The first bird mentioned in the Bible is a raven, related by more than ornithology to the one in the Haida Gwaii story. Noah, adrift on the waters, sent the bird out and it never came back. Seemingly no comfort there. Except that there was, for Noah knew something about ravens from stories that were told back then, stories in which ravens look after themselves; and he realized that this raven must have found a place to rest. An island, of course, since there was nothing else. No sign of the raven was, for Noah, a hopeful sign. But like a good scientist, he needed some evidence. So he sent out a dove, a homing pigeon. They always come back, he’d been told; and sure enough it did, carrying a leaf. That was enough. An island with a tree on it. A place for a bird to land. Noah had proof that the floodwaters were receding and islands appearing once again; and one of them, which much later became known to us as Mount Ararat, provided a resting place for the ark.
In some stories of the beginning of the world, nothing came first, nothing at all—which is why the opening of John’s Gospel, in its early Greek version, has no definite article. “In beginning,” it begins. But all the stories agree that sooner or later something happened—a word perhaps, or a deed. Many storytellers hedge their bets and hold out for both. Whatever the case, beginning is marked by a difference: a new note in the scale, a new star in the sky, a new color on the canvas. A bang or a whimper. A line separating above from below, light from darkness. A spot of space or time. And, more often than not, an island.
Most of them offer an image to remember that moment—fire or flood, bird droppings or egg hatchings, island craftings or ocean crossings, fallings or risings. Science and religion collaborate on this more than we realize, weaving together stories that have been told around the world forever. Sometimes they describe events that happened in historical time, sometimes in the mythical past, and often it’s impossible to tell the difference. And the question we love to ask—whether it all began with land or water, island or ocean—is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. A chicken may simply be an egg’s way of producing another egg. Science and religion dance around this like revelers around a beach fire—and whether about rocks or ravens, tectonic plates or turtles, that’s where creation stories come into their own.
Philosophers were the popularizers of science in ancient times, and their speculations had the same authority we now accord scientific accounts. In fact, “philosopher” as the name for a scientist had currency up until late in the nineteenth century, preferred by naturalists as notable as Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. The ancient philosopher-scientists proposed a variety of early representations of the world, and again and again they envisioned land encircled by water. In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Anaximander, perhaps influenced by images from the Middle East, described the earth as a disc floating in water; and images of the earth as a circle, a square, or a disc, often with some sort of roof or umbrella overhead and sometimes surrounded both above and below by water, were widely circulated in Europe and Asia and North Africa. Around the same time, Pythagoras argued the case for a round planet on philosophic grounds, because a sphere was the most perfect shape and motionless (movement could be undignified). He was a mathematician, after all, and mathematicians like elegant explanations. In the fourth century BCE, Pythagoras’s ideas were picked up by Plato and written into scientific scripture by Aristotle. The Roman Macrobius, writing around 400 CE, suggested a geocentric model of the cosmos, with the earth in the middle surrounded by water and air and fire as well as a set of four planetary islands figured as a quadrille. The earth as a sphere was routinely represented in popular globes that were made and marketed in Europe as early as the thirteenth century. And an Islamic map titled “The Wonders of Creation” from the sixteenth century CE showed the earth surrounded by the sea, which was in turn surrounded by a mountain, all nested in a bowl of water.
Plato also described an island continent he called Atlantis, which lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar). It was a philosophical gambit as much as a geological or geographical proposition (science and philosophy really were fellow travelers), an imagining of a place way out there where power and pride and ambition held sway, a place eventually destroyed, as all such places must be when we waken from the dream. Or maybe it was a real place, destroyed by an earthquake or a volcano. He may have been inspired by accounts of Santorini, the Mediterranean island north of Crete that was devastated in about the seventeenth century BCE by one of the most powerful volcanic explosions we know of, darkening the sky, causing crop failure and famine throughout the Middle East and Egypt, and effectively changing the course of Mediterranean history. Or maybe it was a flood, for Plato said that Atlantis sank beneath the waves some twelve thousand years ago (when the last ice age was retreating and reshaping much of the world’s water and land). Stories of the weird and wonderful transformations that took place during that period of climate change might have come down to him in story and song, and both the idea and the reality of Atlantis may have been Plato’s image of a time when the waters rose and the land went under. Whatever the case, Atlantis has held people’s imagination for nearly twenty-five hundred years, and roughly the same number of books have been written about it, establishing its location variously in the Mediterranean, off the west coast of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in the middle of the Pacific. Plato had certainly never seen Atlantis, and indeed the story he told was inside another story which was in turn inside another, like those boxes in the Haida Gwaii creation story. But neither have today’s scientists ever seen the atoms they describe with such detail and delight, recounting stories that their instruments have given them, like the Egyptian priests whom Plato credited with the story of Atlantis. We should be careful not to dismiss the scientific imaginings of classical philosophers, for their storytelling styles are with us still.
So almost all early European and Islamic mappings of the world included images and icons of land surrounded by water. To the Romans, the surrounding or encircling sea was the River Oceanus. The Norse called it Uthal, or the Great Sea. To many sailors of ancient and medieval times it was the Green Sea of Gloom, with boiling waters and frozen wastes, monsters that defied description, and mysterious forces that didn’t have a name. Sometimes there was a realm—an island—above and sometimes one below as well, often on an apparently flat earth; or, especially after the idea of a round earth took hold, the world was pictured as two hemispheres of land, one the mirror of the other where everything was backwards, including people’s feet—which is why that place was called the antipodes. Some dismissed such a place as a philosophical joke or as a lie to mislead them from the truth, since they could not get their heads around the idea that folks on the other side of a round earth were upside down, with plants growing downwards and rain falling upwards. But Pliny the Elder in the first century CE had an answer, suggesting that “in regard to the problem of why those on the opposite side to us do not fall, we must ask in return whether those on the opposite side do not wonder that we do not fall.”
It was also common for cartographers to place their particular home—Alexandria or Athens, Jerusalem or Mecca—right in the middle (just as mapmakers do today with their home turf). Thus centered, the place down under was referred to as the “austral” (from the Latin for south) or southern