Table of Contents
Chaldea, the old name for southern Mesopotamia and the homeland of Ur, keeps coming back in my research as a place where astronomy, writing and flood memory seem to begin fully formed. These are the pages where I wrote about it.
A torch passed on
Ignatius Donnelly, on Civilization an Inheritance, counts Chaldea among the nations that only carried forward a civilization they had received:
Phœnicia, Egypt, Chaldea, India, Greece, and Rome passed the torch of civilization from one to the other; but in all that lapse of time they added nothing to the arts which existed at the earliest period of Egyptian history.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
Chaldean astronomy and writing
On The antiquity of some of our great inventions Donnelly tells how Callisthenes sent Aristotle Chaldean astronomical observations from Babylon, on baked clay tablets reaching back to 2234 B.C., and cites Humboldt that the Chaldeans knew the mean motions of the moon so exactly that Greek astronomers built a lunar theory on their figures. On The origin of our alphabet Sir Henry Rawlinson suggests that writing in Chaldea and Egypt shares principles so close that it must go back to before the Hamitic race divided. And on Genesis contains a history of Atlantis Donnelly notes that the formulas used in medieval Europe to exorcise evil spirits were Assyrian words, imported long before from the magicians of Chaldea.
Kings, cycles and the flood
On 86 Chaldean Kings – 34,080 years I follow Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Pre-Adamite Man, which cites ancient records of 86 Chaldean kings reigning 34,080 years, and argues these figures should not be dismissed outright. Cyclical Time in Ancient Legends sets Chaldean antediluvian history at 432,000 years, beside the Hindu Kali Yuga of the same length. The Chaldean Account of the Deluge, George Smith’s 1873 work, argues that the legends of Izdubar and the flood are very old, since they are referred to in bilingual lists composed in Babylonia under the early Chaldean empires.
Ur of the Chaldees
On Ur: Abraham’s City, Sumer and Those Who Built the Pyramids I start from Genesis 11:31 (KJV), where Terah takes Abram, Lot and Sarai and goes forth from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan.
Related pages
- Civilization an Inheritance
- The antiquity of some of our great inventions
- The origin of our alphabet
- Genesis contains a history of Atlantis
- 86 Chaldean Kings – 34,080 years
- Cyclical Time in Ancient Legends
- The Chaldean Account of the Deluge
- Ur: Abraham’s City, Sumer and Those Who Built the Pyramids
For every page I tagged with Chaldea, see the Chaldea tag archive.
