Perhaps they were not Metaphors or Allegories or Works of Fiction
by normandavis
I can only imagine how Frank Calvert must have felt when he found it that day in the hills of Hissarlik in 1865; travelling so far from his native Albion to Turkey armed only with a shovel, a copy of an old story, and a hunch; the long overdue pride in knowing that his conviction had, at long last, done right by him. You see, back then the ancient city for which he was searching was thought to be only a legend, but Mr. Calvert knew better. Actually he didn’t; he was a relatively uneducated man by the standards of the day, however he possessed a love of letters and an ability to follow still extant geographical clues to their terminus, or origin depending on how you look at it.
Despite the ridicule of nearly everyone he told of his plan he set off for the land once known as Anatolia before it was called Turkey, bought a plot of hilly, unfarmable land from a local farmer who thought he was taking advantage of some ignorant sap, and discovered, or rather rediscovered depending on how you look at it, the lost city of Troy.
By reading an old book he did this. The ones who followed in his footsteps found other treasures buried all over the world; oddly enough where the old stories of the local people said an old city was, they would dig and find evidence of it. Simply by referencing these old tomes, and following their clues, they confirmed the ancient truths therein.
Which is your favorite among them? The Old Testament? They have found the cities of Sodom, Gomorrah and Jericho. The Mahabharata? They have found Mohenjo Darro. All of these cities have one thing in common: In the books of scripture in which they appear all of these cities were destroyed by the wrath of God, or a war between the gods. Interestingly, their ruins have preserved another commonality: These sights are all radioactive. The levels are not harmful to the archaeologists there, but they are noticeably higher than the background level; consistent with what would be expected if a nuclear bomb were detonated there a few thousand years ago.
The suffering visited upon the survivors is well documented in these stories; hair and finger nails falling out, cancerous tumors all over the body, skin lesions, etc. These are all classic symptoms of radiation sickness. The same symptoms are described again by the Philistines who stole the Ark of the Covenant, a device held to have great power by the people upon whom it was originally bestowed.
The Mahabharata contains the first known references to mushroom clouds. But why would beings of pure spirit need such weapons? Could they not just have wiped us out with a thought, or perhaps pointed out only specific individuals and eliminated them just with some directed intent? Perhaps they were not gods after all, but beings of great advancement and ability that our ancient ancestors simply perceived as gods and angels.
This is not so far from the realm of possibility as one might think. There are some far more recent examples of this occurrence and they are from a decidedly more terrestrial source. For instance, when the Spaniards came to the Americas the natives saw them approaching in their great ships that appeared to float above the water. When the ships weighed anchor and their occupants disembarked their burnished metal armor reflected the sunlight and blinded them. The natives fell to their knees in worship of these resplendent gods from across the sea; for who other than gods could have made these magnificent vessels that floated on the water and who but the gods could fashion clothing that shone like the sun. The natives felt the wrath of the gods too, except this time it was in the form of disease and slavery.
All across the world, in stories told by civilizations separated by thousands of miles of ocean, we hear that the angels or gods came down and shared with our ancient ancestors the knowledge of fire, agriculture, language and writing and the working of metals among other skills. Sometimes, it is said, they did this on orders from on high. Other times they were forbidden to do so and shared their knowledge with us at great peril to themselves, like when Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, and was subsequently punished by being chained to a rock for eternity.
When we look at archeological evidence this seems to be confirmed, Prometheus aside, by the fact that human expression goes from cave paintings to well organized writing on clay tablets in a very short time; from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to well-planned cities supported by agriculture, irrigation and domesticated animals with seemingly no transitional period in between.
Another story that is common throughout all cultures is the deluge. There is some discrepancy as to whether the deluge was a direct result of the wrath of the heavenly host or rather just a natural catastrophe from which the gods could not, or chose not to save everyone in time. Either way, it is said universally among these that humanity had become too numerous, corrupt, rebellious, and unruly and the host saw fit to thin out their burgeoning numbers. Indeed, it is written that there were only a few that were saved.
Whether you call him Noah, or Atrahasis, or any of his other names across cultures and millennia, there was one man who was charged with preserving humanity. He was given instructions to build an ark. In some stories he was assisted by the gods, but in all cases he was told to save his family and collect all the other living things.
This is evidenced within our own genetic makeup. In studying the genetic diversity, or lack thereof, among the human population at large it is believable, and generally accepted among the scientific community, that the current human population is descended from no more than ten females from around the time that this story is held to have taken place. That is a pretty severe genetic bottleneck.
There are many who dismiss these stories as being works of fiction. Some believe they were made up long ago by those who wished to keep order among the masses through the fear of a vengeful god. Others attack the voracity of these documents because of the corruption of the institutions who evangelize their contents; that the scriptures of a faith whose priests conspire to abuse children or encourages its followers to wage holy war on their neighbors are not to be believed. History, however, is not a matter of faith and neither should the two ever be believed nor dismissed blindly, one based upon the other.
The great historian Herodotus, from whose writings so much of our knowledge of the ancient world has come; so many fruitful archaeological digs planned from his careful attention to detail and geography, leaves but one major uncertainty: Atlantis, the ruins of which sank to the bottom of the ocean; its few survivors scattered to the four corners of the world. He wrote of this event as though it had happened not so very long before his birth. I have faith that, one day soon, history will prove him right on this as well.
