Some ancient myths
depict a character skipping forward in time. In Hindu mythology, the
Mahabharata mentions the story of King
Raivata Kakudmi, who travels to heaven to meet the creator
Brahma and is surprised to learn when he returns to Earth that many ages have passed.
[1] The Buddhist
Pāli Canon mentions the relativity of time. The
Payasi Sutta tells of one of the
Buddha's chief disciples, Kumara
Kassapa, who explains to the skeptic Payasi that time in the Heavens passes differently than on Earth.
[2] The Japanese tale of "
Urashima Tarō",
[3] first described in the
Nihongi (720) tells of a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace. After three days, he returns home to his village and finds himself 300 years in the future, where he has been forgotten, his house is in ruins, and his family has died.
[4] In
Jewish tradition, the 1st-century BC scholar
Honi ha-M'agel is said to have fallen asleep and slept for seventy years. When waking up he returned home but found none of the people he knew, and no one believed his claims of who he was.
[5(1843) has early depictions of time travel in both directions, as the protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transported to Christmases past and future. Other stories employ the same template, where a character naturally goes to sleep, and upon waking up find themselves in a different time.
[11] A clearer example of backward time travel is found in the popular 1861 book
Paris avant les hommes (Paris before Men) by the French botanist and geologist
Pierre Boitard, published posthumously. In this story, the protagonist is transported to the prehistoric past by the magic of a "lame demon" (a French pun on Boitard's name), where he encounters a
Plesiosaur and an apelike ancestor and is able to interact with ancient creatures.
[12] Edward Everett Hale's "Hands Off" (1881) tells the story of an unnamed being, possibly the soul of a person who has recently died, who interferes with ancient Egyptian history by preventing
Joseph's enslavement. This may have been the first story to feature an
alternate history created as a result of time travel.
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