Dating Creation - Sumerian and Babylonian

Sumerian and Babylonian

The standard ancient Sumerian King List (WB 444) lists various mythical antediluvian kings and gives them reigns of several tens of thousands of years. The first Sumerian king Alulim, at Eridu, is described as reigning for 28,800 years, followed by several later kings of similar periods. In total these antediluvian kings ruled for 241,200 years from the time when "the kingship was lowered from heaven" to the time when "the flood" swept over the land. Excavations in Iraq have revealed evidence of localized flooding at Shuruppak (modern Tell Fara, Iraq) and various other Sumerian cities—all dated to the same time. A layer of riverine sediments, radiocarbon dated to ca. 2900 BC, interrupts the continuity of settlement, extending as far north as the city of Kish. Polychrome pottery from the Jemdet Nasr period (3000–2900 BC) was discovered immediately below the Shuruppak flood stratum. The "flood" described in the Sumerian King List, is believed to have a historical basis, and has been dated 2900 BC. Adding 241,200 years to 2900 gives the date 244,100 BC; however, most modern scholars do not believe the ancient Sumerians or Babylonians believed in a chronology of their own this old. Instead they believe that these figures were either fabrications, or were based on not literal solar years (365.2425 days) but instead lunar months (29.53059 days).

Cicero, reacting to the chronologies of such authors as Berossos (who composed a Greek-language history of Babylonia, known as the Babyloniaca, during the 3rd century BC) strongly criticised the claim that the Babylonians had kings going back hundreds of thousands of years:

...Let us scorn the Babylonians...the men whose records, as they themselves assert, cover a period of four hundred and seventy thousand years.

Diodorus Siculus also wrote something similar about how he believed the Babylonians fabricated their chronology:

...A man can scarcely believe them (Babylonians) for they reckon that, down to Alexander's crossing over into Asia, it has been four hundred and seventy-three thousand years, since they began in early times to make their observations of the stars.

Despite these criticisms, some ancient Greeks, including most notably Alexander Polyhistor and Proclus, believed the Babylonian kings were hundreds of thousands of years old, and that the Babylonians dated their creation 400,000–200,000 years before their own time.