There have long been arguments about "doomsday prophecies" or "ark deliverances," most notably the Mayan prophecies that December 21, 2012 was the "end of the world," and the story of Noah's Ark saving animals. Why, then, are similar doomsday fantasies so ingrained in human cultural experience?
In Deception: 5,000 Years of Lies, Forgeries, and Rumors, American paleoanthropologists Ian Tartersol and Peter Nevromont point out that when someone first recorded their views on the world around them, their unknowns and fears about their own and the fate of all of humanity, the illusion of doom took root.
The following is an excerpt from "Deception: Lies, Forgeries and Rumors in 5,000 Years", which is slightly abridged and modified from the original text. The subtitles are added by the editors, not the original text, and the pictures used in the text are illustrations of this book. It has been authorized by the publishing house to publish.
Deception: Lies, Forgeries and Rumors over 5,000 Years, by Ian Tattersol and Peter Nevromont, translated by Wang Yinjun, Chongqing University Press, August 2021.
The end is just around the corner? A few times we know the "end of the world"
If you've had the same experience as we did, you've probably seen a lot of comic book characters holding up signs that read, "The end is near, repent, and you've rarely seen them in real life." Yet similar doomsday fantasies are deeply ingrained in human cultural experience, and apparently take root when someone first records their views on the world around them, their unknowns and fears about their own destiny and that of humanity as a whole. A 2800 B.C. Assyrian clay tablet reads gloomily: "Our land has recently decayed. There are signs that the world is accelerating towards the end. ”
The Assyrian clay tablet, titled Epic of Gilgamesh, is partly written: "Our land has recently decayed." There are signs that the world is accelerating towards the end. Corruption is rife; children no longer obey their parents; everyone wants to write his own book, and the end of the world is at hand. ”
The early Christians also embraced this hunch, clinging to Jesus' repeated declaration that the world before us would end and be replaced by the coming of the kingdom of heaven. At first, Christians seemed to expect the end of the day to come, but by the end of the 1st century, doubts began to emerge: "But that day, the hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father." (Matthew 24:36 ESV)
Later, theologians took this wavering as a challenge. In 365 AD, the theologian Hilary of Poitiers returned to the original narrative that the end of the world was imminent. His followers also took immediate action, prophesiing that the entire world would end at a specific date in the future: January 1, 1000 A.D., the first millennium of Christianity. Even when this magical day passed peacefully and everyone woke up like a dream, a specific date became the trend.
Even Martin Luther, who broke with tradition—who did not recognize the Book of Revelation and said it was "neither apostolic nor prophetic," but most liked to invoke it in apocalyptic doctrines like the Rapture—expected the world to end on October 9, 1538. When the end did not happen, Luther revised the date to 1600, when he was safe and well placed.
It is not so surprising to think that people are willing to believe so many strange things, so that ancient Assyrians and medieval theologians were fascinated by doomsday prophecies. Who's sure? They may be right in the end, although we'll have to wait a while. Perhaps it is Sir Isaac Newton, the embodiment of the age of reason, the man who witnessed the rise of modern science, who is also on their side. It seems that the inventor of natural mechanics and calculus, the author of the majestic Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, also became a believer in the lack of imagination, believing that biblical prophecies were "not indifferent or not, but duty in the greatest moment."
For Newton, the prophecies in Scripture were "the history of things that have come from the past," but they were written in symbolic and mysterious prophecies that required expert interpretation. And he himself is happy to obey. After years of effort, he calculated that the world would be established in 1260 years after the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire until the end of 2060 AD. He wrote in 1704: "The world may later end, but I see no reason for it to end early." "So, judging by the calculations of the most eminent scientists of all time, most of us can at least catch our breath."
Interestingly, Newton made this prophecy "not to assert the time of the end, but to stop a large number of prophecies of the dreamers, who frequently predicted the end of the world, and in this way classified divine prophecies with their failed prophecies."
