By Nathaniel Burson
A Biblical History of the World
In accordance with all known secular histories
FOREWARD
There are two types of histories; those which follow the narrative of evolution, and write the history of civilization as a long, slow, crawl from knuckle-dragging troglodytes up to hunter-gatherers, nomads, villages, city states, and empires; these sources are well-funded, and have access to an immense amount of facts from ancient civilizations to support their narrative.
Then there are those who follow the Christian narrative, believing in a literal, world-wide flood about 4,300 years ago, give or take, and who try to tell the story from that point. Unfortunately, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, most of those histories are laughable. They take a few points of agreement with the Bible, and spin fanciful theories that are poorly supported by facts largely because the sort of authors who write such histories are not academics, and frankly know very little about the history they are trying to explain.
I intend to try and write a middle ground; a seriously researched and scientifically supported history that begins with the Bible, but which fits the evidence of Egyptian, Assyrian, Sumerian, and any other relevant civilizations into the story in its proper place without dismissing or rewriting either story.
This is, as you might expect, a tall order. But after extensive research I’m convinced that an honest reading of Egyptian and Sumerian history demands the Bible’s timeline, and cannot be stretched out over 10,000 years without immense wishful thinking on the part of historians.
In the end, you, the reader, will believe what you want to believe. If you want to believe God does not exist and that the flood was a myth, this will not change your mind. But if you want to believe that the Bible is true, this history will give you good, scientific reasons to feel comfortable about your choice.
It is difficult to be a Christian in a world which worships science – never mind that the science is continually shown to be a victim of groupthink. Because when every educated and respected person tells you as an absolute fact that, there are 5,000 years of recorded Egyptian history, plus thousands of years of prehistory, you want to say “that’s not what the Bible says”… and yet you’re really not qualified to have an opinion unless you’ve wasted absurd amounts of your life reading the science yourself.
That’s why this book exists; to show you that, yes, the history sounds good as a package. But when you take out a magnifying glass and inspect it, read the sources, listen to the academics debate amongst themselves, you’ll find they don’t agree about literally anything except that they, as a group, are right and we, the Christians, are naïve morons.
Blind faith is, indeed, foolishness. But after extensive research [you just used this phrase a few paragraphs above], I’m convinced that it requires more faith to believe in traditional history than in the Bible’s version; that the story of evolution requires more faith than the creation of God.
You’re about to read the story I believe in. It’s not correct; broadly, the story leaves out entire civilizations and the dates provided are, in some cases, probably off by half a century or more. But it is a narrative that ties in with the Bible’s version at every point, and, most importantly to me, does so without rejecting the immense wealth of tablets, histories, and witnesses of ancient history.
When read correctly, those tablets support the Bible’s version at every turn. Indeed, in many cases it takes immense work to read them the way traditional historians do. So read the story, and then decide which version requires more faith; belief in God… or belief in an extraordinarily lucky chaos.
A NOTE ON DATING
Adam was created in 3971 BC. This date differs from what everyone else believes, by at least a bit, but it is broadly agreed upon by everyone who believes there was such a person as an actual Adam. I arrived at this date by two independent lines of reasoning; first, that it is exactly 4,000 years before the death/resurrection of Jesus (not His less-significant physical birth, as followed by most chronologers, such as Bishop Ussher).
The significance of 4,000 years involves a 7,000 year millennial “Week” plan of God (Daniel 9:27) and Jesus being killed in the midst of that week, which based on other versions of this symbol, meant “he would be killed in the end of the fourth (thousand-year) day”, i.e., 4,000 years from creation.
The second way is by adding up all the dates of the Bible in the Old Testament; there are about a half-dozen hinge points in Biblical chronology, places where you can plausibly tie a date to an event at 75 or 85 or 99 years in Abraham’s life, for example, and if you make the right choice – which, in retrospect, is usually the obvious choice – it adds up to 3971 BC. Since it’s thus supported in two ways, I’m quite confident of this date.
If you’re interested, I have other papers that lay out all of the arguments to support these dates, so I won’t bother reproving them here [include them in an appendix?] and I will be using my dates throughout this paper as the backbone of the chronology throughout.
I will of course tie these dates to secular histories as soon as there are reliable extra-Biblical dates to use. Also, going forward, rather than say BC every time, I will simply use -2312 to indicate BC, and on the rare case I might use an AD date, I will use the format +476 to represent AD.
Until we reach the time of reliable extra-Biblical dates, I will be using my own dating to reference historical events; for example, according to traditional historians Sargon of Akkad ruled -2350 or so; obviously, that’s before the flood by Biblical dating and thus impossible.
I place Sargon approximately -1900, so when I mention people like him and a date, that’s where they fit into the story as I understand it; not as traditional historians understand it, and their dates will disagree by up to a millennium with mine in some cases. I’ll explain how I arrived at these dates as we go, then you can decide which story makes the most sense.
ADAM TO THE FLOOD
As I said, Adam was created. Not much to say here. Adam was there. Then people were evil. Then Noah came along. Flood killed all but 8 people. The end.
No secular histories of this have survived except a highly debated section of the Sumerian king list; and yet every culture in the world, to this day, has a flood legend.
THE FLOOD
FLOOD TO SARGON
The flood began in the year -2314 when Noah was 600 years old, and he spent upwards of a year in the ark with his wife, three sons, and their three wives. When the flood waters began to recede, the ark rested on “one of the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4), this in the year -2313.
While there is some room to debate where exactly this is, it’s generally agreed to be in north-eastern Turkey. We can support this because we also have the story of the same flood, with many of the same elements as the Bible, in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And in that version the Mesopotamian Noah, called Utnapishtim in Akkadian or Ziusudra in Sumerian, dwells “at the source of the rivers”.
<picture of the rivers showing Ararat>
As you can see, both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have their sources near Ararat, at opposite sides of the mountain. Interestingly, the Bible records the Garden of Eden being at the source of these two rivers, and two others besides; arguing strongly that God caused Noah to land at the exact site of the creation of Adam, which occurred some 1657 years previously; the two trees and flaming sword and such having been washed away by the flood in the meantime.
The first thing Noah did upon leaving the ark was offer a sacrifice, and secure a promise from God that there would be no further floods to destroy all mankind (Genesis 8:20-9:17). This alone argues strongly that it was no mere local flood, since we’ve had many floods since then in all countries of the world – God promised never to bring another global flood, and He hasn’t.
The second thing Noah did, at least that we know of, was to plant a vineyard (Genesis 9:20).I guess being cooped up with his family for a year in a floating box full of stinky animals made this a priority. Regardless, vines take time to produce fruit; probably at least 3-4 years to produce enough for a proper batch of wine.
Thus we can date Noah’s drunken stupor in Genesis 9:21, and the resulting curse of Ham/Canaan, to about -2319. The story itself is an odd one, particularly why Canaan, who wasn’t apparently involved in the incident at all was nonetheless cursed to be a servant to his uncles (Genesis 9:22-27).
Regardless, this gives us our first historical fact about the nations post-flood: that the Canaanites would, at some point, be servants to descendants of Shem. This was fulfilled, at least in a part, nearly a thousand years later in Joshua 16:10.
THE FIRST EXPANSION
As I said, Noah, upon leaving the Ark, promptly planted a vineyard. People who plant vineyards are not intending to travel much, thus, Noah intended to remain at the base of Mt. Ararat indefinitely; he had done his work in saving mankind, it was up to his three sons – Shem, Ham, and Japeth – to obey God’s command to “Be fruitful and multiply. Increase abundantly in the earth, and multiply in it”(Genesis 9:7).
This blessing of God ensured maximum fertility for Noah’s three sons – we presume Noah was done multiplying at this point – and therefore we should expect an average of three children to be born per year to the three sons.
That said based on the genealogy in Genesis 10, we see that Shem had five sons, Ham had four, and Japeth had seven (consistent with his father’s blessing of “enlarging” him). Obviously, they also had daughters although there is no record of how many or their names.
It seems at first odd that so few sons were born, considering the long lifespan and the urgent need to repopulate the Earth; but if God really wanted to multiply humanity on the Earth as fast as possible, the blessing of “being fruitful” would require a lot more daughters than sons – there being no prohibition against polygamy in the Old Testament, this would be the fastest way to “replenish the Earth” (Genesis 9:1).
Thus, assuming one child, per year, per son of Noah, then after 20 years (-2303) we would have 68 humans on Earth (assuming no twins, although with the blessing of God that might well be wrong, in which case it could be over 100 at this point).
Regardless, after 20 years or so, the math gets quickly out of hand (for me), as new child bearers come of age. Nonetheless, I think I can make an educated guess that by the time 50 years had passed (-2273) we might have a few thousand humans. After 100 years (-2213), we could be approaching 100,000, if we assume maximum fertility. My math stands subject to correction, but this is at least a starting point for discussion.
THE PLAINS OF SHINAR
Regardless, this tells us that the land around Ararat would start feeling crowded within 50 years after the flood, and be absolutely intolerable around 100 years after the flood. It is interesting that what archeologists consider to be one of the oldest cities in the world, if not the oldest, is in eastern turkey at Gobekli Tepe just off the river Euphrates.
There, archeologists find primitive carvings of animals, megalithic temple structures, stone construction using both carving and cut stone. Now this part is interesting; because when the Bible tells the story of the first settlements after the flood, it implies they already had built settlements made of stone before they arrived in Mesopotamia!
Genesis 11:3-4It happened, as they travelled east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. They said one to another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth”
Shinar is generally agreed to be central/southern Mesopotamia. And in the broad plains of Mesopotamia you will not find a single rock for hundreds of miles in any direction. It’s just mud and dirt everywhere – which is awesome for food production, but requires extra effort to make into a building material.
The Bible seems to imply that this was the very first settlement after the flood, but since most, if not all, of these people were born after the flood yet knew how to build with brick, means they had already had settlements in their first home, and that home was someplace where stone was abundant – such as it is in eastern Turkey, near the base of Ararat, and in Gobekli Tepe!
But population pressure, if nothing else, urged them to move farther afield from eastern Turkey, almost certainly within the first hundred years after the flood. Now looking at that map of Ararat above, ask yourself; if you wanted to spread out, get away from your family, and take with you all of your pots, cows, tools, and so on – what would you do?
The easiest way to move would be to build a raft or some such – your ancestors obviously, and I mean obviously, have boat-building skills – and float downstream until you find a nice place to stop. And that’s exactly what they did – according to both Genesis 11 and the records of the ancient Sumerian King List.
THE PLAINS OF SHINAR
One of the most important rules of Bible study – or the study of any historical book, for that matter – is that events that happen in sequence don’t necessarily follow immediately from each other. That passage in Genesis 11:1-4, for example, implies that the building of what we call the tower of Babel happened immediately, as soon as they arrived in the plains.
