but a worldwide calamity of
cataclysmic proportions that caused a sudden an unprecedented rise
in water levels. It therefore is obvious that precipitation alone
could not have been the primary cause of the flood, even though
heavy rainfalls undoubtedly accompanied the event. Two natural
factors that could cause abnormal rainfalls concurrently with huge
rises in ocean levels are sudden movements of the continental plates
and a meltdown of the polar ice caps. Moreover, it is possible that
either of these events could have triggered the onset of the other.
The continental plates are in an almost continuous state of
transition, so that although a movement sufficient to cause an
earthquake of global proportions might be unusual, such an event
almost certainly would have occurred from time to time. As the polar
ice caps contain at least two per cent of the earth's water at
present, the ocean levels would be raised by 40 metres or more if
they were to melt now. When the ice caps were at their maximum
depths about 18,000 years ago, during the last period of glaciation,
they covered about 30 per cent of the earth's land area and the
ocean levels were at least 130 metres lower and in some areas as
much as 180 metres lower than at present. The rapid melt down of the
polar ice caps at that time would have inundated occupied land to a
great depth, which probably explains why the Genesis story of the
flood says that the Ark came to rest on a mountain, as indeed do
most myths of the flood.
Archaeological evidence
indicates that there was a great flood about 12,000 years ago, which
is supported by palaeontological findings. For example, a vast
number of species became extinct in America, Asia, Australia and
Europe during the last Ice Age, the great majority of which were
destroyed during the period from 15000 BCE to 8000 BCE,
but especially between 11000 BCE and 9000 BCE. The present
ice cover in Greenland and Antarctica are the remnants of vast
sheets of ice that melted from the lower latitudes of the earth
about 12,000 years ago. There are coal seams and other evidence
indicating that for many thousands of years at some time prior to
the last Ice Age, the climate of Antarctica had been tropical and
later subtropical. The ice sheets in Greenland at present are as
thick as 3 kilometres and in Antarctica they are as thick as 4
kilometres, compressing the land to significantly lower levels than
originally. Much greater compressions would have existed towards the
end of the last great Ice Age, which would have contributed to even
greater depths of inundation when the pressure of the ice sheets was
reduced. There are countless legends about the creation, but at
least five hundred from around the world say that a cataclysmic
flood almost destroyed mankind. In his book entitled The Flood Reconsidered: A Review
of the Evidences of Geology, Archaeology, Ancient Literature and the
Bible,
Frederich A. Filby records that an eminent German geographer and
anthropologist, Dr Richard Andree, carried out detailed studies of
86 deluge legends from six different regions of the world, of which
he found that 62 had not been derived from the Mesopotamian and
Hebrew accounts.
Because the fertile crescent of the
Tigris and Euphrates Rivers has long been regarded as the location
of the Garden of Eden, it naturally followed that any
evidence of floods found during archaeological investigations of
ancient cities in that region were considered important. Excavations
have been carried out in more than a dozen towns and cities that
existed before the flood, including well known places like Ur the
birthplace of Abraham; Fara the home of Utnapishtim who was
the Babylonian Noah; Kish an early centre of Sumerian
kingship only a few kilometres east of Babylon; and Ninevah,
which was founded by Nimrod. Before the flood Ur would have been at
sea level at the head of the Persian Gulf, about 20 kilometres
from Eridu, the traditional site of the Garden of
Eden. The other towns respectively were at distances of
about 100, 250 and 750 kilometres further up the river basin. Flood
layers found at these places have been dated to about 4000 BCE,
previously hailed as evidence of the Genesis Flood,
but on the basis of currently available information that view has
now been reversed. Later it was believed that the silt deposits were
the result of the local floods that occur spasmodically in the
valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In fact those discoveries
confirm that the Genesis Flood must have occurred
before 4000 BCE as dated by Archbishop Ussher. Sir Charles
Leonard Woolley (1880-1960), one of the most eminent English
archaeologists, was the first to discover the Mesopotamian flood
deposits at Ur when carrying out excavations in the old city in
1929. He found a solid bed of water laid clay about 3 metres thick,
buried under several strata that were rich in the remains of human
occupation. Below the water laid clay from the flood there was
further debris, but it came from a completely different
civilisation. In the same year another bed of clean water laid clay,
about 1.5 metres thick, was found in the lower strata of the
ruins at Kish, which the flood tablets from the library of
Assur-banipal at Nineveh say was the first city to be rebuilt after
the flood.
