Ancestry of the Patriarch 1

A Brief History of the Ancient World and the Ascent of Human from Homo Troglodytus to Homo Theopolis.


AUTHOR’S NOTE: Archaeological research, as well as scholarship in many other fields (geology, anthropology, comparative mythology et al), is constantly adding to our knowledge, and modifying our knowledge. Written five years ago, or five years hence, the version that follows would be significantly different, in particular with regards to dating. What follows is not definitive; it reflects the state of knowledge at the time of editing, and much of it is subject to continuing debate among the scholars. Even as you read this, much of it will already have been deemed to be "wrong"; and by the time the deemers pronounce their objections, they too will have been proven "wrong". This is the nature of this field of study.


PART ONE


Darwin, Australia, 5.4 billion BCE


According to the 19th century German biologist Ernst Haeckel, "Monera begat Amoeba, who begat Synamoeba, who begat Ciliated Larva, who begat Primaeval Stomach Animals, who begat Gliding Worms, who begat Skull-less Animals, who begat Single-Nostrilled Animals, who begat Primaeval Fish, who begat Mud-Fish, who begat Gilled Amphibians, who begat Tailed Amphibians, who begat Primary Mammals, who begat Pouched Animals, who begat Semi-Apes, who begat tailed Apes, who begat Man-like Apes, who begat Man." This is not a version that you will find in the Tanach. Haeckel actually came from Potsdam in Germany, and Australia did not exist at that date, but the jest in the heading was irresistible.


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Eden, 570 million BCE

These are the generations of the Earth.

In the beginning was the Palaeozoic Era, which lasted for 260 million years. The children of Palaeozoic were Cambrian (570-510m), Ordovician (510-440m), Silurian (440-410m), Devonian (410-360m), and Carboniferous (360-290m). And the Palaeozoic Era ended. And it was good.

Then the Palaeozoic gave way to the Mesozoic, which lasted for 225 million years. The children of Mesozoic were Permian (290-245m), Triassic (245-208m), Jurassic (208-146m), and Cretaceous (146-65m). And the Mesozoic Era ended. And it was even better.

Then the Mesozoic Era gave way to the Cenozoic, which lasted for 64 million years. The children of Cainozoic (stet) were Palaeocene (65-56.5m), Eocene (56.5-35.4m), Oligocene (35.4-23.3m), Miocene (23.3-5.2m), and Pliocene (5.2-1.6m). And the Cenozoic era ended. And it was very good.

This period of 570 million years is summed up in the Tanach as the mere six days of Creation!


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Africa, 25 million BCE

The first apes appeared on Earth some 25 million years ago, though they remained confined to Africa for another 10 million years. By 15 million years ago they had reached Turkey; by 12 million years ago Pakistan and India. Then hominids developed, very gradually over a period of some 4 million years, at much the pace that bureaucracy still works in those countries to this day.

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Ethiopia 8 million BCE

The first development of Humankind began 8 million years ago. Archaeologists have uncovered a number of strains, of which the principal are called Australopithecine, Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus and Neanderthal. Australopithecine is the famous Ethiopian "Lucy", 3 million years ago. Habilis lived 2 million years ago; a large-brained tool-maker. Homo Erectus lived from 1.7 million years ago, still in Africa; larger-brained. By 1 million it - we have to say "it", not for reasons of political correctness, but because this creature was still very much animal, not yet truly human - by 1 million years ago it had spread into western Asia, probably Europe, and specifically Turkey, and 
even more specifically to what we call Anatolia, which they called Urartu, the home of the Beney Chet, the Hittite peoples, the very place where No'ach's Ark came to rest, and the Creation of the world resumed after the Flood. All this is crucial to what follows: the roots of all our languages, myths and cultures can be found in Turkey, the source of what William Jones called "the common source". So they wandered eastward, just as Kayin (Cain) did, into northern India (which absorbed the same culture, but developed it in its own way) and then China. By 1 million years ago a branch of Homo Habilis had settled in Kena'an and elsewhere in the Middle East.

It is interesting to note that, to this day, there are more genetic variations in Africa than in all the rest of the world put together. Does this suggest a mixture of roots for human evolution? Does it imply the spread of Human was from only one or two successful species, while the rest have remained undisseminated? We can suppose that any number of hominids may have evolved from the many varieties of simians, but that most of these proved to be evolutionary cul-de-sacs. Where the Tanach, like most ancient Creation myths, has Humankind born from the head of the divinity and the dust of the Earth, the truth is that it required many drafts and re-drafts, many trials and errors, before the dust and the divinity ran out of patience and was content to accept Humankind as best-bet. Yet it may well be that, amongst those multifarious genetic variations in Africa, there is not a single human species at all, but manifold simian evolutions that never left the hearth and home.

And if that is so, then what are the implications for Humankind now that the tribal ghetto has been burst open, and intermarriage is taking place amongst Notting Hill and New York Human? A mutation of the human species? Or its enrichment?

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Urartu 2 million BCE

The Ice Age began 2 million years ago and was repeated approximately every 100,000 years, with inter-glacial warmer periods of up to 20,000 years. The last Ice Age began 100,000 years ago, and peaked between 25-10,000 years ago. Despite the evidence of global warming caused by carbon emissions and other human factors, we are still living in an inter-glacial period and freezing in the next 10,000 years is just as likely as warming.

That human beings survived these epochs is a testament to our evolutionary capacities, yet scientists seem uninterested in exploring this fundamental theme: how did we survive; by what physical or genetic transmutation did we render our heat-of-Africa bodies capable of enduring the conditions of the Arctic, with nothing but the hide of a woolly mammoth to protect us from the cold, let alone the claws and jaws of other woolly mammoths? It seems implausible that tales of these Ice Ages did not form part of the folk-lore of primordial Humankind, both the fear of Ice (perhaps residual in the white witch and the snow queen of fairy tale?) and the terror of flooding when the ice melted (undoubtedly residual in the Flood myths of No'ach, Gilgamesh and Deucalion). Indeed, so much water was trapped in the ice that sea levels were 100 metres lower than now - imagine the flooding when the ice-caps melted! Just as Palaeozoic man must have had to fight off the dinosaurs, and remembered it in Dragon Sea-Monster myths (Tiamat-Tahamat-Tehom of Genesis 1, Liv-Yatan/Leviathan/Lotan and Behemot etc), so these Ice Ages are probably the root of the Flood story, the destruction of the corrupt as a fable of the failure of Neanderthal man and the survival of Homo Sapiens.

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Zinjan 1,700,000 BCE

What at the time were thought to be the oldest known hominids (a human-like species) were found in Tanganyika in 1961. Known as Homo Zinjanthropus - from the Arabic name for Ethiopia - and Homo Habilis, they enabled scholars to date the origins of Humankind to as early as circa 1,750,000 BCE. Zinjanthropus was a heavy-jawed, small-brained, mostly-vegetarian creature (as with the Adam of Eden he eats fruit and herbs before he is given meat to eat); Leakey also found at Olduvai a smaller, meat-eating, stone-tool using creature whom he named Homo Habilis; smaller and carnivorous. These species appear to have co-existed and were probably variations of the same generic type. Together they are known as Australopithecus or "Southern Ape". Probably cannibalistic, the grave-remains provide evidence that they drank human brains from hollowed skulls.

Scholarship, however, moves much more quickly than evolution. Within two decades, further discoveries had proven these "facts" to be wrong by more than 6 million years - or not "wrong"; they had simply provided further evidence that all scientific "facts" are merely hypotheses, ephemeral truths waiting to be supplanted.

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Ubeidiya, Jordan Valley, circa 1m-500,000 BCE: the earliest campsite known outside Africa.

The Ice Ages also give a hint to the ancient idea of Creation. When the Ice Age was at its height, Nature froze into uncreation: "the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep". Existent, but lifeless, because frozen. Existent because, even frozen, "the spirit of Elohim moved upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). As the ice melted, it formed seas. Then, out of the mass of waters, it divided, "the waters under the Heavens gathered together unto one place, and dry land appeared; and the Earth brought forth grass, and the fruit tree...and living creatures". (Genesis 1:2-25). The processes of the Ice Age reflect exactly the order of events in Biblical Creation. Interestingly, when the "living creatures" first appear, they are called in Yehudit Behemot (בהמות), a word which later came to mean specifically the hippopotamus, but was originally one of the great land-monsters who had emerged from the receding ice-oceans. Of all the finds made at Ubeidiya - mostly tools like stone handaxes and choppers from 1.3 million years ago and a complete absence of art or ritual - the only animal remains uncovered were precisely those of the hippopotamus.

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Sudanese Nile 600,000 BCE

Something like a million years later, somewhere around 600,000 BCE, a world of pygmoids (Plesianthropus) and gigantic hominids (Paranthropus Robustus), both of limited brain size, begins gradually to emerge at the onset of the Pleistocene or Ice Age. The pygmoids are probably a development of Homo Habilis, the giants of Homo Zinjanthropus, though this remains to be proven (as does the hypothesis that Habilis and Zinjanthropus were themselves human evolutions of different species of ape). Together they are known as Plesianthropus, and they are still remarkably ape-like. They used the lower jaws of antelopes, cut to provide saws and knives; also gazelle horns with part of the skull still attached for digging; also ape-man palates for scraping. Bones of these "humans" have been found, killed by a blow to the head with the leg of a gazelle. Indeed, the only real evidence that Plesianthropus was a human at all is that he killed with a tool or a club rather than with his hands and teeth. The story of the sun-god Shimshon (Samson) killing a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass (Judges 15:15) may well be a story from as long ago as this; though we can safely presume that, in the original, the jawbone was not that of an ass at all.

Primitive cult activities, such as dancing around a sacred object (Maypole, Ka'aba, Torah, totem pole etc), and various primitive games, all date from this era. Joseph Campbell points out ("The Masks of God" Vol 1, p359) "the surprising detail of the central pole, which in the higher mythologies becomes interpreted as the world-uniting and supporting Cosmic Tree, World Mountain, axis mundi, or sacred sanctuary". The tumulus shrine (e.g. Silbury Hill), the ziggurat, the Egyptian and Peruvian pyramids, and the biblical ramot and mitspeh are all developments of this, as is the Temple on Mount Mor-Yah and the mediaeval church spire.

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Gesher Benot Yaqov, Jordan Valley, 500,000 BCE

The era of the great hunter-gatherers. Desert was now open grassland. The first use of wood: a find of a 25cm x 13 x 4 thick willow plank, flat and polished - presumed to have been used for building!

"And Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord, the beginning of his kingdom was Babel." (Genesis 10:9-10)

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Taurus Mountains 400,000 BCE

The 2nd glacial and 2nd interglacial period; also known as Middle Pleistocene.

