From Kirkus Reviews
In an exhaustively researched and creatively argued reassessment of mankind's origins, British physician Oppenheimer, an expert in tropical pediatrics, contends that the now-submerged area of Southeast Asia was the cradle of ancient civilization. From time to time, scholars from various disciplines have argued for the existence of a vastly old ``founder civilization.'' Among the most famous was Charles Hapgood, who based his theory of a lost seafaring civilization on his analysis of the famous 16th-century ``Piri Re'is'' maps of the Antarctic land mass. In this tradition, Oppenheimer blends evidence from geology, genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology to argue persuasively that such a civilization existed on a submerged land mass in Southeast Asia, which geologists call the Sunda shelf. Pointing to geological evidence for the submersion of the shelf by abrupt rises in the sea level about 8,000 years ago, Oppenheimer contends that the coastal cultures of Southeast Asia were drowned by a great flood, reflected in flood mythologies scattered from the ancient Middle East (such as the biblical story of Noah) to Australia and the Americas. According to the author, tantalizing archaeological evidence exists of settlements under a ``silt curtain'' left by the sea floods in drowned coastal regions from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, while linguistic markers indicate that languages spread from Southeast Asia to Australia and the Pacific. The shared flood story is one striking example of similar Eurasian myths according to the author; the ancient Middle East and Asia share other myth typologies, conspicuously including creation and Cain and Abel myths, which point to common origins in a progenitor culture. Absorbing, meticulously researched, limpidly written, and authoritative: should be regarded as a groundbreaking study of the remote past of Southeast Asia, and of civilization itself. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Kurzbeschreibung
Controversial title which challenges the conventional view of prehistory by relocating the lost "Eden" to Southeast Asia.
Synopsis
A book that completetly changes the established and conventional view of prehistory by relocating the Lost Eden - the world's 1st civilisation - to SouthEast Asia. At the end of the Ice Age, SouthEast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India, which included Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent. Geologically, this half sunken continent is the Shunda shelf or Sundaland. In the Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in southeast Asia - rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed - was the lost civilisation that fertilised the Great cultures of the Middle East 6 thousand years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from creation stories, myths and sag as and from linguistics and DNA analysis, to argue that this founder civilisation was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age.
Kundenrezensionen
Legitimate Crankery
I love this book. It's got legitimate research, a fluid prose style, and it's just chock full of good, old-fashioned "Teutonic crackpottery." First of all, this guy, Stephen Oppenheimer, is clearly a genius. Anyone that can even stand to learn about the sciences that he writes about is megacephalic. He's got stuff about the weather, about continental drift, about Tsunami's (love it), linguistics (oy vey - and not a single reference to the odious Noam Chomsky), archaeology, and THE BIBLE. Regardless of whether he's a conspiracy theorist who makes Jim Garrison look like Mr. Sane, he clearly has an intellect of the first order.
Second, the guy reminds me of a schizophrenic I sat next to in a bakery once. I felt sorry for the man and bought him a cup of coffee. I guess this act of kindness caused him to shed his inhibitions because the next thing I knew, he was telling me about his theory: electricity is yellow and it buzzes and goes into the ground when lightening strikes and he saw some YELLOW wasps BUZZING and coming out of the GROUND. This went on for a while and, basically, to make the guy shut up, I said, "Well, these are interesting ideas. You ought to write them down." The man just beamed at me and pulled a 1,000 page treatise out of his down-filled trenchcoat (it was July in Texas and about 100 degrees outside).
Mr. Oppenheimer is like that. He has written a lengthy treatise about how: (1) ancient South Americans built pyramids and there are PYRAMID-shaped rocks under the water off of Japan!; (2) the first woman in the Bible is named "Eve" and some tribe somewhere on an island near Australia had a story about a progenitorial woman named "IVIE" or "EVIE" or something like that; (3) some people that lived in the Urals or the Caucasus or some place like that built homes on stilts and people in the Pacific DO THAT, TOO!; (4) the ancient Sumerians wrote about great floods and there were really big FLOODS in the South Pacific, too!; and (5) something about the frequency of words for rice that I never really "got" but it had to be more evidence.
You think I may be pooh-poohing Mr. Openheimer. No way. I love this stuff. I like that guy, Graham somebody, who says there are boats buried under the pyramids and all this is related to the Rosacrucians. And what about the dude at Harvard that wrote 1,000 pages on whether a second born has a predictable set of traits? And what about Julian Jaynes? And the "Anatomy of Disgust"? I love all of it. It all reminds me of Wilhelm Fleiss, who, after all, was the original teutonic crackpot, and a big bud of Freud. I could read these books all day. You have to have patience and enjoy it and not care whether it is "right" or not. Just take it like a trip - on acid.
