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A LOST BEGINNINGThe Age Of The EarthToday, educated society is fully aware that, compared to the average human life-span of three score years and ten, the age of the Earth, which modern geology has divided into successive eras and periods each millions of years in duration, is absolutely immense. Yet this concept was not always so, and was not in fact seriously developed until the first half of the nineteenth century. Before then, researchers had tried to establish the age of the Earth by studying ancient calendars, and various assertions about 'time' in classical, Near Eastern and Norse literature, or by working out and totalling the recorded generations of Biblical figures between the traditional 'first man', Adam, and the birth of Christ. Regarding this last mentioned method, the existence of different translations of scriptural sources only served to compound the difficulties.Some authorities, for example Isaac Vossius of Leiden, contended that the most authentic biblical genealogies are to be found in the original Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, rather than in the Masoretic Hebrew texts. Others disagreed. Thus, the age of the world calculated from Patriarchal genealogy as recorded in the Septuagint produced a date of 2,342 years, whereas that based on the Masoretic texts gave a date of 1,656 years.That no really precise date for the age of the Earth was forthcoming from varying sources like these quickly became transparently obvious.Early scholars everywhere recognized that, so far as it was known to them, a great break had occurred in Earth's history, or at least in the human portion of it. The break had been caused by a vast flood, which for Christian and Jewish historians was the Deluge of Genesis, and for classical writers the Great Flood of Deucalion. To all these authors this inundation became a highly important marker event. Not only Christian and Jewish savants, but others of the pagan pre-classical and oriental worlds, agreed th