While I wait

Life can be beautiful yes? Always room to transform. To grow. To fly. Choose your own adventure..choices “matter” .

The gold coast though, whole region loks like some utopian sim city land. If I had to chose and had the means its the first place I would go.

Life-size human statues and column bases from a long-lost temple dedicated to a supreme god have been discovered in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

The discoveries date back over 2,500 years to the Iron Age, a time period when several groups — such as the Urartians, Assyrians and Scythians — vied for supremacy over what is now northern Iraq.....

No more top-to-bottom (pyramid) religions, politics, and money. Look at these altogether is doing to all people worldwide presently and behind events throughout history.

chinese tell me that without an emperor they kill one another until they get one

I have some conflicted thoughts and feelings about that.

disarming

How old, then, is this ancient memory of a lost paradise? In their myths, rites and hymns the ancient Sumerians contrasted their own time to the earliest remembered age--what they called "the days of old," or "that day," when the gods "gave man abundance, the day when vegetation flourished." This was when the supreme god An "engendered the year of abundance." To this primeval age, every Sumerian priest looked back as the reference for the preferred order of things, which
was lost through later conflict and deluge.

In the city of Eridu at the mouth of the Euphrates, the priests recalled a Golden Age prior to familiar history. The predecessors of their race, it was claimed, had formerly reposed in the paradise of Dilmun, called the "Pure Place" of man's genesis. This lost paradise of Dilmun, about which scholars have debated for decades, is strangely reminiscent of the paradise of Eden.

"That place was pure, that place was clean. In Dilmun...the lion mangled not. The wolf ravaged not the lambs," the Sumerian texts read. The inhabitants of this paradise lived in a state of near perfection, in communion with the gods, drinking the waters of life and enjoying unbounded prosperity.

Ancient Egypt, an acknowledged cradle of civilization, preserved a remarkably similar memory. Not just in their religious and mythical texts, but in every sacred activity, the Egyptians incessantly looked backwards, to events of the Zep Tepi. The phrase means the "First Time," a time of perfection "before rage or clamor or strife or uproar had come about," as the texts themselves put it. This was the paradise of Ra, and the memories of that time echoed through centuries of Egyptian thought. "The land was in abundance," the texts say. "There was no year of hunger. . .Walls did not fall; thorns did not pierce in the time of the Primeval Gods."

Or from another text: "there was no unrighteousness in the land, no crocodile seized, no snake bit in the time of the First Gods."

Cosmic harmony, abundance, paradise on earth. To this paradisal, according to the great nineteenth century scholar Francois Lenormant, the Egyptians "continually looked back with regret and envy." The golden age of Ra was, for the Egyptians, the great "example" setting a standard for all later ages.

A surprising fact emerges. The legend of the Golden Age or ancient paradise is as old as civilization. And the implications are well worth pondering. A coherent set of ideas has survived all of the twists and turns of cultural evolution for at least five thousand years--and on every continent. Now that's an astonishing verification of the durability of myth! Many of us had always thought of myth as the outcome of reckless invention--illiterate savages entertaining themselves by contriving magical stories out of nothing. Imagine such a process going on for thousands of years, and ask yourself if any possibility of a universal memory would remain.

Bear in mind that the myth-makers did not just recount a charming tale; they strove desperately to recover what was lost. In the infancy of civilization collective activity reflects a singular reference to the age of the gods--the honoring of the gods through celebration, representation, reenactment, codification, and massive construction activity. In fact, there are numerous grounds for saying that civilization itself was the outcome of this fundamentally religious activity.

Perhaps the most accomplished analyst of mythology in modern times was the late Mircea Eliade, chairman of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion. From his meticulous, lifelong survey of the subject, professor Eliade drew a stunning conclusion: literally every component of early civilizations--from religion to art and architecture--expressed symbolically the desire to recover and to re-live the lost Golden Age. That which symbolically transported the participant back to the First Time, the Golden Age, was sacred. That which did not was transient and mundane, of no interest.

The role of this memory in the ancient cultures carries vast implications for our understanding of the events that provoked human imagination in the myth-making epoch. Early man yearned for a return to paradise. Every coronation of a king, every New Year's festival, monumental construction, every recitation of temple hymns and prayers, every holy war, every sacrifice to the gods was motivated by a desire to recapture some aspect of the Golden Age, to live, if only for a symbolic moment, in that enchanted, opening chapter in the book of gods and wonders.

He brings up some interesting points. I'm thinking specifically about the question of whether they were contemporary societies.

disarming

There are over 500 cultures worldwide with legends of a great deluge. Survivors include single individuals or small groups. All seemed to have been forewarned of an impending catastrophe. They escaped by seeking high ground, caves, or by means of various objects that would float.

In summing up, something catastrophic happened at the end of the last ice age. Myths by people who experienced this help us better understand what occurred.

It seems almost unbelievable that the altered night skies, and especially the rotation of the dome of the stars, would have the effect that it did in generating a half dozen new religions, initiating an historical awareness, and be the genesis of the study of physics. It is even more astounding to see these changes happening worldwide and at almost the same time -- in Babylonia, Greece, India, China, and Mesoamerica. The simultaneity of the interests in these topics is amazing, especially considering the lack of cultural contacts. This has been remarked upon by others.

If you look for the history of any of the Greek cities, or the nations of the Middle East, or China, you will see that in most instances history cannot be traced back before 600 or 700 BC. Everything disappears into legends. It is as if the world suddenly woke up, and abstract thought was first allowed after 600 BC.

The fact is that far-flung regions of the world all simultaneously came to the same conclusions about the universe and the world. This suggests the possibility of something global being the cause of the new sciences, philosophies, and inquiries.

[link to www.ancient-origins.net (secure)]

[link to www.thunderbolts.info]

Something I've thought about quite a bit. Nice topic.