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Ancient Days

ancient-ruins

History is a treasure trove of mysteries simply waiting for you to turn the pages. Understanding where we have come from helps us to understand who we are … and many times why we do the things we do.

Let’s step back into the pages of time and see what we can find.

How far back can we go?
Well according to Wikepedia it says:

Recorded history or written history is a historical narrative based on a written record or other documented communication. It contrasts with other narratives of the past, such as mythological, oral or archeological traditions.

For broader world history, recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BCE, and coincides with the invention of writing. For some geographic regions or cultures, written history is limited to a relatively recent period in human history because of the limited use of written records. Moreover, human cultures do not always record all of the information relevant to later historians, such as the full impact of natural disasters or the names of individuals. Recorded history for particular types of information is therefore limited based on the types of records kept. Because of this, recorded history in different contexts may refer to different periods of time depending on the topic.

The interpretation of recorded history often relies on historical method, or the set of techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write accounts of the past. The question of the nature, and even the possibility of an effective method for interpreting recorded history, is raised in the philosophy of history as a question of epistemology. The study of different historical methods is known as historiography, which focuses on examining how different interpreters of recorded history create different interpretations of historical evidence.

There is so much more in this article, and it would behoove you to read the rest as it goes into quite a lot of detail on various parts of the world. Mainly, it talks about ‘recorded’ history as beginning with the invention of writing. For instance, it goes on to say:

More complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing. Early examples are the Jiahu symbols (c. 6600 BCE), Vinča signs (c. 5300 BCE), early Indus script (c. 3500 BCE) and Nsibidi script (c. before 500 CE). There is disagreement concerning exactly when prehistory becomes history, and when proto-writing became “true writing”.[2] However, invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BCE. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BCE with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BCE.

So we can see that written writing went back to almost 6600 BCE! That’s a pretty long time for people to be recording their daily lives. However, what we’re going to focus on is the time period beginning from the written word of YHWH as we find it in the pages of the bible.

Follow along with us as we walk through the bible….