This sacred goal has not been achieved. In our time, radio evangelist Harold Campin predicted in 1992 that the "rapture" (when, around the second coming of Jesus, the living and deceased believers would join the Lord on the clouds, and that the rest of us would be left to spend time in earthquakes and plagues: another condemnation of revelation) would most likely occur on September 6, 1994. He was not intimidated by the failure to happen as scheduled, but adjusted his prediction to May 21, 2011, although he said that the actual end of the world was five months later, that is, October 21.
How things went, or didn't, eventually forced Campping to "humbly admit that we misestimated the time." But at the same time, he and his colleagues made millions of dollars, all donated to his "family radio." When his predictions did not materialize as scheduled, Campion refused to return the donations. He is said to have said, "We are not yet at the last moment, so why should we return the money?" Unfortunately, the hype overrun for the 200 million souls he hoped to save eventually forced him to shut down the radio station and disband his staff.
Millions of people have taken to conspiracy theory sites on the internet that warn people that, according to a 5126 Mayan circular calendar, December 23, 2012 will be the end of the world we know. Several pages of The Dresden Codex are shown here, containing astronomical and astrological content for calculating the Mayan cycle. This manuscript is one of only three surviving Mayan manuscripts, and it is estimated that the original manuscript numbered as large as five thousand. The remaining manuscripts were destroyed in the 16th century by the Spanish religious authorities.
This frustrating experience did not put the brakes on similar prophecies, especially in an era when the Internet could easily collapse, potentially triggering more catastrophic consequences for human civilization than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. However, after so many disappointments, why do so many people still eat this set?
The theologian Lorenzo Di Tommaso has suggested that such beliefs usually pop up when problems arise in the physical world, and almost always. People feel the pressure of their surroundings. He reminds us that these prophecies stem from a desire to reconcile two opposing beliefs: on the one hand, there are some disturbing errors in the survival of modern man, and on the other hand, there is still room for hope even so. We are moving toward some kind of idea of "great correction," which happens to be balanced with the promise of redemption, so that "the god of eschatology is the god of order, not the god of chaos." If Di Tommaso is right, the belief in eschatology is an excellent example of a cognitive dissonance that seems to profoundly characterize the human condition.
"Ark Archaeology"? The whole story about Mount Ararat is made up
Human experience is limited, so as history unfolds, the same thing repeats itself. One of the most pervasive metaphors in the Western tradition is the biblical description of Noah's flood, which unabashedly tells people that it would be unwise to provoke more powerful forces. However, while most people will associate this story with Genesis and the Christian God, some of its elements actually date back to pre-biblical times, until ancient Babylon may even be earlier, though earlier written records are lost.
According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, written about 1500 years before the Old Testament period, the gods, annoyed by human folly, decided to drown them all. But there was one man, Utnapishtim, who was warned in his dream. He was told to build a covered boat of a specific size, filled with "seeds of all living things."
This story is strangely the same as the Noah described in the Bible and the Great Flood, and of course, it must be admitted that the protagonist's name is a bit awkward. In fact, the two wet legends are identical enough to indicate that they have a common source. Or rather, the latter legend directly copied the previous one.
In any case, the story clearly has enough staying power to repeatedly inspire two more or less contradictory aspects of the human mind. On the one hand, human beings are willing to believe in truths revealed by stronger forces. On the other hand—both based on underlying beliefs and at least with an element of skepticism—human beings are eager to find some kind of physical evidence to support that belief. As a result, the media often reports that someone had found conclusive evidence of Noah's Ark and, as Genesis says, was high somewhere in "Mount Ararat." Today's Mount Ararat is located in the Far East of Turkey, although it was once located in greater Armenia in ancient times.
The 16,854-foot(about 5,056-meter) high Mount Ararat is located in eastern Turkey near the borders of Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan. According to the Old Testament, this is where Noah's Ark last docked. As early as 275 BC, the Babylonian historian Berossus recorded an Armenian ark that "someone scraped off the ship asphalt and used it as a talisman."
