Posted on 06/21/2004 7:49:48 AM PDT by aculeus
coal fired placemarker
Thanks for the ping!
I'm glad you brought up Gilgamesh, however, because there is a tremendous amount of literary evidence that parts of the Bible were modeled after passages of Gilgamesh.
I had a student once in a World Literature class I was teaching who compared Gilgamesh to the Biblical stories of Saul and Samuel.
The comparisons are striking, especially as to the characters.
Right-o. Also, every single ancient civilization was built next to a river, or better yet, the confluence of rivers. Flooding was perhaps an annual event at the very least for almost every ancient city. That explains why so many different cultures have the flood stories, rather than say, blizzard or tornado stories.
Floods also were used for early farming techniques and were an integral part of ancient life. It's easy to surmise how the Noah story (and the others) came to be.
The cognate languages for Sumerian are, interestingly enough Saami (found in Northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia), an ancient non-Han written language found in China, and the ONLY American Indian language to be successfully linked to an Old World language.
These languages in turn may be related to the Dravidian languages, and all of them related to the Uralic-Altaic group (although primarily in vocabulary, but not in grammar).
There are Saami petroglyphs in Finland and Russia drawn on the underside of cliffs that are estimated to be about 7,700 years old. With a bit of understanding of Arctic cultural customs and the place of the shaman in society, you can make out the Story of Lot's experience after the flood, including why momma turned to stone, and why poppa ended up in the tent with the daughters!
(Curious? The deal is the mother failed to make suitible arrangements for her daughter's marriages, hence she turned into stone and the girls slept with their father ~ certainly enough incentive for any woman to make sure the girls got safely married off.)
It's believed the Saami have been in the area up to 10,000 years (or back to the time when the North American ice sheet melted), and may have spent most of the last full glaciation in the area!
Their stories, if taken South as they followed the herds to Mesopotamia, would include a great flood from when Antarctica melted (which should have sent massive soliton waves up to 2 or 3 miles high crashing Northward into most of the populated places around the world in that day).
They'd also have stories of a slower rise in sealevels at the time North America melted. Once in Mesopotamia, they could have added to the basic flood story.
Note, too, the Lot story and the Great Flood probably came in the same package.
The basic Great Flood story among the Dravidian speaking peoples of India (which is incorporated in Hinduism where Krishna manifests himself as the Great Fish) is less elaborate than the Sumerian Flood story. It, too, is found in the most ancient written documents in that part of the world. Again, it's not surprising to find a Saami story showing up in the hands of folks speaking cognate languages.
Oysters Rockefeller ?
GMTA.
260 million years or so for bituminous coal. I think the anthracite is much older based on hardness and how folded the seams are today.
"Figure 1: Marine Fossils on Top of the Andes Mountains. More than 500 giant fossilised oysters were found 3000 metres (about 2 miles) above sea level in Peru..."
Try eating a dozen of THOSE!
Great a myth knew about a legend...
Well, anthracite isn't necessarily older, the key thing is that it just received much more pressure and heating than bituminous; Eastern PA has anthracite because it was closer to the mountain-building episodes and plate/island collisions (hence the folding) than the Bituminous coal around Pittsburgh.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a thorough study on the forces that created the various coals of the US. I've always thought the HGI and FSI measurements might be an indicator of age. Likewise various vol contents might indicate age and/or pressure.
Huh? People were (and are) always coming up with stories to explain stuff they find (c.f. "faerie rings).
BTW, there is no physical evidence for a universal flood.
Then you have http://www.lostlanguages.com/ which will give you a "Turk's eye view" of the whole business. There are some claims here that are a bit over the top, but not as far as you might imagine. Remember, the relationship between Sumerian and the Dravidian languages, and them with Turkish languages, is a relatively recent discovery. 100 years ago nobody even knew Sumerian existed!<P>To say the least, virtually none of the modern Dravidian speakers resembles in the slightest the ancient speakers.
If you are lucky you will latch on to some of the discussion boards where experts in this widely known field discuss the real relationships among the Finno-Ugric languages. These guys get excited ~ pulling knives, kicking shins, oh, my the blood!
You might well look up "odin, thor, herb woman, raindeer man, and little redman" ~ then "soma" ~ this is the really old tyme religion ~ still practiced in some places!
There are books and books and books that detail how the Saami religious practices have spread throughout the world, even to the still primitive Indo-Europeans who were just then invading the Valley of the Indus thousands of years ago.
It's also fair to presume the Sumerians' ancestors survived at least one and maybe several "Great Floods" besides those they encountered in Mesopotamia.
Actually, the Sumerians and their Saami relatives might well have been among the few human beings to survive the melting of Antarctica. When that happened ocean levels rose hundreds of feet drowning all human habitation in our natural range ~ river estuaries!
If petroleum is supposed to be a non-renewable resource and a product of organic material that was buried, how come it only is found thousands of feet underground and below the fossil record?
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