10 Universal Myths Of The Ancient World Morris M. January 16, 2014
No matter where you’re from, you probably have your fair
share of wild myths. From stuff like the legend of King Arthur and his
magic BFF to the mischievous gods of Ancient Greece to the insane epics
of Hindu mythology, just about every culture comes with a set of stories
that most other cultures call foreign or strange.
But then there are the universal myths—myths that crop up repeatedly
in cultures separated by hundreds of miles and thousands of years. These
myths are so near-universal that their prevalence is downright spooky.
10 The Great Flood
The idea of a flood that drowns the entire world pops up in almost every
single culture. Jews and Christians know it as the story of Noah, but
other versions almost certainly predate the Genesis account. The Ancient
Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh includes the tale of Utnapishtim,
who builds a boat, fills it with animals to escape a deluge, and
eventually comes to rest on a mountaintop. The Greeks had Deucalion, who
survived a flood sent by Zeus. Other versions appear in Hindu, Mayan,
and Native American legends.
These tales may or may not be inspired by reality. In 2009, National Geographic reported on the utter lack of evidence for a globe-destroying super-flood. Yet theories still persist of an ancient comet strike near Madagascar sending tsunamis across the globe or a sudden flood caused by melting glaciers
drowning the entire Black Sea area. Could this universal myth simply be
the faded memory of a real event that occurred around 5,000 BC? We may
never know.
9 Paradise Lost
As anyone who’s heard to their grandpa wax lyrical about the 1950s
knows, people see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But this
yearning for nostalgia isn’t just restricted to old folk rattling on
about how kids showed more respect in their day. Very often, it fills
entire cultures.
Take the Garden of Eden. The story of a harmonious land uncorrupted
by pain or lust is the biggest slice of “good old days” nostalgia you’ll
ever encounter. The Ancient Greeks, meanwhile, fondly recalled their
Golden and Heroic Ages—a time when the world was happier, men were men,
and things basically didn’t suck so bad. Similar ideas appear in Hindu,
Norse, and Persian belief, always featuring a lost utopia to which
modern culture can never return.
Interestingly, there may be a scientific reason behind all this. Recent research into nostalgia has shown that idealized memories of the past may make us happier in the present.
8 Epic Cosmic Battles
The idea of an unimaginable war that threatens to tear apart the cosmos
connects with us so deeply that it still powers our epic stories. The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Doctor Who,
and countless others all feature this age-old trope. It can be found in
the legends of almost every ancient culture. Christianity has the
battle between God and the rebel angels
led by Satan. Ancient Greece had the story of the Titans taking on the
gods of Mount Olympus. The Hindu tradition involves a dizzying series of
battles so epic they’d give Peter Jackson daymares.
There are couple of ways of looking at this. One is to go down the
Scientology route of claiming these legends are genetic memories of some
apocalyptic battle that tore the galaxy apart billions of years ago.
The other is to remember that most cultures throughout history have
consistently been on the brink of war or prone to invasion, so an
apocalyptic slaughter was probably never far from everyone’s minds.
Either way, it suggests the human drive to war is just about universal.
7 Vampires
If you hated the last couple of years of hormone-driven
angst-inspired vampire media, try living in Medieval Europe. Back then,
belief in vampires was so prevalent that barely a single country didn’t
consider them a terrifying fact of life. When crops failed or there was
drought or a baby was born with a slight deformity, you’d better believe
vampires got the blame—a tradition that stretches back thousands of
years.
Undead bloodsuckers aren’t a modern invention. They weren’t even
dreamt up this side of the Common Era. Cultures as mind-bendingly old as
the Ancient Egyptians
believed wholeheartedly in their existence, while versions of them turn
up everywhere from China to Tibet to India. Even the Persians of
Mesopotamia had a selection of ferocious blood-drinking demons to
terrorize children, although they bore differences from our modern Anne
Rice-inspired variety.
Looked at rationally, it’s easy to see how the vampire legend arose:
our fear of death crossed with a huge degree of medical ignorance.
Looking at it again after dark when a scary wind howls
outside . . . well, let’s just say we won’t be hawking off our garlic
stocks anytime soon.
6 The Atlantis Myth
We all know the myth of Atlantis: a utopian city wiped out in a
single night thanks to an unearthly cataclysm. But Atlantis is only the
most famous of mythical lost cities. Near-identical stories crop up with
such regularity that it’s tempting to think they must be somehow
related.
Take Iram (also known as Ubar). A fabled city in the deserts of
modern Saudi Arabia, Iram is said to have been wiped out in a single
night when Allah buried it under a flood of sand.
In other words, it’s the Atlantis myth translated to a world without
water. Then you have Ys off the coast of France, which was supposedly
flooded around the 5th century by a mythical warrior king. And that’s
before we get onto the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Hindu myth of
Tripura, which both involve gods wiping out immoral cities in a rain of
fire.
