Something else that most people, even many Christian people, tend to think of as part of a creation myth is the Garden of Eden story. It may well be that the story is mythic in nature and was embellished upon to tell a moral fable of sorts, but that doesn't mean it can't be loosely based on a real place with real people somewhere.
For reasons that are unfathomable to me, historians like to point to ancient stories as having influenced one another simply because of their dating. We have numerous stories of flood accounts around the world that bear certain similarities, the oldest of which is probably the story of Gilgamesh in Sumer. Thus, we have copies of, and/or mentions of, the story in ancient commentaries as being very old--older than any other flood tale we can currently date. This means only three things to modern historians and the like:
1) The story of Gilgamesh is the oldest, so it must have been first.
2) This means that all other flood accounts are based on that of Gilgamesh, at least in some trickle down fashion, because of its antiquity.
3) Since all of the flood accounts have fantastical elements within them, all are relegated to mythic status.
Of course these are all erroneous conclusions and for obvious reasons. First, the story of Gilgamesh probably is the oldest written account of a flood narrative, but that does not mean it could not be based on much older oral legends, and in fact it probably is. Second, there have no doubt been a large number of massive floods throughout the world during the history of man. Some of these men must have seen these floods coming and road them out in a boat of some kind along with their families and at least some livestock. To think this has only happened once in the history of man is naïve. Third, many stories that have some fantastic elements in them have turned out still to be based on real people, places, or events in some way. Homer's fantastical accounts of things that took place in the very real city of Troy should be proof enough of this.
If we think hard about it, we can find certain correlations between several varieties of ancient legends which on the surface seem to have nothing in common at all. Plato's tale of Atlantis may have some correspondence with the Garden of Eden, and both may have a connection to the flood stories of Manu, Gilgamesh, and Noah. The connecting agent in all these stories is water.
I've always thought it probable that the account of Eden was based on a real place somewhere, but that the names of the rivers had been changed over the years and the story itself a fable to explain, if not the creation of the world, at least some great sweeping change that took place in history--a real paradigm shift, possibly just a metamorphosis of man's self awareness. Stephen Oppenheimer in his book, Eden in the East, leaves my own thinking in the dust. Oppenheimer is a geneticist originally from England who worked as a pediatrician for many years. He also happened to live in Southeast Asia for a long time. One thing he noticed while living there is that there are a great deal of stories in that area pertaining to a paradisiacal garden and a giant snake or dragon. (Most of you probably know about the correlation between the great snake tales and the stories of flying snake-shaped dragons in Asia). There are in fact more such tales to be found in Southeast Asia than anywhere else in the world. A good rule of thumb among historians is that, wherever you find the most of a certain kind of story, and in the most dialects, there's a good chance that this is where it originated.
I had intended to go through Oppenheimer's book in order to create a sort of synopsis, but to my surprise Wikipedia's (the encyclopedia we all like to make fun of) description is actually quite good, so I'm going to copy it here for you:
In his book Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia, published in 1998, Oppenheimer hypothesizes that Eurasians have southeast Asian origins, citing evidence from a variety of disciplines to make his case: geology, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, and folklore. Using geological evidence, he writes about the rise in ocean levels that accompanied the waning of the ice age—as much as 500 feet—during the period 14,000-7,000 years ago and says that this submerged the continental shelf off the coast of southeast Asia. He, and others, calls this submerged continent Sundaland and cites archaeological evidence for an original culture in this region. The rising ocean levels caused this culture to disperse, and Oppenheimer supports this idea with the above-mentioned evidence from genetics, linguistics, and folklore. He notes, for example, that those cultures in regions whose geology would have led to their being submerged have flood myths, whereas there are no flood myths in Africa, which because of its lack of a continental shelf, was relatively unaffected by the rising ocean level.
Let me sort of re-surmise things a bit if I can. Oppenheimer has given direct proof through genetic testing which shows Eurasians in general have ancient Asian origins. He also points to several linguists who believe that there was at one time a worldwide language from which all others descended because we can see shared traits for instance in the languages throughout Europe, India, and Asia. He shows how many of the traits we think of as pertaining to civilized man began to spring up in very odd and unconnected places during the same 3,000 year period all over the planet. And he details geological evidence showing where vast flooding appeared toward the end of the last Ice Age--flooding that forced people to flee their lands for new ones. One of the places that ancient texts point to as having been the place of a large, lost civilization is now buried off the southern coast of Southeast Asia and is known as Sundaland. We find pyramids and mounds on every continent except Australia and the Antarctic. Where did they originate, and why do we find this large dispersion of similar traits in the customs, architecture, and stories of people the world over during this period after the Ice Age? Oppenheimer believes that most of the marks of civilization began in Sundaland, and when the waters rose from the melting ice of the Ice Age, Sundaland became buried under the ocean off the coast of Cambodia/Vietnam. The people who lived there, according to Oppenheimer, were likely the cradle of civilized man, and when the people fled, they took their way of life with them the world over. Thus his views are decidedly diffusionistic.
Something else Oppenheimer points to is the story of creation at the beginning of Genesis where it talks a great deal about "water" and the separating of waters and dry land. The Babylonians tell us that the Sumerians before them came to the Mesopotamia by way of ships from a distant land. They were far advanced from anyone else before them. They irrigated, farmed, raised livestock, built the earliest pyramids/ziggurats, had great art compared to others around them, and even had the earliest known form of writing. Could they have come from Southeast Asia? Oppenheimer believes so. He suggests that we learn to view the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis as more of a re-creation story that is actually dealing with a group of people who are forced from their lands by massive floods and settle in the Mesopotamian Valley, and as the flood waters begin to recede we find the separating of waters and dry land. Thus, for our foreign travelers the world is made anew. When you think about it, after the settling of waters directly after the Ice Age when virtually every coastline on the planet changed, it must have been very much like a new world to the people who lived then. It really was a re-creation of sorts.
Unfortunately, we'll probably never know for sure what existed under the ocean waters of Southeast Asia. There are several rock formations that appear to have been pyramids at one time, but the erosion is so complete that we'll never know for sure if they were or not. There are excavations in remote areas of Cambodia that are already bringing to light civilizations that go back as far as 5,000 B.C., and they're only just beginning to do archeological work there. If this is where the Genesis creation story comes from, and if Sundaland was the land where pyramid building began, we have to wonder if pyramids were originally altars erected by early man. I use "early man" and "Adam" interchangeably. Could pyramids have played a part of the religious ceremonies carried out by Adam? One thing I always thought was strange is that the Jewish historian, Josephus, mentions that during his time there stood somewhere an obelisk that was made by Adam's son Seth. It was supposed to have had a lot of writing on it which he never described. Maybe he didn't tell us what it said because it was in such an old language that no one knew how to translate it. But it's hard to think of obelisks without thinking of pyramids as well. Based on what we know of ancient Egypt, the two just seem to go together. Well... who knows. It's interesting, that's for sure.
Here's a picture showing where the Mekong River splits into four separate waters before dumping into the South China Sea. This is the general area where I believe the Garden of Eden story originated from. Sundaland would be located underwater just off this entire southern coast. Also keep in mind that if people migrated from there to the Mesopotamia and became the nation of Sumer, these may well have been the ancestors of the Jews.
I hope this has been instructive, and if nothing else, maybe it will be food for thought.
