: Some good points, although I fail to see how Troy, a
: Greek/Ionian city would be an issue for the Romans.
The Romans believed to have originated from Troy after the Greeks destroyed it, the survivors led on a fleet of ships by Aeneas (of which the title of the Virgilian epic The Aeneid is derived. I suggest you read it, especially the Fitzgerald translation). These Trojans settled primitive Italy. Eventually, the Latins arose, and other myths akin to this, chronologically after, like Romulus the founder of Rome, came about.
In relating to something well-known Roman, Iulius Cæsar thought he was decended from Venus, as well as others of his family in the Julian gens, because the Julians thought their gens title of Iulius was decended from Iulus. Iulus was the son of Aeneas. Aeneas was, in turn, the son of Venus, the matron goddess of Troy.
: Forgive me if I sound like a twat, but we just did a
: study on Mycenaen Greek society (around which Homer
: based his Illiad and Odyessy), and Troy was destroyed
: by Greeks and inhabited by Greeks.
Actually, Homer based the Iliad off of the Ramayana, a very descriptive Hindu tale rather similar to the Iliad, but it has more detail and some added information.
As for the city of Troy itself, that was never truly discovered. The ruins of that little village Schlemann found in a landlocked part of Turkey hardly come close to matching the description of Homer, as being an incredible city with enormous walls covered in metals like tin and a technologically advanced society; all of which sank into the ocean (for Troy was a naval city, and Schlemann's Troy is nowhere near the ocean, in any geologic time period of human history).
: It is, you'll
: remember, very close to other Greek city-states along
: the Ionian coast, as well as Byzantium.
Byzantium…yes, the Greeks founded that, I believe, but it was taken over by the Romans, and Constantine renamed it after himself when he shifted it to be the Roman capital; and now it's Istanbul.
: One thing we are all forgetting here is what exactly, the
: world is. If you look through the Bible (which I
: sometimes do), you find reference to a flood which
: covered the whole world (Noah's Ark), but
: archaeological dating shows that a flood of that size
: never occured BUT one did cover the majority of
: Europe.
Noah's Ark's tale doesn't say the whole world, necessarily, and implies nothing more than the known world to those people, which could have been no more than the Black Sea basin.
The Primordial Flood is also in all ancient cultures. There is tripple geological evidence proving this.
Firstly, the Pleistocene Ice Age ended very abruptly 11,600 years ago. As many of us heard at one time or another, the Bering Strait was an exposed land bridge at the time (covered in ice, albeit, but land above sea level nonetheless), and this is the way in which the Native Americans became. The Ice Age had such low temperatures that incredible glacial ice sheets, 1-3 miles thick, covered the temperate zones of the Earth. This incredible amount of water stored in the glaciers, arriving as snowfall and never melting into the oceans, the water level of the world dropped significantly, some 100-150 meters (about 300-450 feet) of what we would now call the coastline of the world. Because of this, great stretches of land were extended from the modern-day coastline, what are called “continental shelves” in any good map of the ocean. An enormous example of this is a continental-sized region sunken under the South China Sea, referred to as “Lemuria.” This continent, among other places, like off India, was exposed during the Glacial Period of the Pleistocene.
Now, 11,600 years ago, the Krakatoa volcano had an incredibly large cone, and it errupted at this time. An unspeakable conflagration, retold in many Sanskrit and Dravidian texts, engulfed the region of present day Indonesia, Lemuria burned a sunder by all the volcanic erruptions which took place, caused by the original one of Krakatoa. As with any truly biblical erruption, the volcanoes sent massive seismic waves across the lowland areas of the costal world, an incredible amount of death worldwide procured.
Secondly, the soot and ash of the Indonesian volcanoes fell upon the glaciers of the world. This turned them from white to black, having them absorb sunlight rather than reflect it back into space. The temperature of the ice melted it very quickly. In just a thousand years, all the glaciers of the temperate world had melted. This is astoundingly fast in geologic time.
When the glaciers began to melt, their meltwaters flooded down the rivers. Because of this, any river sourced at a glacier would have been deluged into a flowing sea, floods one hundred times what the monsoons bring today. The Indus Valley, for instance, was connected well with the very thick Himalayan ice sheet, and so it was one of the most affected by this sudden end to the Pleistocene. Eventually, all the world lost its coastlands, they becoming todays continental shelves, the world’s water level rising 100-150 meters above the former sea level.
Thirdly, the Dardanelle and Bosporus Straits did not exist before the world-wide flood. They were created when the rising water broke through this bridge of land and flooded the Black Sea basin, for the Black Sea was at the same level as the oceans former to their rise. When the water broke through and poured into the Black Sea, it must have been phenominally destructive, everything in this wall of water’s path destroyed. Perhaps Noah got wind of this occurrence and built his Ark in preparation for it. Any of the three geological floods of history could be held accountable for the story of Noah.
: So, it really wasn't a worldwide flood, but
: since Europe is all that the people of the time knew
: (as well as some of Africa and Asia), it was their
: whole world.
Right; if Noah was on the coast of the Black Sea, he would have only known his isolated little world, just the same anyone knows the world only as his surroundings, similar to the world of the Mythworlders.
So what's this flood which covered Europe? All of Europe never was actually submerged by the sea.
: So Soulblighter destroying the world and shattering the
: Cloudspine wouldn't necessarily destroy the WHOLE
: world, just the portion with which the Light is
: familiar. Unless of course the Myth world is comprised
: of one fairly small continent...
It depends. There are many possibilites. All the Earth’s tectonic activity would be set into unfathomable chaos, everything spewing out of the Earth and destroying the land. Or, perhaps, lava and all the rocks of the Cloudspine would fly and and destroy the world with physical bombardment, the shattered pieces of mountains covering it.
Nevertheless, the “world” of the Mythworlders is only that map and single continent.
It wasn’t made clear, but we can assume it would be really destructive.
: So, while this could be an apocalypse, it would not be a
: worldwide thing. Even if Soulblighter did cause
: Tharsis to erupt, it wouldn't be enough to destroy the
: world. Sure, it'd shatter the cloudspine and
: temporarily block out the sun, but unless there is
: only this one continent, then it wouldn't as as world
: shattering as Soulblighter, Journal Dude and Alric
: describe. Oh, it'd be world shattering for them, but
: hardly something of apocalyptic proportions.
: LR
Lol, you just defined apocalypse, “the destruction of the world”. The world is only what one knows it to be. We know the world to be our whole Earth. People in the classical world knew the equivalent of the Mythworlders, a European-sized landmass with nothing known beyond it. The Mythworlders think there’s nothing beyond the map boundaries, so there is only the one continent of the world. If the world is destroyed, that’s Apocalypse for them.
