Let's Find the Path from Cave Art to the Bible
I've written here often about cave art. I'd like to explain why it interests to me.
We all know what we call history mostly comes from the written word. Some ancient writing has been recopied many times and passed down to us today. Then, there is writing that refers to previous writing which itself did not survive. We know lots of ancient writing recorded recollections of people before there was the written word, verbal history.
History before the written word, of course, is harder to determine. There are recovered tools and artifacts. Then, there is the earliest written communication by man, cave art.
I tried to find how many people in the U.S. study and teach just about the Bible. I think the number must be 300,000 or so. Then, there are all the other religions whose religious books are studied. Each of these tries to peer into the minds of ancient people who wrote ancient tomes. Those who wrote the ancient tomes were practicing the art of writing. Those who try today to see into the minds of those ancient writers are practicing a different kind of art, interpreting and understanding.
Cave art, the oldest kind of written communication, needs more scholars trying to understand the minds of those ancient artists. What were they trying to communicate to each other? Scholars of the Bible try to understand what those ancient writers were thinking about and who their audiences were. Those who "wrote" cave art stories are every bit as important as those who later wrote Bible stories.
The Bible goes back some 5,000 years. Cave art as much as 60,000 years. It seem inevitable that some of the stories on cave walls were the basis for stories in the Bible. More study of cave art may reveal greater understanding of human myths, fears, joys and gods.
We know the Judeo/Christian God has many traits held by earlier gods. If we understood better cave art might we find sources of the gods that in turn preceded those the current God? Certainly, some cave art appears to be about figures that appeared only in the minds of artists and were not of what they observed in their contemporary lives.
A cave art expert talked recently about viewing art from 65,000 years ago, "Standing in from of a drawing that old is just a revelation of an experience. What happens is it's like this artist talks to you, straight to you, from this unimaginable gulf of time..."
Preachers/priests somewhere say the same thing about the Bible every week.
Exactly. Since the cave art is older than the bible, and people around the globe have religions extending back more than three or five thousand years, (the age of the “universe,” according to some) it’s pretty obvious that we humans have dealt with many, many gods, especially since we made them up to explain events their limited knowledge of science could not explain.
ReplyDeleteGrandma-- "..it's pretty obvious...many gods.."
DeleteThe case some Christians make is that the "real god" did not show up until humans were about to write words. Now, if they say these other gods were really the Christian God but people hadn't learned to write yet, why hadn't God taught them to write?
Of course, the Bible admits there were other gods, just the wrong ones. Only the written word could instruct people who was the "real" god and who the fake gods were. If God had taught people to write 200,000 years earlier they would have not worshipped these fake gods for all that time. Too bad the Christian god just showed up at the same time as humans learned how to write. It makes atheists out of some of us.
Sarcasm is flowing on atheist sites about the Catholic Church's reason for not allowing blessing of gay marriages, "We cannot bless sin." The sarcasm goes like this:
DeleteCatholic Church I. "We cannot bless sin."
Catholic Church II. "We can transfer sin to another parish."
I think the concept of "history" relies on the written word for documentation. You did a good job outlining the differences between primary and secondary sources, but what do we have in the absence of these records?
ReplyDeletePre-history.
Of course, once can hypothesize that, if cave art could be interpreted, we could then refer to it as "historical documentation". However, I have a feeling that much of the cave art in existence was done primarily for entertainment purposes. We're getting 10,000 year old versions of Ole and Lena jokes.
Bryan K "We're getting 10,000 year old versions of Ole and Lena jokes."
DeleteThat's always a possibility. But, our inclination is to look at them through our eyes based on our contemporary experience. They resemble our cartoon figures so we gravitate toward thinking the cave society saw them as cartoons.
In the Bible it says first there was "the word. The word was God." Does that mean way back when the first ability to speak words was magical? Could it be the ability to recreate on a wall something seen only in real life was magical? Or were cave artists illustrating their dreams? I've read that over tens of thousands of years on different continents there appears drawings of half women and half animal. There are native peoples today who believe animals have souls and some connections to humans. Perhaps there are deeper things going on with cave drawings--or--maybe not. So far we really have not figured that out.
There are contemporary people who have emotional responses to see "the cross." That reaction is to something abstract from an emotional story. To others not from that culture the emotional reaction seems almost humorous, "It's an X, like what comes before Y." We are not yet tuned in to what people were thinking 100,000 years ago.
It's a plus sign!
DeleteSeriously, though, I'm not saying that there isn't value in trying to understand cave drawings. There are probably millions of specimens out there that are as of yet undiscovered, and millions of those will probably remain undiscovered in perpetuity.
Look at our pop culture. Some say that pop culture reflects everyday life. Some say that pop culture affects every day live. I think they are both true. It is difficult for us to understand what everyday life was like even two hundred years ago because pop culture didn't exist back then.
I find the guttural graffiti that is posted on the walls of Pompeii just as interesting, and perhaps more so, than many academic accounts of history. After all, that graffiti is a primary historical source representing the type of humor that existed at the time. A collection of stuff like that is a key piece to understanding what life was like at that time.
The problem is, when we explore prehistory with symbols that are completely foreign to us, we have to start by trying to figure out which is which.