More seasoned readers of The Hump will remember its emphasis on “origins” before it started to document how the world has finally gone completely mad. One recurring theme was to refute the claim that the Bible, and Genesis 1 in particular, teaches an erroneous “Middle East obsolete science cosmology.” The matter broadly boils down to the proper consideration of genre.
I based one short 2017 blog series on the magnificent work on Mesopotamian cosmology by assyriologist Wayne Horowitz, the series starting here. His work demonstrates conclusively that the commonly reproduced “goldfish bowl” picture of so-called “ANE cosmology” is a mythical Victorian invention, with its flat earth, domed “firmament” and boundless cosmic ocean on all sides.
I argued that, like the phenomenological cosmology of childhood, these ancient civilisations, including the Israelites, pictured their world as a layer-cake, simply because until the Greek philosophers came along, the idea of considering the world as a discrete “thing” was as yet unthought. Compare our own indistinct lay concept of “the shape of the universe,” which we somehow think of as boundless, or as another sphere, whilst we gaze uncomprehendingly at illustrations of it as a torus, or try to conceptualise the Big Bang without thinking of a balloon.
Well, yesterday I happened to be listening to a YouTube interview with one of the greatest living assyriologists, Irving Finkel (who looks remarkably like Horowitz, each resembling an off-duty Father Christmas). Finkel, based at the British Museum, has spent a lifetime reading and studying most of the extant cuneiform literature. He even discovered a new version of the Great Flood story. One of his convictions is that human nature has not changed much, the more vernacular tablets showing that the Babylonians experienced life much as we do, writing of such mundane and familiar matters as letters crossing in the post.
As an atheist (or perhaps a Jewish agnostic) he sees the extensive cuneiform religious literature as being somewhat peripheral to the daily life of the people, who would, he thinks, call on gods only when life went badly wrong, or in dealing with existential challenges like death and bereavement. I suspect he exaggerates the matter there – outside the secular West, one can see how religion is part and parcel of people’s routine lives, as indeed it is for committed Christians and others even here – including his own Christadelphian mentor, Wilfred Lambert. But the general point of shared human experience across the ages is a good one. Finkel suspects that this common experience goes back to the dawn of humanity, long before writing arose in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC.
Anyway, this leads him on to discuss the advanced scientific and mathematical scholarly culture that developed with a literary class, including the divination that, as Francesca Rochberg has shown, actually depended on a strong empirical set of data, maintained over millennia.
This literature Finkel has studied extensively, and I was surprised to hear him say that, although he could not prove it, he is strongly of the opinion that the astronomers and mathematicians (both the same scribes, in fact) knew as well as modern scientists do that the world is a sphere. He believes they would have extrapolated to this from, for example, observations of the moon.
If he’s right, this is remarkable because it suggests that the perennial claims about mediaeval Christians believing the earth was flat are not just erroneous, but entirely fictional, because the roundness of the earth has been known to the educated throughout recorded history, and not simply since the Greeks discovered it as good scholars agree. The earth has not been flat since soon after the invention of writing… until it became a thing on social media, that is!
One objection to Finkel’s opinion, which it would be interesting to raise with him were it possible, is that it would appear to contradict the “layer cake” cosmology so ably demonstrated by Horowitz in the cuneiform literature. I suspect Finkel would answer, as I would, that everything depends on genre. If a religious Babylonian is writing about the hierarchical nature of the world, from the highest dwelling of the gods to the underworld where dead shades are governed by darker deities, then what shape the world takes overall is irrelevant, and he will describe its layers. An astronomical writer, on the other hand – or even the same scribe in astronomical mode – might well have a mental concept of a round world around which the celestial objects turn, even if that concept is never written down (because his subject is the heavens, not the earth).
That is certainly true today, as the following illustration, from my 1983 edition of Collins Atlas of the World, demonstrates. The illustrator knows quite well that the world is round, but since the subject here is the atmosphere, the world is pictured as a layer cake, in true ANE manner – though in this case it is square – perhaps we can blame brutalist modernist architecture for that!
Actually even the regular gistorians now agree nobody pushed the flat earth idea. The bible is gods word and unrelated to the goofy ideas of the ancients or modern ancients.
getting impresions of these old peoples from raw data is difficult. There was a agenda in the 1800’s to reject the bible as gods word and so they invented , imagined, unreasonble things to debunk it. they do it today and probably these two father christmases. We need better truer people to do a moeern better job. then we will find cool stuff.