thumb|250px|right|Creation of the Earth. [[Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677)
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Dating creation is the attempt to provide an estimate of the age of Earth or the age of the universe as understood through the creation myths of various religious traditions. Various traditional beliefs hold that the Earth, or the entire universe, was brought into being in a grand creation event by one or more deities. After these cultures develop calendars, a question arises: Precisely how long ago did this creation event happen?
Sumerian and Babylonian
One of the Old Babylonian versions of the ancient Sumerian King List (WB 444) lists various mythical antediluvian kings and gives them reigns of several tens of thousands of years. The first Sumerian king Alulim, at Eridu, is described as reigning for 28,800 years, followed by several later kings of similar periods. In total these antediluvian kings ruled for 241,200 years from the time when "the kingship was lowered from heaven" to the time when "the flood" swept over the land. However, most modern scholars do not believe the ancient Sumerians or Babylonians believed in a chronology of their own this old. Instead they believed that these figures were either fabrications, or were based on not literal solar years (365.2425 days) but instead lunar months (29.53059 days).
Cicero, reacting to the chronologies of such authors as Berossos (who composed a Greek-language history of Babylonia, known as the Babyloniaca, during the 3rd century BC), strongly criticised the claim that the Babylonians had kings going back hundreds of thousands of years:
Diodorus Siculus also wrote something similar about how he believed the Babylonians fabricated their chronology:
Despite these criticisms, some ancient Greeks, including most notably Alexander Polyhistor and Proclus, believed the Babylonian kings were hundreds of thousands of years old, and that the Babylonians dated their creation 400,000–200,000 years before their own time.
Egyptian
The ancient Turin King List lists a mythical predynastic "reign of the gods" which first occurred 36,620 years before Menes (3050 BC), therefore dating the creation to around 39,670 BC.
Fragments from Manetho (Eusebius, George Syncellus and preserved in Felix Jacoby's FGrH), however, list different dates. Eusebius, regarding Aegyptiaca, in his Chronicle recorded that:
Using these times, 13,900 + 1,255 + 1,817 + 1,790 + 350 + 5,813 = 24,950 years, which counting back from Menes (3050 BC) fixes the creation at 28,000 BC. George Syncellus preserved yet another set of figures for the predynastic "reign of the gods", 11,984 years for Gods and 2,646 for demigods producing 14,630 years, thus dating the creation to 17,680 BC.
The Book of Sothis, considered as Pseudo-Manetho by many scholars, provides different figures. One fragment from Pseudo-Manetho dates the reign of the first Egyptian God (Ptah) 36,525 years before Menes (FGrH, #610 F2) and so dates the creation to about 39,575 BC.
The ancient Greeks reported similar figures on ancient Egyptian chronology. Diogenes Laërtius recorded that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation to their first god Hephaestus, who by interpretatio graeca was Ptah. According to Laertius, Hephaestus (Ptah) lived 48,863 years before Alexander the Great (b. 356 BC), dating the creation to 49,219 BC. Herodotus wrote that the ancient Egyptians had gods who ruled over them before the first dynasty of Egypt, but did not attempt to precisely date their creation by using their chronology:
According to Herodotus the ancient Egyptian demigods began 11,340 years before the reign of Seti I (1290 BC), so 11,340 + 1290 = 12,630 BC, while he listed earlier figures, 15,000 and 17,000, for the reign of the gods.
The ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus wrote that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation (or start of their reign of Gods) "a little less than eighteen thousand years" from Ptolemy XII Auletes (117–51 BC).
Apollonius, an Egyptian pagan priest in the 2nd century AD, calculated the cosmos to be 153,075 years old as reported by Theophilus of Antioch.
Martianus Capella, a pagan writer, wrote in his De nuptiis in the 5th century AD that the ancient Egyptians had archives of astronomy which started 40,000 years before his own era.
Herodotus' figures were discussed by Isaac Newton in his The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) but were dismissed by Newton because they did not fit Christian cosmology.
The mathematician and esotericist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, in his work Sacred Science, reconstructed Herodotus' dates to conclude that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation to an astronomical (stellar) event some 30,000 years before Herodotus' own time.
Hinduism
The Rig Veda questions the origin of the cosmos in the Nasadiya Sukta (the 129th hymn of Rigveda 10th mandala):
Dick Teresi in his book Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science, reviewing Vedas writes that:
Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra have pointed out similarities between the latest scientific understanding of the age of the universe and the Hindu concept of a "day and night of Brahma", which is much closer to the current known age of the universe than other creation views. The days and nights of Brahma posit a view of the universe that is divinely created, and is not strictly evolutionary, but an ongoing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth of the universe. According to Sagan:
Also, as per Hinduism, Kaliyuga, the last part of the current cycle (yuga cycle) of time traditionally starts in 3102 BC.
Greek and Roman
Most ancient Greek and Roman chroniclers, poets, grammarians, and scholars (Eratosthenes, Varro, Apollodorus of Athens, Ovid, Censorinus, Catullus, and Castor of Rhodes) believed in a threefold division of history: ádelon (obscure), mythikón (mythical) and historikón (historical) periods. According to the Roman grammarian Censorinus, the first period of ádelon (obscure), was calculated by Varro as follows:
The primordial ádelon (obscure) period ended with the flood of Ogyges and what followed was the beginning of the mythikón (mythical) period. Varro dated this flood to 2137 BC but Censorinus wrote in his De Die Natali ch. xxi that the Ogyges’ diluvium occurred 1600 years before the first Olympiad (776 BC) meaning 2376 BC. Castor of Rhodes also provided another date for the start of the mythikón (mythical) period, 2123 BC. Censorinus recorded that the second period, the mythikón, stretched from the flood of Ogyges to the first Olympiad: