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The dominion of the Bible
The creation of Eve
from Adam’s rib
c 5509, 3952 or 3761 BC
Beginning in Late Antiquity, European understanding of the past was dominated by biblical interpretation. The dominance of the Christian religion from the also had a negative effect on peoples’ understanding of the past. Christians were in no doubt that their scriptures were the very word of god, containing a literal account of the world since creation and that they were infallible. The world was created only about six thousand years ago (many early medieval writers used a dating system known as Anno Mundi – Year of the World – in which each year since creation was counted, calculated by Bede in Cronica maiora as 15 March 3952 BC). The history of humanity was the story of the descendants of Adam, who became distinct ‘peoples’, biologically descended from a patriarch, as a result of the confusion of languages that followed the destruction of the Tower of Babel. Down to the time of Jesus of Nazareth, the Bible was the history of humanity, although nobody seems to have puzzled about why the early history of Greece and Rome known through the Classical writers was not included, especially in view of the attitude that anything not included in the Bible was not worth knowing.
Medieval writers developed ingenious ways of linking the history of their peoples – most of whom seemed to be unknown to the supposedly divinely-inspired authors of the Old Testament – with the descendants of Noah. Europeans, as everyone ‘knew’, were descended from Japheth, so it was a matter of providing the genealogies. The Britons thus found themselves descended from a Brutus (who had lent his name to the island of Britain), who was a descendant of Aeneas – providing a convenient link with the Classical world – whose ancestry could be traced back to Japheth. Similarly, the Franks were descended from Francus and so on. How far people believed these concocted genealogies to be literally true father-to-son descents and how far they understood them in allegorical terms is not known, but they remain popular with religious fundamentalists despite their non-biblical origins.
If the world was created only a few thousand years ago, it was theoretically possible to write a chronicle of World History from beginning to present (Bede’s Cronica Maiora end with an exposition of what will happen in the End Times, making his World Chronicle complete). The Roman church was not the only organisation to try to calculate the date of creation. In the Orthodox Church, ’Αιτος Κοσμου (‘Era of the Cosmos’) was 1 September 5509 BC; after years of rival dates, the Hebrew calendar was codified by Maimonides in 1178 and set creation at 3761 BC.