Not yet the birth of Humankind as we know him, the emergence of Pithecanthropus, circa 400,000 BCE, gives us the shadow of those Titans who inhabit the Greek myths of the pre-Heroic Age, and ante-diluvian Genesis in the forms of giants and mythic beasts. It was Pithecanthropus - his brain on average between 900 and 1200 cc in size (the brainiest ape is 600; we average 1400-1500 cc) - who developed the hand-axe that would eventually become Zeus' thunderbolt and Thor's hammer, Indra's bolt, Siegfried's Wotan-sword which elsewhere is Arthur's Excalibur. Disguised as Prometheus, it was also Pithecanthropus who was responsible for the discovery of fire, though generally, while the axe and bolt are usually associated with a god, fire tends to be the gift or even the body of a goddess, as Siegfried also discovered. His use of the remains of animals for tools is such that, as Joseph Campbell has observed, we might do well to call his the Bone Age, rather than the Stone Age.

The earliest known controlled fire was discovered in the Choukouten (Zhoukoudian) caves of northern China. It is carbon-dated at 460,000 years ago, and found with it were stone tools, cracked skulls, split bones and fireplaces. The creature who made these artefacts is called Sinanthropus (Pekin Man, or perhaps we should now call him Bei-Jing Human). A kind of Prometheus the Great; contemporary of Javanese Man, a Pithecanthropus Erectus.

At the same period we also have Africanthropus, an East Africa skull find; Heidelburg Man. This is the early Palaeolithic period in Europe, a time when bear, lion, wildcat, wolf and bison roamed with men and wild boar. Modern writers like Borges and Primo Levi have compiled anthologies of fabulous beasts, almost all of them the fantastic concoctions of the fertile human imagination. The anthologies of archaeologists reduce these to mere fiction, recording as they do such implausible creatures as the Mosbacj horse, the broad faced moose, the Etruscan rhinoceros and the straight-skulled ancient elephant (a late form of the woolly mammoth). Now this really is a collection of Behemot! But it proves that the whole Earth was populated by this time, save only America - and even America is not certain. But still no art work. The human for whom these outrageous fictions were daily realities was called Homo Faber, "the tool-maker", though his flints and axes would have availed him very little without the blessed intervention of the gods!

That the Shimshon and Hercules tales should stem from this time is unsurprising. Judges 15 tells how, at Ashkelon, at the time of the harvest - the killing of the corn-god, himself identified with the sun - he "went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Pelishtim, and burnt up both the shocks and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives". Who was the King Eurystheus for whom he performed these labours? Hercules' full name was Herakles-Melkart; from the meaning of the Greek name of Eurystheus we can easily deduce that he must have been Avi-Melech, king of Gerar, the same Avi-Melech whom both Av-Raham and Yitschak (Isaac) knew
, and who ruled at Shechem after the death of Gid'on (Gideon). Melkart, Melech, Moloch - three alternative spellings of the Kena'ani sun-god, into whose sacred fires children were traditionally sacrificed on the hill of Mor-Yah, where Av-Raham went to sacrifice his son and Muhammad's horse tripped and left a hoofmark while bearing the Prophet into eternity. It is this god who is still remembered today, in special services on Rosh Ha Shana and Yom Kippur, by the modern monotheistic Jews: Avinu Malkeynu.

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Cheddar Gorge 350,000 BCE

Whatever Arabic, Greek or Latin name we may use to dignify them, these ancient humans still communicated by grunts, not language. They lived in caves or forest clearings. Life expectancy was short. Cold and disease killed less virulently than snakes or wild animals. The lives of men were dominated by the great hunts for wild beasts, and by the shamanistic totem-rituals designed to aid them through propitiatory or sympathetic magic, the shaman serving as interpreter and intermediary between humans and the powers (elim) behind the veil of nature. Though there were female shamans, the lives of women were generally drudgerous: rearing children; gathering berries, tree-fruits and root-vegetables; making clothing out of animal-skins; latterly tending the fire.

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Cave Des Trois Frères, Perpignan 300,000 BCE

In the Palaeolithic temple-caves (the best-known example in the Bible is the Cave of Machpelah which Av-Raham bought from Ephron of the Beney Chet, Art at last emerges from the human darkness. Animal forms predominated, invariably linked to the hunt. The shamans did the painting, with brushes made from animal hair and blood for paint. To imagine something taking place is to bring it nearer to realisation. To realise it in paint is to bring it alive into the visible world, whence only animation in actuality is missing. To dance is to animate. So the hunt has already been successful, even before men leave the cave, and it remains only to re-enact the ritual on the living stage. The success of the rehearsal guarantees the performance.

The classic painting was a literary narrative, depicting the hunters, the arrows, the beasts, in various stages of the chase. We have to imagine the dances performed around these temple-paintings, probably stamping the feet in some choreographed representation of the animal itself, originally the woolly mammoth, the primordial roast beef, but later on the bison and buffalo, later still the goat; likewise we have to imagine the songs they sang as chanted imitations of the sounds of animals. The keynote to the ritual was magic - of the sympathetic-propitiatory kind - led by the chief shaman in his horns and robes of the bison, or boar, or goat - a primitive archbishop, Ya'akov receiving Yistchak's blessing. Just as every shaman has an animal-mother or origin-animal, so the men become the animals they are hunting, divided into totem-clans - the freemasons' lodges of primordia - each with its own ritual garb: tails made of foliage, painted faces and bodies to depict the beautiful plumage of birds, the markings of animals; pointing-stick horns or antlers protruding from their skulls like the horns of Mosheh (Moses).

Among the North American Blackfoot we know the names and designations of the totem-clans. They are: Little Birds (boys from 15 to 20); Pigeons (experienced hunters); Mosquitoes (full-time hunters); Braves (veterans); All Crazy Dogs (40 year olds); Raven Bearers (not described but presumably drudges who failed to make it as shamans); Dogs and Tails (separate societies for old men though they dress alike and dance together); Horns and Bloods (secret ceremony groups, presumably shaman initiates), Soldiers (shamans), and Bulls (chief shamans wearing the bull's head and robes). The scheme is clearly hierarchical, and age-related; the whole society is involved in some capacity and men move up the hierarchy like incremental civil servants.

On the day of the hunt, the shaman performs the final propitiatory ritual. Frobenius described it as follows (cited in Campbell Vol 1 p 296/7): "Killed, the blood and entrails of the animal must be covered up, buried in the earth, lest the soul of the beast - the god that compelled it into life - be unable to find rest, and return to haunt its killer and take blood-revenge. The skin, the bones and horns, the skull especially, may nevertheless be retained, the one to make clothing, the second for tools, the third for ritual dress, the fourth - and if not the whole skull, then at least the jawbone - for oracular pronouncement." We can now read
Shimshon's three hundred foxes as men in costume, their firebrands lighted torches for what was in truth merely another act of sacking and pillage.

Shimshon performed his feats at a place called Ramot Lechi – "the high place of the jawbone". A high place means a hill-shrine. When Hagar was sent away by Sarah, she lived at Be'er Lechi Ro'i – "the well of the antelope's jawbone". Shimshon means "the sun"; his wife was Delilah, an Aramaic word meaning "the night", and as such a natural counterpart (blinding him took away his light, cutting off his hair took away his strength - both images familiar from any child's drawing). The oracular shrines were dedicated to the three-fold mother-goddess (
Cordelia, Regan and Goneril in one version, Cinderella and her step-sisters in another, the three daughters of al-Lah in yet a third), her tripletcy based on the three phases of the moon, waxing, full and waning; the role of her priestess was likewise threefold: to deliver oracles, to tend the shrine, to keep the sacred fire.

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Himalaya Mountains 200,000 BCE

The creature that we are today, Homo Sapiens, emerges into pre-history from about 250,000 years ago, in two groups: Neanderthal in Europe and the Middle East, Homo Sapiens (sapiens) elsewhere. These humans were semi-nomadic, food-gathering, small-game hunting, living in tropical and semi-tropical regions mostly, but also in the icy regions, where fire and animal skins have been found. The first emigrations to America belong to this period, and it is amazing that no one has yet undertaken a serious study of the ways in which aboriginal American myths and customs (north and south American) so clearly parallel the Hittite and Babylonian and Egyptian which were their common source, and how all these appear to have their origins deeper inside Africa, both west and east.

The appearance of Neanderthal man circa 200,000 BCE does little to change the patterns of previous existence, but adds the realm of thought that makes it now recognisably human - even superhuman, for its brain size was between 1250 and 1750 cc, where today's averages only between 1400 and 1500 cc. And well over 6 feet tall! Inventor of the boomerang and the javelin, he also used flint-pointed spears. The main objectives of the hunt were mammoth, rhino, wild horse, bison, wild cattle, reindeer and deer, brown bear and cave bear - all done by chase and hand-to-hand combat. The human dead were disposed of in mounds and barrows, in ceremonial burials accompanied by vast amounts of grave-gear; the skeletons buried with bones from animal sacrifices, usually wild ox, bison and wild goat; the bodies lying foetally, often on pillows of flint or chipped stone, facing east-west to mirror the path of the life-giving sun and with the sun’s solstice fixed geometrically to enter the tomb.

So we can say that the cult of Death has opened, linked to the sun, and with it the hope for an afterlife and the belief in rebirth. Bear-skull sanctuaries in the high mountains of the Himalayas, ritual cannibalism/human sacrifice connected to the hunt - evidence from skulls found at Krapina and Ehringsdorf in Germany - suggest animal cults linked to shamanism. Animal sacrifice took place within a circle of stones, progenitor of the later temples that we know from Gil-Gal and Stonehenge, later still the Greek amphitheatre; but what better way of controlling fire than within a barbecue of stones? Neanderthal Human may not yet have left the ape entirely behind him, but he is on the verge of inventing gods.

Yet though they had fire, they did not roast meat. Then why the hearths? For heat? As the presence of the deity, like Mosheh's pillar of fire? Or as a shrine? To this day kindling a hearth in a new home is an important marriage rite; or, at least, switching on the central heating for the first time! The vestal fire of Rome had its attendant priestesses; the fire was always extinguished during the interregnum of sacred kings.

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Neander Valley/Qafzeh Cave, 120,000 BCE

The capacity of the human brain to think, imagine and create has little to do with its physical size. Human powers of intelligence are more a matter of the usage of potential - even Einstein, the greatest of all modern thinkers, is unlikely to have used more than one-third of his brain capacity.

The brain had by now shrunk to the size of modern humans, and it remains an interesting question for the evolutionary scientists: why?

