Mankind's Second Dispersion
Greetings,
Prior to searching for the archaeological evidence of the Flood, I was familiar with assurances that there has never been any replenishing of the world that might be identified with a new dispersion from Noah's family. I reckoned it was so. Otherwise, how could the archaeologists have missed it? But it is my custom to check out scholarly and scientific proclamations. I delight when others investigate my own. That improves our understanding of science and history.
I discovered that until the middle years of the twentieth century, migrations were all the rage among archaeologists. Those doing this weren't interested in Noah's family but in light coming from the Ancient Near East. Others were interested in light bearers: Egyptians spreading mummies and pyramids and Aryans their superior civilization. Most migrations were discovered by trying to understand patterns in the archaeological remains. Then set in what is known as the anti-diffusion dogma: the denial that not even inventions or ideas spread from the Ancient Near East to northern Europe, or from the Old World to the New World. Currently, North American archaeologists deny the manifest evidence that natives here migrated from Mexico and Central America.
That has given natives the right to claim as their ancestors the most ancient burials found in their territories, which are usually those from the Flood. But even when folks believed in the Flood, few thought of antediluvians as living in America. Those settlements from the Middle Bronze migration (see above map) that I trace from the Ancient Near East differ from those belonging to the earth's earlier inhabitants in being actual settlements rather than cemeteries or burial mounds. The material cultures of these new migrations have no continuity with those in the Flood burials.
Fortunately, a lot of archaeological research had been done prior to the era of anti-diffusion. The migration lines that you see on the map above are mainly from those archaeological traces. The details are given in the text and footnotes and found in the more than one thousand sources listed in The Archaeological Evidence. The map above pertains to the larger worldwide spread and not the immediate dispersion connecting historically-known peoples according to the table of nations from Noah's family (Genesis 10), to be the subject of another newsletter.
These migrations begin in the Middle Bronze of the Ancient Near East. From about 2100 BC, there spread throughout the world new migrations, each having a distinctive material character but all sharing a subset of what is found in the Middle Bronze of the Ancient Near East. That would include lost-wax bronze working; the heddle loom; wattle-and-daub hut construction, megaron houses with internal court yards, stepped pyramids; spoked-wheel wagons; hieroglyphic writing on bark paper; sand-tempered ceramics that include thin-walled cups and pots, tripod vessels (for open fire cooking), large urns, animal figurines, handles or side lugs for carrying, decorated with incisions and dentate stamping, chevrons and swastikas; and the bow-and-arrow for hunting. They also spread domesticated crops such as grapes, apples, apricots, barley, flax, and distinctive species of cotton. Their domesticated animals included dogs, horses, camels, cattle, pigs, and chickens. They carried with them religious practices like burnt sacrifices and some memory of the great Flood.
Archaeologists do note great changes in the archaeological record occurring at just this time. That they have failed to see what are entirely new beginnings is because, despite their significance and long duration, Middle Bronze Age remains are tiny. This is because mankind's numbers are recovering from the great Flood that ended the Early Bronze Age (as also the Chalcolithic, Neolithic, and Paleolithic "Ages" at concurrent but less affluent locations). Even most of what is now assigned to the Middle Bronze Age are improperly-assigned burials from the Early Bronze Age.
The same situation exists everywhere outside the Ancient Near East. China slowly recovers its population with the beginnings of Hsia, Shang, and Chou settlements along the Yellow River, the Neolithic population all over China having been ended by the Flood. The Formative cultures of America spread from the Far East to Ecuador about three thousand years ago, and all over America from those beginnings. America's Paleolithic and Archaic cultures were lost in the Flood. Sand-tempered pottery and the bow-and-arrow, entirely unknown to the earlier populations of America, were spread by the newcomers.
The first post-Flood settlements in Europe include the famous Minoan settlements on the island of Crete. Minyan pottery marks the spread of new migrants across Turkey into Greece and Italy. These new migrants create the Mycenaean culture in Greece and the Villanovan culture in northern Italy. Both are related to the spreading Urnfield cultures on the continent. Much of Europe, India, and all of subSaharan Africa remained unsettled to the Iron Age when axes suitable for clearing great forest became available.
Archaeologists typically see these migrations as interesting new cultures arising in the midst of those cultures that are marked by burial mounds and cemeteries. This is what inspired the theory of the Aryan invaders. In fact, the new people were less violent than those agrarians who had previously lived in the lands where they were spreading.
Importantly, radiocarbon dating was not available in the first half of the twentieth century when most of these traces were being searched. As in the case of the Hopewell and Adena cultures of the Ohio River, Flood burials more than two thousand years older, are assumed those of the new occupants. But the culture of the burials altogether differs from those of the new settlers.
As I detail in Chapter 20 of my book, these Flood burials provide a wonderful marker for clarifying the archaeology of ancient man. They function as the tuning of a radio or the focussing of a telescope, turning the currently disconnected and muddled picture of man's past into a wonderfully clear picture of settlements and migrations. The light and lens for integrated understanding comes from those "mythical" early chapters of Genesis. No one should judge the light of a lamp until they have actually used it.
Best regards,
Philip Williams
|
