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Atlantis, the Great Flood & all that (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Leon



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In his discussion of creation myths M.J. Harper lists the elements of their construction, which include flood sweeps everyone else away - other than the founding fathers - and adds (THOBR pp 65-66):

Obviously our own modern scholars can't use such relatively primitive methods because:
...
b) their audience has a more sceptical attitude towards Omniscient Mystery Beings;

c) not to mention World-Wide Catastrophe Theory; ...


In this way the Great Flood is relegated to the same category as Omniscient Mystery Beings, absolute tosh if there's any doubt. I hope to advance the view that it ain't necessarily so to the point at least that the Flood can be discussed and not dogmatically dismissed as impossible because it has been incorporated into creation myths. I understand that dogmas are not acceptable material here.

It is also true that Atlantis has been used to propose the most extraordinary mystical and arcane pseudo-historical proposals; but this does not prove either that Atlantis, an island-continent in the Atlantic Ocean and not the hundred and one revisions of Plato that locate it everywhere from Spitzbergen to Antarctica, including Indonesia and numerous places in South America, never existed, or that its existence is a mystical proposition per se.

Orthodoxy History adopts the following views:
1) The Flood never happened;
2) it was a lower-case flood that occurred in Mesopotamia: fairly catastrophic, but not universal;
or
3) whatever it was, it happened at least 11,000 years ago, so it's conveniently outside the range of History's interest.

Archaeology says:
1st and last) There is no archaeological evidence that the Flood happened at any time (and if there is, you won't find us looking for it or paying attention to anyone outside the Groves of Academe who comes up with any).
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Leon



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Let's look at some careful ignorals and anomalies in the general orthodox picture of prehistory and the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC.

In antiquity the fact was frequently commented that the Atlantic was a sea of mud, full of obstacles, which could not be crossed and was dangerous to sail into because ships might founder or not find their way out. This crops up in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and in the writings of Plato, Aristotle and the Roman Festus Avenius, as well as in records of attempts to investigate the Atlantic at various times that were forced to turn back.

Between c 3000 and c 1200 BC the region of Europe between the Scandinavian highlands in the north and the Alps and Carpathians in the south, from the south of England across to Poland, was uninhabited and its skies continuously dark. This is the area of the so-called loess tongue, an unexplained swathe of very rich volcanic soil responsible for the later (up to the present) extraordinary agricultural productivity of the region.

No comment from behind the Wall of Academe.
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Leon



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Classical archaeology tells us that there was a tripartite Stone Age composed of Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic (sound familiar?) which only came to an end with the beginning of the Bronze Age, toward the end of the 3rd millennium BC or beginning of the 2nd.

More recent metal finds dated to times before the 3rd millennium forced the erection of an imprecisely dated 'Copper-Stone Age', which blurs the selectivity of the term Stone Age, meaning an age without metal, and now I find that a Copper Age (I've forgotten the Greco-Latin term) extending from about 4500 to 1500 has been inserted, even though it has not been determined certainly that any metal was actually mined between 3000 BC and the beginning of the Bronze Age.

These manoeuvres are meant to sustain the pure-progress model, which envisions constant technological progress from the Stone Age to the Computer-Space Age. This, however, is complicated by even more recent or recently redated finds not only of copper but of bronze, gold and silver and a little iron, the most perishable, from the 7th down to the end of the 4th millennium, becoming ever more frequent as time goes on.
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Leon



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Parallel with these metal finds, recent palaeodemographic studies have revealed a steady increase in European populations from the end of the Ice Age to the end of the 4th millennium, much greater in the 5th and especially the 4th, with dramatic expansion in its final centuries, followed by a sharp population drop in the 3rd millennium BC.

Indian archaeologists as far back as the 60s and 70s reported that under the 'early civilisation' cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa - estimated 3rd-M populations around 35,000 - and under a layer of mud from 2.5 to 10 meters thick, there are ruins of metropolitan cities of indeterminate population numbers (it has not been possible to excavate the entire areas they are thought to occupy) but estimated in the millions.

Ground plans indicate building sizes and street and avenue widths similar to those of present-day Western cities. Skeletal remains in these lower cities show unusually high levels of radioactivity. Bricks from these cities are so numerous that they have provided material for houses in the surrounding area for 5000 years. They also provided gravel for the roadbed of 150 kms of railway extending from Harappa. Under a similar mud layer a 4th-M city of about 100,000 called Shar-e-Sukhten ('Burnt City') has been partially excavated in Iran.