Neanderthals are known from Qazfeh in Yisra-El and the Shanidar Cave in Iraq, complete with burial of the dead and grave decorations. They had some, but limited, language skills. The Kebara Cave in Yisra-El has hearths showing it was inhabited from 60,000 BCE. At the same time working in flint began; the Levallois technique from Levallois in France is the best known. Qafzeh contains the oldest known human burials, interred around 100,000 BCE: a woman of twenty with a six-year-old child at her feet, in a rectangular pit cut in the cave floor; next to them a thirteen-year-old boy with the antlers of a fallow deer placed across the hands and upper chest. Plants in the Shanidar Cave, in the foothills of the Zagros mountains, prove that vegetation then was exactly the same as it is now. Carbonated pollen finds show bodies here buried with flowers, as well as cadavers equipped with gear for the afterlife; there is even a suggestion of cooked food being placed in the grave.

The early Palaeolithic continued up to 100,000 BCE, with finds of flints across the Middle East. The Middle Palaeolithic has skeletal remains. Homo Sapiens, the first modern humans, are known in Africa from 100,000-35,000 BCE, with some finds of Homo Sapiens in Yisra-El at this time too. Language skills are now highly developed and there is even abstract expression, as evidenced by engraved animal bones using a red ochre paint.

Homo Sapiens survived the Ice Age but Neanderthals did not, though whether it was Homo Sapiens or the Ice that killed them is unclear - the evidence of human behaviour in the 60,000 years since makes both plausible. Homo Sapiens spread into Neanderthal Europe between 45,000 and 35,000 and may well have been responsible, deliberately responsible, for the extinction of the Neanderthals.

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Panaramitee 45,000 BCE

The Neanderthals of Europe were extinct by 45-35,000 BCE. Evidence has been found in Yisra-El, at the Carmel caves especially, of the development of early Aurignacian tools - smaller flints with wood or bone handles. From 35,000 BCE, in Australia, the first rock art : petroglyphs, rock engravings, not yet painting. We have to conclude that the aboriginal Australians, like the aboriginal Americans, required boats to cross the Asian and Atlantic seas (c 55,000 BCE).

But after all the developments of the previous millennia, this was an extraordinary period of 150,000 years in which, despite the cultic and cultural developments, there appears to have been very little serious evolutionary development at all, until...

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Our Lady Of Laussel 40,000 BCE

The dawning of the age of the gods.

While the paintings on the walls of the great temple-caves are almost entirely hunt-based, depicting the world of men, the footless sculptures stuck upright in the ground in recess-shrines were almost invariably female (the women's courtyard of the Temple in Yeru-Shala'im, and Catholic churches with their Lady Chapels, both reflect this practice). Where the men are masked and body-painted, or modified to represent the animals they are about to kill, the females are invariably nude. Carved in stone, bone, or mammoth ivory, they are often pregnant to the point of obesity, the loins and breasts heavily emphasised. Unlike the male body, which is always the same except for the brief time of puberty, the female body is entirely magical, without needing dance or trance or drug. Menstruation, ovulation, birth, the umbilicus, the issue of breast-milk, the menopause – women's bodies clearly work differently from men's, reflecting in themselves the universal scheme and the universal cycles. In a woman's fertility can be observed universal fertility. The blood of birth and the blood of death are the same blood, witnessed in her lunations as it is witnessed daily in the birth and death of the sun. Her children come forth like vegetation from the earth, and into the earth the dead return. So the dead are laid foetally in womb-shaped tumuli, ready to be reborn. So the woman becomes the Great Mother, Our Lady of the Tides, Our Lady of the Waxing-Waning Moon, Our Lady of the Underworld, Our Lady of the Corn. Great Mother, original Eve, Goddess of All Living Things, Mother of the born-died-resurrected universe, Aphrodite-Diana-Mary. Associated with her statues are meanders (labyrinths), doves, fish, sitting animals, the phallus, the swastika, and of course the serpent. It will not take many centuries before this abstract epistemology is given literary form in personifications accessible to the simple human mind.

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Ararat 35,000 BCE

Since 35,000 BCE is also the date of the ending of the last Ice Age - the Wurm Glaciation as it is known - we can presumably date the Deluge far more accurately than in the Tanach. The Tanach imposes an artificial, "pseudo-historical" chronology on human events. We have to assume that stories were being told, and passed on orally, long before they were first written down, even in hieroglyphs, in cuneiform, in pictograms.

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Libya 30,000 BCE

Cro-Magnon man struts and frets his hour upon the stage between 30,000 and 10,000 BCE. Subdivided by archaeologists and anthropologists into the Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian, paralleled in the Capsian-Microlithic, this is the great era of the apogee of shamanism in which cave painting rises to a high art-form and the first stone naked-goddess figures appear. Humans - aided by a still-growing brain that has now reached an average 1590 to 1880 cc - are becoming aware of a force that compels life, and they can perceive that force in all things, recognising it inside themselves, fearing it outside themselves. The arts of witchery and wizardry develop - propitiatory and sympathetic magic performed by priests and priestesses. Totem clans emerge, each especially identified with its own beast-of-the-hunt, and the rites and ceremonies necessary to appease the beast-god they intend to sacrifice. The mythology of the temple-caves develops, with naked goddess figurines and tales of the "powers" whose lives will later be recorded in Homer, Genesis, the Edda, the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh (the Kena'ani "El" means "power" in the sense of "kinetic impulse", the Einsteinian "E"; the Muslim al-Lah and Yehudit Elohim derive from the same root). But Cro-Magnon Man probably esteemed this mental evolution far less than he did his achievement - by 15,000 BCE - of the domestication of the dog.

The origins of Cro-Magnon Man are almost certainly the Black Sea Region - many finds in the Ukraine and around Lake Baikal affirm this. All the big emigrations of the 5th millennium onwards seem to have come from this region too: Hittites, Indo-Arryans, Aramaeans, proto-Greeks etc. What William Jones, speaking about language, called "the common source", begins here, at this moment; but Jones was narrow. It was not simply language; it was the entirety of human culture.

Though fire had been invented a long time before, the art of roasting was invented only in the Cro-Magnon era: previously meat was eaten raw.

The Aurignacian was also the time of the 4th glaciation, when the ice of northern Europe receded to that line of latitude where you will find Oslo; the landscape was arctic tundra with musk ox, woolly rhino, reindeer, woolly mammoth, arctic fox, wolverine and ptarmigan. As the ice retreated, steppe took over from tundra, bringing grazing herds of bison, wild cattle, steppe horse, antelope, wild ass, kiang, alpine chamois, ibex, argali sheep; the tribes began to range much wider and more nomadically as meat became more widely available. All this glaciation and recession makes the flood stories unsurprising.

Humans now stand fully upright, their brain capacity the largest it will ever be, fully 200 cc on average larger than our own - and the developments about to take place show that it really was very advanced! This is the last age of the Great Hunt. The offerings of Havel (Abel) will soon be preferred to those of Kayin (Cain); hunter Esav will soon lose his birthright to shepherd Ya'akov (Jacob).

The Aurignacian was the high period of the teraphim, those female figurines that Rachel stole from Lavan (Laban), and of the earliest rock engravings and painting styles: figurines of stone, bone and ivory. The caves functioned as temples for magic as well as rites of passage; but they also represented the underworld through the burial rites. Wall-paintings show shamans and animal masters, masked dances, the goddess mythology which is now developing; evidence of finger-joint offerings, dancing and what appears to be tattooing.

At the same time, new animals began to appear - red deer, forest horse, moose, fallow deer - as the forests took over from the great plains in the wake of the last ice melting. Hunting in rivers and seas also began, using bone harpoons for whaling and seal hunts. Humans are suddenly smaller, down to 5 feet 1-3, and their brain, like ours, has reduced to 1500 cc. Can we assume the dramatic change in the physical environment was responsible for this? Was there a nutritional factor in the change of stature?

At the Grotto of Les Hoteaux, at Ain in France, a skeleton has been disinterred, covered in red ochre, its thigh bones inverted. Red in Yehudit is adom (אדם), which also gives the name Adam for Humankind, adamah for the red earth of the Yehudan desert, and the land of Kayin, Yishma-El and Esav, which was called Edom, or Idumea by the Romans of the epoch of Jesus. Red blood and red earth, and later, for the sake of life, the red cross as well, the Mark of Kayin branded like a mezuzah on the lintel of the body.

NB: bear and lion have eyes at the front like humans, not at the side like other animals. This becomes mythologically associated with the sun/solar eye/evil eye, and thence to the animal master and shaman.

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Diana's Grove at Nemi, 30,000 BCE

Nimrod the mighty hunter reflects the state of Humankind for millennia before civilisation. His culture was manifested in the ritual dances performed in imitation of animals, and the role of the artist-wizards (shamans) whose rites included lapping brains from skulls (primitive eucharist): human as well as animal. In all mythologies the sun is a great hunter and portrayed as hunting beasts, especially the lion. His rays are arrows; the animal hunted is one of the stars. The shaman is thus the origin of the sun-hero, and regularly dressed as a bird, as the plumed serpent clothing of the Aztec god-king Atahualpa demonstrates. Horus was depicted in much the same way - as a falcon - by the Egyptians. Elohim will later be depicted as an eagle.

But the key animal in the myths changes as the hunt changes: from the woolly mammoth to cave bears; then lions, leopards, panthers; then bison, boar, bull; until the barnyard animals take over as the gods become domesticated. So we see the change from Kayin (bull) to Ya'akov (goat); from Le'ah (cow) to Rachel (sheep); an alteration that is also reflected in the cycle of the zodiac, where Taurus is supplanted by Aries at the time of Havel (Abel) and Ya'akov (Jacob), and Aries by Pisces at the time of Jesus.

By 30,000 the horse was widespread in Europe: Przewalski's horse, a wild Mongolian type. It was first domesticated in the Ukraine from 6,000 BCE.

The rites of the Immolated King also belong to this period: the origins of this shamanistic rite lay in a primitive belief in sympathetic magic. The tribal rain-maker or medicine man or wizard - and what are these but synonyms for shaman - or quite simply the best hunter, became the tribal chief because of the successful exploitation of his powers. Ah, but what a price he had to pay for failure! (Later, when magic gave way to more organised religion, the shaman would give way to the prophet and the priest.) The sacrifice of the king would thus be a ritual act of rejecting and replacing the failed king; but the anointing of the new king is actually more important than the killing of the old one. At the same time his killing makes regeneration possible.

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High Pyrenees, 25,000-18,000 BCE

The coldest point of the last Ice Age; but as with all of Nature, the flowering point is also the instant at which it begins to wilt, and vice versa. As the Ice Age reaches its peak, so from its very core an era of global warming begins, the Age of Fertility dawns that we still inhabit today.

