Memories of the Past

I have been fascinated with legends and mythology since my childhood. This article comments that folklore is a lot older than we would think. I remember my father telling me the legend of Troy and how the German, Schliemann went and excavated the city (or several cities).

Our paper ran a series of comic strips, one was a factual one and there was one about the legend of Atlantis. It might have been at the time, when the BBC Chronicle TV programme was investigating various period of history, Silbury Hill and Stonehenge featured, so it might have been one of these programmes and looking at the theory that Thera in the Aegean was the original basis of the legends.

However, the flood myth seems an universal myth with every culture having a variant on the legend. Climate change has played apart over the period and this might be the reason for this universal appeal. This BBC radio programme considers how the landscape around the British Islands changed over the period and these survivors carried tales of the flooding down in their stories. The commentator recalls how a trawler first brought up some remains that humans had lived in this part of the world, before it became a sea.

I had always thought of the stone ages as a 'boring' period of history, but several articles over time have changed my mind. The recent series by Michelle Paver called The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness is a very good read and has some excellent comments. Also there have been odd finds that have appeared, The Bronze Disk of Sanger and this has led to some wild theories about the past. The idea that there is a starting point for civilization is a fascinating one as researchers try and discovered the truth about the past.

I wonder what stories the future will tell of this age?