But it doesn’t have to be read that way. Every time “they said” something, an interval of months or even decades might have intervened. So while it might be one event, the text requires that we also allow the possibility for it to have meant…
“they found a plain and they lived there… [for a while, and then]… they said let’s make bricks… [and then they used them for normal buildings for a while]… and they said and build a city and a tower”.
Based on this text alone, it’s impossible to be sure whether they landed in Shinar, learned how to make brick, then immediately decided to make a city and a tower… or, far more plausibly, that these things took decades, even a century, to happen.
Fortunately, we have another, contemporary, extra-Biblical source, which confirms exactly what happened – and even how long it took!
THE SUMERIAN KING LIST
The Sumerian King List (henceforth, SKL), is a document collated around the reign of Utu-hegal (approximately -1682) which purports to show all the kings and dynasties of Mesopotamia since the creation of man.
The SKL is an edited collection of king lists and histories from various cities in Mesopotamia such as Uruk, Kish, Ur, and so on which the original author of the SKL must have had access to, and which he copied down and arranged in a way that made sense to him. This had been done before, probably under Sargon (approximately -1896), but this version was much more extensive and included more cities, and since it was done centuries later, several more centuries of dynasties were added.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the original list dating back to Utu-hegal, only later copies from at least a few hundred years later, written on clay tablets or cylinders that are to a greater or lesser degree cracked and damaged, so we must reconstruct the list from several different versions, eliminating errors that have crept in by copyists over the centuries, in order to approximate the original form of a list which is, itself, a copy of a copy.
All of that said, the SKL is still an invaluable source of data, and while traditional historians are skeptical of many of the claims, an awful lot of the kings mentioned on it have been proven to exist by other artifacts; obviously, fewer of the older kings are attested from archeological finds, as would be expected from a less imperial, less developed society. But this doesn’t imply they didn’t exist.
On the contrary, the accuracy from the parts of the list we can verify externally argues for the accuracy of those parts we cannot verify. Thus, it deserves serious study, not to be dismissed. It’s not gospel, don’t get me wrong – but it’s not meaningless either.
The list begins with pre-flood kings, listing between 8 and 10 depending on which copy you use, and goes on to describe dozens upon dozens of kings, along with the length of time that they reigned, and the dynasty they belonged to, and sometimes a few brief notes about what the king did or who his father was.
Sounds good, right? Let’s just add up the dates and see what happened! Well, unfortunately it’s not quite that easy. Because taken at face value, it makes several ridiculous claims that no historian believes – such as reigns of individual kings that lasted for 3,600 years or more. In the preflood world, it’s even more extreme with reigns up to 43,200 years long!
But these are solvable problems, and when studied carefully and taken seriously, as several respected mainstream archeologists have done, it proves itself to be a very accurate record of the Mesopotamian world, and when interpreted correctly actually proves the Biblical timeline!
I am focused now on telling the story of history, not arguing the minutia of history, so I’ll try to give the briefest summary possible of the basic points you need to know in order to decide whether to trust the SKL or not, and if so, exactly how far you should trust it.
FANTASTICALLY LONG REIGNS
First, we wholeheartedly agree the extremely long reigns are impossible, even if people lived as long as they did in preflood times; Lugal-banda for example, is said to have reigned 1,200 years, while Etana is said to have ruled 1,500 years. Even the Bible’s extremely long pre-flood life-spans never topped 969 years (Methusaleh), and so obviously these numbers are pure fantasy… Or are they?
That’s what scholars believe, almost without exception; but if we give the history a bit of a chance to make sense before we dismiss it completely, we might notice something. Looking at all reigns that are longer than about 50 years, we’ll notice that without exception they are in the earliest dynasties.
Later dynasties routinely have normal reigns like 3, 7, or 25 years long. Only the earlier ones are absurdly long; this leads scholars to conclude that the earlier kings are just legendary… only they aren’t!
Some of these people did, in fact, live because archeologists have uncovered contemporary inscriptions of many of them. But surely they didn’t rule for 1,500 years! So the historians who are willing to be guided by the SKL at all typically just ascribe random durations of 20 or 30 years to any king with an implausibly long reign; this actually yields fairly good results, but it is far too arbitrary to be considered good scholarship in my opinion.
But let’s assume for a minute that there is a real truth in these dates, even though the reigns are impossibly long. How might such an error have crept in? Looking at the dates, one thing you’ll immediately notice is, with very few exceptions, the reigns are always in round numbers; 360, 900, 840 and so on.
Statistically, this is impossible; but the other thing you’ll notice is that about 90% of the dates are in round numbers of multiples of sixty. And so if we were to divide these ages listed above by 60, we get the very plausible reign lengths of 6, 15, 14, and so on – numbers very consistent with the average reign lengths in the more reasonable parts of the list, later on in history.
Granting that dividing by 60 yields very promising results, why might the numbers have been inflated by exactly that number? Well, the Sumerians did not think of numbers in base-10, as we do. They used a sexagesimal system which is a fancy way of saying base-60.
In other words, we have 10 unique numbers, 0-9, and when a column is filled we write “1” in the column next to it to express that the “box” of 10 numbers is full, and “one” in that column therefore represents “10”.
Base-60 is the same, only you write the numbers 0-59 in the first column, then you write “1” in the column next to it and you start over again at 0 in the first column. Thus, “one” in the “sixties” column (where we put our tens) is actually meant to represent 60, not 1!
And so the reason the numbers of these reigns are so fantastic is because the earliest version of this list – which we don’t have today – recorded the numbers of real reigns, of reasonable length. But it did so in what would become an archaic dialect! Because it was, after all, the very first writing in human history!
A later scribe, assigned to copy this list centuries after the people involved were all dead, misunderstood the ancient character for “1” and assumed it was the character he knew as “60”! Technically, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but this is the basic idea.
Granting the intelligence and good intentions of all involved, one simple error, easily explainable by the evolution of writing over a few centuries which we know happened in that timeframe, would easily explain all the excessively large reigns, reducing them, without exception, into the sorts of reigns normal humans would have.
Thus, when the scribe in the time of Sargon copied down the list, he was, in effect, accidentally multiplying all reigns by the number 60, producing absurdly long reigns that are obviously not true. And yet, they do record a truth – if you trust your source enough to look for it!
Most copies of the King List give Ur-Zababa an unrealistic reign of 400 years, but one copy reading “six years” is held to be more plausible. (Wiki, Ur-Zababa).
This mention about a much later king on the SKL helps to confirm that dividing by sixty solves a lot of chronological problems; rather than the implausible 400 recorded on one list, 6 is recorded on another. Dividing 400 by 60 would yield 6, with 40 left over.
Since Babylonians counted by 60s and also had a sign for 10s and 1s, then would could surmise the original text said “Ur-Zababa reigned 6 years, 4 months”, which, in Sumerian, was misunderstood as 6×60 years + 40 years, the months being misinterpreted as 10s.
This is what I meant when I said at the beginning we will make sense of the sources without dismissing them, but reading them as they, themselves, were meant to be understood! If we do this, Lugalbanda reigned, not 1,200, but a quite reasonable 20 years; Etana ruled, not 1,500, but a quite plausible 25 years. And so on.
CONTEMPORARY DYNASTIES
Hopefully, this has given you hope that our source is not simply a fabricated account of legendary heroes, but a document based on fact, however it might have been damaged by copyists and translations over the years. Bear that in mind, because there is another problem with the SKL to solve.
The structure of the SKL goes like this; “the kingship was first at Kish…” then a list of kings and their names, and then “Then Kish was defeated and the kingship was taken to E-anna [Uruk]”. Then there’s a list of kings of Uruk, occasionally with a short comment like “son of…” or “the shepherd”, and eventually the dynasty ends with the phrase “Then Unug [Uruk] was defeated and the kingship was taken to Urim [Ur]”, and so on.
For convenience, historians refer to these as “the first dynasty of Kish”, “the first dynasty of Ur”, and so on; eventually, there is a second dynasty of Kish, a second of Uruk, and so on. Read sequentially, as presented by the ancient scribe, even if we divide the longest reigns by 60, the list still adds up to thousands of years of history. Far too long for the Bible, and even regular historians don’t believe it.
Fortunately, we can prove that the kings did in fact reign concurrently, even though the scribe meant us to believe it was sequential; and the best part is, we can prove it using the text of the list itself! The best example is with Gilgamesh and Dumuzi, kings of Uruk, and Aga (sometimes spelled Aka) and Enmebaragesi, kings of Kish.
If the chronicler was to be believed, Dumuzi lived 2,569 years after Aga; even if we divide the reigns by 60, we get no less than 42 years later. Yet the SKL informs us, as a note on Dumuzi’s supposed 100 year reign “He was taken captive by the single hand of Enmebaragesi”!
Further, from another ancient source, titled “Gilgamesh and Aga”, we find that Gilgamesh rebelled against the dominion of Kish – no doubt begun when his father, Dumuzi, was captured – and successfully killed Aga, heir of Enmebaragesi.
For now, the key point is that we have firmly established that these two consecutive rulers of Kish were contemporary with two consecutive rulers of Uruk and thus proving that the Uruk dynasty was partially contemporary with Kish!
Which means that when the chronicler said the “kingship was taken from Kish”, no such thing happened. All that happened was that an independent kingdom which had been established at Uruk conquered Kish and either installed a puppet king or took an oath of loyalty from the existing king.
I mean, think about it; when Dumuzi was conquered by Kish, Gilgamesh obviously kept reigning, and sending tribute to Kish, for that was why he rebelled. And when Gilgamesh, then, conquered Aga, Kish must have likewise kept existing with some sort of ruler, subservient now to Gilgamesh of Uruk.
THE BIG PICTURE
Thus, even though the kingship was now at Uruk, there must have still been a subservient king at Kish; how long he remained subservient is another question, but the key is that there must have always been some local king or governor, no matter whether the city had “kingship” or not, as we saw in the case of Gilgamesh under Enmebaragesi;
The same is true for most of the later dynasties, that as each new city came to power, the original dynasty, though defeated, continued to exist and continued to have kings, albeit subject to the dominant power of that time.
Indeed, there was no gap in time between the first dynasty of Kish and the second dynasty of Kish, nor between the second and third, and so on. These were actually a continual list of rulers, and the archivist broke them up by dynasties in order to arrange them into a consecutive instead of contemporary order.
So the second major problem with the text is that the SKL is structured around the (erroneous) premise that there was only ever one uncontested ruler over Mesopotamia at a time, and that whenever one dynasty fell, another city-state took over the reigns (get it?) and ruled until some other lucky city conquered it and became the sole ruler of the land.
