Global Warming and “The Fall of Man” (Book of Genesis)
Up to the time of Heinrich Schliemann’s archeological discovery of the ancient city of Troy, it was generally thought that Troy was just a ‘mythical’ city in the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey; an imaginary creation of Homeric poets. More generally, all myths were largely thought of as – just that – myths (i.e. fictions created by poets). After Schliemann’s discovery and other archeological and geological discoveries, such as evidence of great floods giving rise to the Noah’s Ark like flood myths, historians began to look at myths as possible oral traditions rooted in actual historic events.
It is in that ‘spirit’ (i.e. the historic basis of mythology) that the Book of Genesis story of the Fall of Man may be related to the origins of Mediterranean civilization; the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates River Civilizations.
(Note: this of course treats Genesis as a ‘secular’ myth, rather than the sacred doctrine presupposed in Judeo-Christian religious traditions.)
Specifically, the great classical scholar and world history A. J. Toynbee wrote:
“After the close of ‘the Ice Age’, our Afrasian area began to experience a profound physical change in the direction of desiccation; and simultaneously two or more civilizations arose in an area which had previously been occupied solely by primitive societies of the Paleolithic order. Our archaeologists encourage us to look upon the desiccation of Afrasia as a challenge to which the geneses of these civilizations were responses. (A Study of History Vol. I p.304 emp.+)
Toynbee goes on to quote extensively the highly renowned archeologist V. G. Childe.
“ ‘ While Northern Europe was covered in ice as far as the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Artic high pressure deflected southwards the Atlantic rainstorms. The cyclones [jet stream] that today traverse Central Europe then passed over the Mediterranean basin and the north Sahara…The parched Sahara enjoyed a regular rainfall…We should expect in North Africa parklands and savannahs, such as flourish today north of the Mediterranean…While the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the reindeer were browsing in France and Southern England, North Africa was supporting a fauna that is found today on the Zambesi in Rhodesia [Zimbabwe]
The pleasant grasslands of North Africa was naturally thickly populated by Man…
Subsequently, when the ice covering Europe retreated the “climate changed” (Toynbee’s words 1934), the environment changed and the way of life changed in Afrasia. Toynbee:
“Faced with the gradual desiccation resulting from the re-shift northward of the Atlantic cyclone belt [jet stream] as the European glaciers contracted… the hunting/gathering populations [of Africa and Arabia] responded to the challenge of desiccation by changing their habitat and their way of life from food-gathers into cultivators …created the Egyptian and Sumeric civilizations out of the primitive societies of the vanishing Afrasians grasslands. (Study v. I, p. 304-5 emp.+)
Toynbee sees in these facts of history the basis for “the story of the Fall of Man in the book of Genesis”(Study v. I, p. 304, n. 2)
“In the story, the application of the myth to the geneses of civilizations is direct. The picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a reminiscence of the state to which Primitive Man attained in ‘the food-gathering phase of economy…The Fall…the expulsion from the Garden into an unfriendly world and Man must eat bread in the sweat of his face…
The equation of civilization with agriculture, and progress with toil…
Their sons who impersonate two nascent civilizations: Able the keeper of sheep and Cain the tiller of the ground…Cain as the father of civilization…builds a city and his descendants Jubal and Tubal-Cain fathers of harp and organ, and artificer in brass and iron…. (Study v. I, p. 290 emp.+)
Further, I would note an aspect of Geneses, Toynbee did not mention about the correlation of the myth of the Fall and the response of Man to the climate change: Adam and Eve were sent “East of Eden”. (“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden…” Gen. 3:24).
Like Adam and Eve, the migration of people from Africa and Arabia after the post-ice age savanna desiccation was in the direction East into the Nile and East into the Tigris-Euphrates river valleys.