The Joint Expedition of the
Field Museum and Oxford University carried out the excavations at
Kish under the leadership of Dr Stephen Langdon. The relics found
underneath the 1.5 metres thick flood layer included a four-wheeled
chariot and skeletons of the animals that drew it. Those remains
also were from an entirely different type of culture from those
found above the flood layer. During excavations in 1931 Dr Eric
Schmidt, from the University Museum of Pennsylvania, found a flood
layer of alluvial sand and clay that had been deposited between the
middle and bottom cities at Fara. The value of these excavations was
enhanced when Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan (1904-1978), director of
the British Museum Excavations, made important complementary
discoveries in 1932-1933. When supervising excavations at Ninevah he
excavated a pit that was almost 30 metres deep and revealed a 2.5
metres thick stratum of viscous mud and riverine sand. Five
prehistoric strata of occupation were found above the flood layer,
but again the relics found below the layer were from an earlier and
completely different culture.
In Eden of the
East, Stephen Oppenheimer provides a graphical summary, in
the following words, encapsulating the train of events that would
have taken place after the deposition of the flood layers that were
exposed during the foregoing archaeological
investigations:
“The
last flushing of glacial meltwater finally slowed to a trickle as
the rise in sea-level peaked on continental shelves around 5500
years ago. It was as if a curtain of water had been drawn across the
remains of previous coastal settlements. Pots and implements that
allowed archaeologists to define prehistoric cultures were
inaccessible; they lay under silt and under the sea, miles from the
shoreline. But there was a window. Over the next few thousand years
the sea-level settled back by up to 5 metres, and the coastline
emerged again, to a distance over 100 kilometres. This partial
drawing back of the curtain allowed Woolley to peer under the silt
layers, at the few hundred years after the main force of the flood
of Utnapishtim struck. Because the marine inundation persisted from
around 7500 to 5500 years ago on many of these sites, there was a
big gap between the archaeological remains under the silt layer and
those above it. Woolley’s extended example bridged the transition
from the Neoliothic to the Metal Age.”
The story of Genesis and the
multitude of myths and traditional histories from around the world
all say that there was a cataclysmic event, which created a
worldwide flood that devastated an existing civilisation. Although
archaeological investigations have not yet unearthed tangible
evidence that proves the existence of an advanced civilisation
before the great flood, the considerations outlined above do not
preclude the possibility of such a civilisation. Moreover, a great
deal of circumstantial evidence supports the existence of such a
civilisation. For example, if that civilisation had developed in a
similar way to our present civilisation, the main areas of
habitation would have been concentrated along the coastlines, which
would now be buried on the continental shelf well below the present
ocean level. Even today about a third of the world population is
scattered sparsely in the hinterland, with very few large structures
or substantial towns to identify their presence, so that little
tangible evidence of their existence would be found thousands of
years after the demise of the occupants. Any inhabitants of the
hinterland before the great flood would probably have existed under
similar circumstances if they were not hunter-gatherers, so there
would be very little tangible evidence of their occupation. Because
the humans who emerged from the Garden of Eden about
60,000 years ago had about four times as much time to develop as the
present civilisation has had since the flood that occurred about
12,000 years ago, there is every reason to believe that there would
have been an advanced or at least a significant pre-flood
civilisation.
