Dragons? Satan? Really Now?

Ahem....

The Dragon Has Landed....     

I've looked into the idea that the ancient Israelites found fossilized mammal bones, that inspired their tales of the "nephilim"; as the ancient Greeks apparently found fossilized mammoth and wooly rhinocerus bones and believed that they were the bones of cyclops, heros, and so on...

The area that the ancient Israelites lived in, contained NO fossilized mega-mammalian bones - large mammals of the Pleistocene era...

However, the fossils that ARE found in Israel are those of the "mososaurs" and "elaphrosaurus"...  Large, sea-going dinosaurs/reptiles of the Cretaceous period.

Here is a website that lists a few of the fossils found in Israel - scroll down the list until you come to "Israel"...  Some of the links are clickable...

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/locations/Asia.shtml

And speaking of China....

One reason that the "dragon" mythology is so prevalent in China, is due to the VAST fossil resources found in China.  "Dragon" bones are found in most chinese "apothecaries" - and almost always consist of fossilized bones...

Here are a couple of websites on that subject...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19606626/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/t/chinese-villagers-ate-dinosaur-dragon-bones/

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2007-07-04-bones_N.htm

Zid - the board's resident She-Devil     - and DRAGON!!! 

"Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life."-Genesis 3:14

The dragon, original serpent come from this scripture above. If a snake had limbs it would be a skinny lizard. The Chinese dragons have this kind of look.

A curse to be a limbless creature that is already limbless is not a curse.

I think that if one wants to distinguish between the 'snake' in the "garden of eden", and the "dragons" supposedly mentioned later on in the bible, one would have to look into the original terms that were translated as 'snake', 'dragon', 'behemoth', 'leviathan', and so on....

Also one would need to look into the mythology of the surrounding nations, and those nations which conquered Israel - Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and so on...

The Hebrews/Israelites were conquered so many times, there were MANY sources of so-called "pagan" mythology that influenced the ancient Hebrews.

"behemoth" and "leviathan" are both in the OLD testament, if I recall correctly...  And the "snake" in the "garden of eden" is most certainly an old testament myth...

So it would be more fitting to look at the HEBREW words translated as "snake", "behemoth", "leviathan", and so on...

But speaking of the actual environments, and the snakes present therein...

Greece and Crete are both home to a variety of snakes, some of them quite poisonous.  However, most of them are fairly small - nothing approaching the size of anacondas or pythons...

Here's a decent link with good color photos...  Including a photo of the "Ottoman" viper...   There are several varieties of vipers in Greece...

http://www.hylawerkgroep.be/jeroen/index.php?id=8

And here's a decent website that mentions at least 4 varieties of poisonous snakes mentioned in the bible...

http://natureisrael.com/creatures.html

However, there's also those fossilized remains of Cretaceous mososaurs, which could DEFINITELY be mistaken for the bones of "dragons", if found by the ancient Israelites....

Also, the Babylonians believed in "dragons", although they, along with serpents, were considered the children of the goddess Tiamat, who was a major character in Babylonian creation myths...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#Origin_and_etymology_2

Belief in dragons and other monstrous creatures is a very old mytheme that does not necessarily depend on fossil analogues, or those fossils found in a particular locality.  These are also often conceived as ancient cosmological forces that must be tamed by the gods in order to have order and peace in the world, and which may be responsible for geomorphic features like mountains, seas, rivers, etc.  In the ANE dragons were conceived of as manifestations of the powerful, turbulent, violent sea.  The reptilian features of Tiamat are associated with the sea in the Enuma Elish: Tiamat writhes, roils, its waves are like rows of scales, etc.  The Hebrew primeval monster Rahab, conquered by Yahweh, is similarly a word otherwise referring to the unruly, stormy sea.  The Canaanite epics from Ras Shamra concern the conflicts between Baal and Lotan (= Leviathan in the Bible) and Yamm ("the Sea").  The conflict between Baal and Yamm, ending with Baal's enthronment at Mount Casius, was probably localized along the Orontes River (called the Typhon, or Draco, River in ancient times) which flows northward downstream from Mount Lebanon, twisting around and carving out spectacular gorges before emptying into the Mediterrenean near Mount Casius.  That Mount Lebanon was believed to be home to a primeval monster, as well as the council of the gods, is also an ancient belief found in the Gilgamesh Epic (where the monster is called Huwawa).

If the ancient discovery of fossils inspired or reinforced the mythological imagination, a feasible place for that to have occurred was the mid-Holocene Sahara.  A Proto-Afro-Asiatic culture, including ancestors of the Egyptians and Berbers (and indirectly, Semitic peoples), lived in the Sahara during the Neolithic subpluvial period, which was much wetter than it is today.  It is also thought that there was population movement into the Mediterreanean, including Crete.  The Sahara is rich in fossils from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, including sauropods, "super-crocs", pterosaurs, primitive whales, megalodon (the gigantic-sized shark), etc.  At least one myth at least localizes the primeval dragon in North Africa: it was where Herakles slew the hundred-headed dragon Ladon (= Lotan, Leviathan) who guarded the tree bearing immortality-giving golden apples in the Garden of Hesperides (located near the Atlas Mountains in North Africa).