The earliest known cremation took place at Lake Mungo in Australia circa 24,000 BCE. The first rock-paintings, of the same epoch, have been found in Lascaux and Pech-Merle in France, at Altamira in Spain, and in a different form, known for obvious reasons as "African rock art", at the Apollo 11 cave in Namibia.

The first known specifically fertility symbols: pregnant female figurines with exaggerated breasts and buttocks, have been found everywhere from Spain to Russia, dating from 23,000 BCE. And in the same epoch, 33-13,000 BCE, bone sculpture and engraving as well as the use of bone and antlers for tools. The Kebara Cave in Yisra-El has turned up microlithic tools from 18,000-12,500 BCE, these being stone blades mounted in bone or wood handles: what marks the advance in human technology is that damaged blades are now replaceable. They were used as reaping knives and as grinding stones to process grain. The people who made them were the predecessors of the Natufians (Wadi en-Natuf in Yisra-El), who harvested crops across the whole Levant by 13,000. Ohalo on Lake Galilee was a winter base camp for hunter-gatherers (as were the Carmel caves), a place for storing wild barley and wheat dating back to 19,000 BCE. There is also much evidence of fish-eating and fruit. The dig at Ohalo (Ohel means "a tent") covered a square mile of remains from this period: a mud-hut, two other structures, a cooking area, a stone circle, hearths and a hut made of wood.

Among the engravings in Yisra-El from 15,000 BCE there are a few decorative objects, but predominant was the parallel line or ladder found at Urkan e-Rub: early versions of Ya'akov’s Dream! And yes, geometric patterns! These people also made awls and needles to work animal hides, and fish-hooks, and spatulae. The handles of their knives were often carved into animal heads, especially deer.

Most surviving cave art dates between 20,000 and 10,000 BCE. Pigment was applied by fingers, spitting, or animal hair - implications of a complex religious life?

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Fertile Crescent, 17,000 BCE

This land now truly deserves its sobriquet as wild cereal gathering begins in the Middle East. The Ice Age was fully in retreat by 13,000 BCE and vegetation was mutating to adapt to the new meteorological conditions. Between 13,000 and 18,000 BCE the ice thawed, with temperatures up to present levels by 8,000 BCE; sea levels rose by several thousand feet, filling in the Bering Strait, creating the North Sea and the Mediterranean, causing a huge increase and spread of plants, animals and humans. Much Ice Age flora, fauna and animals died out, unable to adapt by evolving. Wild wheat and barley, native to Turkey and the Fertile Crescent, began to be gathered and harvested by the Natufians from circa 17,000 BCE. Deliberate farming began circa 9,000 BCE, and led to settled living. Can we date vegetation cults to this time as well?

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Al-Ubaid 12,500 BCE

In the beginning was the void.

The Age of Ice had ended and the glaciers flowed back. This entire land of southern Mesopotamia is dry and barren, a wasteland extending as far as the eye can see, from the Great Waters in the south through the marshes to the plains of Akkad in the north, from the hills of Kasdim in the east through the forests to the vast, empty desert that stretches forever to the west. Two great rivers flow north to south across this land, the Tigris and the Euphrates as they are called in the Akkadian tongue. The rivers flow out of Carchemish and out of Nineveh, many weeks journey from this land; they converge at the Sea of Lagash, and thence flow onwards through the reed marshes of the delta, into the Great Waters and the sea.

For the rest the world is quite flat, uncarved and infertile, open to the sun, unprotected either by hill or tree. For eight months of the year not a single drop of rain falls, and then the land is tormented by the burning sun, by clouds of dust and sand that swirl in ever-increasing circles and pile up mountain-high on the red floor of the desert. But in winter there is much rain, carried over the hills to the north and east in torrential storms, driving the Two Rivers into constant, terrifying floods, which pour across the mud-flats and poison it with salt. Even the sweet, clear water of the two streams Piyshon and Giychon becomes undrinkable at this time, so that neither human nor beast would freely choose to live in this place.

From time to time, however, humans do stray into this primordial land, hunters from the north and west travelling in pursuit of elephant, lion and buffalo, tracking the wild boar with dogs they have learned to domesticate, passing through the sun's anvil to make their caravanserai at al-Ubaid, or further to the north at Jemdet Nasr. And these say, in the proverb of the Bedou: "May the gods be thanked that in this place nothing grows, neither tree nor flower nor blade of grass, for thus there is nothing to be spoiled, nothing that may be burned or washed away. May the gods be praised for creating nothingness, for from nothingness nothing may be taken, and out of nothingness only life may spring." So hostile is this landscape, so indifferent to human activity, that the sight of it alone is sufficient to re-kindle the Bedou's wanderlust. It is a land that has not yet been created. For eight months of the year the sun-god Utu, who is also called Dumuzi, rules unchallenged from his home in the high mountains of the clouds, and when he goes down to the Underworld for the Winter Chaos reigns supreme. No breath of wind passes over the face of the deep.

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The Taima Taima mastodon site in Falcón, Venezuela,11,000 BC

Joseph Campbell ("The Masks of God", Vol 1, p212) notes the similarities of late period Maya-Aztec America and Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China: a basic neolithic complex, comprising agriculture and stock-breeding - in America the llama, alpaca and turkey; matting, basketry, painted pottery both coarse and fine, loom weaving with elegant patterns, using both wool and an Asiatic cotton; metallurgy in gold, silver, tin, platinum and smelted copper, with alloys of copper-tin, copper-lead, copper-arsenic, copper-silver, and gold-silver, employing the cire-perdue method for the casting of sculptured figures, and fashioning, among other products, golden bells; a highly developed calendric system yielding a pattern of interlocking large and smaller cycles; an assignment of deities to the various heavenly spheres and a notion of the horoscope; the idea of cycles of creation and dissolution; the mythological figure of the Cosmic Tree with an eagle at its summit and a serpent at its root; the guardian gods and the four colours of the four directions, the four elements (fire, air, earth and water); a concept of the heavens stratified above and hell below; a weaving goddess of the moon; and a god who dies and is resurrected...four social classes: priests, nobles, agriculturalists and slaves - with insignia of kingship almost precisely duplicating those of the ancient world: fan bearers, sceptres, canopies, palanquins, and the blown conch as a royal trumpet; the idea of the city as the capital of an empire, approached by causeways and embellished by ornamented temples and palaces, the temples atop pyramids, almost precisely as in Mesopotamia, and the architecture including colonnades, spiral staircases, sculptured doorways, lintels, pillars etc; arts including mosaics, high and low relief, carved jade, murals in fresco, memorial monuments, and the writing of books. And Christopher Columbus only discovered the existence of this land in 1492 CE!

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Ma'on 11,000 BCE

The earliest evidence of the domestication of dogs in Yisra-El is found circa 11,000 BCE - domesticated from the wolf, not the jackal. At the same time round, stone-walled huts with sunken floors became commonplace in the Levant. By 10,000 burial was the norm in Yisra-El: under the floors of huts or in cemeteries. Personal ornaments such as necklaces, bracelets and anklets were buried with the dead. But no pottery as yet - the oldest pottery yet known, from 10,500, came from Japan.

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Grotte du Tai, 10,000 BCE

The first known solar calendar was created around 10,000 BCE, and was found at the Grotte du Tai in France: 4 inches long, one side scratched with marks like the walls of a prison convict's cell, each mark denoting a single day - more than 1,000 in total indicate that primitive man was at the very least persistent.

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Mount Carmel 9,500 BCE

Dorothy Garrod published her findings in 1937 in "The Stone Age of Mount Carmel". Nomadic or semi-nomadic hunting tribes had inhabited the caves along the Mediterranean coast for hundreds of millennia. But at this moment in history, identified now as the Proto-Neolithic or Natufian phase, there is a major change. Though they are still using late stone age tools, they have begun supplementing their food with grain-like grasses cut with stone sickles from an unplanted harvest; there is also evidence of the bones of sheep, goats, pigs, oxen and an equid recognisable as a pre-horse. All this suggests habitual slaughtering even if it does not yet prove domestication or stock-breeding. The caves at Mount Carmel will later become a shrine to both Eli-Yahu (Elijah) and the priests of Ba'al. The fossils of men and animals, particularly human heads and thigh-bones, as well as animal jaw-bones, will acquire the sacred status of oracular vessels. Similar finds have been made in caves across the Middle East, including Machpelah at Chevron (Hebron). They inform us of the beginnings of Creation. But Creation did not take place at Mount Carmel. Rather it took place between the two principal rivers of Eden, the Tigris and the Euphrates .

We are standing at the dawn of Humankind as we now know him, Humankind the agriculturalist, starting to take responsibility for his own life by planting it not hunting it, and thereby gaining the capacity to hoard it as capital, to trade, to become sedentary, to become civilised in the literal sense of that word: an inhabitant of towns and cities. What comes next is Adam - Man. What came before, in the language of the Bible, can be summed up in a single, homogenous expression: Nephilim.


for Part 2, click here...




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Ancestry of the Patriarch 2

PART TWO


Wadi El Natuf, 8,000 BCE

The Last Ice Age finally ended in the 9th millennium BCE; and with it the first signs of agriculture appear: the Mesolithic Age, circa 8,000 BCE. In Yisra-El it is called the Natufian culture, from Wadi el Natuf where wild grain cultivation and animal herding was first discovered. Stone implements, flint sickles. The domestication of animals. The earliest known village, at Karim Shahir in Iraq, was founded at this time. The Neolithic age was the beginning of sedentary life, a transition from food-gathering to food-producing. The village of Jarmo in Iraq, in the 7th millennium, had both tools and vessels of stone; houses were of packed mud on stone foundations. Basic agriculture is demonstrated by the remains of bones of sheep, goat, pigs and oxen.

This era is known as the Capsian-Microlithic. It lasted from 30,000 until perhaps 10,000, perhaps as late as 4,000 BCE. It was the period that saw a switch from hunting to planting, the invention of the bow and arrow, the use of the hunting dog. Rock painting was now a major art form; and the nature of painting changed too: in place of animals, the scenes began to be human. Women are now much more important in society, a fact reflected in their representation with hips and legs instead of pregnant bellies. Shaman power has largely been replaced by tribal power, the origins of the Greek and Yisra-Eli amphictyonies which were themselves modelled on the twelve constellations (Adonay Tseva'ot, the Host of Heaven) and the seven planetary deities.

The above paragraph is mostly true of the African plains - by now the African desert! - especially Tunisia. It spread north into Europe, reaching Spain by 10,000 BCE, and travelled east across North Africa (whence the Biblical claim of Kush and Libya as progenitors linked to Cham), and thence into 
Mitsrayim (Egypt) and on, to originate the cultures of the Fertile Crescent, going as far north as the Black and Caspian Seas, and into the Indus Valley. The myths and rites went with, then stopped, developed, and returned the way they had come over the next few thousand years. The single culture zone for the next ten thousand includes all these lands; with emphasis on that last phrase: the single culture zone.

