Lost ancient civilisation's ruins lie beneath Gulf, says boffin

Refugees from a lost civilisation whose ruins and relics lie submerged on the seabed deep beneath the Persian Gulf may have founded ancient, advanced Middle Eastern societies thousands of years ago in the time before the Pharaohs. According to Jeffrey Rose, a Birmingham uni archaeologist, recent excavations and discoveries …

[Anonymous Coward]

bible

ive always wondered how much of history is actually hidden in the bible. a while back, dureing a rather heavy smoking session, me and some friends discussed the possibilty that the garden of eden was actually atlantis, and as mentioned in this report was eventually submerged and the people left "paradise" to start anew in a much more hostile land. Over the course of thousands of years the story was changed and adapted to suit the currant lawmakers. if this is correct, we might have been right. I wonder what else is hidden in the bible, under all the propoganda and nonsence?

[Code Monkey]

"Inspired by events"

It's fair to say that a lot of the Old Testament was inspired by events - for example the great flood appears in other ancient texts; though I refuse to dignify all the supernatural humbug as "events".

[Shakje]

And let's not forget...

there's not even any evidence for the Exodus. The Bible is far too unreliable to be a primary source, and until events are confirmed by other means I don't think it's that much use historically except as a culture reference. I think you also have to be careful to assume that because something appears in other religious texts it is true. Remembering that many religious texts share other details which could be interpreted as having simply come from the same source mythology.

[Mike Moyle]

Re: the Exodus ("And let's not forget...")

I've generally held to the idea that, if Egypt suffered a series of unfortunate calamities within a short period of time that impacted food production -- locusts, insect-borne diseases among the cattle, crop-damaging hail, etc. -- that expelling large populations of foreigners who don't worship the "real" gods (and were probably the ones who pissed them off!) to go fend for themselves in someone else's fields would be a logical food-conservation measure.

...Sort of a "Get your people out!" rather than a "Let my people go!" scenario, but that doesn't play as well in the hinterlands...

But, them, I'm a cynical old SOB...

[Martin Gregorie]

Further reading

If you want to know more about the correlation between the Bible and history, you could do worse than start with Werner Keller's "The Bible As History" - still in print and available as a paperback from a giant Internet Bookseller everywhere.

[bob's hamster]

A currant lawmaker?

"Over the course of thousands of years the story was changed and adapted to suit the currant lawmakers." I expect that a currant lawmaker has a similar role to a sultana lawmaker (looking after the rights of the dried fruit) or am I wrong?

[Richard Taylor 2]

but

A primary source would be grapefully received.

[Aron]

beliefs and facts

Dilmun is in fact Bahrain. In ancient times the Babylonians and Indians believed it to be a major gateway to a pleasant afterlife owing to the sweet freshwater surrounding the island. That's why we find over 200,000 tombs on the island of foreign origin.

As for the Garden of Eden, cmon, are we talking history or fiction? This is strictly a Bible story that relates to very wide region from Euphrates to the Ganges according to Josephus.

[raivn]

history or fiction?

over time, history becomes legend, legend becomes myth.

don't be so quick to dismiss accounts of the past just they appear in religious texts.

[Reality Dysfunction]

ook

sounds like its all just one big wheel of time.....

[Ammaross Danan]

Rivers

"the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are both mentioned"

Ever consider the rivers received their names based on the rivers mentioned in the Bible, rather than the other way around?

[Anonymous Coward]

Garden of Eden?

OK, maybe not.

Insert your own made up location:

Atlantis?

Camelot?

El Dorado?

Cockaigne?

Valhalla?

Avalon?

Shangri-La?

.....

[Richard 116]

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Sheffield?

[AC-This-Isn't-Facebook]

Title

Bradford?

[Christoph]

Or maybe

Numenor

[Anonymous Coward]

The G-spot

Well I've never found it.

[hexx]

what title?

try on females

[Charlie Stross]

Post-glacial inundation

Let's remember that, at the end of the last ice age -- 12,000 years ago -- sea levels were much lower than they are today (the water being locked up in the ice caps that covered most of Europe and North America). Given the early human tendency to live in lowlands/near bodies of water, that means that many mesolithic and neolithic settlements have been submerged; for example <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Doggerland">Doggerland</a>, the huge low-lying fertile basin that stretched from between the Wash and the Thames to Germany.