But the fact is, most of these dynasties existed contemporarily with each other for most of history; this fact takes what would be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years of rulers and compresses them into a span of roughly 1,000 years, from the time of the first ruler of Kish to the time of Hammurabi.
In order to see exactly how contemporary they are, we must separate the dynasties into independent lists, and tie them to each other based on known interactions of the kings in the list, from the SKL’s notes or from independent, external inscriptions.
Fortunately there are enough of these to provide us with a very good idea of how they should be arranged, leading to the diagram into the picture below:
<PICTURE OF CHRONOLOGY CHART>
PROPAGANDA
But that raises an important question; if you were a scribe, why would you arrange dynasties you know to be contemporary into a succession you know to be false? It could only be because the narrative you were trying to tell needed a lengthy list of kingdoms which led to your own king, the one who commissioned the tablet¸ and that this way of telling it best secured his legitimacy and/or flattered him the most.
Based on extensive study of the text of various ancient versions of the list, noted Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobson concluded that the earliest version of the SKL as we know it was composed in the reign of Utu-Hegal, of the fifth dynasty of Uruk; according to my chronology, about -1676, or 500 years after the beginning of the dynasties.
Understanding the political context of the fifth dynasty of Uruk, to which Utu-Hegal belongs and of which he is the only member (it being composed in his lifetime), we can better understand the structure and purpose of the SKL as a whole; according to the SKL, the city was newly independent after having escaped the century-long domination of the invading Gutians, ethnically distinct Iranian peoples.
Trying to establish himself as the heir of Gilgamesh and Enmerkar would be a good reason for the composition of such a list. And trying to establish himself as the one, sole, divinely appointed ruler of Mesopotamia would explain why, against all reason, the list blatantly lied about the succession of rulers, even as it told the truth about their interactions with various dynasties.
In other words, the king must have ordered a scribe “I know that there is only one rightful ruler of the land, my humble self. As I know it has been since the time kingship was invented; so go find the records, and prove that.”
It is never healthy to ignore such a clear order from your king, and yet the scribe was faithful to his craft; so the scribe first copied accurately every word off of the records, and then rearranged the records to show what the king wanted to see.
Thus, we have our synchronisms, faithfully copied from his source texts; and we have his fabrications, that the kingship “was removed, and taken…”, showing that there was only ever one king at a time over Mesopotamia as the present king, Utu-hegal, wanted us to believe.
But these dynasties were not inserted at random; there was probably a division or marker in the original text to indicate where an actual dynasty was deposed and replaced, and at this point the scribe broke the list and inserted the dynasty which was founded next,in chronological order.
We can see this in the story of Gilgamesh and Aga; after the death of Aga, Gilgamesh, the conqueror, would have installed a vassal king, probably a local, and taken an oath of loyalty from him. Thus, the first king of the second dynasty, Susudu, continued ruling Kish with no break.
We can confirm this, because later kings of the second dynasty of Kish and the first dynasty of Uruk interacted in a way that confirms that the second dynasty had to follow close on the heels of the first. And, realistically, the last thing a conquering king would want is a city in anarchy; the whole point of conquering a city is to take tribute every year, which you can’t do if no one is in charge to plant, harvest, and manufacture goods.
So, to sum up, we’ve learned that there are two flaws with the SKL, now corrected; our scribe misread the sign in the oldest texts for “1” and read it instead as “60”. And, for political reasons, he told us that the dynasties were successive, when he must have known they ran in parallel.
BACK THE STORY
That digression was necessary, since we’ll need to weave the SKL and the Bible together to make sense of the next part of the story. When we left them, Noah’s descendants were being fruitful and multiplying in the regions around Ararat and building the first post-flood towns of stone in eastern Turkey, and gradually overpopulating themselves and being forced farther afield.
While some no doubt stuck around, the bulk of them seem to have chosen to float downstream and try their luck in the land of Shinar – literally, “between the rivers”, which is incidentally the same meaning as the Greek word “Mesopotamia”.
Arriving there, there, the SKL tells us they built the city of Kish, which is what Genesis 11:2 meant when it says “they dwelt there”, for an unspecified time before the building of Babel. Now the SKL lists twelve kings, unattested from history, as the first kings of Kish.
What’s strange is that these kings have odd names, they’re literally just words meaning “dog”, “lamb”, “gate”, “scorpion”, etc. Naturally, scholars dismiss this as a later addition, and skip straight to the person both the SKL itself and other Sumerian histories credit as the first king of Kish, Etana.
The SKL entry on the “thirteenth” king of Kish says “Etana, the shepherd, who ascended to heaven and consolidated all the foreign countries”.But that’s quite strange; because according to both our Biblical history, and Sumerian history, there literally were no other people in the world at this time!
So who then were these “foreign countries”, or “other nations”, that were “consolidated” into his rule at Kish? Remember, at this point in the story, “the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. It happened, as they travelled east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there.”
If the WHOLE WORLD was living in the plains of Shinar… WHO were these nations that Etana united?? Again, trust the historical source at least enough to hear it out; who could they be, but the first twelve entries of the “kings of Kish” in the SKL!
Why list 12 obviously abstract names, and then say “Etana became king over the nations” unless the twelve names WERE names of the nations over whom he became king!
Thus, these twelve kings were not kings at all, as scholars correctly deduced. But they were wrong to dismiss them as fabrications; for without them, the story of Etana makes no sense! These “kings” whom he conquered were banners on the tribes by which the whole family of Man was organized, twelve groups under the seventy elders of Genesis 10, who were consolidated into one nation under Etana!
Later legends record that Etana was made king by Inanna (the queen of heaven), but was without child; so skipping over some stuff, he helped an eagle, had some dreams, then was carried by the eagle to heaven, the abode of the gods, and was given “the plant of birth” to help him have a child.
Stripping the worst of the mythology from this, it might imply that Etana had journeyed back to Ararat where Noah was to seek a solution to his problems; perhaps his barrenness, or more likely the political situation at the time, whatever that was.
Since Noah never died, (at least, he hadn’t yet), he seemed immortal and must have been more or less deified in the eyes of most people; thus his home would plausibly be “the assembly of the Gods”, just as Gilgamesh viewed it centuries later when he made a pilgrimage there to find the secret of immortality from Utnapishtim which means “he who found life”, the Sumerian name for Noah:
‘Because I am afraid of death I will go as best I can to find Utnapishtim whom they call the Faraway, for he has entered the assembly of the gods.’ So Gilgamesh travelled over the wilderness, he wandered over the grasslands, a long journey, in search of Utnapishtim, whom the gods took after the deluge; and they set him to live in the land of Dilmun, in the garden of the sun; and to him alone of men they gave everlasting life.(the Epic of Gilgamesh)
Although the text puts Noah’s abode at the mouth of the rivers, it proceeds to describe a long trip across desert, grassland, then mountain ranges and an ocean. This points it to the source, not the mouth, of the rivers – i.e., Ararat, not the Persian Gulf, Arabia, or eastern Africa.
If we take the elements of the story seriously at all, Gilgamesh cannot have gone to the south because there are literally no mountains south of Sumer and especially no grasslands. However, this is exactly what you would find if you went north, which is where we know Noah would have been living at the time!
This indicates that going to visit Noah to get answers was an accepted practice, albeit an increasingly rare one by the time of Gilgamesh. So Etana “ascending up to heaven”, to “the abode of the gods”, would plausibly be a visit to the mountains of Ararat to get Noah’s blessing for becoming king over his descendants.
Or perhaps it was simply a myth, or all took place in a dream Etana had. Regardless, Etana felt he was given divine blessing to rule over Noah’s family and was able to persuade the heads of the twelve tribes of the same thing.
And to help confirm this story, we know one fact for certain; for literally thousands of years after this, the title of “king of Kish” was the most prestigious title you could bear in Sumer. No conqueror was satisfied until he had extracted tribute from Kish, for the kingship of Kish clearly contained some legitimizing quality.
Historians have no idea why this would be, but we can easily explain it if it was the seat of the first divinely sanctioned government of the heirs of Noah. No other king could ever be satisfied until he could say he had ruled over it because it was the only real seat of power – ceremonially, at least.
It was, in effect, like Jerusalem is today. Possession of it meant something, because it was the first true kingdom after the flood.
TWELVE TRIBES
The first twelve entries on the SKL tell us that before the first king ruled at Kish, humanity had organized themselves into twelve tribes – twelve groups of people each ruled over by an elder or “prince”, who BECAME the first city “lest they be scattered among the face of the Earth!”
I don’t want to call God unimaginative, but He does strongly favor patterns. So consider that Jesus called twelve disciples, made them apostles and sent them to spread the gospel in different places, to build their own foundations as Paul called it (Romans 15:20).
More to the point, Jacob had twelve sons, which became twelve tribes; and each of these tribes had a banner to identify them; we have no idea what might have been on them, but we can plausibly suggest that Judah was a lion and Ephraim was a bull (Genesis 49:9, Deuteronomy 33:17).
Numbers 2:2 “The children of Israel shall encamp every man by his own standard, with the banners of their fathers’ houses: at a distance from the Tent of Meeting shall they encamp around it.”
So the idea that Noah’s family was similarly organized into twelve tribes, each of whom identified themselves with a different banner of the house of their father, having an abstract symbol like a scorpion, dog, or gate on it is extremely consistent with how God’s people were organized throughout history.
Furthermore, Israel was also ruled over by 70 elders (Numbers 11:25);thus, it’s not surprising at all to find seventy elders, heads of the family of man, in Genesis 10; count up every individual grandson of Shem, Ham, and Japeth, and you’ll get a total of seventy individual nations – and these men were the heads of those nations.
Just as Israel was composed of twelve tribes, with the ancestors – and thus elders – of those tribes numbering 70 at the time they went down into Egypt (Genesis 46:26-27).Egypt, which was also a descent to a land built around a fertile river in the south, and which also led to widespread idolatry and apostasy.
God has routinely discouraged kings over His people, grudgingly accepting them as a last resort (Luke 22:25-30), due to the inherent risks in letting one man’s moral failings corrupt or destroy an entire people.
Which is why, when these twelve tribes eventually left Egypt for the Promised Land, at God’s direction Moses again organized them into twelve tribes with seventy elders over them, which is how they remained until they demanded a king over them. Sounding familiar, right? You don’t even know the best part yet!
1 Samuel 8:19-22 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles… And the LORD said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king…
And what was the name of that king? I’m sure you know his name was Saul. But in one of the weirdest coincidences I’ve ever seen – if it really is a coincidence… the first king of Israel, the one who united the twelve nations of Israel into one kingdom… was the son of Kish(1 Samuel 9:1).
And Etana, the man who united the twelve banners of Noah into one kingdom, built the city of Kish. Coincidence? Probably, but still…
ETANA IN THE BIBLE
We would expect to find a person in such a position of authority to be one of the seventy elders in Genesis 10;it being unlikely that some young upstart could arrive in such a position of power so early in mankind’s history.