Whatever differences we may wish to see, we have been a monoculture for the past ten thousand years. No'ach and Gilgamesh and Deucalion survived the same Flood a hundred thousand years ago; Jesus was first crucified at least thirty thousand years ago; Aharon led the first worship of the Golden Calf fifteen thousand years ago; David danced as he brought the shrine of his god to the hill-shrine ten thousand years ago. Not by those names, perhaps. But still one culture, one language, one mythology. What we speak, in Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism or Islam, is merely dialect.

It was in this period, between 8,000 and 7,000 BCE, that we have evidence of the domestication of the pig, the cow and the aurochs - a wild ox also known as the reem and the urus, the last recorded survivor of which species died in the Jaktorów Forest of Poland in 1627 - and of the development of mud-bricks made in wooden moulds.

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Mount Carmel, 7,800 BCE

Capsian Man was 5 foot to 5’6” tall. He had a long head and retreating forehead, much like the Ma'asai (Masai). He hunted with a boomerang, club, bow and harpoon. He collected berries and roots, used snails and shellfish for food and ornamentation, wore dish-shaped beads made from skulls, as well as feathers, bracelets and girdles. He decorated rather than clothed his genitals, while his women wore skirts. The best known example of the Capsian-Microlithic is the Natufians of Mount Carmel (6,000 BCE). He was the first to domesticate the herds, and the first to attempt planting. The process of domesticating animals is also the process of domesticating the sheep-god, the cow-god, the pig-god etc, and so Capsian Man is also responsible for pastoralising religion (the replacement of Kayin by Havel, Taurus by Aries). Domestication is a dreadful thing for humans to contemplate, and leads to such myths as Sisyphus and Prometheus: the defiers of the gods who must be punished for their arrogance (the great myth of the guilty human conscience, the Fall of Man in Eden, is connected to this). 

   To propitiate the gods the animals were often given ceremonial burial; yet no bones of the pig have yet been discovered. Was the pig associated with some despised alien or socially inferior group (asks Campbell), or with a mythology of the Underworld, and therefore not eaten? The answer appers to lie in the goring of Attis by a wild boar, of Adonis, Osiris, all the other counterparts of the erstwhile sun-god who is now evolving into the vegetation-god, Tammuz, or Jesus. The beginnings of a concept of Death as a negative force, counteracting the dynamic, kinetic powers which men now call Elim - gods. The beginnings, thereby, of a dualistic view of Life; having "divided" (see Genesis 1) life from death, having witnessed the division of sun (light) and moon (darkness), able to experience the division of sea from dry land, male from female, having suffered earthquakes, avalanches, tornados, ice-melts, river-floods and more, the division into moral elements that are negative and positive becomes a possibility. The key difference between Judaism and all other expressions of the human condition will emerge from this: that Judaism developed Unity, through Elohim, the God of Oneness, where all other human paradigms continue the division into Dualism.

Capsian Man was also the first to introduce planetary symbols, most famously a disk of the sun superimposed on the head of a ram, as the sun-god Ammun would later be represented in 
Mitsrayim (Egypt).

What happened to him? He became Shimshon, whose locks were cut by Delilah.

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Serengeti, 7650 BCE

In the 4th millennium the grasslands of the Sahara were rapidly drying out, as were the grasslands of the Negev, the Sinai and the Nefud - not yet deserts, but becoming so. As the number of game reduced, the Capsians retreated south. Their culture ends in Zimbabwe, though by then it had spread across the world, as Frobenius remarked:
"The fragments of mythology and ritual that have come to light in south-east Africa, in the nuclear zone of the southern part of the Eritrean empire, compel us to reconstruct an image that resembles that of the Sumerian and of the Indian Dravidian lore of life and the gods as closely as one egg resembles another. The moon-god imagined as a great bull; his wife, the planet Venus; the goddess offering her life for her spouse; and everywhere this goddess, as the Morning Star, is the goddess of war, as Evening Star a goddess of illicit love, and a universal mother besides; in all three zones (Africa, Dravidian India and Sumer) the drama of the astral sky is the model and very destiny of all life, and when projected as such upon Earth gave rise to what may have been the very earliest form and concept of the state - namely, that of a sacred, cosmic, priestly image. Is it too bold, given these circumstances, to speak of a Great Eritrean Culture Zone, which in ancient times comprised the shores of the Indian Ocean?"

Is Frobenius correct, or is he, as he asks, too bold? The Capsians took their culture north and east; by 4,500 it was established in Mitsrayim (Egypt), in the Nile Valley, and from there continued to travel as far as the Black and Caspian Seas, the Indus Valley, and at last, turning around and beginning the journey back again some fifteen hundred years later, it entered the Edinu Valley and, now Hittite and Aramaean and Indo-Arryan and Mycenaean, came back to the Middle East to stay. (And perhaps this is why the Tanach uses the name Cush for both Ethiopia and southern Arabia, neighbouring lands on either side of the southern Red Sea).

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Jericho, 7,500 BCE

The existence of a natural spring made Jericho an oasis anyway, and the soil fertile for planting. By 8,000 BCE the settlement covered two and a half hectares. It was surrounded by a ditch and a stone wall seven hundred yards long; inside the wall there was a semi-circular tower thirty feet wide and high. The maximum population at this time was about a thousand.

First hints of ancestor worship are identifiable from headless skeletons found at Jericho and dating from circa 7,000. These heads were presumably displayed in the shrine, with shells in the eye sockets, as they still are among the Greek monks to this day, as indeed any visitor to St George's Monastery at Jericho can verify.

After the Capsian-Microlithic, the Proto-Neolithic Age, possibly as early as 9,500 BCE but more likely 7,500-5,500 BCE. The Proto-Neolithic of Asia Minor includes important finds at Jericho and Anatolia before any in Iraq or Iran. Discoveries in the Carmel Caves resemble those in HelwanMitsrayim (Egypt) and in Beirut and Yabrud in the Lebanon, ans well as the Kurdish hills of Iraq. These artefacts are known as Natufian. At this time men lived as semi-nomadic hunting tribes, using flint or bone tools; not yet in villages, but supplementing their food with a grain-like grass; bones of pig, goat, sheep and ox and an equid still not yet the horse; but still much primitive food-gathering. They also possessed musical instruments such as drums of split logs, and used a system of drum-beat signalling; they had secret societies, burials, skull-cults, the worship of birds, snakes and crocodiles, spirit priests and spirit huts, fire making rituals, and made an early form of clothing from palm fibres and bark (as Adam and Chavah would do in Eden). They held communal rites of animal and human sacrifice, related myths of journeys to the land of the dead and return therefrom, began to develop and spread root languages, and even kept domestic fowl.

Agriculture and stock-breeding begin in the Near East between 7,500 and 4,500 BCE; they covered the globe by 2,500 BCE, making a nonsense of Columbus' claim to have "discovered" the New World in 1492 CE. The ancestor of the goat was the Bezoar; of the sheep the Asiatic Mouflon: at first herded, they were selectively bred from 9,000 BCE (cf Ya'akov and Lavan).

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Kesed 7,000 BCE

In the beginning was the miracle.

Almost simultaneously, in several regions of the Middle East, an accident of nature precipitated a leap of evolution. In those days wheat was a dry, insipid grass, inedible and scarcely fertile, a thin arrowhead of lifelessness that stabbed at the ankles of hunters and sharpened the stones of the desert. But centuries of flooding had brought a rich, alluvial silt down from the mountains, and gradually the silt fecundated the barren soil. Then, whether by gusting winds, or genetic mutation, or - as some would say - by design of the gods, the wild wheat crossed with a natural goat-grass to produce a fertile hybrid that combined the fourteen chromosomes of each and engendered a new variety called Emmer Wheat. The additional chromosomes made the hybrid plumper than any other strains, and it had the ability to pollinate itself by spreading, for the seeds did not cling to the husk, but scattered in the wind.

Then the Emmer Wheat crossed with a second natural goat-grass to produce a still larger hybrid comprising forty-two chromosomes and called Bread Wheat. Yet even now the miracle was incomplete, for though the ear of the Bread Wheat is fat and succulent, it is too heavy to break up in the wind and scatter. Only if an external agency should act for it, only if it is broken up, can it scatter and germinate. The Bread Wheat is dependent on a human hand to tear it open and to spread its chaff. For it to thrive, men must first turn from wandering to agriculture, and for men to make that transition there must first be some crop that they can cultivate. The origins of city-man lie in the miracle of the Bread Wheat, as it is written:
   "These are the generations of the Heavens and the Earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord Elohim made them. For the plants of the field were not yet grown, and the grass was not yet in the earth, since the Lord Elohim had not yet caused it to rain upon the Earth, and there were still no humans to till the ground." (Genesis 2:4-5)

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Beit Lechem Ephratah, 7,000 BCE

Wild Einkorn and Emmer are the wheats that became bread wheat; Emmer has only ever been found in the Middle East. Einkorn was gathered wild from 20,000 BCE; its first known domestication was at Tel Aswad on the Golan Heights around 7,800 BCE.

While farming started in the Middle East, the rest of the world was a long way (up to 3,000 years) behind. Europe got started around 6,500 BCE. Millet farming in China takes off from around 6,000 BCE. Plant domestication in Mexico begins around 5,500 BCE. Fishing communities are known in the southern Sahara from 7,500 BCE, though no harpoons until 5,000 BCE. The earliest houses in Britain date from 7,500 BCE; flexible poles sunk into the ground to form a circle, bent to join at the central dome; the gaps filled with smaller branches and reeds, then daubed with mud. Farming on the Nile commences around 5,000 BCE, as far as the First Cataract (way down south in Faiyum Basin); not at Memphis and the north till 3,100 BCE.

Farming brought new requirements, such as storage and drainage. The first farms depended on rainfall or springs. In Mesopotamia the Euphrates and the Tigris were channelled to bring water from 6,000 BCE (al-Ubayd 5,900-4,300). Irrigation became the key to the development of cities in Mesopotamia. We can therefore date the birth of Tammuz - or, rather, Dumuzi, his earliest known name - to around 7,000 BCE. And specifically this version, not Attis, Ar Thur (Arthur), Adonis, Bran, John Barleycorn, Osher (Osiris), Jesus, Robin Hood, or any other manifestation of the ever-dying ever-reborn god of the vegetation and the Underworld: Tammuz-Dumuzi, because his home was the Euphrates, the locus of the miracle of the bread.

