Dating creation

Various traditional beliefs hold that the Earth, or the entire universe, was brought into being in a grand creation event by one or more deities.

After these cultures develop calendars, a question arises: Precisely how long ago did this creation event happen?

[2] Cicero, reacting to the chronologies of such authors as Berossos (who composed a Greek-language history of Babylonia, known as the Babyloniaca, during the 3rd century BC), strongly criticised the claim that the Babylonians had kings going back hundreds of thousands of years: ...Let us scorn the Babylonians...the men whose records, as they themselves assert, cover a period of four hundred and seventy thousand years.

[3]Diodorus Siculus also wrote something similar about how he believed the Babylonians fabricated their chronology: ...A man can scarcely believe them (Babylonians) for they reckon that, down to Alexander's crossing over into Asia, it has been four hundred and seventy-three thousand years, since they began in early times to make their observations of the stars.

[7] Fragments from Manetho (Eusebius, George Syncellus and preserved in Felix Jacoby's FGrH), however, list different dates.

Diogenes Laërtius recorded that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation to their first god Hephaestus, who by interpretatio graeca was Ptah.

[16] Apollonius, an Egyptian pagan priest in the 2nd century AD, calculated the cosmos to be 153,075 years old as reported by Theophilus of Antioch.

[17] Martianus Capella, a pagan writer, wrote in his De nuptiis in the 5th century AD that the ancient Egyptians had archives of astronomy which started 40,000 years before his own era.

[20] The Rig Veda questions the origin of the cosmos in the Nasadiya Sukta (the 129th hymn of Rigveda 10th mandala): Neither being (sat) nor non-being was as yet.

129)[21]Dick Teresi in his book Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science, reviewing Vedas writes that: Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together.

The Sanskrit speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one.

According to Sagan: The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.

Most ancient Greek and Roman chroniclers, poets, grammarians, and scholars (Eratosthenes, Varro, Apollodorus of Athens, Ovid, Censorinus, Catullus, and Castor of Rhodes) believed in a threefold division of history: ádelon (obscure), mythikón (mythical) and historikón (historical) periods.

Because the events in it are contained in true histories, he calls it “historical.”[25]Eratosthenes and Apollodorus of Athens, however, pushed back the start of the historical period to the Trojan War, which they fixed at 1184 BC.

[35] Most ancient Greeks, however, did not subscribe to such a literalist view of using mythology to attempt to date the creation; Hecataeus of Miletus was an early ancient Greek logographer who strongly criticised this method, while Ptolemy wrote of such an "immense period" of time before the historical period (776 BC), and thus believed in a much greater age for the creation.

[36] Among the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers there were different opinions and traditions pertaining to the date of the creation.

[41] Since evil first entered the physical creation after the spiritual creation was complete, Zoroastrians maintain that for 9,000 years the world continues to be a battlefield between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, which will end during the 12,000th year, when the Saoshyants brings about the final renovation of the world to defeat evil.

220-265 AD) in his Three Five Historic Records dated the creation of the world by Pangu 36,000 years (2 x 18,000) before the reign of the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors.

A second narrative begins with the first human pair, Adam and Eve, and goes on to list many of their descendants, in many cases giving the ages at which they had children and died.

Since the biblical story lacks chronology for some periods, the duration of events has been subject to interpretation in many different ways, resulting in a variety of estimates of the date of creation.

Numerous efforts have been made to determine the biblical date of creation, yielding varying results.

[56] The patriarchs from Adam to Terah, the father of Abraham, were often 100 years older when they begat their named son in the Septuagint than they were in the Hebrew or the Vulgate (Genesis 5, 11).

For example, the period from the creation to the Flood derives from the genealogical table of the ten patriarchs listed in Genesis 5, and 7:6, called the generations of Adam.

According to the Masoretic Text, this period consists of 1,656 years, and Western Christian Bibles deriving from the Latin Vulgate also follow this dating.

[59] The Hebrew calendar has traditionally, since the 4th century AD by Hillel II, dated the creation to 3761 BC.

[68] Bede was one of the first to break away from the standard Septuagint date for the creation and in his work De Temporibus ("On Time") (completed in 703 AD) dated the creation to 18 March 3952 BC but was accused of heresy at the table of Bishop Wilfrid, because his chronology was contrary to accepted calculations of around 5500 BC.