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 Shaman power has largely been replaced by tribal power, the origins of the Greek and Yisra-Eli amphictyonies which were themselves modelled on the twelve constellations (Adonay Tseva'ot, the Host of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.
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:
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 Helwan, Mitsrayim (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, Kish, Lagash, Eridu, 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 Eridu, Lagash, Nippur, Kish, Bavel 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.
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