The Real Landscapes of the Great Flood Myths
nautil.us
nautil.us
I am enamoured of Protong in particular, not just because of the nature of Szukalski himself as an enormous crackpot, but also because the concept of a sub-meta-proto- language, readable in all ancient art (and thus demonstrating a common root), is highly fascinating.
Through Szukalski I learned to try to see the 'assembly language' of human culture as a persistent meme across generations of civilizations, and that in itself - irresepective of Szukalsksi's other heinous crackpot racist theories - is a good reason for anyone to check out Protong!
https://books.google.at/books/about/Behold_The_Protong.html?...
(He is a crackpot - the yeti stuff is a load of bollocks. But Protong itself, in my opinion, has a great deal of merit as an artistic pursuit..)
It wouldn't surprise me. Seems plausible at least.
Occasional contact with Neanderthals by the people that would eventually move into Northern Europe, and possibly also the lack of anywhere for Neanderthals to retreat to, leading to more conflict, may have exacerbated the "otherness" with which they were seen (a natural extension of conflict/war), and solidified them under a different name for those peoples, which was then passed down through oral tradition.
I'm not saying any of this is likely, just that I'm not aware of anything that makes it entirely implausible (but I'm by no means an expert in the area). It's an interesting "what if".
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_migration
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_islands_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway
Nice idea but it seems improbable
What is the kernel in the Zuni creation myth, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuni_mythology#Creation ? It describes true things, like that trees grow from seeds, but that's a rather low bar.
also, science gets a lot of credit for 'discoveries' it had no part in. most of the time, science is just proving what everyone already knew. the other major portion of the time, discoveries were made by tinkerers, which are often looked down upon by scientists even though they make up a large portion of break throughs.
granted, our history over 5,000 years ago oral accounts, or myths as you like to call them, do not do a particularly good job after such a time at telling us what happened. but quite often, there is a large amount of truth to be found if you are willing to listen.
EDIT I have some cases to counteract your theory:
- Flat Earth
- Earth as centre of Universe
- Quantum mechanics
- Relativity
- Thermodynamics
- Newton's laws
- Evolution
- God(s)
- Bible stories in general
God: science has contributed no new knowledge.
Bible stories: How? For example the creation account in Genesis was regarded as metaphorical at least as far back as St Augustine's time, 1600 years ago (Augustine supports what he calls a literal interpretation, but that means that each thing in genesis has a specific real life counterpart - so each of seven days corresponds to some kind of undefined epoch). Revelations is clearly metaphorical if you read up on the obvious contemporary references it contains. American Evangelical style biblical literalism is a heresy of the modern era - hardly a sign that scientific knowledge is encouraging progress.
That said, I do not think the idea that science incorporates a lot of knowledge from oral sources is false. It is based on ideas developed from pre-scientific ideas - ancient greek philosophy, the Christian idea of a universe that follows laws etc. - but that is hardly surprising as ideas rarely appear from nowhere.
God is a myth/legend. There is no knowledge.
> Bible stories: How? For example the creation account in Genesis was regarded as metaphorical at least as far back as St Augustine's time, 1600 years ago (Augustine supports what he calls a literal interpretation, but that means that each thing in genesis has a specific real life counterpart - so each of seven days corresponds to some kind of undefined epoch). Revelations is clearly metaphorical if you read up on the obvious contemporary references it contains. American Evangelical style biblical literalism is a heresy of the modern era - hardly a sign that scientific knowledge is encouraging progress.
Agreed that Evangelical literalism is ridiculous. However, even taken allegorically the genesis myth adds nothing to what we know about the Universe. Furthermore what we know about the Universe is in spite of this myth not following from it.
> ancient greek philosophy
Could be regarded as a pre-cursor to modern science (not directly but in terms of the process of a species learning about thinking).
> Christian idea of a universe that follows laws
Sorry how does this contribute to science? Also what laws? The laws of some God myth?
If you're truly serious about science as I think you want to be, you might also want to revise that list of yours, as it suggests less of an interest in science itself, and more of scientism and naturalism which are both circular philosophies in the pop-science Dawkins crusade.
Furthermore, to define scientific progress as "a story of overcoming verbal traditions" might show that you have something to learn of the study of ancient history, specifically the accuracy and role of oral tradition in knowledge. You might also want to read up on the laws of evidence.
Some people want to appropriate science as some kind of vehicle in their own personal war against religion, and I don't think you can rationally make it that. Science has no interest at all in, or ability to study anything beyond the natural. Read a few quotes from Carl Sagan if you're still not convinced.
