Ancient textual evidence for planetary catastrophe?

[soulsurvivor]

Thanks for the link to Pierre Grimes. It's wonderful to watch and listen to his teaching.

[Grey Cloud]

Not exactly ancient textual evidence but an interesting little series of articles nevertheless.
Nile Valley Journal
http://www.charlessfinch.com/The_Nile_Journal.html
Lot of good thinking and interesting ideas in there.

[Grey Cloud]

Myth - the Final Phase of Platonic Education
http://www.prometheustrust.co.uk/Meadow ... sophy.html

Good summation of certain aspects of Plato's Philosophy told through reference to The Iliad and Odyssey.

[Extant Taxon]

Myth - the Final Phase of Platonic Education
http://www.prometheustrust.co.uk/Meadow ... sophy.html

Good summation of certain aspects of Plato's Philosophy told through reference to The Iliad and Odyssey.

Excellent. Thanks.

[Grey Cloud]

Myth - the Final Phase of Platonic Education
http://www.prometheustrust.co.uk/Meadow ... sophy.html

Good summation of certain aspects of Plato's Philosophy told through reference to The Iliad and Odyssey.

Excellent. Thanks.

Hi Extant Taxon and welcome aboard. Glad you liked it. I've got a sackful of similar stuff.

Just a thought: We have a (semi-)extinct Texan who moseys in here now and again, any connection?

[Extant Taxon]

Hi Extant Taxon and welcome aboard. Glad you liked it. I've got a sackful of similar stuff.

Just a thought: We have a (semi-)extinct Texan who moseys in here now and again, any connection?

No. None that I know of. I'm across the pond in fair (though in reality often rainsoaked) Cymru.

I'm going through the twenty or so pages of this thread slowly. I'll contribute something if I can, but I'll read through the whole thread first and go through the links they contain too.

[Grey Cloud]

Hi Extant Taxon and welcome aboard. Glad you liked it. I've got a sackful of similar stuff.

Just a thought: We have a (semi-)extinct Texan who moseys in here now and again, any connection?

No. None that I know of. I'm across the pond in fair (though in reality often rainsoaked) Cymru.

I'm going through the twenty or so pages of this thread slowly. I'll contribute something if I can, but I'll read through the whole thread first and go through the links they contain too.

I'm up in Lancashire.
Look forward to your comments. How are you on Welsh myth, folklore etc?

[Extant Taxon]

I'm up in Lancashire.
Look forward to your comments. How are you on Welsh myth, folklore etc?

Lancashire eh? Very good. I'm particularly poor on Welsh folklore. Been a bit of a pop culture hound most of my life really. Decided to get more acquainted with the classical mythology that underpins so much of the mainstream literature and cinema and was then turned on fairly recently to catastrophism.

I don't think I'll be much help with any enquiries into Welsh myth.

[Morky555]

Try Immanuel Velikovsky's 'Worlds in Collision'. Full of textual references from all over the world.

What baffles me most is the way ancient people talk/write about the planets. On a clear night you might be able to see an planet as a pin point in the sky, but back then ancient people refer to planets (and their colors..!) as if they were as close as the moon. Anyone has an explanation for this?

[Grey Cloud]

Try Immanuel Velikovsky's 'Worlds in Collision'. Full of textual references from all over the world.

What baffles me most is the way ancient people talk/write about the planets. On a clear night you might be able to see an planet as a pin point in the sky, but back then ancient people refer to planets (and their colors..!) as if they were as close as the moon. Anyone has an explanation for this?

Hi Morky555 and welcome,
Velikovsky is not an ancient text and I'm not a big fan of V. as I have pointed out elsewhwere in this thread.
The colours assigned to th planets are not necessarily the same as the colour they appear to the eye. For example Venus is associated with green. Would you care to give an example of the ancients talking about planets as if they were as close as the moon?

[seasmith]

The Flood Refuge in the Taurus and Caucasus Mtns [North-South East-
West bridge]

http://encarta.msn.com/map_701511584/ca ... tains.html

The Bronze generation, however, was very corrupt. Zeus was angered by their impiety and sent a Great Deluge to the envelop the earth and destroy them. Only Deukalion and Pyrrha survived--having been warned of the impending calamnity by Prometheus, they mounted a chest and sailed to the dry peaks of Mount Parnassos. Other Greek regions also claimed survivors--King Dardanos was said to have sought refuge on Mount Ida in the Troad, Kerambos was carried to the heights of Mount Othrys by the Nymphs, Megaros fled to Mount Gerana, Arkas and Nyktimos were preserved on Mount Kyllene in Arkadia, and the tribe of Parnassos fled to the heights above Delphoi. Io and her son Epaphos, who lived in Egypt, were also preserved.

http://www.theoi.com/Heros/Deukalion.html

But...

Deukalion was the son of Prometheus, the creator of mankind, while Pyrrha was the daughter of Pandora, the first woman.

And...

PROMETHEUS was the Titan god of forethought and crafty counsel who was entrusted with the task of moulding mankind out of clay. [ or flood mud ].

