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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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?
*
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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