- Image via Wikipedia
Okay – no worries – I’ve not gone off the deep end of the Indian Ocean. But, we know that corporate memory plays a large part in (classical) myth making. So, in that light – I found this story interesting.
A once fertile landmass now submerged beneath the Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human populations outside Africa, according to an article published Wednesday in Current Anthropology.
In recent years, archaeologists have turned up evidence of a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf dating to about 7,500 years ago. But how could such highly developed settlements pop up so quickly, with no precursor populations to be found in the archaeological record? Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist and researcher with the University of Birmingham in the U.K., believes that evidence of those preceding populations is missing because it’s under the Gulf.
“Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago,” Rose said. “These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean.”
Rose said that the area in and around this “Persian Gulf Oasis” may have been host to humans for over 100,000 years before it was swallowed up by the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago.
via FoxNews.com – Lost Civilization Under Persian Gulf?.
Related articles
- Persian gulf oasis hypothesis (dienekes.blogspot.com)
- Lost ancient civilisation’s ruins lie beneath Gulf, says boffin (go.theregister.com)
Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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I thought the Garden of Eden was in Iraq!
I dunno – I can’t find it on my map
For whatever it’s worth, I just finished a class on Mesopotamian mythology, and many of the flood-related stories referred to an Edenic-type location that is a subject of some dispute. In some legends it is unknamed, and in others it is callen Dilmun. It is generally vaguely identified with Bahrain which, you guessed it, in the Persian gulf. Perhaps the Dilmun story has some overlap in origin with the Garden of Eden as described by these folk.