Lagash, 3,500-2,500 BCE
The founding of the Hieratic City State. An explosion of culture. The expansion of trade between regions. The first professional priesthood, combining astrology with ceremonies of propitiation as humans tried to understand, and not simply to fear and worship, the powers of Nature: primitive calculations and descriptions in word and image of the patterns of the heavens, the movements of the sun and moon and the five known planets, as well as the fixed stars.
These people made the first attempts to model cities on heavenly patterns, establishing the seven-day week, and a political hierarchy in which the king and priests served as the surrogates of the gods on Earth. Walled cities were now divided in quarters, as was the pottery, based on the mandala motif. A mathematically structured calendar contained fixed festivals and holy feasts. A basic system of numbering, using the decimal system for business and the sexigesimal for metaphysics - a method which has caused so much consternation among Bible scholars who simply cannot believe that Metu-Shalach (Methuselah) lived to the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine. Liturgical arts including music. Cuneiform writing, as we have seen, alongside the wheel (3,200 BCE in Sumer but not in Mitsrayim (Egypt) until 1,800 BCE). The establishment of 360 degrees as the circumference of a circle. The definition of the year as a parallel cycle, 360 days, plus five festival days to make up the full 365 which even then was understood, albeit slightly inaccurately, to be the correct number. Royalty rooted in kingship. Taxation. The wheel. Glass. Clay-brick masonry. Book-keeping for both business and astrological purposes – the latter was the more important, because advance knowledge of the intentions of the gods, through precise observation of the heavens, furthered the cause of domesticating Nature. The city, not just the Temple, now symbolises the cosmic order, with four classes: priest, warrior, merchant and peasant. Below the sun-god-on-Earth as king, of course, with his consort, the moon-goddess-on-Earth as queen, and their ever-reborn-ever-dying beloved son, the Created Earth (Brahma), the Underworld (Siva) and the Sustaining Bread-of-Life (Vishnu), all combined in one.
The methods of divination used, mostly to watch the heavens and know the intentions of the gods in respect of future floods etc, were: hepatoscopy, which is the examination of the livers of sacrificed beasts; oleography, which is the judging of the configurations of oil poured onto water; astroscopy, which is the observation of the visible appearances of the stars, planets and moon (but not yet their relationship to the zodiac); meteorology, which is the judgment of cloud formations, the varieties of thunder and lightning, rains, winds, earthquakes etc; and in addition the observation of the behaviour of animals, the flights of birds, the births of prodigies, and other natural and especially unnatural (supernatural) occurrences. All this gradually developed into the exact science of zodiacal astrology which is still alive in horoscopal readings to this day, despite our contemporary understanding that the specific positions and movements of the visible planets are in fact a map of the universe many light years ago, and thus reflect the past and not the future.
There were new rites too. No longer just the animal hunt but cosmological rites, rituals, ceremonies, embedding the domestication of Nature through astrological readings in a more effective structure of propitiation. Rites focused on the seven celestial orbs: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – though these were not of course their names for them. The king was central because he was the god (the sun) on Earth; his queen was the moon; the virgin priestess, who accompanied him to the underworld and married his resurrected self, was Venus, by whatever local name. His four chief ministers were the lords of the treasury and war, the prime minister, and the lord executioner, representing Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - though this pattern did vary across the region.
The god and goddess were incarnate in the ruling king and queen. The moon god of Ur was Nanna, a male variation of Inanna - the royal tombs at Ur suggest priest-surrogates took the place of the king at the time of his death, allowing him to continue reigning. Later the priest would be substituted by a criminal, and later still by the first-born son, a ram (the Azaz-El), the "pidyon ha-ben" and finally, in Christianity anyway, by the first-born son again. The god in question, the one whose sacrifice was being "imitated" in the act of regicide, was Utu, also known as Dumuzi, Apsu (or Absu - from which the English word "abyss"), Tammuz, or simply Adonis – "the son of the abyss who rises". In Mitsrayim he would become Osher (Osiris); in the Greek world Attis; in Saxon Britain Bran, as in the Celtic world he would become Ar Thur - "the god" but also "the king" - and later simply the Romance legends of the decidedly-human Arthur; and of course, in Christianity, Jesus.
Understanding of this celestial order would become manifest in Upper Egypt as Ma'at, in India more abstractly as Dharma, as it would in China with Tao (a term adopted later by Zoroastrianism and Christianity: "I am the Way", and by Judaism as Halachah = "the path"), and in Greece as Kosmos (Harmony). The Biblical concept of Mot (Death) also derives from this. The Hindu-Buddhist world mountain, Sumeru, likewise has its origins in this organisation (and the name is self-evidently derived from the name of the region: Sumer!), as were Olympus, Dante's Purgatorio, Jewish Tsi'on, Valhalla, and the Teocalli ("god houses"), the Aztec temples. However, all of this came later. It reached the Nile around 2,800 BCE, China around 1,600 BCE, Peru and Middle America by 700/400 BCE. It may be of interest to note that the constellation Orion was regarded as Set (Shet in Yehudit, Seth in English) by the Egyptians, and that the pyramids, like Stonehenge, are pointed towards the constellation Orion.
Plato said: "The motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; these, therefore, every man should follow, and correcting those circuits in the head that were deranged at birth, by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions of the world, he should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win the fulfillment of the best in life set by the gods before mankind both for his present time and for the life to come."
In other words, having established a theocracy on earth, under the sacred-king and his priesthood, all the rituals are designed to bring ordinary men and women within the four-quartered boundaries of the cosmic harmony. The development of mythic tales and their associated mysteries - the stories of Jason and Hercules, of Eshet and Osher (Osiris), of Ya'akov (Jacob) and Mosheh (Moses), of Siva and Vishnu, of Jesus and Mary - are the means of achieving this. "Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in the heavens".
*
Yavan 3,500 BCE
Strangely the several lands we now think of collectively as Greece appear to have known neither Palaeolithic nor Mesolithic settlement. The first known population to enter did so around 3,500 BCE, arriving by sea with its civilisation already intact: agrarian and pastoral in the High Neolithic style, they brought with them fine ceramic wares, polished stone tools and weapons, knives of obsidian and of course the familiar female figurines. They established colonies in Thessaly (Aeolia), at Phocis and Boeotia, building small, rectangular, flat-roofed homes of brick on stone foundations. Some spread northwards, into Macedonia, others southwards into Attica, the Peleponnese, Argolis, Arcadia, Laconia (Lacedaemonia), Messinia; but not westwards. This civilisation was destroyed in its entirety a thousand years later, giving way to Helladic Greece (also known as the Mycenaean epoch and not to be confused with the much later Hellenic), and the great era of Troy, from 2,500-1,300 BCE, culminating in the Homeric era that ended in 1184 BCE.
Warka 3,100 BCE
When suddenly, after the years of peace and growth, the years of mud and blood began.
In the northern villages, where the land had been made arable with dykes and irrigation canals, it was possible to graze sheep, and breed cattle, and grow fat off the fat of the land. Generations of trial and error to learn the values of the wool and hides; generations of experience to improve the techniques of pasturing; generations of knowledge to weave the wool and make clothing from the hides; generations of tradition to alter the very landscape. In the northern villages men had assumed a measure of sufficiency.
In the southern villages, where the land had remained dry and barren because the alluvial silt had not yet fertilised the soil, an attempt had been made to plant, and irrigate, and produce crops; but the land was unsuitable for farming, and offered up only scarcity. Journeys to the northern villages to trade bland crops for strong meat; journeys to the northern villages to get drunk on barley-beer; journeys to the northern villages to steal tools and cattle; journeys to the northern villages to burn down the homesteads and slaughter the sheep and cattle and bring home women as trophies. In the southern villages men had assumed a measure of jealousy.
To the point where the Subar became a divided people.
And finally, inexorably, the inevitable happened.
The men from the southern villages did not directly attack the northern villages. During the night they surrounded each of the northern villages, silently and unseen, and in the morning they sent delegations into each of the villages, on the pretext of a conference. And only then, when the elders of the villages were assembled in the open fields, only then did the attack come. The village elders were slaughtered, homes and fields were laid waste, sheep and cattle appropriated, laws and tithes imposed. The men from the southern villages had assumed a measure of predominance.
Yet even this new situation did not endure for long.
