Posted on 12/15/2014 7:42:15 AM PST by blam
(A few years back, Professor Stephen Oppenheimer wrote a book titled "Eden In The East" where he proposed that our culture flowed from east to west instead of west to east. Here's a rebuttal)
Cultural diffusion from East to West?
2014/01/12
Oppenheimer’s theory is that “ … the roots of the great flowering of civilisation in the fertile crescent of the Ancient Near East lay in the sinking shorelines of Southeast Asia. The Sumerians and Egyptians themselves wrote about the skilled wise men from the East, a fact often dismissed as the embellishment of a fertile imagination.” Purely as an aside, the infertility of the minds of some researchers protecting true knowledge can surely be offset against a true opposite, the imaginative minds of some lawyers in their role as protective inquisitors in an open court in the nations of the Anglo-West.
Oppenheimer points out that the myths of the Sumerians, “with their religious connotations,” were “among the first written records in the third millennium BC;” and that “in the majority of cases the structure and content of the Mesopotamian myths show them to be derived from earlier Eastern sources;” and that “we may suppose that the direction of diffusion was East-to-West.” That claim must be equivalent to putting a cat into an aviary! If true, the dates of diffusion may be much earlier than 6,000 years ago.
He states as a ‘myth-type’ the parable of the ‘two warring brothers’ which had arisen in eastern Indonesia, and to have travelled with the Austronesian expansion along the north coast of New Guinea into the Southwest Pacific “at least 6,000 years ago.” As a most probable clash of cultures (eg. nomadism vs. agriculture), this parable (an example is that of Kulabob and Manup in eastern New Guinea)
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at rajarasablog.wordpress.com ...
The key was travel through the Straits of Malacca...there was a ‘magic moment’ when the water became deep enough to allow ship/boat traffic to flow in that direction opening up whole new worlds to sea travelers.
Maori Men And Women Are From Different Homelands
Want to give it another try?
“He states as a ‘myth-type’ the parable of the ‘two warring brothers’ which had arisen in eastern Indonesia...”
Why assume it arose in Indonesia? Seems more likely that both the Indonesian version and other similar myths both came from an older, original source.
Thanks blam. I think John Mayer did a song about Sundaland...
Yup...Donovan did one here too.
LOL. Not only can’t I translate Vietnamese, I have trouble remembering what I had for breakfast this morning. Manup is, however, a rather common Thai male name. Probably coincidence.
Actually there are several known examples of rapid shoreline change. Here are 10:
http://listverse.com/2013/08/05/10-lesser-known-mysterious-underwater-cities/
and 5 more:
http://www.earthporm.com/5-mind-blowing-underwater-cities/
most are due to earthquakes, major storms, or tsunami (I guess that could be earthquake related). Though some like the one in the Denmark region took a number of happenings over time. God moves nature quick some times.
Here's a map of the Straits Of Malacca, I've been through there a few times and it is highly infected with pirates, even today.
The area (Malaysia)above the Straits is the oldest rain-forest in the world at 130 million years. That rain forest was there when the Indian continent went trucking by 50 million years ago and crashed into the land mass and created the Himayalian mountains.
This area must have been a perfect place for humans to live, flourish even, during the Ice Age.
Some of the oldest human DNA ever discovered is in Malaysia with some small Negrito people.
It must be geographically beautiful in that region-—but I was unaware of the piracy.
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