In short, the idea of a city obliterated overnight is so powerful it
seems to show up everywhere. Are these half-remembered tragedies with
some basis in fact (like Pompeii) or just stories that play to the
apocalyptic fantasist in all of us? We’ll leave it to you to decide.
5 A God’s Resurrection
Jesus’s resurrection is the big selling point of Christianity, a
unique moment that established Christ as the one true savior. At least
that’s the idea. In reality, the idea of a dying deity or important
human who is later resurrected has been around for millennia.
Most famously, this includes the story of Osiris,
the ancient Egyptian god whose birth was heralded by a star, who was
betrayed by a friend, was murdered, and was later resurrected. But there
are less explicit versions too. The Greek cult of Dionysus had their
figurehead killed off every two years, only to rise again at a later
date. Persephone also died regularly, and many pagan traditions from
Scandinavia to Central America involved gods dying and returning to life
or men dying and coming back as deities.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, a historical tablet known as
“Gabriel’s Revelation” allegedly tells the story of a Jewish rebel known
as Simon who was killed by the Romans, only to be resurrected three
days later. The catch? It was written in 4 BC, over 30 years before Jesus
allegedly pulled off the same trick. Either it’s a mistranslation, or
the Son of God was building on centuries of groundwork by other deities.
4 Dragons
Dragons are likely the most traveled creature in all of mythology.
Even more than vampires, they have a habit of turning up in societies
and cultures so far apart in time and space you’d think it was
impossible. There are ancient Sumerian tablets
that record the act of dragon-slaying, Greek tales of dragons cavorting
with other monsters, and an entire science built around the uses of
their bones in China. In Central America, the Mayans worshipped the feathered snake Quetzalcóatl, while both Norse and Christian mythologies specifically mention dragons.
As late as 1886, Victorian scientists still held that dragons had once existed but had gone extinct.
Not until dinosaurs became firmly established in the public mind did
people see the probable link between ancient fossils and dragon myths.
Currently, our best guess is that various cultures all stumbled over
dino bones at some point and translated them into gigantic mythological
beasts.
3 The Hero’s Quest
Thanks to the occasional self-indulgent movie adaptation, most of us probably have a vague knowledge of the poems of Homer. Considered the earliest examples of Western literature, his Iliad and Odyssey
are epic myths of tortured heroes fighting their way across oceans and
continents in search of metaphorical salvation—and they appear in
near-identical form in almost every culture.
It’s called the “hero’s journey,”
and just about all epic stories throughout history have followed the
specific model. Famously, George Lucas deliberately based the first Star Wars on it, and you can find its influence in The Lord of the Rings, the Oz books, and even Harry Potter. But this archetypal myth was around even before fancy-pants anthropologists handed it over to lazy scriptwriters.
The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Sinbad the Sailor in the
1,001 Nights, the legend of King Arthur, the tale of the
Argonauts . . . all of these and plenty more fit the structure of the
hero’s journey just like Homer’s awesome poems above. In fact, nearly every single culture in recorded history
has myths that fall into this category. Even Moses’s epic wanderings in
the Bible fit this model. We as a species truly are lazy storytellers.
2 Explanations
Cultural myths don’t just entertain us and record historical events.
They also serve to explain why the world is the way it is. Hence the
prevalence of stories designed to give a reason for some mystery of
existence.
In the Bible, we have the Tower of Babel, which explains why we have different languages. God’s speech prior to expelling Adam and Eve from Eden is another example, giving a reason for both the agony of childbirth
and why ancient man had to toil all day in the fields. Wander across
traditions into the stories of the Ancient Greeks and the legend of
Prometheus demonstrates why fire is so valuable, while the story of
Pandora gives a reason for the existence of disease and suffering.
Start looking for them and you’ll find these explanatory myths
scattered across every culture in history. There are myths that explain why rhinoceroses have no hairs, why incest is forbidden, and how medicine came into existence. Anything you can think of has some poetic explanation somewhere. In an unscientific age, poetry was often all we had.
1 Apocalypse
Everything that begins has an end, and our ancient ancestors knew that
as simply as we do. No surprise then that most cultures carry an End of
Times myth to counter their creation story—a sort of consolation prize for those who won’t live to see the actual end (i.e. everyone).
For Christians, this apocalypse is a gigantic epic that plays out
over many, many years and involves so many disasters, wars, and
calamities that it’s hard to keep track. Same with the Norse Ragnarok,
which is a collection of disasters and battles that results in the Earth
being drowned and recreated afresh. In Hinduism, it’s another epic
battle followed by a rebooted universe, while Buddhism annihilates the
world in a pyrotechnic fireworks display so amazing it deserves its own Michael Bay film.
In other words, most humans throughout history have lived with their
own personal vision of the end of everything, one that makes sense in
the context of their lives and cultures. And that’s all these myths
really are: ways for us humans to make sense of the world we live in, no
matter when or where we are. It’s just an added bonus that some of them
make absolutely awesome stories, too.
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