Within a decade a second, more protracted war broke out. Tribes from the south of Akkad had been driven into the land of the Subar by flooding at the sources of the Two Rivers. At first they settled peacefully in the hills beyond the northern villages, where they presented no threat to the Subar; but as the floods worsened they were compelled to resume their journey southwards, and now the Subar did oppose them.
The war between the Subar and the Sumer lasted twenty years. At its conclusion the Sumer had occupied the whole land. The leaders of the Subar were driven out, forced to live as refugees in the hills; the remainder, who submitted to the rule of the Sumerians, were gradually enslaved; the defeated remnants of the previous Subarian war, already confined within the boundaries of the now decimated village of Ur, were deprived of all rights and given the status of outcasts.
Thus there were now three distinct groups within the land of Sumer, once called Subaria: the Sumerians, who ruled; the Subar, who were enslaved; and the outcasts in the village of Ur, the site of the temple to Nanna, god of the moon.
In the Sumerian tongue the word "Subar" came to mean "a slave" or "an outcast".
In the Sumerian tongue - as still in the Egyptian 2,000 years later - the word for an outcast was "Habiru" or sometimes "Hapiru" or "Apiru" (in English Hebrew).
This account is based upon clay tablets excavated at Warka in southern Mesopotamia in the 19th century CE. It is thought by many to prefigure the Biblical legend of Kayin (Cain - meaning "jealousy") and Havel (Abel - meaning "vanity"), as well as the flight of Terach, Av-Raham's father, from Mesopotamia.
*
Jemdet Nasr 3,100 BCE
The non-Semitic conquerors of the Subar called themselves "Sag-giga", which means "the black-headed ones", their newly acquired land "Kengir", their language "Emegir"; the people of Akkad, from whose land they came, used the name Sumer to describe the people, their language and their land, and it is through Akkadian writings, under the name Sumer, that they have come down to us in History.
The town of Uruk (today called Warka, and sometimes Erech) is the capital of Sumeria, fortress-town of its conquerors and rulers, site of the Temple of Utu (called Dumuzi, called Tammuz, called Dionysus, called Adonis), chief among all the gods. The fortifications were built by Gilgamesh; the seven sages laid the foundations of the Temple. Though the Sumer and the Subar are distinct groups, they have begun to fuse both ethnically and culturally. Yet there is no denying the hierarchy of Sumeria. The Subar and the Habiru have been subdued, their principal god, Nanna the moon-god, has been deposed in favour of his son Utu.
The village of Ur, home of the Habiru, seat of the temple of Inanna, plays only a minor role among the villages of Sumeria, but its Habiru population have remained loyal to their goddess, and they alone among people, in Ur alone among towns, continue to uphold and obey the matriarchal moon-cult. Such obedience may be seen by the Sumer as a symptom of potential rebelliousness, but the Habiru are an outcast tribe (the Sanskrit word is "harajan") with no practical means of rebellion, and such heresy, although illegal, may be quietly tolerated. No Habiru male may wed a Sumerian or Subarian woman - it is possible to recognise a Habiru male by the sign of his circumcision, a sign appointed by Inanna to symbolise the clipping of the vine that it may run to fruit. Only in Charan, many weeks journey to the north, and in Yericho, far to the east, does Inanna rule unchallenged. The Subar have laid aside the moon-cult in favour of the Sumerian sun-cult, honouring the heresiarch Utu, whose temple Sargon would construct, whose palace Cyrus the Mede would fortify.
Yet the knowledge acquired by these people was not lost with their subjugation. Assimilated by the Sumerians, it continued to grow steadily and flourish over a period of years. Cattle-breeding, early attempts to tame the wild camel, domestication of the donkey, pottery, clay-brick masonry, cultivation of the carob tree, artificial canals, the discovery of glass - all these, in however primitive a form, were the achievements of the Sumerian peoples. At Jemdet Nasr a cylindrical seal has been excavated, the oldest of its kind yet found. Tools from the mound at al-Ubayd point indisputably to the invention of bronze. Stone tablets at Warka are inscribed with pictographs, a crude version of cuneiform which heralds the origins of written language.
On this evidence modern archaeologists have been able to disprove, once and for all, the version of the dawn of Humankind offered in the 3rd century BCE by Berossus, a priest at Babylon. According to Berossus, a race of monsters, half-human and half-fish, emerged from the depths of the Great Waters one day, innately possessed of the skills of agriculture, metalwork and literature, and became Humankind.
The methods of divination used, mostly to watch the heavens and know the intentions of the gods in respect of future floods etc, were: hepatoscopy, which is the examination of the livers of sacrificed beasts; oleography, which is the judging of the configurations of oil poured onto water; astroscopy, which is the observation of the visible appearances of the stars, planets and moon (but not yet their relationship to the zodiac); meteorology, which is the judgment of cloud formations, the varieties of thunder and lightning, rains, winds, earthquakes etc; and in addition the observation of the behaviour of animals, the flights of birds, the births of prodigies, and other natural and especially unnatural (supernatural) occurrences. All this gradually developed into the exact science of zodiacal astrology which is still alive in horoscopal readings to this day, despite our contemporary understanding that the specific positions and movements of the visible planets are in fact a map of the universe many light years ago, and thus reflect the past and not the future.
There were new rites too. No longer just the animal hunt but cosmological rites, rituals, ceremonies, embedding the domestication of Nature through astrological readings in a more effective structure of propitiation. Rites focused on the seven celestial orbs: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – though these were not of course their names for them. The king was central because he was the god (the sun) on Earth; his queen was the moon; the virgin priestess, who accompanied him to the underworld and married his resurrected self, was Venus, by whatever local name. His four chief ministers were the lords of the treasury and war, the prime minister, and the lord executioner, representing Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - though this pattern did vary across the region.
The god and goddess were incarnate in the ruling king and queen. The moon god of Ur was Nanna, a male variation of Inanna - the royal tombs at Ur suggest priest-surrogates took the place of the king at the time of his death, allowing him to continue reigning. Later the priest would be substituted by a criminal, and later still by the first-born son, a ram (the Azaz-El), the "pidyon ha-ben" and finally, in Christianity anyway, by the first-born son again. The god in question, the one whose sacrifice was being "imitated" in the act of regicide, was Utu, also known as Dumuzi, Apsu (or Absu - from which the English word "abyss"), Tammuz, or simply Adonis – "the son of the abyss who rises". In Mitsrayim he would become Osher (Osiris); in the Greek world Attis; in Saxon Britain Bran, as in the Celtic world he would become Ar Thur - "the god" but also "the king" - and later simply the Romance legends of the decidedly-human Arthur; and of course, in Christianity, Jesus.
Understanding of this celestial order would become manifest in Upper Egypt as Ma'at, in India more abstractly as Dharma, as it would in China with Tao (a term adopted later by Zoroastrianism and Christianity: "I am the Way", and by Judaism as Halachah = "the path"), and in Greece as Kosmos (Harmony). The Biblical concept of Mot (Death) also derives from this. The Hindu-Buddhist world mountain, Sumeru, likewise has its origins in this organisation (and the name is self-evidently derived from the name of the region: Sumer!), as were Olympus, Dante's Purgatorio, Jewish Tsi'on, Valhalla, and the Teocalli ("god houses"), the Aztec temples. However, all of this came later. It reached the Nile around 2,800 BCE, China around 1,600 BCE, Peru and Middle America by 700/400 BCE. It may be of interest to note that the constellation Orion was regarded as Set (Shet in Yehudit, Seth in English) by the Egyptians, and that the pyramids, like Stonehenge, are pointed towards the constellation Orion.
Plato said: "The motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; these, therefore, every man should follow, and correcting those circuits in the head that were deranged at birth, by learning to know the harmonies and revolutions of the world, he should bring the intelligent part, according to its pristine nature, into the likeness of that which intelligence discerns, and thereby win the fulfillment of the best in life set by the gods before mankind both for his present time and for the life to come."
In other words, having established a theocracy on earth, under the sacred-king and his priesthood, all the rituals are designed to bring ordinary men and women within the four-quartered boundaries of the cosmic harmony. The development of mythic tales and their associated mysteries - the stories of Jason and Hercules, of Eshet and Osher (Osiris), of Ya'akov (Jacob) and Mosheh (Moses), of Siva and Vishnu, of Jesus and Mary - are the means of achieving this. "Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in the heavens".