The orthodox 'argument' is, as a sceptical and of course very well educated Englishman said to me, can we really trust the findings of Indian archaeologists?
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Leon



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This well-educated Englishman would not trust Indians claiming Indian superiority for very straightforward AE reasons.

Indian superiority? They just said, we've found something.

And you're right, the original dating was done by Englishmen in the interwar period. But because they held the historico-archaeological pure-progress model as self-evident, they regarded the 4th-millennium cities under the mud as primitive forerunners of the historical Mohenjodaro and Harappa and didn't bother to ask what all that mud was doing there between the two. (When Leonard Woolley on the other hand found the same phenomenon at Nineveh around the same time, he said, 'It's the Flood, of course,' although he assumed that it was a purely Mesopotamian event.) The reason their later Indian colleagues bothered to question this judgement and make more wide-ranging excavations was that Indian oral and written traditions tell of a civilisation that existed before the present one, which was destroyed. Not a question of superiority, just being in possession of useful information.
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Leon



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So then, what can explain:
1) the mud in the Atlantic, c 3000 BC to mid-15th C AD, when at last the Portuguese made it to the Azores, and then Chris Colombo sailed the Ocean blue, probable last remains the Sargasso Sea;
2) West to Central Europe between the northern and southern mountain ranges uninhabited c 3000 to c 1200 BC, but densely inhabited before and after, as well as much greater density of population throughout Europe in the 4th millennium BC than in the 3rd;
3) Metal Age 7th-4th millennia, Stone Age beginning of 3rd to beginning of 2nd, Bronze Age following;
4) 4th-millennium metropolitan cities in India and Iran, succeeded by 3rd-millennium big towns we call cities because they're the only candidates for the name (Jericho and Çatalhöyük, smaller than the Indian cities, are also dated to the 4th or even 5th millennium and explained away as forerunners of the 'beginning of Civilisation')?

Well obviously I'm suggesting that there was a previous civilisation which was destroyed by the Great Flood. Sceptics bear with me for a moment while we ask, What caused the Great Flood? and then your scepticism will really have a chance to be exercised.
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Leon



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Plato in 'Timaios' and 'Kritias' reports that Solon learned from Egyptian priests in Sais that the Flood was caused by the destruction of Atlantis. He does not say, though this is the much repeated misinterpretation, that the event took place in the 9th millennium BC. The only dates Plato mentions are the founding of a city state in Athens 9000 years before Solon, about 9600 BC in our calendar, and an Egyptian state 1000 years afterward.

His description of Atlantis in antediluvian times includes the mention of various metals, and he describes military forces comparable in numbers of men and types of weapons to those of the Persian Empire in his own time (he doesn't make that comparison, Martin Freksa does, in the book this theory is drawn from, Traces of the Atlantic Civilization).

Later Aristotelians said, 'He who created it also destroyed it', attributing these words to Aristotle, and Aristotelian science has echoed the thought ever since, saying that Atlantis was a fantasy, a utopia, a doting attempt at fiction. Plato also said that to the west of Atlantis a string of islands led to a 'boundless continent'. Did he make that up too? Is America a hallucination?

The Mayan tradition tells of a land to the East called Atlan, which like Plato's was ruled by a King and nine viceroys and was destroyed 'by water and fire'.

The Hopi know of Atlantis as Talwaitichqua, 'Eastern Land' or 'Morning Land', likewise destroyed in a sudden catastrophe. Collective Unconscious, anyone, to explain all that away?
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Leon



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When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first explosion of an atomic bomb (July 16 1945) he was reminded of some verses he had read when he studied Sanskrit years before, which included, as he remembered it, the phrase 'Brighter than a thousand suns'.

If the light of a thousand suns
Should suddenly fill the heavens,
All together: this would compare
With the radiance of that marvel...


The words are from the Mahabharata, 6th C BC, an enormous epic of 210,000 verses which tells of a war that happened 2500 years previously. The rival forces are two Indian noble houses, one of which is allied with foreign powers, including the 'Giants'. Strange weapons are told of, capable of destroying entire cities: one that kills with heat, another with cold, and another, called the Sudarshan, or 'blinding' weapon. This one, after a devastating attack by the foreign enemy, is launched (Bhagavad Gita, a part of the larger work) by the commanding general Arjuna under the guidance of King Krishna, later called the World-destroyer in Hindu theology.
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Leon



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The Mahabharata says of the Sudarshan weapon:

If the light of a thousand suns
Should suddenly fill the heavens,
All together: this would compare
With the radiance of that marvel...