Therefore, one of the names in Genesis 10 should be the Hebrew translation of Etana. Some historians derive the name of Etana from the mythology attached to his name, that he “ascended to heaven”, in Sumerian, literally Ed-Anna. Thus Etana or Edana might be acceptable variants of his name.
We should further be able to narrow down the list in Genesis 10 by considering that Etana built the city of Kish; and that most people name cities either after themselves, or their ancestor (Judges 18:29, for instance).
Now since Hebrew doesn’t record vowels and the letter C and K have the same sound in most languages, Kishis literally the same as the name Cush. Thus, we should expect Etana to be either Cush himself, or a descendant.
Cush was a son of Ham, and alongside his better known son Nimrod, his children are listed in Genesis 10:7-8; and his grandson is said to be named Dedan! Looking at the commentaries, it may have been meant to be pronounced Dedana in Hebrew.
Thus, Etana/Edana in Sumerian, first king of Kish and therefore descendant of Kish is very plausibly Dedana, grandson of Cush!
THE SECOND CITY
So the children of Noah came to Shinar first as twelve self-governing tribes under the 70 elders of Genesis 10. Which is where Genesis 11:2 tells us, “they lived there”. Then later, they said “Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly”, they became the first city-state under Etana, at Kish, approximately -2250; I hope to firm up this date later, but it’s good enough for now.
This lasted for awhile – how long, the Bible doesn’t say. But since Aga of Kish and Gilgamesh of Uruk were contemporaries, then counting backwards in the king lists, we find that Uruk, the second city in Sumer according to the SKL must have been built approximately 60 years later, in -2190.
But between Kish and Uruk, there is an immensely significant city that was built which the SKL left out. Which is why you can’t understand Sumerian history without both the Bible and the SKL working together!
Genesis 10:8-10 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.
This is where it gets really interesting, as we fold the Bible’s story in with the history of Sumer as told by the Sumerians; because according to the SKL, there was no such person as Nimrod. And of course, there wouldn’t be, because this is a story written in Hebrew, probably passed down orally from Abraham to his children centuries after the fact.
So I’m quite certain that if you had gone to the tower of Babel and yelled out “Hey, Nimrod!”, no one’s head would turn. However, thanks to the magic of cooperation between the Bible and the SKL, we can pinpoint exactly who Nimrod was in the SKL!
Because reading Genesis, we see that Nimrod’s kingdom began at “Babel, and Erech…”. Now Erech is just a different spelling of Uruk, just as the modern state of Iraq is a different spelling of Uruk. Thus, we see that Nimrod’s kingdom began at Babel and then at Uruk!
But that’s interesting, because according to the SKL there was no kingdom of Babel! No “first dynasty of Babel” is known from history until the time of Hammurabi nearly a thousand years later! This is another reason why historians dismiss the Bible, but they shouldn’t – for the Bible explains exactly why this discrepancy exists:
Genesis 11:4-9 They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.” Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.
This is why there is no city of Babel recorded in the SKL; because they STOPPED BUILDING IT! And yet Nimrod’s empire began there! Because they STARTED building it! Thus the Bible is absolutely true, that his kingdom began at Babel and moved on to Uruk; just as the SKL is absolutely correct that there was no first dynasty of Babel because no one ever ruled at Babel!
Now if this site of Babel is at or near the site called Babylon under Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, then it’s only about 12 miles apart; very close to Kish, and a severe threat to it – ideologically, if not militaristically.
But after God confused the languages and cursed the city, Nimrod moved to Uruk, 110 miles downstream… And there they built a city, and began recording the reigns of the kings of Uruk! Not at Babel, which never had a king!
THE HISTORICAL NIMROD
And now we return to the SKL; the first king on the list, according to most scholars, is En-mer-kar. According to other Sumerian sources, this is the king who built Uruk; and if the Bible and the SKL are to agree, this must be Nimrod.
The name certainly doesn’t look like a match at first… until you learn that Kar is the Sumerian word for hunter! Thus, this could be read as Enmer the hunter!
This is certainly encouraging, but we can do more. Remember, Hebrew has no vowels. So if you wrote eNMeR-kar in Hebrew, you would, of necessity, write it as NMR the hunter! Which is certainly very promising, but still, NMR is not NMRD.
However, there is a curious fact about Sumerian writing; they often don’t write down “amissable consonants”. According to google’s AI answer:
“An amissable consonant is a final consonant in a word that can be omitted in writing. This was common in the Sumerian language, where consonants like /d/, /g/, /k/, and /ř/ were often left out, especially at the end of a word.”
Note that “D” is one of the amissable consonants! Thus, a name that was pronounced with a D on the end may, in Sumerian, have been spelled without the D! But it was not omitted in Hebrew, which retained the correct consonants of the name NIMROD!
However, Hebrew lost the vowels, since they only write the consonants. Thus, if you wanted to say “Nimrod” and have him actually recognize his own name, you would use the Hebrew consonants, guided by the Sumerian vowels; and you’d probably find that Nimrod pronounced his own name En-mer-ad, or some such.
To the Hebrews, this name came to signify rebellion, indicating that Abraham heard the story from ancestors who considered Nimrod to be the bad guy, which Moses faithfully (and accurately) passed on in Genesis. But in Sumerian, it had a different meaning…
“while the etymology stills unclear, “the ‘Lord’ (is / has) a glowing giant snake” has been proposed” (Wikipedia, Enmerkar).
Thus, enmerkar (probably) means “the Lord (of Nimrod) is a glowing giant snake”. Name a kid that, and you can’t be surprised he turns out to be a deceiver of mankind, founder of the false religion that has deceived people since the time of Babel by pointing them towards the worship of the first deceiver of mankind.
MORE ABOUT NIMROD
In case you still had any doubts that Nimrod is Enmerkar, we are about to put them to rest. Because we have ancient stories about this same Enmerkar, and his various exploits. The first is called “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta”. Though written later, probably around -1600, it dates itself to the earliest days after the flood:
“In those days of yore, when the destinies were determined, the great princes allowed Unug [Uruk] Kulaba’s E-ana to lift its head high. Plenty, and carp floods and the rain which brings forth dappled barley were then increased in Unug Kulaba.”
This tells us that the “great princes”, i.e., the seventy elders who ruled over the twelve tribes of Noah, and later Etana who united them, these “great princes” allowed Enmerkar to build a city and become powerful. Interestingly, if Etana is the Bible’s Dedan, Nimrod would be his uncle.
In Uruk they built a temple to Inanna, the queen of heaven, in this story Inanna is displeased with Aratta (apparently because they are not idolatrous enough) and therefore favors Uruk, who then demands recognition and tribute from Aratta, who refuses. What is most interesting for our purposes is the following passage…
“…At such a time, may the lands of [suffice it to say, a lot of places…]… the whole universe, the well-guarded people – may they all address Enlil together in a single language! For at that time, for the ambitious lords, for the ambitious princes, for the ambitious kings – Enki, the lord of abundance and of steadfast decisions, the wise and knowing lord of the Land, the expert of the gods, chosen for wisdom, the lord of Eridug, shall change the speech in their mouths, as many as he had placed there, and so the speech of mankind is truly one.”
The first take-away from this passage is that Enmerkar is still trying to reverse the curse of the languages! Which means the frustration it caused his kingdom is still so recent, he is actively trying to fix it! This confirms the story in the Bible of the linguistic division, and does so in the context of Nimrod, and therefore Babel!
The story continues with various challenges between Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, but soon a problem develops; all of this time, Enmerkar has been sending messages containing challenges back and forth via a messenger, and after the third (lengthy) message the messenger is supposed to take to Aratta…
…His [Enmerkar’s] speech was substantial, and its contents extensive. The messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired, was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba [Enmerkar] patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the message like a tablet. It was just like that. The messenger was like a bird, flapping its wings; … He stepped joyfully into the courtyard of Aratta, he made known the authority of his king. Openly he spoke out the words in his heart. The messenger transmitted the message to the lord of Aratta: … “This is what my master has spoken, this is what he has said. … Enmerkar, the son of Utu, has given me a clay tablet. O lord of Aratta, after you have examined the clay tablet, after you have learned the content of the message, say whatever you will say to me … After he had spoken thus to him, the lord of Aratta received his kiln-fired tablet from the messenger. The lord of Aratta looked at the tablet. The transmitted message was just nails, and his brow expressed anger. The lord of Aratta looked at his kiln-fired tablet. [whereupon a great storm happened, a bad omen; it isn’t clear how the story ends].
Note that the messenger presented a tablet, which was “just nails”, i.e., just appeared to be indentations of fingernails, as cuneiform tends to appear; after all, Nimrod had just invented writing, it is obvious that the lord of Aratta hadn’t yet learned how to read!
Because to carry a message, it is not necessary that your audience can read; remember, the messenger complained of forgetting things – so writing was to help him remember, but he was still to announce the message in his own words.
Thus the earliest writing used pictures, just enough to jog someone’s memory – just as, to this day, speech-givers write notes on cards, but use their own words when they speak. So writing down a picture of five bushels of wheat will remind him you wanted five, not four, and wheat, not wine. But it’s up to the messenger to fluff it up and phrase it nicely.
Which is why the simplistic nature of the earliest language isn’t so much language, per se, as it is reminders for the messenger who accompanied the message, and later as a reminder of the contract that was made or the offering given.
For the basics of communication, you really just need a list of noun-pictures and a few verbs that can be represented as pictures, like walking, eating, warring, etc. And interestingly, in all of the three earliest writing cultures – Sumer, China, and Egypt – the earliest writing bears a striking similarity to each other.
Not only in the fact that they used pictures, but the very form of the pictures indicates a common origin – even though, according to historians, these civilizations had no contact with each other by this point. Yet thanks to the SKL and the Bible, we know they did – for they all dispersed from a common point, just after the languages were confused – but not before the earliest writing was invented to help them communicate despite the language barrier!
Genesis 11:7-8 “Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city.
All of these languages were initially simple, because they all trace their origin to that first tablet Nimrod patted in the clay; and the crude scratches in the clay at first could convey only simple numbers and basic, identifiable things and concepts.
After these peoples migrated towards what would be their new home, they continued to improve these drawings based on their own language, environment, and thought patterns and gradually became able to express more complex and abstract ideas such as “want” and “hate”.
Somewhere along the way, though, they needed to write down proper names of places and people; and since they had no conception of the alphabet, they used the next best thing; pictograms that sounded like the name, assembled to sound it out.
So let’s say you wanted to write the city name “Liverpool”. You could draw a picture of a liver, which has a fairly unique shape; and then a picture of a swimming pool. By themselves, these pictures make no sense in context (you’re not throwing a liver in a pool, or anything). But together, they form a sound in YOUR language which reminds you of the name of the place.