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Al-Ubayd 6,000 BCE

Early farming communities were linked by marriage as well as by trade, which transformed the tribal structure, enlarging it from distinct clans to larger tribes; it also made for a new distinction, between the nomadic and the sedentary.

Before pottery, vessels were made of sun-baked mud or white-ware (lime and ash built on a basket-mould and fired). Fired clay developed in the 7th millennium BCE, leading to new types of terracotta figurines and lime plaster sculptures. The smelting of copper in the Middle East dates from 6,500 BCE, though it had limited use until the development of bronze. There was much use and trade of obsidian (black volcanic glass), which was highly valued for cutting. The Fertile Crescent has this material in abundance.

The earliest figurines of what is now recognisably the mother goddess were found, dating circa 6,500 BCE, in what is also now recognisably a chapel, at Catal Huyuk (Çatalhöyük) in southern Anatolia.

The development of the date palm (Tamar) appears to start around 6,000 BCE, the fruit harvested for food, its fibres used for string and rope, its trunks for building, its leaves for mats and baskets, possibly also for fencing.

Some of the earliest temples have been found at al-Ubayd (sometimes written as Obeid or Ubaid), an ancient Sumerian city in southern Mesopotamia. The style and type is difficult to distinguish as it was replaced by a Halaf style of temple around 5,400 BCE. The settlement at nearby Eridu also had several temples, each built on the remains of the last; the oldest a single mud-brick room with an altar for offerings.

The first stamp seals on clay appear from 6,000 BCE.

What we are seeing is the start of settled village life: a barnyard economy based on grain agriculture (wheat and barley) and stock breeding (pig, goat, sheep and ox), with crafts such as pottery and weaving, carpentry and house-building, usually in tripartite form with rectangular or cross-shaped rooms, and rows of smaller rooms on either side.

Increasingly the women cease to be drudges and gain importance, because of their vital role in agriculture, the crop-sewer and berry-gatherer now equalising with the mammoth-hunter. The woman was both planter and reaper, and the link between woman as nurturer and the fertility goddess begins to add matriarchal elements to the cults, or even to transform them into matriarchies, leading to the enhancement of the fertility goddess cults - the figurines gave aid to women in childbirth and conception, served as house shrines for prayer, offered protection from danger and of course served as ornaments; taken into the fields they guarded the crops, and did the same for the cattle in the barn; they watched over the children, as they did sailors and travellers. The modern "Our Lady" has her roots here, and it is fair to say that religion from this point on begins to become "womanish", for all that it remains to this day dominated by men. The principal attributes of the deity, in both Judaism and Islam, are related to the Rechem, the womb: YHVH El Rachum, and al-Lah ar-Rahim: "the compassionate, the merciful".

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Samarra 5,500 BCE

The epoch known as the Basal-Neolithic, from 5,500-4,500 BCE; barnyard economies based on the planting of wheat and barley and stock-breeding; more developed pottery and the earliest signs of weaving. It is at this time that settled village life begins in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, east into Iran, west into Anatolia (Turkey), south along the Mediterranean into Mitsrayim (Egypt); the tels have turned up evidence of carpentry and house-building; the first of these in Yericho (Jericho), pre-pottery but nonetheless brick houses, with signs of agriculture and stock breeding, plus a skull cult. Serious pottery does indeed begin at this date, but not in Yericho; Halaf, Samarra and Ubayd wares provided the golden age of the figurines, beautifully decorated and geometrically composed painted pottery: the birth of Art, and not surprisingly: the establishment of sedentary life, with men no longer required to hunt, gives time for thought and creativity, for Art and Ethics. A new social order also develops, with specialisation in both life-tasks and work.


Halaf, 5,400 BCE

Samarra is in Iraq, seventy miles from Baghdad. Amongst the imagery on Samarra ware we find the swastika and the Maltese Cross. Halaf ware came from Turkey, from the Taurus mountains and Hittite Anatolia specifically, and contains many bull images and clay doves as well as the double axe and the Maltese Cross, long, long before the Knights of St John Christianised it, (note that Halaf is in Urartu, where No'ach, like Utnapishtim, sent out his doves; while Anatolia means "the land of Anat", the moon-and-mother goddess whose principle shrine in Kena'an would be at Beit Anatot, Bethany); cows, oxen, sheep, goats and pigs are also depicted. In Halaf we also find the first beehive tombs, identified biblically with Deborah, the "wet-nurse" of Yitzchak's wife Rivkah (Rebecca), who of course came from Padan Aram, this very region. The principal motifs were the bull, representing the chief of the gods, and the naked moon-goddess, his wife. Halaf culture spread to Crete and Syria a thousand years later; it became the megalithic mound burial culture that extended west to Gibraltar and Ireland (Virgil’s Danaans); also across central Europe: south Germany, Switzerland, Brittany (Carnac), later to the Vistula and Baltic, arriving by the 4th millennium BCE; and thence south, back into Africa (Gold Coast, Nigeria and the Congo); it became - forgive the pun - the foundation-stone of the Mycenaean culture. As we shall see, Stonehenge grew from this culture, which would later be known as Celtic (see Campbell op cit Vol 1, p428ff). Crete, like Rome much later, depended on Cornwall and Romania for its tin, Ireland for its gold!

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Yericho 5,300 BCE

Or possibly Yerecho, or even Yareyacho - Jericho in English - was one of the earliest human settlements, possibly even earlier, as much as 1,500 years earlier, than the date above suggests. A neolithic, pre-pottery village, by the 7th, and certainly by the 6th millennium, it was unquestionably a city and not just a village. The city wall, made famous by Yehoshu'a (Joshua), was constructed of stone. Its houses were of pounded earth and mud brick or stone. Floors of clay were plastered with lime and burnished, then covered with reed mats and ornamented with clay figurines of animals and mother goddesses. Statues of clay on reed frames suggest the high gods were worshipped here in groups of three: the father-mother-son triad which is also Sun-Moon-Earth. Skulls were buried separately from bodies, inferring human sacrifice. Ornaments and statuary have features modelled in clay, with shells for eyes. The existence of sickles, querns and grinders confirm that cereals were being cultivated. There is also evidence that a basic irrigation system had been developed.

This is hugely significant to our investigations. Only three major cities in the Middle East have thrown up evidence of the triad cult: Ur, Charan and Yericho - precisely the three cities identified with Av-Raham. We shall see later - in the commentaries on the Yehudit Bible - why this was significant.



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Byblos 5,000 BCE

Somewhere around 5,000 BCE, the Basal Neolithic gave way to the High Neolithic, a term which describes chronological progress, but not cultural or evolutionary; other than its pottery, the High Neolithic was generally more backward than the Basal. What marks this period is its spread: by the late 5th millennium, there were villages large enough to call themselves cities across much of western Asia: at Byblos (this link is not the same as the one above), Ras Shamra (Ugarit), Tel Judeideh, Ninveh (Nineveh). The Hassuna culture was established in Mesopotamia by the mid 5th millennium: village-based life dependent on small-scale farming and crafts. Sedentary life, which began in Mitsrayim (Egypt) at this time, is sadly irretrievable by archaeologists, lost under centuries of Nile mud. This was also the period of the great megalithic tombs in Europe such as New Grange in Ireland; and of the passage graves, the beehive graves, the tumuli and dolmens and cairns. In the Middle East too - the artificial chronology of the Tanach suggests otherwise, but this is the era of David and Av-Shalom in Yisra-El.



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Tigris river 4,700 BCE

The banks of the Tigris were now densely populated, with rectangular houses of crude brick or pounded mud, and tholoi - circular structures with low, domed roofs for cultic purposes: the earliest temples. Halaf culture, which had flourished over the previous two thousand years, had produced polychrome geometric and floral designs, and clay figures of animals and women (strangely: never men!); the latter in childbirth, again proof of a mother-goddess cult – she was probably known as Inanna, but would later become Ishtar. Pottery was now kiln-fired though the wheel remained to be invented. And still no writing.

Halaf culture came to an end by 5,000 BCE, replaced by the second phase of Ubayd culture and a level of social, political, religious and technological advance unprecedented in human history. Sophisticated pottery with glazed designs; writing; the wheel; the calendar; mathematics; kingship; priestcraft; taxation; book-keeping; complex mythologies and cults; temples – all these are in evidence along the banks of the Tigris as the 5th millennium opens. An elaborate language of symbols accompanied it: the mirror, the kingly throne of wisdom, the gate, the morning and evening stars, columns flanked by lions rampant (cherubim, or, correctly, Keruvim). Illustrations in stone show the mother-goddess: squatting in childbirth; as "Pietà"; as Madonna; cow-headed bearing the bull-child; naked on a lion or flanked by rampant lions or goats; holding flowers or serpents; crowned with the wall of a city; sitting between horns or on the back of a bull. Linked to the female statuettes are clay figures of doves, cows, humped oxen, sheep, goats and pigs. Male symbols now appearing include the swastika, the Maltese Cross, the rosette, the double axe and the bucranium (bull's head).

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Mesopotamia, 4,600 BCE

What can begin to call itself civilisation extended north to south from Ninveh to the Persian Gulf, from the Euphrates in the west into Iran and the Afghan borders. This is the base for all modern civilisation: from Mesopotamia it would spread to Crete around 2,500 BCE and thence to Britain, the African Gold Coast; to Greece as Mycenaean culture; it would establish itself as the cult of the dead and resurrected bull-god in Mitsrayim (Egypt) around the late 4th or early 3rd millennium and lead to the invention of hieroglyphic writing – though true writing and the calendar would not appear in Mitsrayim until 2,800 BCE. Propelled by sailing fleets undertaking trade, the bull-god cult will develop variously as Venus and Adonis, Isis and Osiris, Guinevere and Arthur, Mir-Yam and Aharon, Mary and Jesus - also perhaps as Chavah and Adam, Sarai and Av-Ram, Le'ah and Ya'akov (but not Sarah and Av-Raham, nor Rachel and Ya'akov, both of which belong to the sheep-god cult, a later stage of the development of civilisation). Yet this culture does not belong to Mesopotamia, it simply came into Mesopotamia, and developed there; its roots – as the name should give away – were in the Taurus (or Bull) mountains of Anatolia (Anat, as in Beit Anatot or Bethany, is the earliest known name for the mother-goddess).

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Sumer 4,500

Originally there were "elim" – the powerful forces of nature that inspired Humankind with awe, but also terrified us
: the E of Einstein's E=MC2. As Humankind began to tame the powerful forces of Nature, so did we domesticate the language with which we described and explained them, reducing them to Disney-tales by personifying them, anthropomorphising them, analogising them in myths and fables, calling them gods and super-parents, creating homes for them in temples and palaces or on mountain-tops or in the heavens, elaborating the structures of our society as mirror-images of what we imagined theirs to be. Religion as the domestication of Nature. The evolution of religion from mythological allegory to today's abstract concepts (the god of the storm and the trees and the heavens evolved into the God of Mercy, Love and the Afterlife), reflects the progress Humankind has made in comprehending Nature and therefore no longer needing gods to explain it, but also Humankind's failure to bring the abstractions into reality by our own actions. Humans only need gods for the parts we cannot explain or achieve ourselves.