[It was] a single projectile
Charged with all the power of the Universe,
An incandescent column of smoke and flame
As bright as ten thousand suns
Rose in all its splendour...

It was an unknown weapon,
An iron thunderbolt,
A gigantic messenger of death...

The bodies were so burnt
That they could not be recognised.
Their hair and nails fell out;
Pottery shattered without apparent cause,
And birds' feathers turned white...

After a few hours
All the food was infected...

...A shaft, fatal as the rod of death:
It measured three cubits and six feet. [color=black][almost 4 metres]


Endowed with the force
Of thousand-eyed Indra's thunder,
It destroyed all living creatures...[/color]

Remind you of anything?
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Leon



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Abdullah el-Idrisi, the most important geographer of the Middle Ages, in his investigations of the Atlas Mountains found tidewater marks at a height of about 2000 metres (1 metre = 3.07 feet).

In Western Central Asia they appear at about 1500 metres, and farther east, at about 1200. In the second case they were shown to a German diplomat named von Schwarz by Cossack guides, who told him: 'This is where the Flood reached.'

This descent of the water marks, incidentally, besides pointing to the Atlantic as the epicentre, helps to explain the greater density of population in the Far East today. (My comment, not Freksa's.)

Given that the tidal waves must have been somewhat less high than the height to which they washed up the western mountainsides, it can be assumed that there were survivors on the eastern side at a somewhat lower level.
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Leon



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What is is what was: Just as in the last 5000 years civilisation has developed to the point of becoming global, and a fairly small world population has increased to 6 or 7 thousand million, so also in the millennia following the end of the Ice Age, up to the end of the 4th, civilisation developed, population increased, and finally a stage of advanced technology similar to the present was reached. This world was destroyed by the Great Flood, which was caused by the destruction of Atlantis in a great war.

Within a century or so, when the lowlands had recovered from the effects of the Flood and become fertile again, people began descending from the mountains.
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Leon



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(From this point I diverge in part from Martin Freksa's theories.)

The Slavs spread out from the Carpathians.

The Germanic peoples came from Scandinavia. Norse colonists might well have begun migrating to northern Britain, then totally unpopulated, by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, and these migrations, in various waves, would have continued into the last millennium. Future English-speaking Norse also settled in eastern Ireland: this I take to be true because of what Mick Harper has written on the subject -- and logic points that way, of course: once they had reached the northern tip of Britain, it would be natural to go round and down.

From the western Alps came the future French and a linguistically decisive part of the Spanish, the Celtic peoples properly speaking (to name them all from one of their principal groups in the manner of 'Germanic' peoples): let us say Keltic to avoid confusion. From the southern Alps and the Appenines, Italic populations, linguistically related to the western Alpine people, and Illyrians, including the Etruscans. In the northern Alps there were probably Germanic groups, as there are today, who began settling what is today southern Germany and northern Austria, and were much later joined by Germanics coming from the north.

In the northern Iberian mountains there were Goidelics in the Cantabrian chain to the west, who migrated first to Galicia and Portugal, Basques in the western Pyrenees -- Bay of Biscay region, Navarre -- and I suspect that in the eastern Pyrenees there were people related to the Keltic inhabitants of the Alps and Juras. Populations linguistically related to the last named probably survived in the central Iberian ranges: Gredos, Sierra de Segura, etc. Berbers must surely have moved into southern Iberia at some time in the first two millennia after the Flood.
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Leon



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Postscript: The megaliths are stones left over from the previous civilisation whose original purpose is unknown, except where they form part of barrow graves constructed in the 4th millennium. Druids and (presumably) other people with similar religions arranged them in post-diluvian times in circles and "henges" and avenues and what not. The Great Pyramid and its two nearby companions are also the product of antediluvian civilisation, technologically impossible in the 3rd millennium BC.
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Grant



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This is the area of the so-called loess tongue, an unexplained swathe of very rich volcanic soil responsible for the later (up to the present) extraordinary agricultural productivity of the region.


Leon, what is loess? I've never been able to understand the official line that it was all left by glaciers.
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Leon



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It's volcanic soil. Isn't that what I said? Why don't you google it for more details.
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