[LNHY/ACRA] The Daily Super Short-Short Story #63 [Long, again]

[phippsmartin at hotmail.com]

Saxon Brenton wrote:
> [Martin unearths a lot of freaky cool stuff on Nephilim]

> Like Eagle said, Nephilim turn up in a lot of places, not least
> of all in fanatasy with wildly erratic backgrounds and natures.

Well, it does bring up an interesting point of discussion.  Was the
Sumarian civilization wiped out by a flood?  The Sphinx of Egypt shows
signs of rain erosion so there might have been heavy rains back in
those times.  (The evidence that the Sphinx was built by the Sumarians
is based on the fact that the Sumarians invented Astrology and the
Sphinx, shaped like a lion, is supposedly pointing in the direction of
the constellation Leo.  There's also the fact that the Pharoah's head
carved into the Sphinx is too small for the body.  Carbon dating can't
be used on stone so that doesn't help.  Further evidence is the fact
that the Egyptian civilization started up immediately after the
Sumarian civilization ended which suggests that they simply picked up
and moved, for some reason.  Perhaps Egypt had been a Sumarian colony.
Egyptian mythology does claim that their civilization was founded by
people coming from the East.  See The Book of the Dead.)  This wouldn't
have been a global flood destroying mankind.  Hell, there were typhoons
here in South East Asia last summer that lasted for as much as six days
at a time and the rest of the world simply wasn't affected.  There
wouldn't be enough water in a world for a global flood anyway.  But if
Gilgamesh was a real person and there was a major flood during his
reign then, gee, I guess it was a historical event, just not the global
disaster that the Bible made it out to be.

Of course, this may all be irrelevent because this is Looniverse Y
we're talking about and if Arthur were to write up a Looniverse Y
version of the great flood it probably wouldn't involve the Sumarians
or Gilgamesh at all.

The idea that the Nephilim were, in fact, Neanderthals throws a monkey
wrench into this discussion though.  Of course, perhaps it would be
more accurate to say that the Sumarian kings _claimed_ to be Nephilim
as described in the Bible, just as the Pharoahs of Egypt claimed to be
descended from Gods.  (Did they mean the Sumarian kings themselves?)
That would make sense.  Similarly, Hercules could have been a
historical person who _claimed_ to be the son of Zeus and Jesus...
well, let's not go there. :)

So, yeah, with a bit of work we can reconcile what you wrote with
recorded history, the Bible and archeological, geological and genetic
evidence.  If we want to go that far.  The bottom line, I suppose, is
that for the purposes of Looniverse Y, the Sumarian kings could very
well have been Nephilim who were wiped out in a global flood whereas in
reality they were probably just ordinary people who suffered a lot of
rain.

Martin