*
Yavan 3,500 BCE
Strangely the several lands we now think of collectively as Greece appear to have known neither Palaeolithic nor Mesolithic settlement. The first known population to enter did so around 3,500 BCE, arriving by sea with its civilisation already intact: agrarian and pastoral in the High Neolithic style, they brought with them fine ceramic wares, polished stone tools and weapons, knives of obsidian and of course the familiar female figurines. They established colonies in Thessaly (Aeolia), at Phocis and Boeotia, building small, rectangular, flat-roofed homes of brick on stone foundations. Some spread northwards, into Macedonia, others southwards into Attica, the Peleponnese, Argolis, Arcadia, Laconia (Lacedaemonia), Messinia; but not westwards. This civilisation was destroyed in its entirety a thousand years later, giving way to Helladic Greece (also known as the Mycenaean epoch and not to be confused with the much later Hellenic), and the great era of Troy, from 2,500-1,300 BCE, culminating in the Homeric era that ended in 1184 BCE.
*
Warka 3,100 BCE
When suddenly, after the years of peace and growth, the years of mud and blood began.
In the northern villages, where the land had been made arable with dykes and irrigation canals, it was possible to graze sheep, and breed cattle, and grow fat off the fat of the land. Generations of trial and error to learn the values of the wool and hides; generations of experience to improve the techniques of pasturing; generations of knowledge to weave the wool and make clothing from the hides; generations of tradition to alter the very landscape. In the northern villages men had assumed a measure of sufficiency.
In the southern villages, where the land had remained dry and barren because the alluvial silt had not yet fertilised the soil, an attempt had been made to plant, and irrigate, and produce crops; but the land was unsuitable for farming, and offered up only scarcity. Journeys to the northern villages to trade bland crops for strong meat; journeys to the northern villages to get drunk on barley-beer; journeys to the northern villages to steal tools and cattle; journeys to the northern villages to burn down the homesteads and slaughter the sheep and cattle and bring home women as trophies. In the southern villages men had assumed a measure of jealousy.
To the point where the Subar became a divided people.
And finally, inexorably, the inevitable happened.
The men from the southern villages did not directly attack the northern villages. During the night they surrounded each of the northern villages, silently and unseen, and in the morning they sent delegations into each of the villages, on the pretext of a conference. And only then, when the elders of the villages were assembled in the open fields, only then did the attack come. The village elders were slaughtered, homes and fields were laid waste, sheep and cattle appropriated, laws and tithes imposed. The men from the southern villages had assumed a measure of predominance.
Yet even this new situation did not endure for long.
Within a decade a second, more protracted war broke out. Tribes from the south of Akkad had been driven into the land of the Subar by flooding at the sources of the Two Rivers. At first they settled peacefully in the hills beyond the northern villages, where they presented no threat to the Subar; but as the floods worsened they were compelled to resume their journey southwards, and now the Subar did oppose them.
The war between the Subar and the Sumer lasted twenty years. At its conclusion the Sumer had occupied the whole land. The leaders of the Subar were driven out, forced to live as refugees in the hills; the remainder, who submitted to the rule of the Sumerians, were gradually enslaved; the defeated remnants of the previous Subarian war, already confined within the boundaries of the now decimated village of Ur, were deprived of all rights and given the status of outcasts.
Thus there were now three distinct groups within the land of Sumer, once called Subaria: the Sumerians, who ruled; the Subar, who were enslaved; and the outcasts in the village of Ur, the site of the temple to Nanna, god of the moon.
In the Sumerian tongue the word "Subar" came to mean "a slave" or "an outcast".
In the Sumerian tongue - as still in the Egyptian 2,000 years later - the word for an outcast was "Habiru" or sometimes "Hapiru" or "Apiru" (in English Hebrew).
This account is based upon clay tablets excavated at Warka in southern Mesopotamia in the 19th century CE. It is thought by many to prefigure the Biblical legend of Kayin (Cain - meaning "jealousy") and Havel (Abel - meaning "vanity"), as well as the flight of Terach, Av-Raham's father, from Mesopotamia.
*
Jemdet Nasr 3,100 BCE
The non-Semitic conquerors of the Subar called themselves "Sag-giga", which means "the black-headed ones", their newly acquired land "Kengir", their language "Emegir"; the people of Akkad, from whose land they came, used the name Sumer to describe the people, their language and their land, and it is through Akkadian writings, under the name Sumer, that they have come down to us in History.
The town of Uruk (today called Warka, and sometimes Erech) is the capital of Sumeria, fortress-town of its conquerors and rulers, site of the Temple of Utu (called Dumuzi, called Tammuz, called Dionysus, called Adonis), chief among all the gods. The fortifications were built by Gilgamesh; the seven sages laid the foundations of the Temple. Though the Sumer and the Subar are distinct groups, they have begun to fuse both ethnically and culturally. Yet there is no denying the hierarchy of Sumeria. The Subar and the Habiru have been subdued, their principal god, Nanna the moon-god, has been deposed in favour of his son Utu.
The village of Ur, home of the Habiru, seat of the temple of Inanna, plays only a minor role among the villages of Sumeria, but its Habiru population have remained loyal to their goddess, and they alone among people, in Ur alone among towns, continue to uphold and obey the matriarchal moon-cult. Such obedience may be seen by the Sumer as a symptom of potential rebelliousness, but the Habiru are an outcast tribe (the Sanskrit word is "harajan") with no practical means of rebellion, and such heresy, although illegal, may be quietly tolerated. No Habiru male may wed a Sumerian or Subarian woman - it is possible to recognise a Habiru male by the sign of his circumcision, a sign appointed by Inanna to symbolise the clipping of the vine that it may run to fruit. Only in Charan, many weeks journey to the north, and in Yericho, far to the east, does Inanna rule unchallenged. The Subar have laid aside the moon-cult in favour of the Sumerian sun-cult, honouring the heresiarch Utu, whose temple Sargon would construct, whose palace Cyrus the Mede would fortify.
Yet the knowledge acquired by these people was not lost with their subjugation. Assimilated by the Sumerians, it continued to grow steadily and flourish over a period of years. Cattle-breeding, early attempts to tame the wild camel, domestication of the donkey, pottery, clay-brick masonry, cultivation of the carob tree, artificial canals, the discovery of glass - all these, in however primitive a form, were the achievements of the Sumerian peoples. At Jemdet Nasr a cylindrical seal has been excavated, the oldest of its kind yet found. Tools from the mound at al-Ubayd point indisputably to the invention of bronze. Stone tablets at Warka are inscribed with pictographs, a crude version of cuneiform which heralds the origins of written language.
On this evidence modern archaeologists have been able to disprove, once and for all, the version of the dawn of Humankind offered in the 3rd century BCE by Berossus, a priest at Babylon. According to Berossus, a race of monsters, half-human and half-fish, emerged from the depths of the Great Waters one day, innately possessed of the skills of agriculture, metalwork and literature, and became Humankind.
*
Akkad 3,000 BCE
Pre-history is over and now modern history begins; the distinction lying in the fact that history is what is documented. The earliest known texts survive from Ur circa 2,800 BCE. The classical age of Sumeria runs from 2,800 to 2,360 BCE. What we previously deduced from archaeological remains is now primary source evidence: small city-states, theocracies ruled by gods who owned both city and land, the temple as manor house with gardens, fields, storehouses. An earthly head of state known as the "lugal" or "great man" (Av-Ram means the same!), with his "ensi" or priest. Kingship came down from Heaven - therefore the ensi was technically superior to the lugal (c.f. the relationship between Shmu-El - Samuel - and Sha'ul - Saul)! Metal-working (attributed in the Tanach to Tuval Kayin) was accompanied by gem-cutting. Solid-wheeled vehicles were drawn by oxen and asses for both military and peaceful uses. Scribal schools were attached to the temples, and here the epic tales and myths were written down, where previously they had been transmitted only through oral tradition.