Then along with that note, you would draw a picture of a city – telling your reader that the nonsense you just wrote isn’t meant to be understood as a liver and a swimming pool, but sounded out as a name of a town.
This is broadly how the most ancient cultures conveyed information; and it’s the basis of how traditional, written Chinese conveys things that are not recognized words, like names, to this day. And this tablet credits the invention to Enmerkar, Nimrod the hunter, to help his messenger intimidate the Lord of Aratta.
Also known as… the Lord of Ararat.
ARATTA
The location of Ararat is debated, but it definitely wasn’t in Sumer. The descriptions in the various poems are mutually exclusive, but it was across “seven mountains” according to one description, but you could get there (mostly) by the rivers, which puts it upstream, towards Turkey. Precisely where one finds Ararat!
Another clue comes from the message Enmerkar sent this distant lord of Aratta; for in it, the messenger refers to Enmerkar as…
“…the scion of him with the glistening beard [Cush], whom his stalwart cow gave birth to in the mountain of the shining me, who was reared on the soil of Aratta, who was given suck at the udder of the good cow, who is suited for office in Kulaba.”
Bearing in mind this was written probably 500 years after the events in question, and had become legendary by then, key facts still emerge; Nimrod’s dad rocked a sick beard, and his mother raised him “in the soil of Aratta”. Thus, Enmerkar belonged to the first generation of emigrants from Ararat! He had been born there!
Calling his mother a cow was apparently not the insult then that it is now, but the reference to him having been born in “the mountain of the shining me” needs explanation. In Sumerian mythology, concepts like kingship, godhood, and victory, as well as skills like basket weaving and musical instruments, as well as things like fear and peace, were contained in physical objects called mes. Something like Marvel’s infinity stones, if you haven’t been fortunate enough to avoid superhero movies over the last 20 years.
Regardless, Enmerkar was raised in the mountain where these things came from; i.e., the source of mankind and the origin of skills, authority, and wisdom… in other words… Ararat. Which is, again, the literal name of the Aratta, just spelled slightly differently because of the different languages involved and the ages between them.
And who would have been Lord at Ararat? Either Noah himself – though it’s dubious that even Nimrod would have the nerve to argue with someone everyone at the time believed to be immortal (he had, after all, never died)…
Or, more likely, some more righteous descendant of Noah who had, after Babel, decided to go back home and leave Sumer behind. Possibly Shem, Arphaxad, or some other ancestor of Abraham – at least, that’s what I’d like to be true.
The second story in the Enmerkar saga names him, but it’s not a name I recognize from any known character in the Bible – En-suhgir-ana or Ensuhkešdanna. We may never know, but it was almost certainly a Semite, since that was Shem’s territory, between where Aram and Lud settled.
CUSH
Back to Uruk, we know from the Bible that Nimrod was the son of Cush, grandson of Ham. If we assume Ham had children promptly after the flood, then Cush his firstborn would have been born in ‑2312, and if we assume some 30-40 years for his son Nimrod, who was evidently not the firstborn (Genesis 10:6-8), then Nimrod would be born roughly -2272, well in time to be among the first wave of settlers from Ararat.
Now from the SKL, the father of Enmerkar was Meshkiangasher. It says of Enmerkar that he was “the son of Mesh-ki-ang-gasher, the king of Unug, who built Unug (Uruk)”. Nimrod built Uruk, not his father Cush – both the Bible and the SKL agree on that.
The accuracy of this entry on the list is debated, which I think is partly justified; Meshkiangasher did not rule over Uruk, thus it makes no sense to have him as the founder of the dynasty of Uruk in the SKL. But Meshkiangasher did sire Enmerkar before going farther afield to settle elsewhere, thus his place at the head of the list makes sense.
But where did he go? The SKL notes of Meshkiangasher that he was “the son of Utu” – one name for the Sumerian sun-god – and adds that “Mesh-ki-ang-gasher entered the sea and disappeared”, or another translation has it “went into the sea and came out (from it) to the mountains.”
Historians, always eager to treat fact as legend, generally believe that Mesh-ki-an-gasher was fictional, or at the very least was associated with his father, the sun-god; a typical sample is quoted below:
The rendering “”came out” is also supported by the fact that the journey of Mes-kiag-gasher, the “son of the sun-god,” obviously reflects the daily journey of the sun. In the evening the sun goes down into the sea in the west. During the night it travels underground, and in the morning it comes out to the mountains in the east. Crossing over them, it then appears again to the world. (Thorkild Jacobson, Sumerian King List).
This seems very plausible, and makes excellent sense, until you realize… the sun does not set in the sea in Sumer!! Nor does it set in the sea at any inhabited place for hundreds of miles in any direction! How, then, are these people expected to have developed a legend that would only make sense if you lived on the west coast of a continent??
Therefore, this was not a fictional reference to the sun’s journey at all; this was a piece of history, that historians refuse to take seriously at face value – but we will. Let’s assume this is not myth. If I, writing from Uruk, on the banks of the Euphrates, with desert on every side, were to tell you “my dad went into the sea and disappeared”, what would you think?
You would, correctly, understand that he had gotten into a boat, floated down the river into the Persian Gulf, and never returned. And that when he did come out of the sea, he did so in a land full of mountains.
But where, exactly, did he go? This is where we have a huge advantage over the worldly scholars, for we know what happened with Nimrod’s father Cush; he settled in eastern Africa, a place known as Kush since the earliest history, mentioned repeatedly in the Bible and applied to the areas that are now Ethiopian and Sudan – and Ethiopia is by far the most mountainous country in that part of the world!
So yes, the first settler of this country would indeed have had to “disappear into the sea”, and he never returned because he “came out of the sea and lived in the mountainous region that bears his name to this day!” Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? But only if you use BOTH the Bible and history!
FATHER UTU
DATING BABEL
Genesis 10:22-25 The children of Shem; … Arphaxad … And Arphaxad begat Salah; and Salah begat Eber. And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.
This division refers to the division of the languages and people after Babel; we can date this event using these four generations, for which the Bible gives us dates in Genesis 11:10-16 which add up to 110 years from the flood, or -2204 to the birth of Peleg.
However, it doesn’t say he was born in the year of the division of language, only that it happened “in his days”. Presumably, since he was the last generation mentioned among the 70 nations in Genesis 10, he wasn’t that old, but presumably not yet old enough to name.
In many cultures, naming was an event that didn’t happen until a child was a man – something which might happen at 13, 20, your first kill, a vision quest – it varied depending on the culture. Regardless, relatively early in his life. Thus, let’s say the window is -2204-2184.
So its interesting that we can confirm this from a left-field source, <Roman source I forget> that tells us from the dated event <insert here> to the “time when Ninus (Latin for Nimrod) first held world power to the defeat of Philip of Macedon (dated 192 BC) lies the interval of 1996 years”.
That tells us that the kingdom of Nimrod would have existed precisely 2192 BC, or 122 years after the flood – sufficient time for the population to multiply for 75 years, migrate to Mesopotamia, live in relative harmony in Kish for 50 years, and then begin to build Babel.
This might be off by a bit – you can only trust Roman historians so far – but it is consistent with what we would expect from the Bible. And when you reduce the dates of the SKL using our divide-by-sixty trick, and connect those to Egyptian history, properly rearranged (it’s a huge story, we’ll get there), it does indeed fit perfectly. But the proof of that will have to wait a long while.
WHO WAS AT BABEL
Thus, the division of languages and the destruction of Babel, and the beginning of the resultant spread of humanity to the four corners of the globe, dates to -2192; first, it’s important to note that all of humanity was in Mesopotamia, excepting Noah and possibly a few people who stayed there. Because humanity is very specifically said to have spread from Babel as a starting point.
Genesis 11:6-8 Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad FROM THERE on the surface of all the earth…”\
The Canaanites, for instance, settled in the east coast of the Mediterranean; and since that’s a lot closer to the starting point, Ararat, than it is to Babel, it’s tempting to assume they might have already broken off and settled before arriving in Sumer; but it specifically says the Canaanites were “spread abroad” afterward.
Genesis 10:18 …Afterward the families of the Canaanites were spread abroad.
Now it doesn’t say after what; but in context, it can only be after the events of Babel referenced in verse 10, which tells us specifically that the Canaanites were at Babel. And there is no reason to believe that everyone else mentioned in Genesis 10-11 wasn’t there as well. Because remember the whole reason of going to Sumer:
Genesis 11:4 They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.”
If some of them had already scattered, it would be too late for that. Plus, remember that at the time of Babel, everyone in the whole Earth spoke one language (Genesis 11:1).It was because of the events of Babel that everyone was cursed with different languages, right?
So wouldn’t it be odd if, say, Canaan or Japeth was cursed with a different language when he wasn’t even here, or involved in the building of Babel? Also, how can the Bible claim that “the whole Earth” was traveling east together to Shinar, if Canaan wasn’t there?
Why would God have to compel them to scatter to them, to seed the surface of the whole Earth; wouldn’t that be an overreaction if half of them – Hittites, Egyptians, Canaanites and all of Japeth, as most people believe – had already left??
I find it very difficult that the surface of all the Earth would be seeded from here, odd that Japheth’s languages were changed to force him to scatter abroad, if Japheth was already scattering into Europe on his own!
Ergo… humanity, including all the seventy mentioned in Genesis 10 and their descendants, were in Mesopotamia at the time of Babel, and involved in the events there to some degree, and scattered to the four winds from there.
Our only clues about the history of Iran during the 4th millennium BC are provided by archaeological data, in particular, the evidence of the “Uruk Expansion”. This immensely interesting historical and cultural phenomenon, which can roughly be dated to ca. 3500–3100 BC, involved a migration of significant numbers of people from southern Babylonia into its periphery. These individuals subsequently established a network of colonies, which, as far as it can be ascertained, functioned mainly, but certainly not exclusively, as trading outposts. Because of their proximity to Babylonia, and of their being, in geomorphological terms, an extension the Babylonian floodplain, the regions that had been particularly strongly impacted by the “Uruk Expansion” were the Khuzestan and Deh Luran plains, to the extent that their material culture, represented at such sites as Susa and Choga Mish, is virtually indistinguishable from that found in contemporary southern Babylonia. A likely reflection of this early Babylonian presence in Khuzestan is the fact that the name of the chief deity of Susa, Inshushinak, almost certainly derives from that of the goddess Inana, the patron of Uruk and the most important deity of Late Uruk times. Since the ultimate source of the “Uruk Expansion” unquestionably was the city of Uruk, it logically was during that particular time that Inana’s cult had been carried from Uruk to Susa. Apart from Khuzestan, the “Uruk Expansion” left its imprint on various other places in western and central Iran, most notably the site of Godin Tepe in the central Zagros. <The birth of Elam, Steinkeller>
THE SONS OF SHEM
It’s actually surprisingly easy to see where most of them went. The Bible lists Shem having five sons, Arphaxad, Elam, Lud, Aram, and Asshur. And one of the great things about taking the Bible as your primary source is that if you just look for these names on an ancient map, you’ll know exactly where these tribes first settled;
<Wikipedia 2000BC>
Looking at this map, you immediately recognize a son of Shem east of Sumer, in Elam. Northeast, you find Asshur. Farther west you find Aram. Not on this map, but well known to history, are the Luwians, later the Lydians, early inhabitants of Turkey – the children of Lud.