Science doesn't like being anthropomorphized.
I mean that only partially in jest. You mean "science" here as shorthand for "people who follow the natural philosophy known as 'science'". I'll call those people 'scientists', as is the normal practice.
The thing is, there are scientists who investigate putative supernatural events, such as ESP in its various forms, or supernatural events like stigmata from a stone sculpture.
This is possible because some supernatural events affect the natural world. If someone says they can use dowsing to detect a buried bottle of water, then the success is part of the natural world. If during unblinded tests they can find the water while during blinded tests they cannot, then it's likely that any success is not due to a supernatural agent but to to the internal knowledge of the dowser.
Similarly, some claim that water molecules can be influenced by thought. (Eg, the film 'What the Bleep Do We Know'.) Such claims can be tested, which puts them in the natural world.
However, other supernatural events, such as received wisdom, might have no impact on the natural world. If you say the god Mxyzptlk told you that left-handed people should not eat soup, then there's nothing that science can do or say about it.
While if you say that Mxyzptlk told you that William the Conqueror in 1072 liked to smoke Cuban cigars and eat macadamia nuts while watching Game of Thrones, then science still can't say if Mxyzptlk does or doesn't exist, but can show that such an event was ahistorical. It is much more likely that Mxyzptlk doesn't exist, or that Mxyzptlk told you a lie.
Going back to your phrase "Science has no interest at all in, or ability to study anything beyond the natural". What you say is true. If something has no impact on the natural word, then there's nothing that science can do or say about it. But the vast majority of supernatural event also have a natural component, and those real-world effects are in the domain of science.
Are you limiting yourself to only those events with no real-world effect? Or do you want to include supernatural events like a global flooding, which would leave physical traces had it occurred?
The issue is not the interest of scientist, is the applicability and function of the method known as "science".
Global flooding isn't inherently a supernatural event, and can be investigated with science, but science cannot, by its very nature, address any supernatural cause, ask it can do is produce a natural model of causation.
We can test two populations, ones who receive stranger prayer, and ones who do not, and see if one population gets better treatment. We can look at the epidemiology to see if people from one religion, who practice healing prayer, have different health outcomes than those who do not. (This is tricky but not intractable because there is more than one factor at play.)
Thus we have the ability to detect if there is something outside of the current model. Detecting failures of the current model is part of science, even when it it cannot produce a better model other than "here there be dragons." What's at issue is that so far those gaps seem to get smaller and smaller the more we look into them. Hence the phrase "God of the gaps."
We of course have many examples of thing which were outside of the then-current understanding of science. The "ultraviolet catastrophe" is a classic example. The irreconcilability of general relativity and quantum mechanics is another.
But we did not call that "supernatural", even though when we knew there was a gap in our understanding.
At this point, global flooding of the sort discussed would have to be a supernatural event. There is no place for the water to come from or go to. There is no physical trace of such an event. Therefore, it would either require planetary engineering of the sort more appropriate for science fiction, or some sort of magical or divine intervention.
That's obviously possible.
What's subject to debate is whether that action in the material universe produces any change in outcomes in the material universe.
> We can test two populations, ones who receive stranger prayer, and ones who do not, and see if one population gets better treatment. We can look at the epidemiology to see if people from one religion, who practice healing prayer, have different health outcomes than those who do not. (This is tricky but not intractable because there is more than one factor at play.)
Sure.
> Thus we have the ability to detect if there is something outside of the current model.
Science is all about detecting things outside the current model, creating a hypothetical models which include those things, validating whether they explain observed realities better than the current model, and updating models.
OTOH, once it does so, the new model is still, by definition, a naturalistic model which excludes the supernatural. If intercessory prayer has an influence on health effects, not only can science detect it -- but by detecting it can quantify it (even if the necessary model is one of changes in the probability distribution of outcomes, not a simple direct consistent change in outcomes) and incorporate it into a naturalistic model.
> At this point, global flooding of the sort discussed would have to be a supernatural event. There is no place for the water to come from or go to.
No, it wouldn't. The lack of knowledge of the details of the mechanism or explanation for something which is nevertheless an element of the best model does not suddenly make the incompletely-explained thing supernatural; otherwise, things like the Planck constant are "supernatural".
Neuroscience may have something to say about the origin within one's brain of the idea that Mxyzptlk has any opinion whatsoever about left-handed soup eaters.