Birth of Mediterranean History and Culture
Circa the forth millennium BC the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations began to flourish, forming by the second millennium a geographic continuum know as the Fertile Crescent with an eastern Mediterranean sea board running from the Nile delta to present day southeast Turkey. They were followed by other Mediterranean societies such as the Hittites, Minoan, Persians, Greeks, etc. {note: societies such as Persia are not Mediterranean per se, in that they were not 'on' the Mediterranean Sea. However, they dynamically interacted with the Mediterranean world and affected its culture - think Greeks and Persians}
As each society came into being, flourished and receded, those preceding influenced those following. For example, Greek philosophers and mathematicians recorded their trips to and influences of Egypt (e.g. Thales, Protagoras, Plato, etc.).
By this dynamic interaction between the various societies of the Mediterranean world one may say the Mediterranean culture as a whole evolved, for it is difficult to find one Mediterranean society that was not influenced by another: “The universe in a grain of sand” – as it were.
However, it is also possible to divide the whole of Mediterranean history into the perennial clash between two ethnic groups various labeled as:
European and Asia (Herodotus),
Aryan and Semitic (ninetieth century classical scholars),
Western and Middle Eastern (contemporary parlance).
{Note: in ninetieth century scholarly literature the terms Aryan and Semitic were generally used as linguistic classifications, which in turn implied geographic origin (e.g. E. A. Freeman’s brilliant The History of Sicily- From the Earliest Times). The terms did not connote the ugly racial implications associated with Nazis and other racists. Below they are used in the Freeman et al sense of the words; i.e. both Aryan and Semitic people are of the same race albeit different linguistic characteristics implying different geographic origins and cultures. Put simply: different ethnic groups. Or, if different races, it is not relevant becasue race is not, so far as known, to be a cultural determinant}
While the origins of Mediterranean culture were Middle Eastern (Nile and Tigris –Euphrates river valleys), circa forth millennium BC, people from the Eurasian Continent migrated into the Mediterranean Basis at least as early as the second millennium BC. The Greeks are a quintessential example of ‘Aryan’ people migrating into the Mediterranean basin from Eurasia and clashing with the ‘Semitic’ people of the ‘middle-east’.
For the near four thousand years (down to the present), the results of the dynamic between these two ethnic groups and the many various societies that evolved from the respective groups is what may be called Mediterranean Culture; i.e. the Mediterranean culture is the resulting culture produced by the interaction of the Eurasian and Middle Eastern people.
Southern Italian Culture vs. Northern Italian
A quintessential example of the perennial clash between Eurasia Mediterranean people with those from the Middle East can be found in the history of Sicily beginning circa 750 BC when the Aryan Greeks and Semitic Phoenicians confronted one another in Sicily. This Sicilian conflict continued on and off until 146 BC when Aryan Romans destroyed the Semitic/Phoenician city of Carthage.
Sicily got a respite from this conflict while Rome brought the next phase of the Aryan/Semitic clash to the Middle East (Egypt, Syria, etc.). However, after the fall of Rome, the Semitic Arabs once again clashed in Sicily with the Aryan Byzantine Greeks.
Meanwhile northern Italy was largely spared this Mediterranean Aryan/Semitic conflict. Significantly, when Semitic Hannibal invaded Italy he crossed the Alps into northern Italy and went straight to the south of Rome where he fought the Romans for approximately fifteen years.
At the end of the Roman Empire, northern Italy, which played no significant part in the more than two thousand year Aryan Semitic Mediterranean conflict, was absorbed into the largely Germanic culture in the form of the Carolingian and then Holy Roman Empires. It was physically separated from the Mediterranean South by the Papal State. It was physically, economically, and culturally aliened with Germanic Europe.
In sum
The history and culture of the people south of Rome is the product of a cultural evolution beginning with the global warming ending ice age that gave rise to the Nile and Tigus-Euphrates River civilizations. In the course of that history two ethnic groups, one originating in Eurasia and the other the Middle East, and the many varied societies produced by those groups produced a common Mediterranean culture. A culture shared at best tangentially with northern Italy.
It is that six thousand year cultural world that people like Carmelo Buschera are referring to when they say:
“We see the Mediterranean area as our world, not Italy.”