MYTHS OF CREATION
3. On the Global Unanimity Uncovered in the Material Record
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3. On the Global Unanimity Uncovered in the Material Record
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As scholars continue to puzzle over the reasons for the concertedly planned relationships between manmade structures and landscapes vis a vis the local skyscape, — a puzzle further compounded by the ubiquity of celestial archetypes that have been recovered in the traces of the world’s earliest known civilizations — ongoing excavations among the ruins of a rapidly growing number of vanished cultures has continued to unveil compelling evidence of the incomparably great importance these ancestral communities placed on preserving and transmitting their mythological cosmovisions forward to every subsequent generation to come.
Almost everything made by these peoples, recovered from these very same locations, ranging from the very earliest stone tools and utensils to ... indelibly crafted ornaments ... ever more sophisticated weaponry ... and complex machinery -- the whole array of small and large artifacts which make up the material record of a given culture -- has turned out to be worthy of examination for scattered traces of our ancestors’ actively mythopoeic mindset. Moreover, the same three primary divisions of the historical timeline uncovered by archeology seem by and large to be roughly equivalent to the three basic ages which mythopoeic peoples handed down to us as the three distinct periods through which the world had passed up to their time (cf. Vico, New Science 31): the late Neolithic being the age of the gods; the Bronze age the era of ancestral heroes; and the Iron age inaugurating the time of modern man. References to these three basic historical periods have been found among the fragmentary remains of the ancestral Chaldeans, Scythians, Egyptians, Germans, the Chinese and Indian peoples, and similar notions seem to serve as the background context of many other ancient myth-making nations’ general conceptions of history as well (cf. Vico, New Science 32). In harmony with these three periods, and concurrent with the more noticeable changes in the material conditions and technological development of human cultures, we have likewise uncovered evidence for three kinds of language having been spoken and/or written across these same blocks of time, exactly correspondent to changes in the way that mythopoeic subject matter was portrayed in these peoples' pictorial arts. In their myths, in their language, in their arts and crafts, in their technology, in their rituals, in their religious iconography, in their expressed cosmological and eschatological beliefs, in their general expectations for the proper conduct and organization of society, centered around the decrees of royal and priestly powers -- the essential homogeneity of cosmogonic myths throughout the world is abundantly, even ubiquitously evident in the material archaeological record. -- And it is very subset of material remains that by and large compose the vast majority of the mythological record available to us today. |