The Sumerians were still polytheists, like all the peoples of the world. En-Lil the lord of the storm stood at the head of the polytheon. Each deity had a city where he or she was worshipped: En-Lil at Nippur, Inanna at Ur, Ninhursag at al-Ubayd, Enki or Ea at Eridu. Heavenly order, as we have seen, was mirrored in the earthly political structure - the later Greek amphictyony and the tribal structure of the Beney Yisra-El would do the same. The earliest known law codes are not the earliest law codes – the documents that have been unearthed demonstrate the "reforms" of Urukagina of Lagash in 2,400 BCE; one has to have had something previous in order to reform it.
The Sumerians were not Semites, but the Akkadians were. By the middle of the 3rd millennium they predominated in northern Sumer, having previously been nomads on the fringes who became civilised more slowly. But gradually they took over everything, using Sumerian cuneiform to write - the earliest Akkadian texts date from the mid 3rd millennium BCE. They also adopted the Sumerian polytheon in addition to retaining their own gods; but using Semitic names – a pattern of religious assimilation by absorption that will be repeated throughout human history.
The Sumerians were not Semites, but the Akkadians were. By the middle of the 3rd millennium they predominated in northern Sumer, having previously been nomads on the fringes who became civilised more slowly. But gradually they took over everything, using Sumerian cuneiform to write - the earliest Akkadian texts date from the mid 3rd millennium BCE. They also adopted the Sumerian polytheon in addition to retaining their own gods; but using Semitic names – a pattern of religious assimilation by absorption that will be repeated throughout human history.
The Akkadian empire lasted from 2,360 to 2,180 BCE, founded by Sargon who came to power in Kish, overthrew Lugal-Zaggisi of Erech, and created the world's first empire. His capital was the city of Akkad, near Bav-El (Babylon). Two sons and then a grandson, Naramsin, succeeded him, making this also the world's first known dynasty. Its power extended from Eylam to the Mediterranean (this too is reflected in the stories of Av-Ram and Av-Raham; this too helps us understand how Jones' "common source" of language spread through a much bigger "common source" of culture), and made military expeditions even further east and south, trading as far as the Indus valley. Under Sargon, political focus shifted from the temple to a new invention: the palace. Kings already held divine prerogatives, but Sargon and his heirs did more than hold them: Naramsin, for example, is depicted with a horned tiara and himself rather more than life-sized, his name written with the divine determinative – Naram-Sin. The Akkadian language grew and spread, informing every language in the Middle East. Though the empire only lasted two hundred years, its impact is still felt today!
Sargon of Agade (the common English mispronunciation of Akkad) came to power in the catalystic year 2,350 BCE – so it took him just ten years to found his empire. A text attributed to him reads as follows (click here to see it): "Sargon am I, the mighty king, Monarch of Akkad. My mother was of lowly birth; my father I knew not; the brother of my father is a mountain dweller; and my city, Azupiranu, lies on the bank of the Euphrates. My lowly mother conceived and bore me in secrecy; placed me in a basket of rushes; sealed it with bitumen; and set me in the river, which, however, did not engulf me. The river bore me up. And it carried me to Akki, the irrigator, who took me from the river, raised me as his son, made of me a gardener: and while I was a gardener, the goddess Ishtar loved me. Then I ruled the kingdom..."
The original myth, preceding Sargon but borrowed by him to raise his stature, is that of the divine mother and child - the births of both Osher and Mosheh will reflect it. The archetypal motifs are visible: modified virgin birth; father as mountain god; exposure on the waters (cf Erichthonius, Vyasa, Osher); rescue and fostering (cf Romulus, Mosheh); hero as gardener (elsewhere as shepherd, either way fructifier of the goddess); beloved of the goddess (or her priestess, the princess/queen: Yedid-Yah, which is David's full name, and Hera-Kles, the Greek original of Hercules, both mean "beloved of the goddess"). The same motif, of course, resurfaces in the Tanach as the legend of Mosheh, in his case probably borrowed from Osher rather than Sargon; Sargon does not appear by name in the Tanach, but stories of Nimrod the Hunter in Genesis 10, and especially the stories of Nimrod in Midrash, many of which also appear in the Qur'an, are likely to have had their roots in Sargon, who ruled the land in which Av-Raham and Yishma-El's people were already "Habiru".
Sargon of Agade (the common English mispronunciation of Akkad) came to power in the catalystic year 2,350 BCE – so it took him just ten years to found his empire. A text attributed to him reads as follows (click here to see it): "Sargon am I, the mighty king, Monarch of Akkad. My mother was of lowly birth; my father I knew not; the brother of my father is a mountain dweller; and my city, Azupiranu, lies on the bank of the Euphrates. My lowly mother conceived and bore me in secrecy; placed me in a basket of rushes; sealed it with bitumen; and set me in the river, which, however, did not engulf me. The river bore me up. And it carried me to Akki, the irrigator, who took me from the river, raised me as his son, made of me a gardener: and while I was a gardener, the goddess Ishtar loved me. Then I ruled the kingdom..."
The original myth, preceding Sargon but borrowed by him to raise his stature, is that of the divine mother and child - the births of both Osher and Mosheh will reflect it. The archetypal motifs are visible: modified virgin birth; father as mountain god; exposure on the waters (cf Erichthonius, Vyasa, Osher); rescue and fostering (cf Romulus, Mosheh); hero as gardener (elsewhere as shepherd, either way fructifier of the goddess); beloved of the goddess (or her priestess, the princess/queen: Yedid-Yah, which is David's full name, and Hera-Kles, the Greek original of Hercules, both mean "beloved of the goddess"). The same motif, of course, resurfaces in the Tanach as the legend of Mosheh, in his case probably borrowed from Osher rather than Sargon; Sargon does not appear by name in the Tanach, but stories of Nimrod the Hunter in Genesis 10, and especially the stories of Nimrod in Midrash, many of which also appear in the Qur'an, are likely to have had their roots in Sargon, who ruled the land in which Av-Raham and Yishma-El's people were already "Habiru".
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Egyptian Carnac 2,900 BCE
Or Karnak, in most English renderings of the phonetic; but this allows the connection with that other, slightly later Carnac, the megalithic one in Brittany.
By the 3rd millennium BCE Mitsrayim (Egypt) had become unified, with Upper Egypt very much in control. King Narmer (also known as King Menes; first dynasty, 29th century) was depicted with the white crown of the south and the red crown of the north: Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt. According to Herodotus, Narmer raised the dyke that protected Memphis from Nile flooding. He is buried in the tomb of Abydos, surrounded by an enormous human congregation, their hands over their faces or throats, or clutching at their hair, in a manner that is disturbingly reminiscent of the crematoria at Auschwitz and suggests they did not go willingly; alongside the human company he is also comforted with elegant furniture and a vast abattoir of sacrificed rams (though not wild asses, which had been tamed in the Nile valley around 3,000 BCE; the ass became associated with Set, the god of the underworld, and would not have been a suitable king-companion on the journey to the afterlife; the Habiru would later associate it with Sha'ul (King Saul), his name a variation of She'ol, the Beney Yisra-El underworld).
The 2nd dynasty, which followed, lasted until the 27th century, and when we speak of "ancient" Mitsrayim this is the period we are thinking of. The Sumerian temple pattern reached Mitsrayim around 2,800 BCE and would soon inspire the building of the pyramids - though actually the earliest known pyramids were further south, in Mali and the Sudan, and it was probably their design, supplemented by the Sumerian, which the Mitsri adopted. Before them, burials in Mitsrayim had been in open pits, and would remain so for mere mortals - mummification, even for royalty, is unknown before 2,500 BCE (Maidum, Lower Egypt).
The oldest pyramid in Mitsrayim was the step-pyramid built by Djoser (often rendered in English as Zoser though he was actually called Netjerykhet) at Saqqara, near Memphis, in 2,650 BCE; its mortuary temple is the oldest known of hewn stone anywhere, and the step-structure follows the Sumerian ziggurat precisely. The 4th dynasty pyramids were the greatest: that of Khafre (sometimes called Khefren) and Menkaure rising in the 26th and 25th centuries, the Great Pyramid at Memphis among the last: 481 feet high, with a square base 755 by 755 feet, requiring 2,300,000 blocks of hewn stone (who on Earth counted them!) at an average weight of two and a half tons; there was no machinery available to assist in erecting them, save only ropes, pulleys and slaves; and yet nil error!