That leaves only Arphaxad not easily located on this map – but we’ll come back to him, as he is the ancestor of the Hebrews, among others.
Meanwhile, Ham is recorded having four sons; Cush, Misraim, Put, and Canaan. These are even easier to track, for to this day, if you go to Egypt, their name for their country in Arabic is Misr, as the Bible consistently calls Egypt.
Cush, as has been mentioned, has been known throughout the ages to be the lands south of Egypt. Farther north, the Canaanites are easily located since Moses invaded Canaan; but Canaan had many tribes mentioned in the Bible, and they occupied a territory across southern Turkey, to Syria, almost to Egypt.
Several sons of Canaan are quite recognizable, such as Sidon – the ancestor of the Phoenicians, and much later, of the Carthaginians. Another son Heth was ancestor of the Hittites who were fairly minor players early on, but made up for it later.
Still another son was the father of the Amorites and is well known in ancient Egyptian texts under the name Amurru and – spoiler alert – about 800 years later these people would conquer Babylon and found the first Babylonian dynasty, best known for producing Hammurabi and his famous code of laws!
And so on; the point is, with no effort at all, and honestly very little room for argument, we have completely identified the first homeland of all but one of the sons of Shem and Ham! We can make a good stab at the next generation, although mapping all 70 with confidence is a big ask; but just the ease of mapping these tribes is compelling proof of the theories presented so far!
A WORD TO THE CRITIC
A critic would say “sure, they wrote fictional origin stories and folk etymologies down a thousand years after the fact”. Let’s take a moment to consider these supposed Hebrew or Jewish authors trying to fabricate origin stories for the world’s civilizations.
I ask them… what are the odds that some Yahweh-obsessed priests in a petty bronze age city state, vainly trying to make their sad lot in life better by preaching the preeminence of their own sad cult, would be able to do such a great job of proving it?
Remember, these men would be writing a thousand, by some critics even two thousand years after the fact; after names and languages had changed for thousands of years, what are the odds these amateur historians would have been able to provide such concrete origins for the exact names of the earliest civilizations of mankind?
How could they possibly have known some of the things they clearly knew; for example, that Nimrod/Enmerkar the hunter built Uruk, roughly 1,000 years earlier in such close agreement with the SKL, which they surely could neither read in the original cuneiform nor even access?
How could they have guessed that his father, Cush, had left from Sumer to enter the sea to arrive in mountainous Ethiopia, a place the Jewish priests had certainly never been and may never have even heard of?
I mean, even modern, rational historians don’t know what “he disappeared into the sea and came out into a mountain” means! So even if they had read it, they wouldn’t have understood it! Which means they must have preserved a history of the same event independently – and more accurately!
How could any Hebrew writer, however late, have so accurately known that Kish was built before Babylon, or that Babylon [Babel?} had been built before Uruk? Or how could he have known that ethnically, the Elamites, Arameans, and Assyrians are so closely related when most likely, any possible author of Genesis had never even seen these people?
How could such a people have provided accurate origin stories of the earliest and most ancient Sumerian kingdoms placing them in precisely the location, priority, and ethnic arrangement we know them to have been?
And what possible reason would they have had to try to provide an origin story for an obscure country like Ethiopia or Elam with no diplomatic ties to Israel… ever?
In a world with no accurate maps – indeed, with few maps at all – in a world where people often lived and died in a 10 mile radius, how could anyone at that time possibly have possessed such a vast knowledge of geography, ethnology, and linguistics as to chart a plausible origin story for every civilization on Earth at that time?
This inclines one to believe the Bible was written by people who knew what they were talking about – people who had been there, or at least knew people who had. People who had accurately preserved written or oral histories from the very earliest times of man.
JAPHETH
As I said, Ham and Shem argue strongly for the accuracy of the Bible on this subject. And yet, in this story there is no room for Japheth; which is odd, because his very name means “expansion” (Genesis 9:27). Nor is his name, or the names of his descendants, clearly found in any major site in the region (there are a few individual names, but they are isolated, debated instances).
According to Josephus, whom virtually all Christians follow in this subject, writing just after the time of Christ, Japheth was the ancestor of the Europeans. Yet it is not so easy to find in the Mediterranean the names of the children of Japheth, certainly nothing we can feel as confident about as we can with his brothers Shem and Ham.
Josephus blames the lack of clear naming evidence on the Greeks consciously changing the names to confuse the identity. Which is an argument I find very weak, although every other Biblical scholar seems to accept without question.
But there’s another problem with that. A much more existential one, indeed. If Ham is the African peoples, and Shem is the Middle-Eastern peoples from Iran to Turkey, both things everyone agrees upon… and if Japheth is the Europeans…
Then who is the ancestor of all the Asians?? A few straggling Shemite tribes? Why, then, do Asians appear so different in every way, genetically, linguistically, culturally, and religiously, from the Middle Eastern peoples?
We can forgive Josephus for not worrying about this question since he didn’t know of their existence! But we should be less charitable with modern Christians who could do with mixing their beliefs with a dash of reality now and then.
Josephus was simply using common sense; he looked at the world, his world and he knew where the Shemites had been; knew where the Hamites had been. He had no idea where the Japhethites had been so he looked at the biggest dark spot on HIS ethnic map, which was Europe, and decided they must have been there.
But we have a much better grasp of the world than he did; so our common sense should yield better results than his did. And using the same process, we would see that the ethnic blank spot on our map that needs filling is Asia.
When you think about it, no matter where Japheth went from Sumer, he would have had to leapfrog his brothers; Elam, Assur, Aram, and Lud formed a solid ring north and east; and Canaan, Mizraim, and Cush formed a solid ring south and west. Where else was he to go? Where would YOU have gone? Where people almost always go – the path of least resistance.
Imagine yourself caught between your two brothers and their endless squabbles, every bit of land for a thousand miles in any direction claimed by your brothers. You find yourself on the shores of a mighty river that flows into the sea – a sea which the eldest son of Ham, Cush, promptly used to move southward and settle Africa.
Where would you go? You’d build boats – it is, after all, your family’s business, with 120 years of boat building experience before the flood – and load up all your family and belongings, and float out to see and see where the current takes you. And where, exactly, would that be? It depends on the time of year!
<MAP Of currents>
If you leave in March/April – the time of the Biblical feast of Passover and Unleavened Bread, it should be noted – you would, by these currents, find yourself promptly carried to Africa and down the coast. Stop in some nice place – as Cush must have done – and you need never return.
On the other hand, if you wait six months and leave in September/October – the time of the Biblical Feast of Tabernacles, it should be noted – you will float right around the coast of India, and find yourself in the vast complex of islands and isthmuses and peninsulas of southeast Asia.
Isaiah 66:19 And I will set a sign among them, and I will send those that escape of them unto the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, that draw the bow, to Tubal, and Javan, to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the Gentiles.
This passage, listing some of Japheth’s descendants 1,500 years after the flood, says they are in “the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame.” Now this could, possibly, describe the Greek islands – that’s what Josephus and most people believe; but they’re not really that far off.
The Mediterranean was a pretty small place by Isaiah’s time, and you could catch a commercial boat to Greece and be there in a matter of weeks. Furthermore, since there were Jewish populations around the Mediterranean, it’s unlikely that the Greeks had never heard of the fame of Yahweh.
But if you go in the exact opposite direction, out the mouth of the Euphrates and into the vast archipelago, you will find an island that had been called Java as far back as anyone can remember. Islands truly “afar off”, so far away that they certainly never heard of the fame of the Hebrew God.
Islands where there has never been competition with Shemite or Hamite peoples which was, after all, precisely why Japeth left in the first place! There was no room for the son of Noah blessed with “expansion” to expand!
But the far east is indeed a vast, rich land suitable for the expansion of the most populous peoples on Earth, where over half of Earth’s population dwells!
THREE GROUPS OF MANKIND
My final appeal to this explanation is simply common sense. Looking at the old world, it is obviously broken up into three broad categories; by land mass, by language, skin color, facial features, culture and religion, we can easily divide the world into the peoples of Europe, the peoples of Asia, and the peoples of Africa.
Genesis 9:18 The sons of Noah who went out from the ship were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham is the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these, the whole earth was populated.
You cannot get more different, ethnically, than a Kenyan, a Chinaman, and an Englishman. This suggests, on the basis of mere common sense, that the stories of Shem, Ham, and Japeth can be used to explain the diversity of humanity that we see – the division of humanity into three broad categories.
Now we know, both from their ancient art and the features of modern inhabitants, roughly what the ancient Assyrians looked like; likewise the Arameans and Elamites. And comparing those pictures to say, a Japanese or Ugandan, there is a great and obvious difference.
However, comparing the Assyrians to a random European, they are quite similar. They may have darker skin or slightly different noses, but it cannot be argued that, if forced to choose between the native populations of each of the old world continents, the Shemites of the plains of Mesopotamia most closely resemble Europeans, identifying the population of Europe as Shemites, and not Japhethites.
In every conceivable way, the Iranians are far closer to the Greeks than either are to the Japanese. This argues strongly that the Japhanese (yes, I said it) are descended from Japheth. Which, based on his departure point from the shores of the Euphrates, is the easiest place for him to have gone.
Which, again, is just plain common sense. In the broadest possible sense, there are three great ethnicities in the world; Asia, Africa, and Europe. This argues that, at an extremely early time, mankind was divided into thirds by the sons of Noah.
Even the very shape of our planet argues that there were meant to be three broad divisions among these three sons (plus the western hemisphere, which God had later plans for). And of those three continents… the “expansionist” tribe got the biggest chunk!
Nor is it an accident that his holy city happens to be at the crossroads of these cultures. Because the law was meant to go forth to all nations from that city, and so God conveniently located it between them!
Micah 4:2 Many nations will go and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.” For out of Zion will go forth the law, and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem;
THE FATHER OF THE BLACKHEADED
Thus, Japheth went east, to the rising sun. Ham went south, to Africa. And Shem went north and west. Hold that thought.
