First World History

Benno Zuiddam's View of Catholicism and Creationism · First World History · Is Dei Verbum a Young Earth Creationist Document? · Ambiguous Sentence Found · For Those who Do Take Vatican II as a Valid Council

While Genesis 12 to Genesis 50 concentrates on a family saga, Abraham to Joseph's children Ephraim and Manasse, it also gives some fairly broad brush strokes on what happened in Egypt, Mesopotamia and in between in Canaan during that time.

However, its scope is limited to the Middle East. If the Trichterbecher-Kultur or Funnel Beaker culture starts around the time of Abraham in Central, Northern and Western Europe, we are not told about it in Genesis - it's on my part, unless I misrecall my earlier work, which could be the case, a conclusion from carbon dating being used in dating Funnel Beaker culture and carbon dates for Chalcolithic of En Geddi and projecting the rise in carbon levels backword, so it's my work, not God's own word.

With Genesis 1 to 11, this is not so. It really is the history of mankind, even if Genesis 11 verses 10 to the end deal with Abraham's lineage, they also provide a timetable (in conflicting text versions) for the general time lapse between Babel and the dispersion of peoples and the Empires that Abraham knew. All previous to second half of Genesis 11 is dealing with mankind, including a description in Genesis 10 of the first Empire, which arguably goes beyond the time of Genesis 11:1-9. When Asshur founded Niniveh, it would have been the time of Sarug, with carbon dates 6000 BC (earliest settlements in Niniveh) corresponding to real dates between 2327 BC and 2288 BC, around the birth of Sarug in 2294 BC, as I mentioned in my French essay on Ninus and Semiramis:

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Ninos et Sémiramis
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2019/01/ninos-et-semiramis.html

Note, I did not really get it, but since Ninus or Ninos is simply Sumerian Nin with Latin or Greek ending, and Nin simply means Lord or Lady, Assur theoretically could be Ninus.

So, a Babylonian and a competing Assyrian Empire, starting on my view in Northern Mesopotamia both of them, and the Babylonian one expanding South and getting its original territory swallowed by Assyrians, these are the first world Empires, after the Flood that is, and Egypt comes a bit later, around the time of Abraham. Before Babel, the Upper Palaeolithic was the immediate post-Flood world (in my view contested by some who prefer even Neanderthals being post-Babel, while I place them pre-Flood).

For pre-Flood world, we have found the savages (or presumable such), Neanderthals, as well as some traces of Denisovans and pre-Flood Cro-Magnon, as well as men who could show the morphology of Denisovans, namely Heidelbergians and Antecessors, as palaeoanthropologists like to call them, and Genesis 5 gives timeline, while Genesis 4 and 6 give some insight as to political circumstance ... and we have not found the cities of Nod.

But we could be looking at a non-Hebrew tradition on them kept in Ham's, Kush's, Regma's lineage, and distorted as to part of the facts by polytheistic and idolatrous interpretations, in Mahabharata.

And the Genesis history goes behind even that, to the time when Adam and Eve sinned and beyond to when they had not yet sinned.

And what makes it credible as world history apart from the confirmations which people holding to other, anti-Biblical, timelines will dispute, are the genealogies. Greek "myth" will have a story which is fairly complete around the Trojan War and previous generation (we are talking the period of the Judges here) and it has an account of man being created and of man surviving the Flood. But very little between. Indeed, kind of making a case that man was created more than once, that we do not descend genealogically from the first men. That our knowledge of spans of world history, of history of men, is known because a goatherd in Boeotia had a revelation by the Nine Muses.

Genesis makes the case, Genesis 2 and 3 are known to us because according to Genesis 5 to 8 we descend from Adam and Eve, and so it is simply family history. The one thing which would have needed revelation (to Adam or to Moses or to both) is Genesis 1.

Gilgamesh, by contrast, has no claim even on going back to the beginning of mankind.

Creation vs Evolution : What a Few Lines from Gilgamesh Epic Tell us of the Errors in Babylonian Theology
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2017/04/what-few-lines-from-gilgamesh-epic-tell.html

Christian and Atheist alike will feel sth is wrong when mankind doesn't exist before commercial ovens do. And the Eridu Creation story, also doesn't qualify, since it goes about creation and flood (partly agreeing with Genesis on general order of events, partly in theological conflict as to what causes the events, and obviously diverging in details), but has no claim to continue it all up to the times of Gilgamesh.

World histories are scarce in antiquity and Genesis 1 to 11 has a clear claim on being first in the field.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Remigius of Rheims
1.X.2019