cyberdad wrote:
Crimadella wrote:
Someone else I was watching recently said something about he thinks we were more advanced around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago but a giant asteroid struck and set us back.
Any idea when the first bits of the bible where wrote? It would be a nice picture if that also tied in about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
There is a global memory of the great flood when the last ice age finished around 12,000BC. The Noah myth is quite old pre-dating the ancient Sumerians.
That's not proven, but that IS one theory.
The familiar Noah version of the story goes back to maybe 700 BC. But we now know that that story was plagarized from the Sumerians in Mesopotamia because there are cuniform texts of the Sumerian/Mesopotamian flood myth of Gilgamesh going back to 2800 BC (basically all of the way back to the beginnings of writing itself- in the oldest civilization to have writing).
So the real answer to his question of "when was the Noah story written?" is: 2700 years ago in its present Biblical form, but almost five thousand years ago it had already been "written" in its almost identical earlier Pagan form as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Obviously the story was already an old oral tradition at the dawn of writing itself. How much older is anyone's guess.
But the Middle East does not have monopoly on Flood myths. The Chinese, and Indigenious Americans, also had flood myths as well.
That IS one theory that all of these flood myths around he world were inspired by real cataclysms that occurred when the last ice age ended, and sea levels rose the world over when the glaciers melted. But the last ice age ended six thousand years before the invention of writing in the earlist civilizations.