This page was originally written in September 2017.
I stumbled recently across the Nasadiya Sukta, the 129th hymn of the 10th book of the Rigveda, and noticed that it has some striking similarities to Genesis 1. (I’m sure somebody else has beat me to it, so I almost certainly can’t take any personal credit here.) Here’s some bits from it, from T. H. Griffith’s 1896 translation:
“Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. . . . Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? . . . no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was void and form less . . .”
At a glance, it looks like both pictures begin with an initial state of chaos, of darkness and water, of a time before day and night were distinguished. A (single) deity of some kind breathes (compare ruah elohim). The terms “void” and “form less / without form” appear in both — although that could be an artifact of a translator of the Rigveda who was familiar with the KJV.
I don’t want to make too much of the similarities. There are important differences, many of which disappeared behind the ellipses in my quote. But the similarities are striking. I suppose you could say that, in a prescientific world, people could come up with cosmologies that similar completely independently of one another. Or else there is some kind of cross-cultural communication, however remote, through which ideas from the same origin made it into writing both into the Priestly source (500 BCE?) and the Rigveda (1200 BCE?).
If there is some common origin to the motifs present in both, when and how did the diffusion occur? Well, there are definitely some motifs of common origin between Genesis and the Enuma Elish (1700 BCE? 1100 BCE?), including a pre-creation state with waters of chaos before order is imposed. If Genesis and the Rigveda contain some motifs of common origin, then the Enuma Elish must be added to the list, and the ideas must have spread to an area including Mesopotamia and the Greater Punjab by, at the latest, the second half of the second millennium.
This is feasible, as trade relations between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley existed well before then.