We know next to nothing about the settlements of these lands because their remains have been under water (and silt) for thousands of years.

[Herbert Meyer]

harry turtledove said...

"Down in the Bottomlands". Harry said it what is now the Mediterranean Sea.

And someone else said the Black Sea.

Same idea, different place on the map.

[AndrueC]

Primitive societies.

>Given the early human tendency to live in lowlands/near bodies of water

You mean like most of the world's major cities? That would explain a lot about 'city folk' :)

[breakfast]

Inundated kingdoms

Doggerland was actually less of a low-lying, fertile basin, more an enormous but very secluded car park.

[Woodgie]

No one mentioned

David Gibbons yet.

http://www.davidgibbins.com/

[Anonymous Coward]

We're saved

Hvase they found the Zero Point Energy source and grav drives yet?

[thecakeis(not)alie]

@AC Are you American?

They have! Sadly, they burnt out the ZPM opening the 'gate to Atlantis and have failed to cough up any new ones.

Bring on the glowy plastic energy saviour!

[rictay]

Ice Age melt down

This is old news as it has long been speculated that the origin of Sumaria and other ancient places lay out there under the Gulf waters.

It must have an incredibly fertile place with a mild and stable climate for all the millenia of the last Ice Age. No wonder we have legends of a perfect place in our folk memory. It certainly fits the bill for the Garden of Eden.

I surmise that the ending of the last Ice Age was not a gentle drip by drip affair, but rather a number of catastrophic ice sheet collapses. Low lying land caught by a one or two metre sea level rise would soon disappear under the waves. An ice sheet collapse would probably trigger major climatic events to go along with sudden sea level rise.

These events would have been extremely stressful to cultures used to millenia of peace and plenty. Hardly surprising that we should have ancient memories, as legend and myth, of drastic events like expulsion from perfect places and Flood Myths.

When remains of ancient cultures are found beneath these waves, perhaps people will have more respect for our ancient legends and myths. These were probably eye-witness accounts of events far more disastrous than our present global warming scares.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Ice Age meltdown.

"I surmise that the ending of the last Ice Age was not a gentle drip by drip affair, but rather a number of catastrophic ice sheet collapses."

No need to be so cautious. I think the idea of such events in the Great Lakes area of Canada is fairly mainstream. It's all thousands of years before recorded history, but *not* before the first "cities" like Jericho, so it is perfectly plausible to imagine a continuous aural history from that time, eventually being committed to "clay tablets that happened to survive", which is simply *our* definition of recorded history.

[Julian I-Do-Stuff]

Well well well

Who else but The Register could possibly provide such an unrivalled combination of Playmobil re-enactment, PARIS-based tittilation and aeronautical lunacy and journos who care enought about obscure stuff to know that to leave out the Dilmun-Bahrain connection would have been to miss half the fun of the story... as well as in depth IT coverage (occasionally).

... and, of course, readers who quote Josephus.

Trebles all round!

PS If scientists get to be good old fashioned Boffins here, how about a suitable Reg-style epithet for archaeologists? Bone-botherers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well well well

"PS If scientists get to be good old fashioned Boffins here, how about a suitable Reg-style epithet for archaeologists? Bone-botherers?"

'Boners' maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

timescales are phenonemal ...

So all of *recorded* human history can be streched over ... 10,000 years (being generous).

Our species is 12,000,000 years old ....

How many civilisations could have risen & fallen in that timescale ?

[markfiend]

Our species is NOT 12,000,000 years old...

From wikipedia ("human" article) "Anatomically modern-appearing humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago."

So you're out by a factor of 60...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Our species is NOT 12,000,000 years old...

Nonetheless, time for the Reapers anytime soon then, eh?

[thecakeis(not)alie]

@Markfiend

Anatomically modern Homo Sapiens are only about 200,000 years old...but I believe that the Genus "homo" is at least a million years old. I seriously doubt that we only reached "behavioural modernity" 50,000 years ago, however. I'd be willing to bet a fairly large sum of money that timeframe is closer to 100,000 years.

I guess the question is “what is human?” Genus Homo? Homo Sapiens X? Only Homo Sapiens Sapiens? What about our descendant sub-species? When Homo Sapiens Sapiens fragments once more into Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Novus, will Homo Sapiens Novus be “human?”

