Entry 1:
Have been going on a hunt lately into the past . . . way back into the past. I've been reading some legends about giants, and have been looking for more information on them from Babylonian, Mesopotamian, and early civilization literature. So far there is little research that takes giants seriously, and most of it is labeled as folklore or children's fiction. There's a website from a guy in Texas who claims to have some pictures of giant graves and skeletons of 35' humans (that's right, not a typo), but his website has been labeled as "very cranky" by another watchdog website. Most of the websites on giants also talk about alien abduction and extreme interpretations of biblical prophecy in the next sentence.
One book at Barnes & Noble, Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock, looks at archaeological evidence connecting the Incan, Aztec, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian civilizations together, but it seems to be categorized as "marginal" history, a kind of subversive underground.
The Epic of Gilgamesh came in the mail this week. Will be reading it soon, once papers are done and a few other books and editing projects are finished. For now, signing off.
- Drake Finton, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
3 comments:
I will give a worthy comment to this, but off to teach anti-colonialism. Maybe they relate.
Would love to hear it. Will wait with impatient anticipation. :)
I'm not sure if I'm following you, Fatty, but I'll give it a stab. Do you feel that these cultures all developed independently of each other without communicating? When we look at the similarities of the ziggurats in Incan, Mayan, Aztec, Egyptian and Sumerian cultures, it's hard not to see a connection. Were they building similar things because they were in contact? Because they were replicating something from an earlier, shared history? Or, like with quantum theory, were they "in tune" to each other even though they were separated by an ocean and had no contact? If it's this last one, that's borderline spooky.
The German philosopher Hegel talked about the "Zeitgeist," the spirit of the Age, and the belief that at certain periods in time it's like there's "something in the air," and people are thinking the same thing in different parts of the world. Newton wasn't the only one working on calculus, but he gets the credit for it, maybe because he was able to market it quickest and come up with a more elegant form. When Watson and Crick were trying to discover the DNA structure, there was another woman (I don't remember her name) who was doing the same, and in fact had worked out some of the details ahead of them. Again, we remember Watson and Crick, not her.
I had a dream about scuba equipment that worked more like the natural gills of a fish, only to wake up, search on the web and find that an inventor is currently working on something similar in Israel and hopes to have it developed in the next two years.
Is it a cultural connection? A coincidental connection, or are we linked in ways to the spiritual, unseen world in ways we can't begin to get our minds wrapped around? Or is there someone planting these ideas in our heads at just the right time to move us on to the next transition? If so, then we're less in control of our destinies than we'd like to believe.
You always get me thinking. What are your thoughts?
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