When the cattle were still hunted, humans depicted them on cave-walls, and worshiped them as objects of fear in their own right. But this is the first great age of cattle-rearing, and now Humankind has tamed the bull. The earliest figurines in Sumeria (circa 4,500 BCE) were made of bone, clay, stone or ivory. Standing or seated, usually naked, the women were often pregnant, or holding or nursing a child: the Madonna or full-moon phase of the life of the triple-goddess. Alongside these, representations of the Earth and Mother Goddess as a cow: in Kena'an and Mitsrayim (Egypt) Io and Hat-Hor would likewise be represented as cows, as was Biblical Le'ah in her earliest form. Accompanying these were heads of bulls with long curving horns: the bull that fertilises the Earth goddess, that dies and is annually reborn. The bull is no longer feared, but assimilated into the household, domesticated in its god-form too.

But in Sumer, in the 5th millennium BCE, humans had not yet understood the workings of the Heavens, and in particular the position of the Earth in its relation to the sun and moon, nor the connection between lunation and menstruation. Images of the bull show horns that represent the waxing and the waning moon – the crescent of Islam and of al-Lah still reflects this; those of the cow depict her as the sun. This is a different cult from the triad, where the bull is the sun and the cow the moon; this is the probable source of the long battle between the Av-Rahamic moon-cult and the "heathen" cults against which the Biblical Prophets raged, most clearly witnessed in the name Yah, which was male to the early Beney Yisra-El, as it still is to most contemporary Jews, but female to the Beney Kena'an, who identified Yah with Yoh (Io, the sister of Ephron, from whom Av-Raham purchased the Cave of Machpelah), who gave her name to the Ionian sea. The Greeks would later engage in the same battle, reflected in the myths of Zeus, Pasiphae, the Bull of Poseidon and the Minotaur in Crete.

The moon bull-god and the sun cow-goddess were the principal fertility symbols of Sumer from 4,500-3,000 BCE. The earliest known temples in the world, those at al-Ubayd, Uruk (Warak, Biblical Erech) and Eridu, Khafaja, Uqair and Barak all provide evidence of this. Al-Ubayd was dedicated to the dairy-goddess Ninhursag, Khafaja to Inanna, the mother of Dumuzi and grandmother of Ishtar-Ashtoreth-Astarte-Asherah-Sarah. Al-Ubayd, Uqair and Khafaja imagery tended to be oval-shaped, to represent the female genitalia, and the temples were themselves understood to have generative powers - as in the story of Chanah and Shemu-El (Hannah and Samuel) in 1 Samuel 1 and 2. Cows were kept in the temple for milk and sacrifice (see Numbers 19 for the Red Heifer). In India today temple visitors are fed prasad, a milk-rice. The chief sacrifice was the calf, the cow’s son - and in Mesopotamia the sacred cows were kept in the temples - but only because this was still the Age of Taurus; when Taurus became Aries, around 2,200 BCE, the sacrificial beast would become the Paschal Lamb; and when Aries became Pisces at the year 0, the people would be fed fish, and baptised in the water, instead.

And note that the bull that fathered the cow and ruled the universe also pulled the plough!

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Uruk, 4,300 BCE

The real urban revolution took place around Uruk during the period 4,300-3,100 BCE. The Sumerians appear to have been the first city-builders: Ur, KishLagashEridu, Sippar, Shuruppak, Nippur, Erech.

Mesopotamia had neither wood nor hard stone; both had to be imported from the Lebanon as only reeds and mud were otherwise available for building. Food also had to be imported as not enough could be grown locally. Everyday objects such as bowls and mud-bricks were mass-produced. From 3,200 BCE sledges began to be used for transport, as well as wheeled transport. From 2,500 BCE other domestic animals began to be reared: sheep and goats for milk and wool as well as meat; oxen and onager (wild ass) for pulling ploughs and sledges and carts. Copper beads were imported too as the age of metal began. The earliest known musical instruments (e.g. the lyre) date from Uruk around 2,400 BCE, with an accompanying libretto of songs and hymns. In a theocracy, the king represents the god, and his family the remainder of the pantheon. The princess-priestess of Uruk, identified with the cow-goddess, was named Asherah (note that the Yehudit name Sarah, which is probably a dialect variant of Asherah, also means "princess").

The town of Uruk covered four hundred hectares and was ruled by a theocracy. Previously mud had been used to make bricks. The Uruk temples, called ziggurats, were raised on platforms, low structures with a sanctuary on the summit for the ritual of the world-generating union of the Earth goddess with the Sky lord, presumably enacted by the May-King and May-Queen orgiastically. The temples followed the tripartite pattern with elaborate wall decorations, complex buttresses and niches, pillars. Temple Kullaba was dedicated to the sun god Ana – a male equivalent of the later Anu; Temple Eanna was dedicated to Inanna the goddess of love and war.

Among the symbolic artefacts discovered in these temples are cone mosaics, precious gems, and many exotic materials of real grandeur. The pottery of the region is called al-Ubayd ware. The development of trade, jewellery, stone carving and weaving is known to have taken place here, and at this time. Bevelled-rimmed bowls characteristic of Uruk were exported widely. Writing at this time was simply marks scratched on the surface of a hollow clay ball, later flattened to make a clay tablet. It was known as cuneiform: a rectangular-ended stylus pressed down on wet clay, whence the script was wedge-shaped. The cylindrical seal was developed from 3,400 BCE to replace the stamp seal. Pictographs were used as well, from 3,300 BCE.

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Indus Valley, 4,250 BCE

Throughout this time - 10,000 BCE onwards – the civilisation of the Indus Valley had been developing alongside that of Mesopotamia. The influence of Sanskrit, a language which, like the various Mesopotamian dialects, was derived from the Hittite language of Anatolia, suggests the two cultures ran in many parallels. Three generations of founding gods – Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu – are paralleled in the Greek Ouranos, Chronos and Zeus as well as the Biblical patriarchy of Av-Raham, Yitschak and Ya'akov (all three of whom were probably gods before the Bible redactors transformed them into tribal patriarchs for the convenience of monotheism and history). Pottery styles found in the Indus valley are definitely Mesopotamian, probably arriving via Persia (Iran) as the Mesopotamian cities expanded trade.

The Indus valley's village culture, known as the pre-Harappan age, grew from about 4,000 BCE and starts to become recognisable as Harappa Culture from 2,500 BCE. Three great cities provided the focus for its civilisation: Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro and Chandhu-Daro. Archaeologists have found the mandala form on seals, as well as early evidence of the yoga position. The four principal beasts, depicted in the mandala, were the water buffalo, rhinoceros, elephant and tiger, and in the development of Hinduism the motifs were sustained: Siva, for example, normally holds a trident like that of Neptune, Poseidon and the Kena'anite Yam, comparable with the rod of Aharon – all of them variations on the earlier shaman magic-stick. The serpent daemon called "nãga" appears around this time, depicting Vishnu reclining on the Cosmic Serpent whom the Persians would call Ophis, and the Greco-Egyptians would transmogrify into the medical icon of the caduceus pole; Mosheh (Moses) portrayed him on his banner as Nechushtan and the Creation story in Genesis 1 reduces him from Tiamat to mere Tehom and Tohu, 
before he makes his re-appearance in the Garden of Eden.

Female figurines were also of the Mesopotamian type, though far more sexual in their concrete symbols: cone-shaped or phallic erect stones known as lingam for the male, circular stones with hollow centres known as yoni for the female; these were particularly linked to Siva and his wife Devi. Where Mesopotamia, and the cultures that grew from it westwards, replaced the shaman with priests and Prophets, the Indus Valley replaced theirs with yogi. But the Hindu pantheon nonetheless reflects the Mesopotamian. The cosmic mountain was domesticated into the ziggurat, and India also provides considerable evidence of sacral regicide, while the sacred bull and cow are clearly theriomorphic counterparts of the lingam and yoni.

Cuneiform texts from 2,450-1,800 BCE confirm trade across the Arabian sea from southern Arabia to India, a journey of about 1500 miles: a jar containing cloves found in Syria, for example, dates circa 1,700 BCE, and we know that cloves were native to India but not to the Middle East.

The civilisation of the Indus valley collapsed around 1,800 BCE, probably because the Saraswati river dried up. The ruins of Mohenjo-Daro provide evidence of a serious malaria epidemic [see Campbell, op. cit. Vol 1, 435ff for more details of this civilisation.]

The Harappa was also called the Dravidian, a name closely linked to the Celtic word Druid.

From the middle of the 2nd millennium a migration of Vedic Aryans, cousins of the Homeric Greeks, also impacted on the valley; it may have been these who destroyed Harappan culture. The Vedic Age began in 1,500 BCE and continued until 500 BCE: a dark age culturally, though the oral tradition of its sacred books (the Mahabarata, Ramayana, Vedas, Brahmanas, Upanishads) was sustained, and those epics were finally written down around the 3rd century BCE. Hindu-Buddhism as we now have it is a cohesion of the Dravidian with the Vedic.

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Land Of The Two Rivers 4,200 BCE

In the beginning was the settlement.

Five separate legends tell of this period.

According to the first legend, the gods grew jealous of the domination of the land by Utu, called Dumuzi, god of the sun, and conspired among themselves to seize their rightful portions from him. So, when winter came on, when Utu went down into the Underworld and Chaos reigned supreme in the land, the gods saw their opportunity, and drove out Chaos, and divided the land among themselves, appointing an equal share for Utu to receive upon his return. Thus Anu took possession of the skies, and En-Lil of the air, and Enki of the waters, and Ninhursag of the soil, and Inanna - who is also called Ishtar, and Ashtoreth - took possession of the seeds of life, and fecundated them. And together the gods gave birth to a new land, in which season was divided from season, and day from night, marsh from desert, sea from dry land, firmament from firmament. And the land prospered, and the gods caused herbs and plants to grow, and trees bearing fruit of every kind, and animals came to settle in the land. Until the gods were satisfied with this new harmony they had established, and they sat back and rested, for their part of the work was done. But they did not abandon their creation - for the gods do not have that prerogative. From among the tribes of Bedou to the west they selected one, and this tribe was brought into the Land of the Two Rivers, to be custodians of the garden which the gods had made, and to tend it for the gods, and to settle there.