Traditionally, Atlantis was a
powerful and magnificent island city that lay beyond the Strait of
Gibraltar, which in ancient Greece was referred to as the narrows of
the Pillars of Hercules. In
his dialogues called the Timaeus and the Critias, the great
Athenian philosopher Plato (c.428-348 BCE) recorded that
Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea "in one terrible day and one
terrible night when terrible earthquakes then floods
occurred". Solon (c.638-558 BCE), who was a statesman
and lawmaker of Athens and one of the Seven Sages of
Greece,
was told the story in Egypt and took it back to Greece. Solon said
that it was the priest of Sais who told him of the great
civilisation of Atlantis that had developed 9,000 years earlier.
Many hypotheses have been advanced for its location and various
searches have been undertaken to find it. According to a recent
count, about 20,000 books have been published on the subject of
Atlantis. It is of interest to note that during the 1920s an
American clairvoyant, Edgar Cayce, foretold that Atlantis would
reappear near the Bahamas in about 1968. While carrying out an
extensive deep-sea diving expedition during 1968 an American
zoologist, Dr J.M.Valentine, reported that he had discovered some
extraordinary structures of huge stone, deep in the sea off the
island of Little Bimini, in the famous area known as the Bermuda Triangle.
Although no evidence has been advanced to prove that these
structures were not part of ancient Atlantis, most archaeologists
are sceptical.
In their book entitled When the Sky Fell, Rand
and Rose Flem-Ath advance convincing evidence that Atlantis was in
Lesser Antarctica, now buried under about 2,000 metres of ice. It is
of interest to note that Plato's description of Atlantis bears a
remarkable resemblance to this area. The evidence that has been
advanced in support of Lesser Antarctica as the site of Atlantis
includes ancient maps that accurately delineate the present
subglacial topography of Antarctica as determined by modern seismic
surveys, especially those made during the International Geophysical
Year of 1958. Various ancient maps reveals several stages in the
advance of the Antarctic glaciation, which began during the period
when it would have been possible to sail between the Antarctic land
masses, which was from about 15,000 years ago until about 13,000
years ago. In his book entitled Fingerprints of the
Gods,
Graham Hancock summarises the evidence of Antarctica and the ancient
maps in the following words:
"Is it possible that a human
civilisation, sufficiently advanced to have mapped Antarctica, could
have developed by 13000 BC and later disappeared? And, if so,
how much later? The combined effect of the Piri Reis, Oronteus
Finaeus, Mercator and Buache Maps is the strong, though disturbing,
impression that Antarctica may have been continuously surveyed over
a period of several thousands of years as the ice-cap gradually
spread outwards from the interior, increasing its grip with every
passing millenium but not engulfing all the coasts of the southern
continent until around 4000 BC."
A plausible explanation for
large parts of Antarctica being virtually ice free until as late as
4000 BCE is provided by the mechanism of earth crust
displacement.
Professor Charles H Hapgood
advanced his theory of the phenomenon in 1953 and has
expounded it in a book entitled Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to
Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. The mechanism only
takes place with comparatively small sections of the earth's crust
and it must not to be confused with plate tectonics,
commonly referred to as continental drift, which has
already been discussed. Expressed simply, earth crust displacement
takes place when the rotation of the earth has developed a
centrifugal momentum in the unsymmetrically distributed masses of
the earth's crust, which is sufficient to cause small sections of
the earth’s crust to move comparatively rapidly along weakened
planes, allowing a better state of equilibrium to be established.
When checking his theory, Professor Hapgood carried out a detailed
analysis of all available ancient maps. In Maps of the Ancient Sea
Kings, Professor Hapgood concludes that Antarctica must have
been mapped when virtually free of ice.
The worldwide traditions of
the flood, including the story of Atlantis and the various South
American accounts of the bearded, pale skinned men who appeared from
the south in a time of chaos and upheaval in prehistoric times, are
not the only evidence of an advanced civilisation before our own.
