PreHistory

Everyone has heard of this term as well as the term prehistoric. They are used to describe events that were supposed to have taken place in history long before anyone could record them.

There are several definitions for both words but we are only going to deal with the meanings used by archaeologists and historians. Those definitions are:

#1. prehistory-the time during the development of human culture before the appearance of the written word (source)

#2. prehistoric– Of, relating to, or belonging to the era before recorded history. (source)

If you are a regular reader f this website, you would have guessed by now that we do not fully agree with these definitions or applications.  One reason we do not like them is that anything done in the past is actually history, whether it was recorded or not.

Does something have to be recorded in order to be considered factual history? One could argue that recorded history has a way of weeding out false data, legends and myths and keeping them from real history.

However, that defense falls in light of the old adage ‘history is in the eye of the historian.’ This means that we may not be getting actual history in our archaeological or historical publications.

In reading three books on the Civil War, one by Macpherson, Foote, and Catton, we got 3 different perspectives of the war, the events that occurred, and the conversations that took place.

If we pieced them all together, we may get some factual accounts and then, we may not. The content all depends on the historians’ point of view, what evidence he or she left out and what evidence they included.

With this reality in mind, you can forgive us if we disagree with those definitions and their applications Another reason is, we do not know when writing was invented, what records have been destroyed or are still buried in the ground.

Some archaeologists and scholars claim they know what it the oldest alphabet and language in the world is, but that is an impossible claim. Archaeology cannot look back into time and accurately say this was first, that was second, and the remaining languages are third.

If you believe like we do, that there were two worldwide civilizations that were divided by the Flood, then there is no such thing as prehistory or prehistorical. All records of the pre-flood society are lost or if found, misidentified.

That is if those that were found could be translated. We do not know the original language the pre-flood world spoke or wrote thus we would never know what they recorded

Then, the Bible has the written language going back a long way and archaeology would agree that there was a form of writing in ancient Sumer which is said t be the first organized civilization in Mesopotamia.

That is roughly 4 to 5,000 years ago. Sadly, too many people do not consider the Bible a factual record that contains actual history in it.

The Bible is not a reliable historical source because it does not meet the standard criteria of source reliability used by historians. The Bible is not, as many believers assume, eye witness testimony. Reliable sources are generally based on authors who were eye witnesses to an event (i.e. it is a primary source). Since any particular source may be fabricating their story, multiple independent sources are usually required for confidence. Establishing the lack of author biases, including religious motivations, is also necessary if a work is to be read at face value. The Bible satisfies none of these requirements. (source)

That source is not the only one saying this and we have seen and heard far too many authors and speakers say the same thing. The problem is, those who claim the Bible is not a reliable historical source cannot back up their arguments.

But, with that said, the Bible does not record every act, word, or deed by historical figures for every ancient society. In that regard, it is not a historical text. But what historical events the Bible does speak on are factual and actual events.

That includes the creation and the flood. This factual record may help us pinpoint some periods of time where no history was recorded. In Adam’s time and maybe the first generation after he and Eve, we can’t be sure, there was probably no history to record or anyone with the ability to write well.

We know the pre-flood world built great structures, knew astronomy and math quite well so it stands to reason they could read and write. At some point after Adam, someone started to record their history. We just can’t prove it.

Then right after the flood may be a time when people did not record history as they were rebuilding their lives, civilization and again had little history to write about. Somewhere between Shem and Babel, someone could have written down what was taking place in the world at the time.

The problem is that we would not know because the people, prior to God dividing the language, spoke the same language as the pre-flood world. It was brought forward to the new post-flood era by Noah, his wife, their children, and their wives.

If we found any records dating to that time period, we could not decipher it. We do not know what it was or what it looks like. We could guess but that would not bring us even close to the truth.

People are trying to find the one language that started it all and when writing originally developed. So far, we have come across about 3 different opinions n this topic.

