The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One by James A. Owen

Westerners consider to be the first six thousand years of civilized human history—and yet, other than several crumbly tomes of questionable lineage and a scattering of parchment found in shepherd’s caves, there is no traceable proof. And yet, if all of the writings from the period covered were somehow maintained, undamaged and unaltered, just how many volumes do you think they would fill?”
    “Are we talking historical writings, or religious ones?”
    “What’s the difference? Was Jesus a religious or an historical figure? If I teach a history course involving events dating to the fourth century, just whose birthdate do you think initiated the scale that provided the dates?”
    “I see your point,” Michael conceded. “You said there were perhaps seventeen to twenty books other than the Prime Edda …?”
    “Yes. Of the set, I was only able to peruse the first seven in ascending order of age, and this was the only one in Icelandic—or German.”
    “How were you able to do more than give them a cursory glance,” asked Michael, “given that they were all probably written in languages either dead or unfamiliar to you?”
    “Obviously, I would be unable to actually translate, but my studies and my travels have given me enough of a general grounding in language to glean at least a smattering of information from a number of languages I may not be familiar with.”
    “Okay,” said Michael. “We’ll give you that one, for the moment. Why did you only look at the first seven?”
    “Because,” said Jude, “after that, there were too few markers with which to extrapolate syntax from the languages I didn’t know.”
    “Extrapolate syntax? You were learning languages as you translated? Wouldn’t it have been easier to make some sort of copies and compare them?”
    “Sure,” said Jude, “if you’re dealing with existing languages—which I wasn’t. After a certain point, there was nothing recognizable to them, and I had to extrapolate, and in a few cases, invent, what I could from the available material.”
    “Invent?” gasped Michael. “How old were the books?”
    “It’s difficult to say, though a reverse review of the first seven gave me a rough time frame, and extrapolation of common linguistic elements found in decreasing quantities in the others allowed me to estimate a thumbnail projection of their historical coverage.”
    Michael coughed. “How … how long ?”
    “Around two million years, give or take. And that’s not counting the Gregorians.”
    Galen merely raised an eyebrow, but Michael looked as if he’d been shot. Jude would have laughed at the expression on the historian’s face if it hadn’t been one he was entirely prepared to receive. “Shall I go on?”
    “Please.”
    “The next youngest volume, speaking of things Biblical, was written in Aramaic, and was a Judaically-contemporary copy of the five books of the Law; the Pentateuch of the Hebrew Bible, which everyone supposes was written by Moses.”
    “It wasn’t?”
    “Oh, actually it was,” said Jude brightly, “but the volume I saw was approximately forty percent longer than the most exhaustively-interpreted set of scripture—and most of the excess material was pre-Adamic.”
    “How could it be pre-Adamic? What in any interpretation of the Bible would allow for that?”
    “You see the paradox,” said Jude, “and you’re once again confusing history and religion. Moses wasn’t writing for publication—he was writing for posterity . This was the one thing Jesus had down pat—if you’re going to teach, you’re better off creating parables, and leave history to the historians. If any version of this material actually made it through the centuries to the Jewish Elders or the Vatican, it’s not hard to see that neither group would have benefited from a public proclamation that Adam not only had a father, but was also sixth son in a family of eleven.”
    “Adam wasn’t the first man, then.”
    “He wasn’t