Consider, for example, the knowledge of astronomy necessary for
Stonehenge to be set out with sufficient accuracy to indicate the
multitude of important alignments of the sun, the moon and the
eclipses from about 2000 BCE to 1500 BCE. Extensive
computer analyses undertaken by Gerald S Hawkins to solve these
alignments are recorded in Stonehenge Decoded. It
would have taken many centuries of astronomical observations to
obtain the fundamental information, to analyse the data and to solve
the relevant complex astronomical equations before construction
began, all of which supposedly was beyond the capabilities of those
who constructed Stonehenge. Christopher Chippindale gives a graphic
account of the history and purpose of Stonehenge in Stonehenge
Complete.
Radiocarbon dating of pine
wood from three pits near the entrance to the site of Stonehenge
indicate that they were probably excavated from about 9000 BCE
to 8000 BCE, so that they probably are not related to the later
construction. The earliest evidence of farming in the area dates
from about 4000 BCE and the earliest monuments appeared only a
century or so later. The earliest work on the present structure has
been dated to about 3100 BCE. The Stonehenge People,
subtitled An Exploration of Life in
Neolithic Britain 4700-2000 BC, is an interesting book
on this subject by Rodney Castleden, a British geographer and
geomorphologist. Another recent book that has a bearing on the
scientific aspects of Stonehenge is Uriel’s Machine,
subtitled The Ancient Origins of Science, by
Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. The mass of evidence provided
leads us to the almost inevitable conclusion that the essential
astronomical work at Stonehenge must have been done by an advanced
civilisation before the flood.
The construction and alignment
of the pyramids at Giza present a similar problem to that
encountered with Stonehenge. A detailed analysis of the sloping
shafts in the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) proves that, at the
time of their construction in about 2450 BCE, the shafts were
designed to point accurately to various stars as they transited
across the celestial meridian. These stars were of importance in
relation to the ancient Egyptian myths concerning the passing of the
soul from the earthly to the heavenly Duat. It has been shown
by astronomical calculations that, when the pyramid was constructed,
the southern shaft from the King's Chamber pointed to Al Nitak, the
left hand star in Orion's Belt, which the pyramid represents. The
northern shaft pointed to Thuban in the constellation of Draco, the
mysterious abode of Tuart the goddess of fecundity and childbearing.
The southern shaft from the Queen's Chamber pointed to Sirius, which
is the star of Osiris, whilst the northern shaft pointed to the
centre of the four stars forming the adze shaped "head" of Ursa Minor,
alluding to the adze used in the ceremony of "opening of the mouth"
that was performed by Horus. Moreover, the three Great Pyramids are
accurately located to reflect on earth the heavenly location of the
three stars of the Belt of Orion, whilst the Great Sphinx is aligned
to mark the position of sunrise at the vernal equinox, as it would
have been in about 10450 BCE, which to the ancient Egyptians
was the Zep Tepi,
or First Time of Osiris.
Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert explain the significance of the
Zep Tepi in The Orion Mystery and
Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock provide further background in Keeper of Genesis. As it
was in relation to Stonehenge, the essential astronomical work and
planning of the three Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx appear to
have been carried out by an advanced civilisation before the time of
the flood, although construction was not carried out until after the
flood when civilisation was being re-established.
Ample scientific evidence is
now available to establish beyond doubt that there was worldwide
flooding during the melt down towards the end of the last great Ice
Age and that much of it was catastrophic in nature. There also is
substantial evidence that the rapid rise in ocean levels at the peak
of the melt down would have been magnified suddenly by the bursts of
energy caused by movements of Antarctica as a result of earth crust displacement
during the same period, as well as by decompression of the
earth that had been compressed under massive ice sheets, especially
in the northern hemisphere. As all of the available evidence also
substantiates the existence of a civilisation before the occurrence
of such a catastrophic flood, as recorded in Genesis and supported
by a multitude of myths from peoples all around the world, it seems
reasonable to assume that our present civilisation owes its origin
to members of an earlier civilisation who survived the worldwide
floods near the end of the last great Ice Age.
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