According to the second legend, a great visionary grew up among the tribes of Bedou in the lands to the west, who revealed to his people a prophecy that one day humans would be masters of their own destinies, and would begin to play their own parts in the eternal creation of Creation. Since all life sprang from the void, he taught them, so too their destinies must be born out of the void, and he encouraged them to go in search of the most appropriate place, in order to inhabit it, and fecundate it, and establish there the kingdom and the reign of Humankind. Many people listened to his teaching, and followed him, and came at last into the Land of the Two Rivers, than which nowhere could have been more void, and they established their village at Bavel called Babylon, and settled there.

According to the third legend, a tribe of Bedou (or Bedhou) from the western lands was engaged in a war by a tribe of Bedhou (or Bedou) from the south of Akkad, over a quantity of gold, bdellium and onyx which the western tribe was alleged to have stolen. The war went badly for these notorious thieves and murderers, who retreated southwards, pursued by their enemy into the desert between the Two Rivers, where a fierce battle took place. The western tribe was routed, their property confiscated, their young men slaughtered, their wives and daughters put to natural use, while those who survived by fleeing found themselves encircled at last, unable to leave this barren, empty land, obliged to settle there.

According to the fourth legend, a tribe of Bedouin (or Bedhouim) came out of the west and stopped at the caravanserai at 
al-Ubayd (or possibly al-Ubiad or el-Obeid) for a night's rest on their long journey from Yericho (called Yarayacho, "the city of the moon", which is to say "the moon-goddess") to the land of Eylam. They came in the early spring, when the water in the two rivers was still polluted by the salt brought down in the winter floods, and they drank the water, but it only increased their thirst, and the scorching sun burned their lips, and their tongues bled from the salt in the sores. By morning there were many dead; within three days a third of their number had perished and, as was the custom of these people, they built mounds in which to bury their dead, and sang psalms of mourning and lamentation over them. But such was the number of the dead that the period of mourning lasted many months, and in that time many more had died, and the weeping and the wailing did not cease. While they remained they began of necessity to till the land, and to erect a village, and finally, with the loss of so many of their sons and daughters, weariness persuaded them to end their journey, and they settled on the land.

According to the fifth legend, a tribe who were neither Bedou nor Bedhou nor men of Eylam nor of Akkad, a tribe who did not worship Utu, called Dumuzi, the god of the sun, but rather the father of Utu, Nanna, god of the moon, who in his female manifestation is called Inanna, and Ishtar, and Ashtoreth, and Diana, and Chavah (Eve), and Eshet (Isis), and sometimes the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary, goddess of the seeds of life... this tribe had travelled the four corners of the world since the beginning of time in search of that paradise they had been promised, the only land in which they could live and not be called trespassers. At times they had tried to settle, only to find themselves mistaken, or evicted, or cut down, and now they came into the Land of the Two Rivers, their faces scarred by hopelessness, their speech tinged with disenchantment, their hearts heavy with desuetude, their bodies aching from so many years of futile journeying, their muscles ruined by transporting through eternity the empty litter that bore the invisible form of their immaterial god. They looked at the barren earth, the empty desert, the stagnant marshes, the burning skies, the vacuous heavens, and one by one they sank to their knees in exhaustion and despair. Their eternity of wandering had been in vain, for the paradise they had dreamed of clearly did not exist. Their destination had been nowhere, and now, as they looked out over the land, it became evident that they had arrived.

The Land of the Two Rivers, circa 4,200 BCE, marks the beginnings of that curious form of magical realism known by human beings as Literature.

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Ur Kasdim (Ur of the Chaldees), 4,000 BCE

After the Neolithic came the Chalcolithic, so-called for the development of copper-stone, particularly in Mesopotamia. This was really the era of the founding of cities and the first phase of sophistication in agriculture. Elaborate drainage and irrigation projects were undertaken. City-states seized power. A primitive form of writing was invented by the end of the 4th millennium: early cuneiform in Mesopotamia, early hieroglyphs in Mitsrayim (Egypt). Painted pottery emerges, especially Samarra ware with its monochrome geometric animals and human figures, and later al-Ubayd ware from near Ur - this latter between 4,000 and 3,500 BCE. The Badarian people of the Nile valley made burnished pottery from around 5,000 BCE: semicircular polished bowls in red or black, and clay figurines of female deities with bird-like faces suggesting early forms of the vulture-goddess Nekhbet, protectress of Lower Mitsrayim, and the falcon that would come to symbolise Horus.

The cult of the dead and resurrected bull-god reached Syria, then went south to the Nile Delta, in the 4th or 3rd millennium. Out of this came the myths of Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Isis and Osiris, Mary and Jesus. It originated in cattle-breeding though it later metamorphosed, as the age of Taurus became the age of Aries, as animal husbandry extended beyond the bull to other animals, and found the form in which we know it (the ram-god, the Paschal Lamb), and in agriculture (c.f. Kayin and Havel; the Akeda, Jesus).

Pottery and other artefacts show bulls-heads linked to figurines of the goddess, clay figures of the dove, cow, humped ox, sheep, goat, pig. The first known goddess figurines come from the Black Sea region. Probably different regions had different symbols and cults; the new professional priesthood which appears for the first time begins the long process of synthesising these, whence bull-headed serpents, fish-tailed bulls, lion-headed eagles etc; also god names such as Yah, Ba'al and others.

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Jemdet Nasr, 3,800 BCE

A thousand years seems like a long time, when we consider the advances in European civilisation from, say, William the Conqueror to the invention of the Internet. The thousand years between the 4th and 3rd millennia saw the rise of al-Ubayd (c 3,500), Warka (3,500-3,000), Jemdet Nasr (3,000-2,800), and specifically the invention of writing. Finds of early cuneiform from around 3,300 BCE remain undeciphered, but are probably business documents and inventories relating to the growth of foreign trade. Dykes and canals were being dug to drain the marshes and maximise arable land, with mud-brick temples rising on platforms above the marsh. In Warka - Biblical Erech - pottery is now being threaded on a wheel, and at Jemdet Nasr a process is under development for pounding and pouring copper. Cylinder seals have completely replaced the earlier stamp seals. Economic life, like the political, is now centred on the temple. Trade links are known with both Kena'an and Mitsrayim (Egypt). The people who inhabited these towns were called the Sumerians; they were clean-shaven, stocky, broad-headed. They spoke an agglutinative language unlike any other of the region. The earliest known written texts in existence are in their language.

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Yarden Valley 3,700 BCE

Where cities are growing in Mesopotamia, the Yarden (Jordan) valley is still village culture; but making artistic and technical progress. Pottery designs include the eight-pointed star, birds, geometric figures and elephant-like masks. The dead are being buried with food and utensils, in preparation for the afterlife.

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Upper Mitsrayim (Egypt), 3,600 BCE

The Neolithic culture in Mitsrayim until this time is known as the Fayumian. By 4,000 BCE it has become the Tasian, then the Badarian, Amratian, Gerzean, until the end of the 3rd millennium. Much more primitive than Mesopotamia or Kena'an, its houses were made of reed mats or dried mud, its pottery was decidedly limited. But advances were being made. They had developed flax, fruit, vegetables and grain. Copper was in use from the mines in the Sinai desert. The marshes along the Nile were being drained. By the end of the 4th millennium two areas, Upper and Lower Mitsrayim, had become formed as political entities, and hieroglyphic writing was in place. Their mythology of the sun-god Hor (Horus), the moon-goddess Eshet (Isis) and the annually killed and resurrected Osher (Osiris) paralleled that of Mesopotamia, but with variations, because the source of fertility was the Nile, not the clouds. Pottery from Byblos found in Mitsrayim proves trade links, as cylinder seals, architectural forms and pottery prove trade with Mesopotamia; there is evidence too of trade with Crete, Syria and Kena'an. Mitsri ships flew flags depicting the harpoon and the fish. Finds at Megiddo show that Kena'an was already a key trade route. We can deduce extensive cultural and cultic interchange from this fact of trade, and confirm that Av-Raham's journeys a thousand years later were very much the norm.

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Subaria 3,600 BCE

The village of Ur is the centre of the world, the locus of Creation, the birthplace of History. It lies in a narrow fold in the plains, on the southern bank of the Euphrates, its perimeters half-smothered by sand-dunes, some three days donkey-ride from the Sea of Lagash, skirting the northernmost fringes of the marsh. It is not the only village, but it is the principal village, because it has the most direct access to the Great Waters, where the fish are fat and plentiful and the drinking-water sweet, and because it houses the first great ziggurat built by humans, the temple to the moon-god Nanna, chief among all the gods, father of Utu (called Dumuzi, called Tammuz, called Jesus), god of the Earth.

Northwards from Ur, along the banks of the Two Rivers (Mesopotamia means "The Land Between The Two Rivers"; the rivers in question were the Tigris and the Euphrates), flow the two streams Piyshon and Giychon (the four together provide the four points of the manadala which is Eden). In the salt-pans and the mud-flats there are other villages, a dozen in all, inhabited by members of the same tribe, yet each owing allegiance to its own god beside Nanna - the villages of EriduLagashNippurKishBavel called Babylon, Susa, Larsa. The name of these people, in the Akkadian tongue, was Subar. The whole land of the Subar was smaller than modernYisra-El – which itself is slightly smaller than either Wales or Massachussetts.

Little is known of these first settlers of the land, the founding-fathers and founding-mothers of civilisation. Archaeologists have found evidence of an extremely primitive civilisation - though a civilisation for all that. Earthenware pots in various styles, many of them glazed with rush-dye; clay-bricks and figurines; tools and weapons carved out of stone or beaten from raw copper; musical instruments fashioned from the bones of animals; rudimentary farming implements, including the curved sickle, composed of flint blades and set with bitumen into a horn handle.

Where humans had previously lived by hunting, seeking temporary shelter in tents made from animal skins or in the caves of the foothills, these had established permanent dwellings, simple huts of mud or clay-brick, bound in a crude village. In this arid, fly-infested land they had attempted, with marginal success, to master the rudiments of farming, fishing and weaving, to dig canals for irrigation, to live by the fruits of their own labours. No longer peripatetic, they had begun to exchange physical movement for cerebral, to progress towards the human kinesis of invention. Though still locked in the shadows of the Stone Age and the Bone Age, they were approaching the end of darkness, beginning to glimpse the first rays of enlightenment, waking to the dawn of Human. If they did not actually pluck the forbidden fruit, they were certainly groping towards it. Worshippers of terrifying, abstract gods, speakers of unintelligible tongues that had sound but no pattern, substance but no form, syntax but no grammar, speech but no writing, the Subar were a people waiting to be born, inhabitants of a land poised on the verge of Creation.


For Part 3, click  here...




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