#1. The three writing systems that developed independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica, shared a remarkable stability. Each preserved over millennia features characteristic of their original prototypes. The Mesopotamian cuneiform script can be traced furthest back into prehistory to an eighth millennium BC counting system using clay tokens of multiple shapes.(source)

#2. It is thought that human beings developed language c. 35,000 BCE as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (c. 50,000-30,000 BCE) which appear to express concepts concerning daily life… Written language, however, does not emerge until its invention in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, c. 3500 -3000 BCE. This early writing was called cuneiform and consisted of making specific marks in wet clay with a reed implement (source)

#3. Writing was invented independently in at least four different times and places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. Of these original writing systems, Egyptian and Sumerian are the oldest known. The earliest evidence of phonetic writing in Egypt dates to about 3250 BC; the earliest known complete sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BC.¹ Egypt’s Copts used the spoken language until the late seventeenth century AD, making it one of history’s longest surviving recorded languages (source)

Here is a list of the supposed 5 oldest languages in the world but keep in mind that these are only the ones that can be found and the dates may be off by quite a margin.  Just so you know, Wikipedia does its own list but it is about 600 years younger than the scholars put the beginning of the same languages referred to in those quotes.

The reason we say that those may not be the oldest is that those writing systems had to wait until there was a cohesive society that needed a written language before it could be written.

As what happens today, could also take place in ancient times where speakers of different languages and dialects die out and the language they spoke dies with them.

In other words, prehistory may not be prehistory at all. It is just the languages are lost as are most of the records of the people who spoke those languages. We cannot read those records or place them in the wrong people group.

The context in which samples of early writing are usually found is necessarily secondary, that is, physically, temporally, and consequently intellectually removed from where it was composed. The further we go back in time, the fewer sources we have at our disposal. (source)

Then we have the following problem:

History is impossible without the written word as one would lack context in which to interpret physical evidence from the ancient past. (source)

We would tend to disagree with this simply for the fact we cannot trust historians to record everything as it happened. The written context would be according to the historians’ point of view and may not be what actually transpired.

One prime example of this is when the Romans destroyed Carthage. The Roman army also destroyed every written work the Carthinagians wrote. We know this because the only history of the people extant today was written by their enemies.

Roman and Greek historians gave everyone their point of view and we have no way of verifying if they wrote the truth. So this argument of context is meaningless as the written record is vulnerable to historians doing the writing as oral tradition is to the people speaking.

We may not be getting the correct context via either method. Who is to say which version of the context is right? A written record may not be accurate at all as the arguments against many ancient religious texts claim those takes were forged (Bart Ehrman is just one scholar writing on this topic).

In the case of the Mayan people, misunderstanding of their writing system can lead to false conclusions:

Writing records the lives of a people and so is the first necessary step in the written history of a culture or civilization. A prime example of this problem is the difficulty scholars of the late 19th/early 20th centuries CE had in understanding the Maya Civilization, in that they could not read the glyphs of the Maya and so wrongly interpreted much of the physical evidence they excavated. The early explorers of the Maya sites, such as Stephens and Catherwood, believed they had found evidence of an ancient Egyptian civilization in Central America. (Ibid)

How can we be sure that even modern scholars have it right when so many of their records were destroyed by the Spaniards? Not to mention the many languages that cannot be deciphered yet.

This same problem is evident in understanding the ancient Kingdom of Meroe (in modern day Sudan), whose Meroitic Script is yet to be deciphered as well as the so-called Linear A script of the ancient Minoan culture of Crete which also has yet to be understood. (Ibid)

The terms prehistory and prehistoric are very misleading. They are convenient terms to use when scholars may want more freedom to speculate about ancient peoples, their history, or even criticize the Bible.

From Adam till now, there has only been 1 history and there is no real prehistory because it is impossible to record or even preserve every deed or word done or spoken since the beginning of time.

Keep in mind that those terms, prehistory and prehistoric, are man-made terms with man-made definitions. They are not written in stone and only exist as categories to use when archaeologists and historians need to fudge a bit about our past.