The 5th and 6th dynasties, from the 25th to the 23rd centuries, built more but less magnificently. To them belong the Pyramid Texts, containing spells and incantations to assure the safe passage of Pharaoh to the next world - written versions of much more ancient texts. Mitsrayim too was now engaged in world-wide trade – and world-wide really does mean world-wide, for there is strong evidence in the base cultures of Polynesia and South America that a north-west passage had been sought and found long before Sir Francis Drake: to give two simple examples: the first temple-platforms erected in Peru, in 2,400 BCE, bear a remarkable similarity to both the Babylonian ziggurats and the Egyptian step-pyramids, while their ornamentation is strictly Egyptian; and at exactly the same time that the Peruvian temple-platforms were being erected, the megaliths of Carnac in Brittany were taking their name from the Carnac megaliths of Egypt, and the circular temple model known from Kena'ani shrines like Gil-Gal was being mirrored in Brython's Stonehenge, just as it would be in the solar observatories of Colombia, Guatemala and Belize at the same epoch.
That Mitsrayim held sway over Kena'an, economically and therefore politically, is witnessed by the number of Egyptian words entering the Hurrian language at this time, and the number of early shrines in Kena'an bearing Egyptian names (Giv-Yah, Giv-On et al). Other archaeological finds provide evidence of military campaigns in Asia, and the colony at Byblos (Ugarit) provided a major source of wood, mostly cedar, as it had for the Sumerians previously, and would later for King Shelomoh (Solomon). The Ugaritic alphabet that developed two thousand years later was modelled on Egyptian hieroglyphics, probably using the simplified (demotic) version, the vulgarisation of classical Egyptian into army slang.
In Mitsrayim Pharaoh was not the viceroy of the gods but the earthly manifestation of Hor or Ra himself. A vizier ruled on his behalf, as we know from the Yoseph (Joseph) stories. No formal law-code has yet been found, and it is entirely possible that there was none; nonetheless the Pharaoh understood that his duty was to uphold Ma'at, Justice, however that may have been defined. Religiously the Egyptians were polytheistic, but no enduring ordered system ever emerged, only repeated failed attempts at systematisation and theological controversies: the cosmogonies of On (Heliopolis) and el-Ashmuneim (Hermopolis), Memphite Theology, the cult of Akhenaten, the replacement of Ra at the head of the polytheon by Hor – the first temples to Ra appeared around 2,500 BCE, in Maidum in Lower Egypt - and vice versa. The Egyptian polytheon contains more gods than all the other world cults put together, including every beast, fish, bird and insect known to them. What differentiates Egyptian religion most however is the complete absence of local gods.
Megiddo, 2,800 BCE
Kena'an during the 3rd millennium BCE inhabited the early bronze age. It was not wealthy like the cultures of the great rivers of Mitsrayim and Mesopotamia, precisely because it had no great rivers like Mitsrayim and Mesopotamia; though it did have the Great Sea, the Mediterranean, which Egyptians and Phoenicians were exploring. Known towns from this period include Megiddo, Yericho, Beit She'an, Ai, Shechem (today's Nablus), Gezer and Lachish: all fortified cities. The land was properly called Kinnahu, in the Hurrian language of its indigenous people - who we think of as Beney Kena'an or Canaanites. Biblical Yehudit was a dialect of Hurrian, though later texts show evidence of the influence of many other languages, and some passages, such as parts of Job, are in Aramaic. Like the Beney Yisra-El, the Hurrian people were Semitic. The Ras Shamra texts of the 14th century BCE recount the myths of these people, and many are repeated, paralleled, borrowed, even plagiarised in tales purportedly original to the Yehudit Tanach. Kena'an at that time extended as far north as Byblos, beyond Tsur (Tyre) and Tsidon (Sidon) and even beyond Beirut. Strictly speaking the Hurrians – who appear in the Bible as Chorites or Horites – were of the same Phoenician stock as the Lebanese, originally Hittite.
Mari, 2,400 BCE
Somewhere between 2,400 and 2,000 BCE the roofs of houses in Mesopotamia became flat, using timber beams covered with earth and mud plaster where previously tent-style roofs had imitated the wandering mishkan of the Bedou. Academics and scholars study artefacts, bones, reliques, to understand how cultures grew and changed; but somehow they never seem to consider social factors. This they should not have missed: the transition from an enclosed tent, even if it had windows, to a flat roof, has been as significant to Middle Eastern life as the invention of writing or the discovery of iron. Better analogy: 20th century CE philosophers all lamented "alienated Human", sitting in silence next to complete strangers on crowded trains, solitary in bed-sits, humanity reduced to self-bound individuals; then along came the Internet with its social media sites, and everybody on the planet could communicate with everybody, and started doing so. King David would never have seen Bat Sheva had it not been for flat roofs. From Morocco to Calcutta, the flat roof cut an opening in society larger and more fully circular than any tent window could ever have done.
The 5th and 6th dynasties, from the 25th to the 23rd centuries, built more but less magnificently. To them belong the Pyramid Texts, containing spells and incantations to assure the safe passage of Pharaoh to the next world - written versions of much more ancient texts. Mitsrayim too was now engaged in world-wide trade – and world-wide really does mean world-wide, for there is strong evidence in the base cultures of Polynesia and South America that a north-west passage had been sought and found long before Sir Francis Drake: to give two simple examples: the first temple-platforms erected in Peru, in 2,400 BCE, bear a remarkable similarity to both the Babylonian ziggurats and the Egyptian step-pyramids, while their ornamentation is strictly Egyptian; and at exactly the same time that the Peruvian temple-platforms were being erected, the megaliths of Carnac in Brittany were taking their name from the Carnac megaliths of Egypt, and the circular temple model known from Kena'ani shrines like Gil-Gal was being mirrored in Brython's Stonehenge, just as it would be in the solar observatories of Colombia, Guatemala and Belize at the same epoch.
That Mitsrayim held sway over Kena'an, economically and therefore politically, is witnessed by the number of Egyptian words entering the Hurrian language at this time, and the number of early shrines in Kena'an bearing Egyptian names (Giv-Yah, Giv-On et al). Other archaeological finds provide evidence of military campaigns in Asia, and the colony at Byblos (Ugarit) provided a major source of wood, mostly cedar, as it had for the Sumerians previously, and would later for King Shelomoh (Solomon). The Ugaritic alphabet that developed two thousand years later was modelled on Egyptian hieroglyphics, probably using the simplified (demotic) version, the vulgarisation of classical Egyptian into army slang.
In Mitsrayim Pharaoh was not the viceroy of the gods but the earthly manifestation of Hor or Ra himself. A vizier ruled on his behalf, as we know from the Yoseph (Joseph) stories. No formal law-code has yet been found, and it is entirely possible that there was none; nonetheless the Pharaoh understood that his duty was to uphold Ma'at, Justice, however that may have been defined. Religiously the Egyptians were polytheistic, but no enduring ordered system ever emerged, only repeated failed attempts at systematisation and theological controversies: the cosmogonies of On (Heliopolis) and el-Ashmuneim (Hermopolis), Memphite Theology, the cult of Akhenaten, the replacement of Ra at the head of the polytheon by Hor – the first temples to Ra appeared around 2,500 BCE, in Maidum in Lower Egypt - and vice versa. The Egyptian polytheon contains more gods than all the other world cults put together, including every beast, fish, bird and insect known to them. What differentiates Egyptian religion most however is the complete absence of local gods.
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Megiddo, 2,800 BCE
Kena'an during the 3rd millennium BCE inhabited the early bronze age. It was not wealthy like the cultures of the great rivers of Mitsrayim and Mesopotamia, precisely because it had no great rivers like Mitsrayim and Mesopotamia; though it did have the Great Sea, the Mediterranean, which Egyptians and Phoenicians were exploring. Known towns from this period include Megiddo, Yericho, Beit She'an, Ai, Shechem (today's Nablus), Gezer and Lachish: all fortified cities. The land was properly called Kinnahu, in the Hurrian language of its indigenous people - who we think of as Beney Kena'an or Canaanites. Biblical Yehudit was a dialect of Hurrian, though later texts show evidence of the influence of many other languages, and some passages, such as parts of Job, are in Aramaic. Like the Beney Yisra-El, the Hurrian people were Semitic. The Ras Shamra texts of the 14th century BCE recount the myths of these people, and many are repeated, paralleled, borrowed, even plagiarised in tales purportedly original to the Yehudit Tanach. Kena'an at that time extended as far north as Byblos, beyond Tsur (Tyre) and Tsidon (Sidon) and even beyond Beirut. Strictly speaking the Hurrians – who appear in the Bible as Chorites or Horites – were of the same Phoenician stock as the Lebanese, originally Hittite.
