WishboneDawn

I can see that. I can also see a myth built to explain ideas about human behaviour and people picking a devastating phenonmenon they were familiar with to illustrate it. But if it were a matter of picking a nice natural disaster to illustrate a point you'd expect some storms and forest fires too, mightn't you? I wonder how often floods come up compared to the other things?

And thanks for mentioning Adrienne Mayor. I hadn't heard of her before but her work looks really interesting.

The Evil One

Malachi, in your responses to me and spin, you've made your idea completely unfalsifiable. Any evidence which suggests gods-from-kings is evidence of the ultimate origin of religion. Any evidence which doesn't suggest gods-from-kings, you interpret as evidence of how completely religion has transcended those ultimate origins. At the moment, I can't see what possible observation would be incompatible with your theory.

Tammuz

Interesting! Another theoriy I've heard of is that after the Ice Age, when the ice melted, there were many local floods, and the memories of these floods were thus passed on among the different peoples.

I would also speculate that perhaps there was some kind of local flood that happened to our ancestors back in Africa about 100 000 years ago, and that this flood killed many humans (I've read somewhere that many Homo sapiens died about 100 000 years ago, but I don't know why, or if anyone knows why). Perhaps this memory was passed on as our ancestors moved out of Africa, and the memory took various shapes in the various cultures that appeared.

WishboneDawn

I don't even have to think there'd have to be some big event to cause the flood myths. Most humans live close to water. Flooding is a risk involved with that. It's probably been a terror for humans for most of our time on earth.

Malachi151

Sorry, but thats the way that it is. Interpreting myths will always be this way, we can never go back to "prove" that a myth is based on X or Y, that's the nature of myths, all we can do is try to come up with possible explanations.

We aren't ever going to find something from 9,000 years ago that says "I am Bob, and I am making up a story about the ruler Einki and calling him a god, etc., etc."

It doesn't work that way.

To go back to the work of Adrienne Mayor, she hasn't proven and damned thing, but she has shown correlations and possibilities, and her work has, within the past 5 years since it has come out, been widely accepted by scholars.

Can she "prove" that the Titans and the Krakon in Greek mythology are based on ancient fossil finds? Can she prove that griffins are based on ancient observance of beaked dinosaur fossils?

No, but she shows the correlations and shows that that is both possible and would explain various elements of the mythologies.

Its the same here.

Can I or anyone else ever "prove" that the gods described in the Sumerian creation story were really human rulers at some time? No, this will never be possible, however we can determine if that is possible and makes sense.

We have several major problems with interpreting myths.

1) The myth as we receive it today is no doubt different from its origin, and we will probably never know the original version of any ancient myth.

2) Myths are called myths and not history for a reason, because they contain impossible and unreasonable elements.

For all we know the Sumerian version of this myth could have been around for 1,000 years before it was recorded by them.

There will always be cobwebs in myths that you have to sweep away. Sometimes nothing is left when you sweep the cobwebs away, sometimes something is.

My view is that the older myths, of myths of privative cultures, are more likely to be based on reality than more recent myths, because more recent myths, such as the Jesus myth, are themselves based on other myths.

And besides, I'm just asking the question here, what about this prospect that the gods in the Sumerian myth (which the Genesis myth is based on) are really human rulers?

The Evil One

But why couldn't the older myths have been based on still older myths? You are begging the question by assuming that there were no yet-older myths around at the time when the oldest myths we know of today took shape. I don't see any reason to make that assumption.

You're right about the lack of evidence for the original form of myths - that should be a reason for you not to propose sweeping, universal hypotheses about their origin...

Malachi151

Of course that is always possible.

The Sumerian creation story can easily be understood as an account of a population of early privative slaves being ruled by a group of people. It has many elements that make this message pretty clear, the fact that the purpose of the humans is to do the work of the gods, the fact that the gods were themselves like the humans at one time, the fact that the gods had clothes and lived on earth while the people were naked. The fact that they talk about a "garden of eden", i.e. the introduction of agriculture, a bounty compared to what early people were familiar with, the fact that they talk about the gods keep knowledge from the people.

It has all the makings of an account about a privative civilization where the rulers were hailed as gods.

What's more, this is in line with Egyptian religions as well, which states that the early gods were earthly rulers.

This, furthermore, is also in line with potential interpretations of Greek religion, Norse religion, Japanese religion, and other religions.

FURTHERMORE, this provides a harmonious explanation for the evolution of god belief, i.e. that god belief evolved out of leader worship, which not only make sense, but also explains many aspects of religion, such as the ties between church and state, the ties between religion and nationalism, the ties between religion and leadership, etc.

Now, Judaism is a third or fourth generation religion at best. Its a religion based on a religion based on a religion, etc. So, Judaism is very removed from the original development of religion in the Mesopotamia. Judaism is pretty clearly based on Sumerian and Babylonian religion, but its thousands of years younger, after these concepts had evolved quite a bit, yet they still preserve enough that you can see the underlying structure peeking through.

lpetrich

But why be so literal-minded here?

Why can't a flood myth simply be some completely imaginary event that got passed down the generations simply because it was a dramatic story?

Consider the shared plotline of Ziusudra's Flood, Atrahasis's Flood, Ut-Napishtim's Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Noah's Flood in the Bible, and Xisuthrus's Flood in Berossus's history.

Pavlov's Dog

Me neither. I would expect flood myths come up because floods really happen all the time. A lot of civilizations pop up around rivers (for obvious reasons) and rivers flood, some quite regularly.

spin

I said Semitic religions, which includes Assyria and Babylon amongst others.


spin