Were the Ancients Aware of a Globe? (plus a little child psychology thrown in for fun)

@swamidass. Question. Say one day it could be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the ancient’s references to the great Flood were global in nature.

Whereas there would only be ~1500 years of mixing between A&E and other peoples outside the garden before the Flood came, and whereas that would not be enough time to claim a progenitor A&E couple of us all based on genealogical merits, would that then falsify GAE?

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Would that falsify the GAE? It would depend on several details, many of which are movable. So some variants might be falsified, others would not be falsified.

Religion drives men to speculate about things they are in no position to verify. For example, in the Book of Levi (not canonical) the literal celestial waters would not require a spherical Earth:

I’m suggesting it was known at minimum a few centuries after the flood, based on the history of migration we know now, and by these accounts of Sargon, and by God’s people passing down correct historical and scientific knowledge for longer than other pagan cultures.

I’m suggesting Eventually some of this knowledge was lost; we are culturally prejudiced to see Europeans as inventing circumnavigating. I now see that as ridiculous.

It’s likely the Babylonians didn’t know the world was a globe. I think like us (or everyone but YEC today) they believed the earth was older and used the Sumerian King’s list as a sort of cultural pride in their civilization’s long heritage when it was actually just a list of caravan sites related to Cush’s and Sargon/Nimrod’s family plus some history before the flood.

It says

At least one scholar was directly translating this “sail around” as circumnavigate. I can find the source if you like.

Of course it means circumnavigate. I would think EVERYBODY would agree with that. But the issue with circumnavigate is around what?. The text says the sea-lands, not planet earth. (And expecting the text to refer to planet earth, obviously, would be rather anachronistic anyway.)

Lots of ancient and more recent peoples have circumnavigated all sorts of lands and land masses. That is not in dispute. But no ancient text says that Sargon circumnavigated a global planet earth.

Besides, considering the enormous cost and time-commitment (not to mention danger) of circumnavigating the planet, in most of human history nobody had a good reason to try it. That changed in the Middle Ages as Europe wanted cheaper trade routes with the Spice Islands, China, etc. and there was a competitive free-for-all to plant European flags on anything that was considered up for grabs. (“This land now belongs to us!”, or more likely, “This land now belongs to my royal sponsor!”, even when that sponsor was actually of a different country than the explorer. Such was the case with Magellan—and he didn’t even survive the circumnavigation attributed to him.)

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You’re not arguing for what he’s circumnavigating then. You’re just saying it can’t be earth. You’re also missing that in legends he claims he’s king of the world. I can find references for you. You’re missing where I compared the sealands to the Babylonian world map which translates them as ocean and seems to refer to continents/nagu.

No one seems to get my hint here either. :wink: There isn’t a good explanation for this besides that it’s a northern hemisphere ice sheet. So Sargon sailed to the north and around Africa.

Nimrod, i.e. Sargon circumnavigated the globe. He lived during an ice age. There was a devastating famine at the end of his reign and also there was a famine when Abram had to flee to Egypt because it was so severe.

I thought I’d just drop this grenade for fun and see if people got burned over it. But nothing. :rofl: :upside_down_face: Well, that’s no fun…

Nobody likes a troll, so you should reconsider dropping grenades for fun.

She is an ogre, with many layers. Not a troll.

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I didn’t mean it as a troll. I meant it as in - I packed a lot in a few sentences and wanted someone to argue with me as I’m throwing it out there as obvious YEC evidence, and I’d enjoy the verbal sparring :slight_smile:

One of the ogre’s layers is a troll, as in this:

You couldn’t ask for a more succinct definition.

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Ok. Guilty as charged. :slight_smile: I just think it’s a darn good argument. Isn’t it?

It’s a little fun not to be told - wrong, wrong, wrong all the time. But yeah, I should work on humility. I also like to tease.

I doubt that’s obvious to anyone. How is it YEC evidence? And where did you get the idea that Sargon was Nimrod, that he lived during the Ice Age, and what ice sheet are you possibly talking about? Nobody can possibly take this seriously. I know you don’t care, but I think this is just irresponsible posting.

Go back and read Argument #2 on the original post. No, I do want you to take it seriously.

I looked at my argument and I’m drawing from something in the paper I linked when I make an oblique reference to the correlation between the Babylonian World Map and the Sargon legend. Here it is more clearly in the paper and I’ll explain.

https://biblelandsreview.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/goodnick-westenholz-tribute-bler-2013-l2.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3idf7wLyS1sTeqRFPoPG0hEMVeO4Kho8Mkovx2WyGK6os_vZI584ONMvs

I would suggest that the Great Wall in the north on The
Babylonian Map of the World, beyond the mountain where the Euphrates rises, and
across the cosmic sea, is the same Great Wall as that in Joan’s Sargon Birth Legend,
‘The Great Wall of Heaven and Earth.’ If so, Mesopotamian tradition in the first
millennium must have held that a Great Wall was located in the northern extremes of
the World - far far away - where only one king had gone, where no man had gone
before or since, this king being Sargon of Akkade.7

What else is located in the northern extremes of the world far away that could be between sea and land, at the dawn of civilization, that one could ascend, besides an ice sheet of an ice age corresponding to YEC timelines? That’s my argument.

Perhaps it’s a garbled reference to the giant beanstalk that Jack climbed to get to the giant’s castle in the clouds. Isn’t that a more credible theory?

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Maybe. Except people take the Sargon accounts and Babylonian Map seriously as a way ancients viewed the times they lived in, rather than as obvious tall tales for children.

But you’re using the accounts and map to tell us tall tales for children. Perhaps they viewed the Sargon tale as reality (though this isn’t necessarily true) but we have no reason to. And even within the tale, your idea of an ice wall doesn’t work. Sargon, for example, is supposed to have removed stones from the wall; clearly it’s a stone wall. The wall you’re talking about is from Game of Thrones, not Sargon’s story.

Ah…now we’re getting somewhere :slight_smile: Who built this wall of stones between the ocean and the land before the first ancient civilization?

Also: Learn | National Snow and Ice Data Center.