To add on to what the sibling poster said, the Earth was widely accepted as round by at least some cultures by at least 500 BC, due to overwhelming and easily observable natural evidence that the Earth was round.
- The shape of the Earth's shadow on the Moon is a circle.
- The further you travel south, the more the stars change, 'rising' before you and 'setting' behind you.
- When ships sail away, the bottom of the ship disappears first over the horizon, leaving the sails still visible. The same is true for mountains.
There were certainly some ancient peoples who imagined a flat earth (or a flat disc-shaped earth), but the idea of a round Earth is very old and most probably predates the Greek philosophers.
Could you clarify? What is the huge kernel of truth in the Zuni creation myth? How do we distinguish those kernels from the non-true elements of the myth? Did humans once live "in total darkness in a place deep in the earth known as the fourth world" and have "horns and tails, but no mouths or anuses"?
Certainly elements of that creation myth are not reconcilable with other creation myths, so some of them must be incorrect. How do you tell which are incorrect?
The statement was that most myths contain a kernel of truth. If that is meaningful, then shouldn't many of the creation myths also contain a kernel of truth? If so, what is the kernel in all of those creation myths?
One kernel is "people want a story to explain how they came to be." I'm actually fine with that. But then it's not really a story of oral history, but of human desires.
Another is to keep looking through the myth until something works. This seems rather haphazard in that all stories have at least something which is true. For example, Loki is the son of Fárbauti. Loki is of course either a god or jötunn, and neither of those exist, but some people are sons of other people. Is it really useful to say that this is a kernel of truth?
So there was a race before, we humans, and we all spoke the same language then. Then, the flood came. The language faded and cultures re-appeared with a 'memory' of previous times, and those common memories can be extrapolated from various common forms of ancient art found to be broadly dispersed, but yet strangely related ..
Could such evidence exist? Certainly. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuruppak mentions that "At the end of the Uruk period [around 3100 BC] there was an archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak". This marks the end of the antediluvian rulers of the Sumerian King List. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List#Antediluvia... .) Therefore, there are physical remnants of a local flood from 5,000 years ago, which correspond to historical records. If there were a global flood then it too would leave physical traces.
Floods are not uncommon events. In some areas they occur yearly, in others they occur once a decade or one a generation. There are myths around the world which refer to the sun, to the moon, to storms, and to other natural events that were not singular in nature. Floods should fall in that local category.
You hypothesize that 'we all spoke the same language' before this event.
The Chinese flood myth concerns events that took place about 2200 BCE, and emphasizes how human efforts were able to mitigate its effects. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_%28China%29 .) This is 1,000 years after the flood in Shuruppak.
We have written records of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Eblaite, dating from before 2300 BC. Indeed, the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt started about 1,000 years before the Chinese flood.
Therefore, the Chinese flood myth cannot be about an event which occurred when all humanity shared a common language.
Therefore it cannot be the case that all great flood myths refer to the same singular event at you describe. Which means we cannot look to the comment element - a large flood - in order to make an inference that there was a singular event. We would have to use other common elements, and there are no other world-wide common elements.
My question is, given a myth, how can we identify the kernel of truth? Did humans in early Zuni culture live "crowded tightly together in total darkness in a place deep in the earth known as the fourth world"? Or is there something else we should consider that kernel?
If we are not careful, then we can look to a modern myth, like the 'myth of Superman', and posit that the breakup of Krypton explains why there are meteorites.
Modern myths must also stand the same scrutiny which is why we should be careful but not alarmed or dismissive without testing.
If one creation myth says that humans came from "the nethermost of the four cave-wombs of the world", another creation myth say that humans come from logs given spirit and life, and a third says that people come from the tears of Khepri, then we know that at least two of them, if not all three, are incorrect - even if we cannot test them directly.
(In any case, we can test them - none of those myths are compatible with the physical evidence of human evolution.)
The original statement was that "many [myths] must, necessarily, contain a kernel of truth". My question was, how do we tell which is the kernel of truth? That trees grow from seeds? Or that humans come from cave-dwelling creatures? Or that the Zuni people tried to make sense of the petrified bones and landscape forms by creating a post-hoc story to explain things?
At some point the suggestion that there is a 'kernel of truth' become useless, as there is a kernel of truth in nearly everything that humans do.
Your statement, that myths could be used to understand history, is not controversial. I gave examples from the 1800s and 1900s as previous examples, and there are certainly many more.