I vote that anything of genus “homo” be called “human.” After all, there’ sreasonable evidence that some of the other subspecies (Homo Sapiens Neandertalensis) may actually have been smarter than we are. (Although less capable of spamming babies and climatic adaptation: thus their extinction. Well, unless you are a believer (as I am) that the last remnants of Neandertalensis were likely absorbed into the invading Homo Sapiens Sapiens populations.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wha........

Pardon?

[Allan George Dyer]

Pan narrans?

(Storytelling ape, thank you Terry)

[sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD]

There is _nothing_ submerged under the Persian Gulf.

I would advise closer study of the other literature available at hand.

The Pnakotic manuscripts are wrong! I would also add that the G'harne Fragments are a clever hoax. There is NOTHING there of any value or relevance to humanity.

Just leave the area alone!

[Reality Dysfunction]

where do you work?

the laundry?

[sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD]

Where I work...

A laundry.

Nothing more, nothing less.

And that is _all_ we do at our shop, contrary to popular speculation.

Nothing more to see here, move along.

[thecakeis(not)alie]

I disagree.

There is quite likely a metric ***-load of oil submerged under the persian gulf. There's only one way to know for sure...

[Alan Firminger]

Persian Gulf ?

I know where you mean 'cos I am an old man. And the CIA currently call it the Persian Gulf.

The Times Atlas of the World, 1983 edition, labels it The Gulf .

Locals prefer the Arabian Gulf .

There is politics in every name.

[breakfast]

There is politics in every name....

What, even Godalming?

[JCL]

How about Staines?

Staines on Thames - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-11665197

[Anonymous Coward]

"played a not dissimilar role"

Are you suggesting that the Bible "story" was lifted almost complete from an older religion? Heretics!

[The Indomitable Gall]

Gilgamesh?

Odd that there's no mention of the epic of Gilgamesh here....

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the aliens?

It's always about now that we get told that actually aliens are responsible...

[Ammaross Danan]

Of Course!

Of course it's Aliens! Didn't you watch the documentary with Nicholas Cage: "Knowing"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth...

...Is actually far worse than that.

Oh the horror, Oh the huge manatee...

We are not ready for the truth. I would advise no further looking.

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

@ Further reading...

Better than that book is "The unauthorised version" by Robin Lane Fox.

[Graham Bartlett]

"There is _nothing_ submerged under the Persian Gulf."

Or rather, there is, but the Benthic Treaty with Blue Hades means that getting it could be a terminally bad idea. (Read "The Jennifer Morgue" if this passed you by.)

[Harry Stottle]

Graham Hancock's been preaching this for years...

now go to http://www.grahamhancock.com/archive/underworld/ where you will find Graham Hancock's been promoting this idea since 2002 or earlier and has been trying to get archaeologists to look under the water. Major vindication of his ideas...

[Paul Johnston]

Ah Graham!

Him along with Eric Von Daniken!

[Luther Blissett]

Scientific dateline to last ice-age melt

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/01/sea-level-rise-jumpy-after-last-ice-age/#more-28721

indicates the melt started at least 18,000 years ago, and has caused sea levels to rise at least 120m.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: "caused sea levels to rise at least 120m."

Well in that case:

Given that the Gulf has an average depth of around 50m and is nowhere deeper than 160m, it is therefore a racing certainty that most of the sea-bed was inhabited by humans. You don't need faith and/or tinfoil headgear. You just need to look. At some point, robotic technology will allow archeologists to do this relatively cheaply.

[cpage]

Easier way to explore

Sounds like it would be easy enough to put a dam across the mouth of the Gulf and then pump it out? Would also provide quite a lot of fertile ground, which some countries around there might like to populate.

[Johnny Canuck]

obviously

These settlements are the remains of the space-faring Atlanteans who crashed in the are millenia ago! (says the man with the poor grasp of geography and history)

[Anonymous Coward]

Johnny Canuck,,,

you are too close to the truth. Do you hear the helicopters?

[Christoph]

Don't excavate yet

We shouldn't be digging in those ancient undersea ruins yet.

We have to wait until the stars are right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shellfish r us

No need to add in all that extra stuff in need of explanation. Instead, merely assume that humans were "uplifted" by a race of ocean-living beings, such as, say clams. Now could any religion assume such a thing,,,, oh .... wait a minute ...