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Mari, 2,400 BCE
Somewhere between 2,400 and 2,000 BCE the roofs of houses in Mesopotamia became flat, using timber beams covered with earth and mud plaster where previously tent-style roofs had imitated the wandering mishkan of the Bedou. Academics and scholars study artefacts, bones, reliques, to understand how cultures grew and changed; but somehow they never seem to consider social factors. This they should not have missed: the transition from an enclosed tent, even if it had windows, to a flat roof, has been as significant to Middle Eastern life as the invention of writing or the discovery of iron. Better analogy: 20th century CE philosophers all lamented "alienated Human", sitting in silence next to complete strangers on crowded trains, solitary in bed-sits, humanity reduced to self-bound individuals; then along came the Internet with its social media sites, and everybody on the planet could communicate with everybody, and started doing so. King David would never have seen Bat Sheva had it not been for flat roofs. From Morocco to Calcutta, the flat roof cut an opening in society larger and more fully circular than any tent window could ever have done.
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Erech, 2,200 BCE
During the 24th BCE century, power in Mesopotamia passed from the Sumerians to the Akkadians, but this too waned following an invasion by the Guti people from the Zagros mountains in 2,200 BCE. The Guti ruled for a hundred years, and left behind them a dark age. The Hurrians then infiltrated the land of the two rivers, and Emorites (Amorites) - who Ezekiel 16:3 insists were one of the progenitors of the Biblical patriarchs – established themselves in upper Mesopotamia. The Sumerian revival began under the 3rd dynasty of Ur, between 2,060 and 1,950 BCE, with the defeat of Utu-Hegal, king of Erech, by Ur-Nammu. The dynasty now styled itself "kings of Sumer and Akkad". One of its descendants, known as Ensi though this was more likely his priestly status than his name, styled himself "shepherd of Ningirsu". But Sumer again died out, and its language was effectively dead, except in surviving written texts, by the 18th century BCE.
Among the achievements of this period was Ur-Nammu's law code, the oldest known; a tax system introduced by Shulgi at Ur; much development of the calendar; scribal schools and a reform of the system for calculating weights and measures. But Mesopotamia still suffered, as it still suffers today, from a scarcity of wood for building. Most houses and temples discovered in the region, even in this period, were still composed largely of mud-brick.
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Goshen, 2,000 BCE
The beginning of the early bronze age between 2,300 and 1,800 BCE coincides with the start of the 2nd millennium of the pre-Christian era, and more significantly with the revival of Mitsrayim at the start of its Middle Kingdom. Kena'an at this time is filled with nomads, self-identifying as Emorites, perhaps including the Av-Rahamic tribes – who, as noted above, likewise claimed that "my father was an Emorite" - though Biblical dating likes to set that at a later period, somewhere between 1,700 and 1,300 BCE. Archaeologists have found evidence of massive destruction at Ai, Yericho and Megiddo, all of which likewise conflicts with the Biblical narrative, where these events are connected with the conquest by Yehoshua after the death of Mosheh. Perhaps there were many waves of nomadic immigration and repeated destructions of the major cities. What is certain is that the newcomers gave up their nomadic life for a sedentary life in towns and villages in the early years of the 2nd millennium BCE, while Edom, Mo-Av and Amon remained nomadic until the 13th century BCE.
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Ur, 1,900 BCE
The era known as Ur 3 lasted from 2,060 to 1,950 BCE. Its last king was named Ibbi-Sin. Ur collapsed as a result of states breaking away from its centralised control: Eylam to the east, in what would become Persia; Ashur along the Upper Tigris; Mari in the middle region of the Euphrates. Ur itself collapsed when Ishbi-Irra of Mari invaded, making his capital at Isin and conquering northern Sumer. In 1,950 the Eylamites invaded and took Ur captive, deposing Ibbi-Sin. The city was ravaged. A destruction of precisely this kind is described in Genesis as the reason for Av-Ram's family fleeing to Charan (Genesis 11:27-32).
After Ur 3 the land became divided into rival states such as Isin and Larsa. Bavel (Babylon) rose to prominence around 1,830 BCE under Sumu-Abum, and gradually expanded through repeated wars with Eylam. At this epoch the scribal schools at Nippur began to make copies of Sumerian texts, including the Akkadian law codes created by Lipit-Ishtar, at Isin and Eshnunna, around 1,900 BCE. Long before Hammurabi, but later than Urukagina of Lagash or that of Ur-Nammu, they bear a remarkable resemblance to the Mosaic codes.
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Chixian Shenzhou (China), 1,876 BCE
The first recorded eclipse of the sun. Two Chinese astrologer-priests were executed in the 22nd century for failing to predict an earlier one. Clay tablets from Babylon record an eclipse in Ugarit in 1,375 BCE. Later records identify total solar eclipses that "turned day into night" in 1063 and 763 BCE. Yehoshua's claim to have "made the sun stand still over Giv-On and the moon over the Valley of Ayalon" (Joshua 10:12) was probably an eclipse.
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Mari, 1750 BCE
The royal palace of Zimri-Lim at Mari, in Northern Mesopotamia on the Euphrates, took centuries to build; it consisted of two hundred and sixty rooms. More than twenty-five thousand clay tablets, written in Akkadian cuneiform, have been discovered, of which some eight thousand were letters, the rest administrative, legal and financial documents. From these, an almost complete map of the ancient Middle East could be constructed, listing five hundred towns and villages previously unknown.
Among the gods and goddesses of Mari were Dagan, the storm-god, Ishtar, the fertility goddess, and Shamash, the all-seeing and all-knowing sun-god, attributes that would be attached to Elohim by the later Beney Yisra-El. On cylindrical seals he is depicted as standing between two doors, as Elohim would stand invisibly between Bo'az and Yachin in the Temple in Yeru-Shalayim. Ishtar would become Astarte and Asherah elsewhere in the region, and is probably a form of Sarai-Sarah, as Dagan is probably an early form of Dagon, the corn-god of the Pelishtim (Philistines), and Shamash the Akkadian equivalent of Babylonian Utu-Dumuzi, as he will later become Shimshon (Samson) of the Pelishtim and the tribe of Dan. The greatest of all their texts, "The Epic of Gilgamesh", includes a No'ach-like character who survives the Flood and regenerates the human universe, Utnapishtim by name; in Yehudit the Hitpa'el (reflexive) form of the word "nephesh", meaning "soul" or "spirit", yields "lehitnapesh", an unused verb which would, if employed, mean "to generate souls".
Mari had been inhabited since the 5th millennium BCE, reached its peak during the 3rd and 2nd millennia, and was destroyed, probably by Sargon of Akkad, in the middle of the 24th century; rebuilt, it achieved a second golden age as an Emorite kingship, but was destroyed a second time by the Babylonians, under Hammurabi, in 1,757 BCE.
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Ur, 1,720 BCE
A terrible struggle for power dominated Mesopotamia between 1,750 and 1,550 BCE, with Eylam (Persia), Ashur (Assyria) and Mari vying to control the region – was this the War of the Kings in which Av-Raham is described as taking a leading part (Genesis 14)? Victory went to Mari, an Emorite people – Av-Raham was an Emorite. The borders of the new empire extended from Bavel to Carchemish. The Mari developed siege techniques including the battering ram, horse-drawn chariots, and a fire-signal system. Mari itself was an immense and magnificent city, whose palace contained the world's first known toilets and drains! Trade out of Mari went as far as Ugarit, Cyprus, Crete and Anatolia.
Hammurabi's father, Sin-Muballit, defeated Mari in 1,735 BCE, and power now lay entirely with Babylon. Marduk was now the chief god; his temple was called Etemenanki, and if there was an actual Tower of Babel, then this was it. Astronomy began to replace astrology as an exact science, and the first known encyclopaedia was created. Not that astrology disappeared; magic and hepatoscopy remained as significant as the rational processes which led to Hammurabi's law-code.
