Gilgamesh and Babylonian myth- Genesis was copied from an earlier Babylonian story, or The Gilgamesh myth was copied from an earlier Hebrew story, or both were copied from a common source that predates them both.
The Choice of Gatha is the tale of the original choice is balanced by an announcement of the final things, choice and rewards being closely interdependent. The whole human drama, reduced to its essential structure
The Enuma Elish is a Babylonian or Mesopotamian myth of creation recounting the struggle between cosmic order and chaos.
The Chinese Myths- Chinese mythology is as varied and multi-levelled as the country from which it springs. China contains many different cultural groupings, who speak a number of different languages. However, it has had a literate cultural élite for thousands of years, and myths which were originally regional have spread by means of a pictographic script which transcended language barriers. Their evolution has not been entirely oral. Chinese mythology has been influenced by a fear of outsiders. It has also been shaped, sometimes deliberately, by religious faiths and philosophies. Some myths even demonstrate the conflict between them, as in the story of the Monkey King, which reflects the conflict between Taoists and Buddhists
-Source: Ancient History Sourcebook-
Comparative Analysis of the Myths
The fact that language limits anything we know or say is clear from the contemporary realization that our ability to speak does not just communicate what people know; it also determines what people know. Language–or our cultural-linguistic systems–does not affect just how they speak of what they know but also how they know what they know. It determines, in other words, what we know. And, by determining, it limits. People can never see the whole picture. They can never have a universal language. Yes, languages can and must communicate with each other, but to propose a universal language will most likely mean to impose it. Hence, truth, like language, will be better served and protected when it is recognized to be inherently and ineluctably diverse. Any kind of a “common story” for humanity, therefore, will somehow also have to be diverse. Otherwise, it is dangerous.
Thus, there are critics of those of us who speak of a “common creation story” or of the way our “one earth” can provide the common ground for a new dialogue among “the many religions.” There is a “Kantian motor” driving all this talk of a new common text–this one written by scientists–that is supposed to subsume or be the higher norm for all the earlier, disjointed, and “primitive” texts. Such proposals for a shared creation story or for a new inter-religious dialogue that takes the earth as its common ground have been described as a “divinization of the earth” based on a “sacralization of science,” a “new ecologism” that becomes an “eco-olatry.” All of this hide the forces of a new meta-narrative; such a narrative is not only theologically a new form of idolatry, but it can also easily become, politically, an “eco-fascism” that proclaims one unified, universal, authoritative voice–now the voice of the, Earth–over all other voices.
To realize that there is an religious and cultural door through which humanity can pass into the mystical and revelatory splendor of nature can be a help and a safeguard, in, making more sensitive and more ecumenical use of image of the universe story as a common creation story. A post modern criticism asks whether they run the danger of pressing the cultural-linguistic system of modem science on worldviews and cultures for which the scientific creation myth, although used in laboratories and factories, may not have validity in temples and ceremonies. Perhaps not all religious cosmologies can “hear” or relate to the scientific creation story as readily and eagerly. Perhaps many religious persons, especially in the two-thirds world, will fear that the new creation myth is another example of the West’s taking over, this time under the guise of science.
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