Remember Meshkianggasher, father of Enmerkar, who must be Cush, father of Nimrod? Well the SKL calls him “the son of Utu”, which was the name of the Sumerian god of the sun. Now if we take this literally, as scientists are loath to do, it means that he was the son of Utu, the Sumerian sun-God.
…But what if it was true?
Obviously, I don’t believe in this divinity but I do believe they believed this person might be divine. Why? Because he was one of only three brothers who survived the flood. If Enmerkar is Nimrod, then Mesh-ki-ang-gasher is Cush; which in turn means Utu must be Ham!
Furthermore, all the Sumerian people considered themselves his descendants, not only Meshkiangasher:
“Utu, shepherd of the land, father of the black-headed, when you go to sleep, the people go to sleep with you.”
The “black headed” people is a reference to the Sumerian people, their name for themselves. Which is exactly what we would expect – that the father of Cush, ancestor of the undeniably black-skinned Ethiopians, would have all the genes necessary to create black-headed people.
Whether this simply means black-haired or actually black-skinned is debated, and debatable, and frankly not important. But it does mean that the Sumerians looked different than the Shemites around them, because why else name themselves black-headed unless that made them unique?
Obviously, the Sumerians later forgot this was ever a real person as such; and yet, they did remember they were descended from a man/god named Utu, the sun-god. Now there were two main languages in Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian; Akkadian evolved into Assyrian and is much closer to Hebrew linguistically.
And interestingly – well, fascinatingly really – thename for the sun-god in Akkadian, synonymous with Utu, was Shamash. Now this personification of the sun is solidly identified with the Biblical Ham, called Cham in Hebrew. Thus, Shamash is literally Cham-ash!
I may be accused of making up things and seeing connections that aren’t there from time to time. And that’s probably fair – but we must agree that I’m immensely lucky to be able to connect the Hebrew name of Enmerkar to Nimrod, and also so plausibly connect the name of their grandfather, Shamash, to Ham!
But we can confirm Utu’s identity in an interesting way; for there is an ancient legend of Lugalbanda, heir (though not son) of Enmerkar, and in this legend he is having quite an adventure being nice to a magical bird baby and then getting blessed and a cool ride from its parent.
[speaking of the tree the bird nested in] … its roots rested like saĝkal snakes in Utu’s river of the seven mouths. Nearby, in the mountains where no cypresses grow, where no snake slithers, where no scorpion stings, in the midst of the mountains the buru-az bird had put its nest and laid therein its eggs; nearby the Anzud bird had set his nest and settled therein his young. (Lugalbanda and the Anzud bird)
Interestingly, the only river I know of that was famous for having “seven mouths” is the Nile, which has had seven channels draining into the sea since the dawn of time. And if so, then it calls the Nile Utu’s river, or Ham’s river; which makes sense, because the Bible specifically calls Egypt “the land of Ham”!
Psalms 105:23 Israel also came into Egypt. Jacob lived in the land of Ham.
The rest of the description – desolate mountains where nothing grows – is also a good description of eastern Egypt. It certainly is not the Euphrates, for there aren’t any mountains near the Euphrates! This must, therefore, be another river… one in Egypt!
THE DEIFICATION OF THE SONS OF NOAH
So granting that Ham was deified, we would have ask the obvious question: why? And if Ham was deified, what of his brothers?
It’s obvious really. First, they’re literally the origin of all mankind. So, solid reason to consider them divine right there. Further, being the first generation after the flood, if Shem is any indication, means they lived for a long time, much longer than later generations. This would have made them seem immortal, and thus divine.
Plus, they’re the only three people to survive a flood except their shared father, who seems to not have been in the picture that much anymore. So they’re the only ones who know the stories about this whole other world, which again, makes them special. And finally, because people always worship their ancestors sooner or later.
Alfonso Archi, who was involved in early excavations of Ebla, assumes Ishtar was originally a goddess venerated in the Euphrates valley… He considers her, a moon god (e.g., Sin) and a sun deity of varying gender (Shamash/Shapash) to be the only deities shared between various early Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and ancient Syria, who otherwise had different not necessarily overlapping pantheons.
I would thus argue that the three best known Gods of early man, the sun, moon, and Venus, were seen as representatives of the three sons of Noah, whether by their encouragement or against their will (compare to Paul and Barnabas in Acts 14:12).
Yet even if that is the case, why connect Ham to the sun? Well, in Hebrew, Ham means hot. It’s no great stretch to get from “hot” to “sun”. Another meaning, or at least closely related word, is “servant”. Interestingly, the word Shamash is also derived from the word “servant.”
This etymology of Ham’s name is probably why Noah cursed his son Canaan by making him a servant to his brethren.
Genesis 9:25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
This episode has always been very strange, for Canaan is cursed for something that apparently Ham did. But regardless, it strongly connects Ham, hot or servant, to Shamash, sun or servant. Now in Sumerian/Akkadian religion, the most significant and present deities in people’s lives are the trinity of Shamash, Ishtar, and Sin or Nanna; the son, the planet Venus, and the moon.
So if Shamash/Ham is the father of the Sumerian people, it would stand to reason that the father of the Assyrians was either the moon or Venus. Can we support that?
<picture of Assur>
As it happens, we can; because from the earliest times until the fall of the Assyrian empire in 608 BC, the Assyrians considered the king of the gods to be Asshur – whom you will remember, was the son of Shem, progenitor of the Assyrians. And when he is portrayed in human form, it is always as in the picture there – with horns on his head, representing the crescent moon!
Granting that this is Asshur, not Shem himself, this argues for a special affinity for the moon and Semites. Indeed, the moon was considered to be the more powerful god by almost all Semitic cultures in the Middle East; and if you go to the Middle East to this day, you will find, atop every mosque, a crescent moon – a symbol whose meaning, lost in the mists of time, refers to their first ancestor Shem.
The Akkadian name for the moon god, usually spelled Sin in English, was actually spelled Suen in Akkadian – the language of the Shemites. A name evolving from Suen to Shem is not implausible – n to m is a common change, and both S and Sh are sibilants; and variations in the form of the earliest spellings in cuneiform show that there is definitely room for it to have been a name like Shem:
Various phonetic spellings are also attested, for example sú-en, sí-in, si-in and se-en.[17] The large variety of these variants might indicate that the first sibilant was difficult to render in cuneiform.[14] In early Akkadian, the sound /s/ was an affricate [ts], which would explain its initial representation with Z-signs and later with S-signs. (Wikipedia, Sin_(Mythology)
This just leaves Japheth; by default, if this pattern is to be believed, he must picture Venus; which is odd, since Venus was the symbol of the goddess Ishtar, and consistently seen as female. Is this the death of the theory?
Well, remember a few facts; first, that these legends were probably invented well after the tower of Babel, thus after Japheth was no longer around to defend himself when his brothers called him a girl.
In fact, the deception of the post-babel world consciously wrote the high priestess into the narrative as Venus and replacing the human Japheth, who was not worshipped by any local people as he was not their ancestor, would have caused the least uproar.
The morning star may have been conceived as a male deity who presided over the arts of war and the evening star may have been conceived as a female deity who presided over the arts of love.[20] Among the Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, the name of the male god eventually supplanted the name of his female counterpart,[22] but, due to extensive syncretism with Inanna, the deity remained as female, although her name was in the masculine form. (Wikipedia, Inanna)
Note that Venus’s gender is flexible, and the name Ishtar is actually a masculine name.
However, the original association with Venus does make a certain amount of sense; because where does one find Venus? Near the rising (or setting) sun. Precisely where Japheth went; and anciently identified himself as in “land of the rising sun.”
Thus, Japheth is where the sun rises, with him when he rises… thus, Venus. A stretch perhaps, but it fits the pattern. Regardless, back to Sumer, we see these three symbols invoked as witnesses in boundary stones and countless seals and friezes.
And yet, strangely, none of these deities was seen as the creator of all – they were all second or third generation deities! The details changed with culture, but generally the moon was considered the father of the sun and Venus.
Now since Shem’s name literally means “name”, in the sense of “his name is famous”, and since Shem clearly got the birthright of Noah since the lineage of Christ passes through him, Shem was unarguably in charge. Thus, Shem-as-the-moon would be expected to be seen as the authority figure.
LANGUAGE AND THE SONS OF NOAH
Leaving mythology behind, one of the primary effects of Babel – and I promise, we’re almost done there – was the diffusion of languages among the various peoples of the world, based largely on tribal lines; this is why Japanese has almost nothing in common with Italian or Zulu, while Hebrew and Aramaic have quite a bit in common.
Because the languages were not broken up randomly, nor were all languages equally different from one another. After listing 70 nations, broken up broadly into the families of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, God says…
Genesis 10:31-32 …These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their languages, in their lands, after their nations. These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations. Of these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.
Note that families and lands were a criterion for the division of language; thus, people who were more closely related and/or who were destined to dwell near each other by God would be more likely to share more words in common.
Thus, all things being equal, Eber’s sons Joktan and Peleg would have found it much easier to communicate with each other, say, than either would have been able to communicate with, say, Cush. But all things are not quite equal.
Because the language of Akkadian (Asshur’s descendants in northern Mesopotamia), Aramaic, language of their cousin Aram (and incidentally, the language Jesus probably spoke in Judea) are quite closely connected – as is Hebrew, named for the answer of the Hebrews, Eber.
However, these languages are also fairly similar to Hittite, Canaanite, and Egyptian – all of them Hamite languages. By the theory of family alone this should not be; however, Genesis went on to say “after their lands” was a criteria for their division; and for reasons of His own, He wanted Assyrians to be able to communicate with Egypt with relative ease.
Given their proximity, it is also likely that, at the earliest years after the flood, these tribes intermarried significantly, explaining why they resemble each other physically as well as linguistically, as a blend or average of some the genetic traits of some of their Hamite and Shemite cousins.
We can prove this happened in the time of the patriarchs, when Esau (ultimately, an Arphaxadite) married Hittite women (Genesis 27:4), and even Abraham had a child by an Egyptian woman; even these few fusions, early on in a linguistic line, will serve to blend languages and cultures.
Plus, bear in mind that God did not divide the languages of Noah’s sons into Italian and French; these languages have evolved into separate languages in the last 1,600 years alone, without God’s help. Before that, they both spoke Latin.
So the changes at Babel may have been relatively subtle; sufficient to prevent easy communication, especially between different family branches, but not so much to make communication impossible; otherwise, there would have been no way to send messages at all between Nimrod, a Hamite, and the Lord of Aratta, who as I’ll show later, must have been a Shemite.
This is probably why Abraham, descendent of Eber, an Arphaxadite, is not recorded as having had any trouble communicating or needing an interpreter as he traveled from Ur to Haran which was at that time an Aramaic land, down to Canaan where he interacted with Amorites and Hittites, then to Egypt.