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Knossos 1,700 BCE
The greatest temple complex and cultic structure yet known, Knossos by name, from the Greek, though today we would know it as Heraklion, the main port city on the northern coast of Crete. Then it was both the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilisation, from where the Minoans traded across the Levant: goods as well as myths and legends, of which the most famous is that of Daedalus, who built the labyrinth at Knossos, complete with a man-eating bull named the Minotaur at its centre. In fact there was no labyrinth as such, though Knossos was certainly labyrinthine in its structure; the "labrys" was a double-edged bronze axe. A highly literate people, the Minoans were responsible for inventing the envelope; a clay envelope in fact, with the letter sealed inside when the clay was fired in the kiln; and then smashed to release its contents.
Why the Minoan civilisation collapsed remains a matter for speculation, but not that it did so, somewhere between 1,380 and 1,100 BCE; what is known is that the Cretans who fled had to find somewhere else to live, and that most of them ended up on the shores of Kena'an, where they would become known as the Pelishtim, or Philistines, though they also appear in the Biblical texts as Bene Cheret, the sons of Crete.
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Bavel (Babylon) 1,600 BCE
The people of Bavel were famous for adding a more scientific form of astronomy to the previous astrology, for considerable advances in mathematics, and the systematic observation of the planets for the purpose of predictions; the observations made at nearby Kish are so accurate we can date the Mesopotamian kings by them. And the sun god had by now been replaced as chief god by En-Lil of Nippur, in much the way that Zeus would replace Chronos in the Greek mythology, and presumably as Ya'akov (Yah-Ekev) later replaced Av-Raham (Av-Ram), and YHVH Elohim, among the Beney Yisra-El.
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Avaris, 1,600 BCE
Turquoise and faience – an imitation turquoise - were in use in Mitsrayim (Egypt) from 1,800 BCE. By this time Osher (Osiris) was established as the god of the underworld: slain by his brother (in some versions his uncle) Set (Shet in Yehudit, Seth in English), annually resurrected by Isis and Nephthys, exactly as Tammuz in Mesopotamia. The Set cult would later become central to Kena'an, particularly in the stories of Sha'ul (Saul) and David.
Mitsrayim had been dynastically stable for centuries, but in 1,640 BCE the Middle Kingdom, that of the 13th and 14th dynasties, came to an end when an Asiatic people known as the Hyksos ("heka khasewet" in Egyptian means "rulers of foreign lands") invaded Mitsrayim from the Levant, their priest-kings dressed in coats of many colours, as a result of which they earned the erroneous sobriquet of "shepherd kings". In fact the first Hyksos had arrived in Mitsrayim as early as 1,720 BCE, followed by a second wave around 1,690 BCE, so the conquest may have been slow colonisation leading to eventual mastery, rather than invasion and war.
Once established, they moved the capital from On (Heliopolis) to Avaris in Goshen, the very land where Yoseph settled Ya'akov and his brothers upon their arrival. The Hyksos ruled for about a hundred years, somewhat less than the period of slavery described in Exodus, and their empire included Kena'an. One Hyksos king bore the name Khayana; given that the Hyksos were Emorites, this may be a variant of Kayin, which is Cain.
The stories of Av-Raham and Yitschak's journeys into Mitsrayim suggest that they may themselves have been Hyksos, with Yoseph serving as Vizier to the Hyksos Pharaoh. Certainly the Hyksos conquest coincides chronologically with the Yosephic period and the slavery of the Habiru that followed; the capital of the Hyksos kingdom was Avaris, in Goshen, where the Habiru were encamped. Hyksos names are generally Hurrian, which is to say a late development of Hittite, with Anat and Ba'al amongst their principal deities; though none so important as Set, who was worshiped in the form of a boar, and the eating of whose flesh was sacred to his formal ceremonies, which included orgiastic rites. It is highly probable that the specific abomination of pig-flesh, and the list of sexual taboos listed in the Torah, reflect the Habiru aspiration to rid themselves of Set in all his forms, and that the turkey eaten at today's Christmas in the European world is a replacement of the Egyptian pork-feast at the winter equinox, which is still a pork-feast among the Hispanics of both North and South America.
The Hyksos introduced a new type of bow, made from horn, wood and sinew laminated together, and the horse-drawn chariot – further evidence of Asiatic origins, as the horse was unknown in Mitsrayim before their arrival.
Bible scholars are interested in the fact that it was the Theban Pharaoh of Upper Egypt – the southern part, towards the Sudan, which the Hyksos never conquered – who finally drove the foreigners out and re-established both the former kingship and its polytheon of gods. His name was Ach-Mousa, and among the records of his defeat of the Hyksos Pharaoh are a covenant renewal ceremony at the holy mountain in the Sinai desert, where the old gods were revived in their traditional scultpural forms, including Hor as a golden calf; after which he went on to cross the desert, and conquer Kena'an in a manner remarkably similar to that of Yehoshu'a (Joshua), down to the very order of the very place-names.
Chatsor, 1,550 BCE
Isin, 1,500 BCE
While one Hurrian-Hittite connected people were conquering Mitsrayim, another was being defeated after briefly occupying the vacuum left by the fall of the old Babylonian empire. They called themselves Kassites, and they came from the Zagros mountains in Persia. They came, indeed, three centuries before they finally arrived, unsuccessfully attacking Babylon itself during the reign of Hammurabi's son Samsu-Iluna. By 1,600 BCE Bavel (Babylon) had fallen to Hittites out of Anatolia, who carried off the statue of Marduk and replaced him with their own Shuqamuna , who was not an early form of the Buddha, despite the similarity of names.
Mycenae 1,400 BCE
The early bronze age grows into the high bronze age. The culture of Minoan Crete merges with Helladic culture in the Aegean. New cities rise which will dominate the world for a thousand years, and then forever: Athens and Thebes the pre-eminent among them. This is the age of Homer, but also the age of military not economic conquest. The Mycenaeans rooted their civilisation in Argolis and the Peloponnese, but branched it in Epirus, Macedonia, the coast of Asia Minor, deeper into the Levant, and westwards too, into Bavaria, Ireland, Cornwall. They took Crete in 1,450 BCE, merged Minoan culture with Mycenaean, adapted their Linear A script into Linear B, added the double-axe (the labrys) to their armoury, defeated Troy. They buried their dead in beehive tombs (see Genesis 35:8); but mummified their nobility seated upright and surrounded by gold masks, tiaras, armour, and jewelled weapons; cremated their heroes - Achilles, Patroclus, others. What they appear to have lacked was a priesthood, and this is profoundly significant, for the West has been torn this past two thousand years between the Hellenic and the Judaic, and what most distinguishes the two is the position of Humankind in relation to the gods: the Greeks turned to philosophy and exalted the capacity of Humankind to serve the gods through reason and understanding, while the Beney Yisra-El turned to theology and exalted the capacity of Humankind to serve the gods through faith and ritual.
Kena'an 1,300 BCE
The chronology of the Tanach is in disagreement with that of the geologists, but not by much – a mere 570 million years, give or take the odd two thousand. Kena'an, 1,500 BCE, is (more or less) the date at which [most] archaeologists {generally} reckon the arrival of Av-Ram from Mesopotamia, though some would place it up to seven hundred years earlier. That land was part of the Hittite empire, which extended through Anatolia and Turkey all the way to Mitsrayim and would endure for at least another hundred years beyond whenever Av-Raham was. It was from the Hittites that Av-Raham purchased the Cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah.
The stories of Av-Raham and Yitschak's journeys into Mitsrayim suggest that they may themselves have been Hyksos, with Yoseph serving as Vizier to the Hyksos Pharaoh. Certainly the Hyksos conquest coincides chronologically with the Yosephic period and the slavery of the Habiru that followed; the capital of the Hyksos kingdom was Avaris, in Goshen, where the Habiru were encamped. Hyksos names are generally Hurrian, which is to say a late development of Hittite, with Anat and Ba'al amongst their principal deities; though none so important as Set, who was worshiped in the form of a boar, and the eating of whose flesh was sacred to his formal ceremonies, which included orgiastic rites. It is highly probable that the specific abomination of pig-flesh, and the list of sexual taboos listed in the Torah, reflect the Habiru aspiration to rid themselves of Set in all his forms, and that the turkey eaten at today's Christmas in the European world is a replacement of the Egyptian pork-feast at the winter equinox, which is still a pork-feast among the Hispanics of both North and South America.