The "archaeology of the Ark", that is, the field investigation of the ark's tracks, has a long history. Back in 275 BC, the Babylonian historian Belossos recorded: "Some parts of [the ark] were still in Armenia, and someone scraped bitumen from the ship and used it as a talisman." Since then, numerous fearless warriors have traveled there in search of ruins, although a stranded wooden ship will most likely not survive the millennia of wind and rain on the 16,854-foot (about 5,056-meter) high mountain. However, with the advent of television sets and their thirst for sensational subjects, the frequency of investigations seems to be rapidly climbing.
In 1949, a Bible college professor, Aaron M. Aaron J. Smith, grieving the widespread skepticism about the Bible that he had seen, organized a massive expedition to Mount Ararat and publicly declared its purpose to prove its authenticity. Unfortunately, after tracking down several local legends, he found no trace of the Ark. In the next sixty years, people still organized no less than a hundred exploration expeditions, which can be described as indomitable. Many of them were inspired by aerial or satellite images, which captured "ship-shaped" features on hillsides. The results of the exploration were so insignificant (many reports turned out to be a mercenary hoax by the local Kurds), so much so that some scholars shifted their focus to Iran's Mount Suleiman, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. Again, nothing was found.
The Gilgamesh Epic describes how the gods caused a flood to destroy the earth, but instructed the only man, Utanapsim, to build a ship to save himself, his family, and the birds and beasts. After six days, the flood receded and the big ship landed. In Genesis, God decided to send a flood on earth, but instructed Noah to build an ark to save himself, his family, and two of each living thing. Forty days later, the flood receded and the ark landed.
But eventually something happened that allowed people at the TV station to take a big book and write a book. In 1993, CBS network aired a so-called documentary, The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark. George Jammal, an unemployed actor, told the nation in the film that he visited Mount Ararat three times to trace the Ark and eventually found it in an ice cave on the slope of the summit.
According to Jamal's description, the large frozen wooden ship was divided into different corrals, and he also chopped a piece of wood back to prove the existence of the ark. Another piece of evidence is photographs. Sadly, Jamal's photographer stumbled into the ice gap shortly after they found the ark, and his body (and camera) was never found again. The story is so thin that the show's producers may have patronized the names of Jamal's local Armenian guides: "Mr. Ashorian" and "Mr. Ariss Buthetian".
At the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky, the Ark was built to the size described in Genesis. What is the motivation behind the endless and futile search for the Ark? Or Bigfoot, Immortal Springs, Golden City... What exactly are we after?
Still, Jamal was a guest on primetime shows, exaggerating to show the audience the "precious, God-given" piece of wood. His wonderful performance is also assisted by a group of "experts", one more than one oath, one more than the other. On the side was Darren McGarth, a respectful host who summed up the two-hour farce in one sentence, "corroborating the Biblical description of the Flood in every detail." Christians applauded and celebrated, and skeptics scoffed.
The show aired for a year, and Jamal publicly announced that the whole story about Mount Ararat was made up. He had never been to or around Mount Ararat, and the so-called ancient wood was nothing more than a piece of local pine, and he added all the spices he could find in the kitchen and steamed the wood for cooking. It reportedly smelled of teriyaki sauce, but tv producers refused to take it for age testing, just as they hadn't verified anything else. In Jamal's own words, he wanted to expose the "bluff" of "religious far rightists." After his words and deeds, CBS was busy and cheekily changing the program from "documentary" to "entertainment". But the lesson is already in front of us: on paper, it is shallow, and seeing is not true.
Noah's Ark remains an illusion. But the flood recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis may have been true. Around 5600 BC, the waters of the Mediterranean Poured into the inland lowlands and the previously isolated Black Sea basin, with Mount Ararat not far away. Imagine the shock of the basin's indigenous farmers, who saw the water level of the original freshwater lake rise, drowning the familiar scenery and undoubtedly drowning many of them. This shock still reverberates today.
Author 丨 [Us] Ian Tattersol, [US] Peter Nevromont
Excerpt 丨 He Ye
Editor丨 Walk away
Introduction Proofreader 丨 Li Shihui