God in Ancient China

I am taking this with some skepticism, because the speaker is certainly not unbiased, but his talk was fascinating.

The idea is that the stories of Genesis are in fact told in picture form in ancient chinese letters. His argument seems to be that Ancient Chinese and Jews were once one people who split with one group going East to become Modern (Han?) Chinese, and another group west to eventually become the Israelites.

I haven't yet read anything supporting/debunking this, but the linguistic ideas (that ancient letters were pictures - at least for the Chinese) was what interested me most.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA-AkJzpKmg

It is possible. I think it is generally accepted that people originated from one place and over time changed according to their environments resulting in today's 'races'.

I know that a few academics have suggested something similar due to the similarity in various cultures myths, which could mean there was a common point of origin before people dispersed and took those stories with them.

Antedeluvian theories like Atlantis etc say the same.

But it is very interesting that faiths and cultures as different as east and west could have something so essential in common.

I shall scour the net when I have chance lol

Fun to watch, but I know next to nothing about it. I tend to view them more as expressions of the interaction of the Tao, human nature, and nature.... I'll have to go through this one word at a time I think offline!!

If there was ancient documentation of events I'd expect a lot of meaning to be lost in translation along the way, so the metaphor of a flood could mean anything forcing mass migration to me, and to the hill's could point to the Himalaya's. Perhaps it was the only way to escape dinosaurs, LOL, though obviously the dates in the Bible cannot be taken literally IMO, then perhaps they spread east and west from there.... and the myth was carried for millions of years as the 'story' above all other stories.

Sharing a common ancestory/culture could be a good lesson in dealing with strangers, instead of fear you view them as long lost relatives. It sort of makes sense that such an ancient civilization would use a pictographic nature in their characters, which went on to be built up into the various other languages - perhaps kept relatively most intact in China because it traveled the least distance from the hypothetical source.

Akkarin wrote: I haven't yet read anything supporting/debunking this, but the linguistic ideas (that ancient letters were pictures - at least for the Chinese) was what interested me most.

As far as I am personally aware, there are no natural languages with natural orthography (i.e., writing systems not created solely by one person) that are not based, ultimately, in pictures.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are obvious, especially their determiners. And Chinese can be documented to be descended from pictoglyphs as well:


But what about Greek? Latin? Hebrew?


It's just the natural progression of orthography. Our earliest history is written (not drawn) in cave paintings.

This is truly interesting. I have recently been reading some of the work around aboriginal mitochondrial DNA and the repetition of that throughout time. If that is true then indeed the common ancestor theory seems to hold. The other place that is of note on this theme is the thunderbolts project and specifically their three videos on symbols of an alien sky

http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/

and

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvHqXK_Hz79tjqRosK4tWYA

respectively.

Adder wrote: If there was ancient documentation of events I'd expect a lot of meaning to be lost in translation along the way, so the metaphor of a flood could mean anything forcing mass migration to me, and to the hill's could point to the Himalaya's. Perhaps it was the only way to escape dinosaurs, LOL, though obviously the dates in the Bible cannot be taken literally IMO, then perhaps they spread east and west from there.... and the myth was carried for millions of years as the 'story' above all other stories.

Obviously a flood is completely subjective, it could mean slightly more water than usual meaning you can't grow crops and have to relocate to survive or a full on sinking of an island lol. Though it doesn't have to be specifically Atlantis (that's just the most famous example) deluge myths are everywhere in all cultures. The only one who seems to not be affected by a flood myth historically seems to be Egypt (as it's mainly land locked) but they were aware of it and had records of people fleeing from it (hence where the story of Atlantis came from).

The common ancestry also explains similarities in architecture etc as conceivably survivors would try to recreate what they knew but given the lack of the appropriate technology and knowledge they end up with different variations (I'm thinking specifically of the different types of pyramids still around today) strangely though, I know the Asian myths also have at least one big flood, but beyond that their religions etc seem so different from Europeans and even the south America's which is why I'm surprised something was found that seems to link it up

Of course this is all theory and borderline fantasy, but it's interesting. And as a story writer myself, I think it's a great concept

Burn_Phoenix wrote: Obviously a flood is completely subjective, it could mean slightly more water than usual meaning you can't grow crops and have to relocate to survive or a full on sinking of an island lol. Though it doesn't have to be specifically Atlantis (that's just the most famous example) deluge myths are everywhere in all cultures. The only one who seems to not be affected by a flood myth historically seems to be Egypt (as it's mainly land locked) but they were aware of it and had records of people fleeing from it (hence where the story of Atlantis came from).

It could be common ancestry and history of a localized flood, or it could just be that early civilizations were always built near water. Even Egypt had the Nile, though their "flood mythos" was something that made their land fertile enough for crops every year, and thusly wasn't a huge deal to them...