Table of Contents
Dan, host of DeDunking, treats the Sumerian king list as a charter for whoever held the throne. The copies disagree. The oldest leaves out the rulers from before the flood, and later copies put them back. Rule is said to come from the sky at the start and again after the waters, a restart he does not see when a city merely loses the crown. Town digs are real, yet far too young. Those huge spans, he says, belong to gods, so the numbers look like a count in sixties rather than lives he accepts. A Pacific cargo cult from the Second World War is how he pictures a flood memory twisting inside one generation. He then follows Jeffrey Rose. A sunken Gulf Oasis near Bahrain, close to twelve thousand years ago and to Plato’s date for Atlantis, is matched to Dilmun and to the garden in Genesis. Dan shares the idea of an earlier people who sailed and watched the stars, and he still places the first farms in Southeast Asia, not in that oasis.
Key points
- Dan treats the Sumerian list as something scribes could rewrite whenever a new ruler needed older authority.
- The preflood kings show up only in later copies, and a heavenly grant of rule is repeated after the deluge alone.
- Excavated towns sit on the list, but their digs do not stretch toward the enormous spans written next to the kings.
- He reads the giant numbers as divine bookkeeping in a count of sixties, not as years a person actually lived.
- A wartime cargo cult shows him how fast a remembered disaster can harden into myth.
- Rose’s drowned gulf, near Plato’s date for Atlantis, is the landscape Dan is willing to put under Dilmun and Eden, while he locates early farming farther east.
Short quotes
The divine powers of the city, the holiest divine powers were overturned.
DeDunking, Sumerian king list and the Gulf Oasis
He is reading a lament in which sacred authority in the city is thrown down. Watch at 6:07
Although I do find it very interesting that they do go back before the flood.
DeDunking, Sumerian king list and the Gulf Oasis
He is interested that some copies of the list reach back to the time before the flood. Watch at 10:22
The hearts of the great gods move them to inflict the flood.
DeDunking, Sumerian king list and the Gulf Oasis
In the passage that follows, the flood is a decision taken by the great gods. Watch at 12:52
For example, in an introduction to human prehistory in Arabia, he says, "The Gulf Oasis is also the place where myth and reality collide.
DeDunking, Sumerian king list and the Gulf Oasis
Rose, the archaeologist under discussion, puts Sumerian story and a real drowned shore in one place. Watch at 15:05
Video by DeDunking. Watch on YouTube.