Antediluvians

Antediluvians people who lived before the Deluge (q.v.), which occurred A.M. 1657. See AGE. All our authentic information respecting this long and interesting period is contained in forty-nine verses of Genesis (4:16; 6:8), more than half of which are occupied with a list of names and ages, invaluable for chronology, but conveying no particulars regarding the primeval state of man. The information thus afforded, although so limited in extent, is, however, eminently suggestive (see Clarkson, Antediluvian Researches, Lond. 1836; Boucher d. Perthes, L'Homme Antedilucien, Par. 1860; Stein, De moribus ante diluvium, Wittenb. 1783; Burton, World before the Flood, Lond. 1844; Redslob, De Antediluvianis, Hamb. 1847; Willesch, De philosophia antediluvianorum, Leipz. 1717; Jour. Sac. Lit. July, 1862, p. 376 sq.). Some additional information, though less direct, may be safely deduced from the history of Noah and the first men after the Deluge; for it is very evident that society did not begin afresh after that event, but that, through Noah and his sons, the new families of men were in a condition to inherit, and did inherit, such sciences and arts as existed before the Flood. This enables us to understand how settled and civilized communities were established, and large and magnificent works undertaken within a few centuries after the Deluge.

The scriptural notices show, see ADAM, that the father of men was something more than "the noble savage," or rather the grown-up infant, which some have represented him. He was an instructed man; and the immediate descendants of a man so instructed could not be an ignorant or uncultivated people. It is not necessary, indeed, to suppose that they possessed at first more cultivation than they required; and for a good while they did not stand in need of that which results from or is connected with the settlement of men in organized communities. They probably had this before the Deluge, and at first were possessed of whatever knowledge or civilization their agricultural and pastoral pursuits required. Such were their pursuits from the first; for it is remarkable that of the strictly savage or hunting condition of life there is not the slightest trace before the Deluge. After that event, Nimrod, although a hunter (Ge 10:9), was not a savage, and did not belong to hunting tribes of men. In fact, barbarism is not discoverable before the confusion of tongues, and was, in all likelihood, a degeneracy from a state of cultivation, eventually produced in particular communities by that great social convulsion. At least, that a degree of cultivation was the primitive condition of man, from which savage life in particular quarters was a degeneracy, and that he has not, as too generally has been supposed, worked himself up from an original savage state to his present position, has been powerfully argued by Dr. Philip Lindsley (Am. Bib. Repos. 4, 277-298; 6:127), and is strongly corroborated by the conclusions of modern ethnographical research; from which we learn that, while it is easy for men to degenerate into savages, no example has been found of savages rising into civilization but by an impulse from without administered by a more civilized people; and that, even with such impulse, the vis inertiae of established habits is with difficulty overcome. The aboriginal traditions of all civilized nations describe them as receiving their civilization from without — generally through the instrumentality of foreign colonists: and history affords no example of a case parallel to that which must have occurred if the primitive races of men, being originally savage, had civilized themselves.

All that was peculiar in the circumstances of the antediluvian period was eminently favorable to civilization. The longevity of the earlier seventeen or twenty centuries of human existence is a theme containing many problems. It may be here referred to for the purpose of indicating the advantages which must necessarily have therefrom accrued to the mechanical arts. In pottery, mining, metallurgy, clothmaking, the applications of heat and mixtures, etc., it is universally known that there is a tact of manipulation which no instruction can teach, which the possessor cannot even describe, yet which renders him powerful and unfailing, within his narrow range, to a degree almost incredible; and when he has reached his limit of life he is confident that, had he another sixty or seventy years to draw upon, he could carry his art to a perfection hitherto unknown. Something like this must have been acquired by the antediluvians; and the paucity of objects within their grasp would increase the precision and success within the range. See LONGEVITY.