The Hyksos introduced a new type of bow, made from horn, wood and sinew laminated together, and the horse-drawn chariot – further evidence of Asiatic origins, as the horse was unknown in Mitsrayim before their arrival.
Bible scholars are interested in the fact that it was the Theban Pharaoh of Upper Egypt – the southern part, towards the Sudan, which the Hyksos never conquered – who finally drove the foreigners out and re-established both the former kingship and its polytheon of gods. His name was Ach-Mousa, and among the records of his defeat of the Hyksos Pharaoh are a covenant renewal ceremony at the holy mountain in the Sinai desert, where the old gods were revived in their traditional scultpural forms, including Hor as a golden calf; after which he went on to cross the desert, and conquer Kena'an in a manner remarkably similar to that of Yehoshu'a (Joshua), down to the very order of the very place-names.
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Chatsor, 1,550 BCE
Hazor, in most English renditions.
The 17th and 16th centuries also saw Hurrian invasions, from the mountains of Armenia, probably Urartu (Ararat). As a people, they are first mentioned in cuneiform texts of the 24th century BCE, with Hurrian and Indo-Aryan names appearing in Kena'an at this time, though Semitic names were still predominant. The Tanach calls the Hurrians Chorim (Horites) - usually mistranslated as "mountain people" from a confusion with "Har", meaning "mountain", though in fact the translation may be correct and the error in the Yehudit. The horse-drawn chariot and the bow made of horn, wood and sinew, which the Hyksos introduced into Mitsrayim, were probably borrowed from the Hurrians. They also developed fortified camps, of which the ruins of two are known, at Chatsor in Kena'an and Qatna in Ashur (Assyria). A city-state system developed in Kena'an at this time, long before the Greeks made it famous. References to the Horites in Genesis are probably anachronistic.
Thebes, 1,520 BCE
Early in the 16th century BCE the Thebans rallied for freedom under Seqenenre-Re. His son Kamose (Ach-Mousa) ruled after his death, succeeded by his brother Amosis (A-Mousa) from 1,570 to 1,546 BCE - though these two "brothers" may actually be the same person, and only the spelling of the name making them seem like two people. Whether one or two, the 18th dynasty was founded in their time, and in 1,550 BCE the Hyksos expelled, Avaris captured, and the remnant pursued across the desert into Kena'an - unimpeded by tsunamis at the Red Sea! Was this in fact the original Exodus: an Egyptian tale, not a Beney Yisra-Eli legend at all, but with the stories told by the remnants of both eventually conjoined? Once in Kena'an, Ach-Mousa laid siege to Sharuhen (Tel Ajjul) on the southern frontier for three years, then swept across Asia to establish an empire larger than any the world had yet seen. This was the dawn of Mitsrayim's golden age.
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Thebes, 1,520 BCE
Early in the 16th century BCE the Thebans rallied for freedom under Seqenenre-Re. His son Kamose (Ach-Mousa) ruled after his death, succeeded by his brother Amosis (A-Mousa) from 1,570 to 1,546 BCE - though these two "brothers" may actually be the same person, and only the spelling of the name making them seem like two people. Whether one or two, the 18th dynasty was founded in their time, and in 1,550 BCE the Hyksos expelled, Avaris captured, and the remnant pursued across the desert into Kena'an - unimpeded by tsunamis at the Red Sea! Was this in fact the original Exodus: an Egyptian tale, not a Beney Yisra-Eli legend at all, but with the stories told by the remnants of both eventually conjoined? Once in Kena'an, Ach-Mousa laid siege to Sharuhen (Tel Ajjul) on the southern frontier for three years, then swept across Asia to establish an empire larger than any the world had yet seen. This was the dawn of Mitsrayim's golden age.
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Isin, 1,500 BCE
While one Hurrian-Hittite connected people were conquering Mitsrayim, another was being defeated after briefly occupying the vacuum left by the fall of the old Babylonian empire. They called themselves Kassites, and they came from the Zagros mountains in Persia. They came, indeed, three centuries before they finally arrived, unsuccessfully attacking Babylon itself during the reign of Hammurabi's son Samsu-Iluna. By 1,600 BCE Bavel (Babylon) had fallen to Hittites out of Anatolia, who carried off the statue of Marduk and replaced him with their own Shuqamuna , who was not an early form of the Buddha, despite the similarity of names.
Though they ruled peacefully for four hundred years, little is known of the Kassites, for they left behind no inscriptions, no documents, no artefacts. One of their kings introduced the Kudurru, a boundary-stone system for allocating land which is reflected in the treaty between Ya'akov and Lavan (Genesis 31:45-55), where the Kudurru is named Yegar Sahaduta (יגר שהדותא) in Aramaic by Lavan, but Gal-El (גלעד) in Yehudit by Ya'akov.
Where Mesopotamia had previously been city-states in competition, the Kassites united them into a single territory, and expanded trade as far west as Thebes, where Kassite weights and seals have been found. A shipwreck salvaged off the coast of southern Armenia confirms that they traded by sea as well as by land.
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Mycenae 1,400 BCE
The early bronze age grows into the high bronze age. The culture of Minoan Crete merges with Helladic culture in the Aegean. New cities rise which will dominate the world for a thousand years, and then forever: Athens and Thebes the pre-eminent among them. This is the age of Homer, but also the age of military not economic conquest. The Mycenaeans rooted their civilisation in Argolis and the Peloponnese, but branched it in Epirus, Macedonia, the coast of Asia Minor, deeper into the Levant, and westwards too, into Bavaria, Ireland, Cornwall. They took Crete in 1,450 BCE, merged Minoan culture with Mycenaean, adapted their Linear A script into Linear B, added the double-axe (the labrys) to their armoury, defeated Troy. They buried their dead in beehive tombs (see Genesis 35:8); but mummified their nobility seated upright and surrounded by gold masks, tiaras, armour, and jewelled weapons; cremated their heroes - Achilles, Patroclus, others. What they appear to have lacked was a priesthood, and this is profoundly significant, for the West has been torn this past two thousand years between the Hellenic and the Judaic, and what most distinguishes the two is the position of Humankind in relation to the gods: the Greeks turned to philosophy and exalted the capacity of Humankind to serve the gods through reason and understanding, while the Beney Yisra-El turned to theology and exalted the capacity of Humankind to serve the gods through faith and ritual.
*
Kena'an 1,300 BCE
The chronology of the Tanach is in disagreement with that of the geologists, but not by much – a mere 570 million years, give or take the odd two thousand. Kena'an, 1,500 BCE, is (more or less) the date at which [most] archaeologists {generally} reckon the arrival of Av-Ram from Mesopotamia, though some would place it up to seven hundred years earlier. That land was part of the Hittite empire, which extended through Anatolia and Turkey all the way to Mitsrayim and would endure for at least another hundred years beyond whenever Av-Raham was. It was from the Hittites that Av-Raham purchased the Cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah.
Av-Raham's was only one of many tribes migrating continually in and out of Kena'an, Bedou for the most part, or remnants from the fall of Ur. The earliest evidence of a people called Yisra-El appears in Kena'an at this time, Emorites from north-west Mesopotamia and northern Syria, an area that would have included Charan. These people, known in the cuneiform texts as Amurru, became both Habiru and Aramaeans: a generic term virtually for all the Semitic peoples. Throughout the 3rd millennium BCE these tribes had pressed south, occupying Kena'an at the furthest west, the whole of upper Mesopotamia at the furthest east, leaving only the small enclave of Ashur (Syria) in the middle of their realm.
Mari was now ruled by an Emorite. They wrote in Akkadian, but their language was Hurrian, and it was their language, in a new alphabet rooted in Egyptian hieroglyphs, that would become the first alphabet, developed in Ugarit around 1,000 BCE, used by the Beney Yisra-El from about the time of Shelomoh (Solomon), used by the Phoenicians as they traded westwards, used by the Greeks though they understood the meanings of the letters differently - the same alphabet that would be adopted by the Russians when St Cyril brought it to them around 860 CE, the same alphabet that would be adopted by the Romans, who merged it with Etruscan, and made it the basis of almost every European language, including English.
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