The Creationist Follies

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-12-2016, 02:14 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: During the Last Glacial Maximum, what is now the Persian Gulf was above sea level. Melt-waters from snowy peaks of modern-day Turkey and Iran drained through the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into a river that created a long oasis. It was a paradise for hunter-gatherers, quite possibly the foundation of the legendary Garden of Eden. Bright sunlight and a copious flow of water allowed some great crop yields. Imagine the Nile Valley, only about as cool as the American Great Basin.

This world would exist until the ice sheets melted, at which time the hunter-gatherer paradise was hit with a deluge of incredible proportion That messed up their delicate world badly But the sea level rose and inundated lowlands today now shallow waters including the Persian Gulf. Survivors could not return.

As is true with old stories they get bigger as they are re-told. We get Homer's retelling of the Illiad and the Odyssey, and not an objective account. Maybe there was a nasty one-eyed Cyclops, a person who had lost an eye in battle. As a rule, unwritten stories get bigger and better with time, whether the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad-Gita, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or the Kalevala. (I wonder what stories some American First Peoples have. Hurry -- before those people are fully assimilated into Western culute. Write those stiries down if you have access to them -- please!)

Lost world and great Flood. Those would be remembered.

There were also floods well after the glaciers were gone.  For a while when modern archeologists were excavating the Tigris - Euphrates valleys, they found evidence of floods in just about every city.  Not at the same time, though.  The floods apparently got excessively high in one area while being more modest in others, with the various areas taking turns leaving massive evidence of floods.  (From a PBS special where they tried to build a replica of the Arc.)  They suspect that floods were a very common story in that part of the world.  Dealing with floods would have to be part of the culture.  When making up the myths, though, the many floods got combined to a single big flood.

I'd note also that the flood myths appear to have originated in the Tigris - Euphrates area, but started showing up in the Jewish biblical accounts at the time the Jews returned from exile in Babylon.  A secular interpreter would be inclined to believe the myth borrowed from another culture.