was showing his independent spirit, his maverick willingness to go his own way, even when it meant putting more trust in the dirt than in the greatest and most celebrated chronologies of the ancient past.
SUCH RADICAL—indeed revolutionary—conclusions urged Rudbeck to probe into the history of Sweden, seeking an explanation for its great age. Reasoning like the Cartesian that many suspected he was, Rudbeck began at the beginning, hoping to find something fundamental that he could not doubt. As described in the seventh chapter of the Book of Genesis: “On that day, all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.”
Given this destruction, Rudbeck reasoned that all evidence of the earliest period of world history had been lost. The oldest period that any historian could possibly reconstruct, according to Rudbeck, was the time immediately after the Great Flood, the postdiluvian world, when Noah; his wife; their three sons, Japheth, Shem, and Ham; and their wives dared to leave the massive ark, and started to rebuild human civilization. This momentous event not only appeared on almost all standard chronologies of the day, usually calculated as
Then Rudbeck asked himself two crucial questions: How did the earth get repopulated, and why did the descendants of Noah settle in Sweden? His answer was as logical as it was grounded in biblical evidence.
The key to these questions lay in what sources of food were available to the survivors of the ark. No cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, or other land-dwelling animals, Rudbeck reasoned, would have possibly survived on an earth flooded for 150 (or 190, counting the first forty of rain) days. Animals of the air would also have died, since they needed food as well as places to rest from flight, both of which would have been underwater.
It was not necessary to be a botanist to understand that such a state would have eliminated most vegetation, too. This could be inferred, Rudbeck pointed out, by observing the effects of spring floods in Uppsala. These leave so much sand and gravel in their wake that they end up choking any surviving vegetation. Only a few trees such as willows and sallow flourish in such surroundings, and if a simple spring flood causes so much damage, imagine a flood on an enormous scale. In short, no animals, birds, or vegetation would have lived. But fish, on the other hand, were a different matter.
Creatures of the water would have been better positioned to survive this cataclysm. Nowhere in the sacred text were fish specifically ruled out as destroyed, and reason also suggested that they would have survived, flourishing in their natural environment. In this way, fish provided a central element in Rudbeck’s vision of the past, and a key to a new understanding of the earliest events in history.
Given the passage of time since the waters of the Flood subsided in 2400 B.C., and the population of the world in Rudbeck’s day, 1670, simple mathematical calculations showed that fish were absolutely necessary in order to repopulate the earth. There was simply no other way for the world’s population to reach the present level in such a short period without this huge and steady supply of food. Rudbeck compiled many tables to work this out, calculating the first eight humans, the number of children recorded in the genealogies, and the rate at which the population must have grown, mathematically, for the descendants of Noah to fulfill the command “be fruitful and multiply.” Rudbeck was more convinced than ever about the role of the fish in rebuilding civilization.
Looking at ancient peoples, Rudbeck asked: Did they not settle near the water? The Greeks colonized around the Mediterranean, as Plato would say, “like frogs around a pond.” The Chaldeans encircled the Persian Gulf, the Chinese gathered around the East Indian Ocean, and the Scythians colonized the Black Sea area. The eminent Harvard historian Frank Manuel noted that Isaac Newton had proposed an early theory of the riverbed origins of civilization in his
Relentlessly following the reasoning, Rudbeck further pursued this line of thought. Water not only provided the most secure food supply for early humans, and promoted the growth of old civilizations, but helped in other ways as well. Long before the invention of the compass or the systematic use of stars for traveling, rivers offered the best orientation for early explorers, as well as the most reliable source of food on their perilous journeys. Again Rudbeck looked to ancient texts to see if this rationale corresponded with the accounts of the earliest history.
Beginning with our oldest surviving historian, he turned to Herodotus, “the father of history,” as Cicero called him. This fifth-century-B.C. historian told the story of how an ancient barbarian tribe, the Cimmerians, fled from the even more barbaric Scythians, making the escape by following along the coasts. Julius Caesar similarly wrote about how the ancient Gauls preferred to march along the rivers, particularly when they were lost in foreign lands. Going back into the realm of myth, and one of the oldest journeys on record, Jason and the Argonauts, too, progressed in their search for the Golden Fleece by following the rivers.
To persuade remaining skeptics, Rudbeck invited them to read the travel reports of explorers in the New World. Even in the modern age, with the mastery of the compass and the ability to read the stars, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and Swedish travelers made progress inland by following the course of rivers.
Many places of course had fish in abundance, but according to Rudbeck, there was no place that could rival the north. Here the rivers teemed with fish and the land overflowed with abundance. Herring, salmon, pike, cod, mountain cod, whales, whitefish, and so on, all this variety and wealth was made all the more vital when the animals, birds, and vegetation died in the Flood (and the pairs saved on the ark were too few to prevent starvation, let alone suffice to repopulate the earth). This natural asset was still very much tangible in his own day, Rudbeck ventured, pointing out how wealthy Dutch, Norwegian, and English fishermen had become on their trade. It was impossible to count how many distant lands and peoples were still fed by the reservoirs of fish found in northern waters.
The significance of Rudbeck’s finding was not lost on his contemporaries. In an oration delivered at the University of Kiel in the 1680s, one professor painted a picture of Sweden in a way highly reminiscent of Rudbeck’s vision of a marvelous land that had once served as the cradle of civilization:
Sweden is rich in metals, overflows with herds and flocks, and in all places crowded with forests… . Which waters in the world gush forth so many kinds of fish one after the other and in greater abundance than those which flow in Sweden?
Nature has taught the hearts of people, the professor said, to turn like a magnet in a compass to this original homeland in the north. Such a notion would live on for quite a long time, indeed well after many parts of Rudbeck’s story had been abandoned or forgotten.
As Rudbeck was beginning to see, survival in the earliest times was a matter of following the fish north to Sweden. With this vision of the ancient past, founded on the sacred history, his archaeological dating method, his wide experiences in natural history, and his own logical deduction, Rudbeck concluded that “it simply could not have happened otherwise.”
And so the search was on. The remains of the world’s oldest civilization lay just out in the countryside—its dirt, its stones, and its fish had yielded the most astounding and unbelievable conclusions, and who knew what else might be found there. Olof Rudbeck was at the beginning of what would be an extraordinary adventure. Ultimately, too, he was taking the first steps in another quest, a personal mission to gain redemption after the day he had been so publicly humiliated and thoroughly discredited.
Meanwhile, Olaus Verelius and Johannes Loccenius were overjoyed with the potential of this project. Both experts fired off letters of support to a dashing count who was then not only chancellor of Uppsala University but also chancellor of the Swedish Empire. Hoping to interest this gentleman in the quest, everyone waited in heightened expectation.
6
GAZING AT THE FACE OF THOR
—LUCIUS APULEIUS,
