Dating Creation

Dating creation is the attempt to provide an estimate of the age of the Earth or the age of the universe as understood by various religious traditions. Various traditional beliefs held that the Earth, or the entire Universe, was brought into being in a grand creation event by one or more gods. Once these cultures developed calendars, many began to ponder the question of precisely how long ago this event happened.

Most ancient Greek and Roman chroniclers, poets, grammarians, and scholars (Eratosthenes, Varro, Apollodorus of Athens, Ovid, Censorinus, Catullus, and Castor of Rhodes) believed in a threefold division of history: ádelon (obscure), mythikón (mythical) and historikón (historical) periods. According to the Roman grammarian Censorinus the first period, the ádelon (obscure), was calculated by Varro as follows:

The first (period) stretches from the beginning of mankind (the creation) to the first cataclysm [i.e. the flood of Ogyges].

The primordial ádelon (obscure) period ended with the flood of Ogyges and what followed was the beginning of the mythikón (mythical) period. Varro dated this flood to 2137 BC but Censorinus wrote in his De Die Natali ch.xxi that the Ogyges’ diluvium occurred 1600 years before the first Olympiad (776 BC) meaning 2376 BC.Castor of Rhodes also provided another date for the start of the mythikón (mythical) period, 2123 BC. Censorinus recorded that the second period, the mythikón, stretched from the flood of Ogyges to the first Olympiad:

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