Then, when Zeus withheld fire, he stole it from heaven and delivered it to mortal kind hidden inside a fennel-stalk.
... Prometheus was arrested and bound to a stake on Mount Kaukasos where an eagle was set to feed upon his ever-regenerating liver (or, some say, heart). Generations later the great hero Herakles came along and released the old Titan from his torture.

http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanPrometheus.html
http://encarta.msn.com/map_701511584/ca ... tains.html

http://cache.eb.com/eb/image?id=64758&rendType~

[Grey Cloud]

Brigit,
You seem to have a very strange take on history, (the past and the discipline) which is a combination of RW American Protestantism and touchy-feely romanticism.
I can't quite see what UNESCO has to do with the study of history. And if you think that history written by the losers is any more reliable or objective than that written by the victors, consider the OT.

Those two reviews of the book were from newspapers - hence they are full of hyperbole. They were the first two I found and were provided for convenience rather than any high-brow analysis.

And the historians all have this clever way they date everything using Greek references.
It's perfectly self-fulfilling prophecy, because then they can say the other cultures were emulating and borrowing from the Greeks.
The fact is, they date everything produced by another culture so that it follows after what the Greeks were producing.

This is pure twaddle. It is because they ignore Greek dating that they have a several hundred year Dark Age. The 'Greeks invented everything' idea had been dead for 50 years at least.

Brigit and Seasmith,
Re the biblical flood, some observations.
1. The core narrative of any given people concerns only that people. Outsiders are mentioned only in so far as they interact with the people. They do not think in terms of 'mankind' or 'humanity' as we do. Similarly, when they say 'world' they mean their world or the world as it relates to or affects them. They are not using 'world' as a synonym for 'planet'. Put another way, these narratives are locale and relate to a relatively small group. This is nowhere no more ture than in the OT, the Jews consider themselves to be the chosen people - not them and future Christians let alone all of humanity; no one else just them.
2. The biblical flood story is obviously taken from the older Mesopotamian account, presumably during the Babylonian Exile period. The story itself seems to pre-date the Babylonians. Obvious candidate for the original would be Sumer which was at least near the sea. Keep in mind though that 'Sumer' is a modern construct, Sumer was not a single entity but a collection of independent city-states. Given that the story appears in one of the versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh who was from Uruk, this may or may not be a clue to the original locale. Presumably all this happened before the semitic Sargon the Great conquered non-semitic Sumer (how does this sit with confusion of tongues'/Babel story?). Incidentally, Sargon was placed in a basket and floated down a river, adopted and rose to prominence etc.
3. See the story of the various Oannes and Dagon who came to help the Sumerians get started - they came from the sea (the actual sea). If you look at the iconograhy Oannes looks like he's wearing an Acme fish-suit but when I read the written version I got a picture in my mind of someone wearing fish-scale armour with his helmet pushed to the back of his head.
4. No one can say who the Hebrews were or where they came from. What seems probable is that they were not an ethnic group. It was a 'mixed multitude' which came out of Egypt (Ex. 12, 38); they was an intermingling with Canaanites in the northern kingdom; various other peoples were settled in the northern kingdom by the Assyrians (and the Israelites shipped out); rinse and repeat in the southern kingdom when the Babylonians stepped in. My point being that it is extremely unlikly that the OT is a coherent or continuous account of anything you can hang your hat on. I am not saying that there is no historicity there, only that it does not, generally speaking, form a continuous narrative or come down to us from a continuous narrative - ergo it is not something one can build any sort of reliable hypothesis upon.

[seasmith]

GC,

Good points, and yes the OT, as well as the people who compiled it, represent a compilation and melding of of several more ancient sources.

Also true is that early Sumerian (pre-Akkadian) and Jewish creation myth both have an Adam / Adapa, as per the stories of Genesis and the Enuma Elish.
Both also have a Flood & Ark story (here one can use the Uruk Flood for Sumer),
from which point in time, new lines of patriarchs and kingships begin.

Hence we still have that longish, undefined period between the ~Adam and the final flood.
Probably were some catastrophes in that period, for which the only "textual evidence" is chiseled on stone.

By late B.A. (late 2nd millennium BC?) the Altaic and Steppian pastoralists with their ~Siberian cousins were in full cultural bloom. Post-glacial pastures, lakes and waterholes were drying up again and well-mounted and armed tribal clans were swarming towards the western and southwestern seas.

Whether these disastrous influxes were coincident with planetary incursions is a good question, and imho probably;
as above, so below.

http://www.everythingselectric.com/singing-stones-1/

[seasmith]

minor derailment-

At the foot of the Mycenaean Acropolis of Thorikos, dominating the natural harbor of Lavrio, ...

Underground, the morphology and the organization of the mining infrastructure allow to distinguish several phases of activity. The archaeological data gathered and observed during the latest phase of the 2015 campaign: pottery, stone hammers made of a volcano-sedimentary rock quarry, point towards a high dating for the earliest phase of mining activities in the area (Late Neolithic / Early Helladic: around 3200 BC). If future research confirms this hypothesis, the chronological framework of mining in the region of Attica and the Aegean world would be profoundly modified

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot. ... r5igFI-PFg

[Grey Cloud]

From the link above:

The hardness of the bedrock and the mineralizations show the extreme working conditions of these workers, for the greater part slaves, sentenced to the darkness and the extraction of the lead-silver ore …

So much for Brigit's touchy-feely pre-empires utopias.