All of these languages would, at that time, have been roughly as similar as Spanish is to Italian; not mutually intelligible, but having enough cognates that it would take relatively little effort to communicate at least roughly; helped by the fact that travel between lands was, necessarily, slow, it would allow time to learn the local dialects as you entered new lands.
A COMMON LANGUAGE
It is well known that languages most likely evolved from a common origin; European languages have been traced back to a common hypothetical ancestor called the Proto-Indo-European group, which contains languages as different as Sanskrit, Persian, English, Greek, Russian, and so on.
All of these languages, to some extent, share common words or expressions, and are theorized to have evolved from a common origin. We don’t disagree with that at all – it’s just that instead of evolving over say 20,000 years, they did so in a much shorter time.
It’s possible the languages were corrupted overnight, by divine decree; but the Bible also allows that it took a matter of days, or decades even, for the languages spoken at early Kish to become what they were after Babel.
Reading the narrative closely, there is no real reason to believe the languages changed overnight. They very possibly did, if God was in enough of a hurry, but the Bible allows for it to have been a more gradual process – but whatever it was, it happened fast enough to make the finishing of Babel impossible.
But that, in and of itself, is strange. Why would they stop building the city, only to go out and build another city, Uruk, under the same leader? One obvious answer suggests itself; that the builders of the city were from all the families of Noah.
When they could no longer communicate, they couldn’t agree who was going to live there; so Nimrod and his closer relatives who could still communicate with him moved downstream and built their own cities. Meanwhile, Asshur and his relatives who could still communicate with him moved upstream, and built Ninevah, Rehoboth Calah, Assur, and Resen (one of these is almost certainly another name for the city of Asshur, later capital of Assyria).
Remember, God’s stated goal was to force the people to separate specifically by confusing the languages. This forced Shemites to move one direction, as a group towards Assur, and away from Kish; just as it forced Hamites to move the other direction, to Uruk.
From this time onward, the northern nations spoke a language known as Akkadian, a Semitic language, while Sumerians spoke a different language which, as near as I can tell, its closest modern relatives are in the Bantu languages of southern Africa. Which is to say, the language of the land of Ham, as the Bible calls the continent of Africa (Psalms 78:51).
If anyone is inclined to mock this story, I would advise evolutionists not to throw rocks in this particular glass house of theirs, because the origin of language is one of the most embarrassing points in evolution theory. There is just no plausible theory out there; or rather, there are so many that no one can agree because they all have huge deficiencies.
To me, the greatest problem for linguists is that as we go back in time, all languages get more complex, not less. It was much harder, grammatically, to speak Latin than it is Italian. Vastly harder to speak ancient Sanskrit than it is modern Hindi. The English of Chaucer is vastly more complex, grammatically, than modern English. And so on.
Thus we see, consistently, a pattern of ever-decreasing linguistic complexity, of gradually removing grammar rules to make it easier to speak; every time a new population change happens – immigration, emigration, intermarriage, etc. – the language is simplified by the new speakers to make it easier to learn.
This points to a time in the past when there was a ridiculously complex but awesomely precise language, which has been devolving into grunts and emojis ever since. So how, then, did that language become so complex if it started with an ape saying “ow” when he hit his thumb?
Evolutionists have no good answer for this. But the Bible does.
Languages are made of words, words are made of breath, and breath is made of air – or, archaically, “spirit”. So when God created Adam, He breathed into him the breath of life and gave him the gift of language.
Language which began to decay rapidly at Babel – where everyone suddenly developed a speech impediment, which rapidly evolved into different languages; which have been devolving into ever more simplistic languages ever since.
So really, rather than language evolving from apes… our language is evolving into a series of grunts like the apes!
FROM BABEL TO ABRAHAM
After Babel, the world was being repopulated, the first dynasty in Egypt was being founded by Mizraim, languages were evolving, and people were moving. The Bible is pretty silent about this period, just giving us a list of the ancestors of Abraham and then getting to its main focus – the children of Abraham.
The SKL tells us that the city-states in southern Sumer kept growing, bickering, warring, and occasionally one would become dominant over another; major players in this game were, in rough chronological order, Kish, Uruk, Lagash, Ur, Akshak, among others.
All of these cities were ethnic Sumerians, not the Semitic Akkadians of the north who it seems mostly were not involved in the squabbles of this period. One notable Semitic exception is the Elamites, who it seems – although this relies heavily on the author of the SKL – to have invaded and dominated a considerable portion of Sumeria between the first and second dynasties of Kish, approximately -2020.
It was into roughly this environment that Abraham was born, in the year -2022.
We omitted one important member of the second generation earlier, Arphaxad. Interestingly, he is only recorded as having one son, Selah; who in turn had one son, Eber – father of the Hebrews. Eber had two sons, Joktan and Peleg.
This is odd. God told them to “be fruitful and multiply”, and this is hardly multiplication. It’s barely addition. It’s pos
Another interesting fact; the three most ancient writing systems in the world are found in Chinese, Mesopotamia, and Egypt; and after the fall of Nimrod’s empire to Elam and then to Akkad – we’ll get there – the “torchbearers” for writing each received one representative from each son of Noah; the Chinese of Japeth, the Egyptains of Ham, and the Akkadians of Assur.
ONE LAST PROBLEM
There is one last minor problem, which is those few reigns which are not divisible by sixty; they include Dumuzi, with 100 years; Gilgamesh, with 126; Meshkiangasher, with 324; and a few others. I’m confident that these can be explained by simple scribal errors, though not quite as easily as the others, still errors that are plausible and require few assumptions.
Babylonian numbers are written somewhat like Roman numerals, using I for 1, II for 2, III for three, and soon. Then they use < for 10, << for 20, <<I for 21, etc. Remembering that they use base sixty, I<<I would be 60+20+1, or 81
In the current copies of the list, we have, in most cases, clear versions of these numbers, so modern “translations” are accurate representations of the numbers as they were understood by ancient scribes who copied our most recent copies.
However, it would be relatively easy, in this case, for the number 81, I<<I, to be mistaken for <<<I, 31. Or for 126, written II IIIIII (the space meaning a line placement, hence, two sixties and six ones) to be mistaken for << IIIIII, 26.
Who knows how degraded the copies the ancient scribes used as sources were? Who knows how many times they were copied? Or the relative skill, literacy, and indeed, eyesight, of the various scribes? Indeed, we would be stunned if something like this didn’t happen.
These things cannot, by their nature, be proven unless the original tablets are found which is highly unlikely to ever happen. I am simply seeking to find a plausible explanation that allows us to believe in the fundamental integrity of the SKL, a way to reduce the reigns to reasonable numbers that would be expected to fall in the 5-30 year mark in most cases, based on historical precedent; and to do so without simply guessing or arbitrarily assigning dates.
All of that having been said, I must concede to my Biblical audience that if the Bible is indeed true, people did actually live for hundreds of years after the flood, gradually becoming shorter through the generations. So some of these longer reigns might, from that perspective, be a reflection of real truth.
I however believe this was confined to those who followed Noah’s righteous ways, and probably dropped off much more rapidly in the average lineage. That being said, there is some evidence from Sumerian texts that the Sumerians (who referred to themselves as the black-headed people) did originally have longer lives:
When in ancient days heaven was separated from earth, when in ancient days that which was fitting ……, when after the ancient harvests …… barley was eaten (?), when boundaries were laid out and borders were fixed, when boundary-stones were placed and inscribed with names, when dykes and canals were purified, when …… wells were dug straight down; when the bed of the Euphrates, the plenteous river of Unug, was opened up, when ……, when ……, when holy An removed ……, when the offices of en and king were famously exercised at Unug [Uruk], when the sceptre and staff of Kulaba were held high in battle — in battle, Inana’s game; when the black-headed were blessed with long life,in their settled ways and in their ……, when they presented the mountain goats with pounding hooves and the mountain stags beautiful with their antlers to Enmerkar son of Utu – (Lugalbanda and the Mountain Cave)
This later story, referencing the time of Enmerkar, first king of Uruk, specifically mentions that they were blessed with “long life”. Now that might mean long life to us, say, 100 years; or long life to Eber, say, 400 years. Another quote suggests that had 100 years of youth, followed by 100 years of adulthood age.
After the flood had swept over and brought about the destruction of the countries; when mankind was made to endure, and the seed of mankind was preserved and the black-headed people all rose; when An and Enlil called the name of mankind and established rulership, but kingship and the crown of the city had not yet come out from heaven, and Ninĝirsu had not yet established for the multitude of well-guarded (?) people the pickaxe, the spade, the earth basket and the plough, which mean life for the Land — in those days, the carefree youth of man lasted for 100 years and, following his upbringing, he lasted for another 100 years. (Rulers of Lagash)
This specifically dates it to before the kingship of Kish, before the building of Babel or Uruk. After those events, based on my other research, anyone not in the ancestry of Abraham probably died much shorter, no more than 200 years, consistent with these numbers.
All of that having been said… long life does not necessary ensure long kingship. It’s hard to be king, and even if one might live to be 400 years old all things being equal, kings rarely die of old age. Therefore, I prefer to keep reigns, wherever possible, in the 40-years-and-under range.
THE SONS OF EBER
Historians naturally ignore these impossible ages; and it is true, in other cultures there seems to be a wide distinction between pre-Flood “gods” (Adam, Enoch, etc.) who lived hundreds or thousands of years, and post-Flood “men” who lived a normal lifespan.
Because after the Flood, as now, the average person generally lived an average life. But the descendants of Eber were not average. With that in mind, consider the first words out of Pharaoh’s mouth upon meeting Jacob:
Genesis 47:7-8 Joseph brought in Jacob, his father, and set him before Pharaoh, and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. Pharaoh said to Jacob, “How many are the days of the years of your life?”
Why that question out of the blue? Age is not something that was mentioned much in the Bible. In fact, I can’t think of a single example where anyone was ever asked their age, and if it was mentioned at all, it was in ways like John 8:57.
So first, why did Pharaoh care; and second, why did Jacob then make excuses for “only” being twice as old as Pharaoh would ever get?
Genesis 47:9 Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The days of the years of my pilgrimage are one hundred thirty years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.”.
Reading that, we naturally assume Jacob meant his father and grandfather. But GWV translates it: “the years of my life have been few and difficult, fewer than my ancestors’ years”. Abraham (175) and Isaac (180) didn’t live much longer than he himself would go on to live (147).
So why did Jacob say this? At the time, Abraham and his family were called Hebrews (Genesis 14:13, 40:15), as was the land they dwelt in. They were well enough known in Egypt that the Egyptians had prejudices against them (Genesis 43:32).
Looking at this chart of Jacob’s immediate ancestors, you can see that while Jacob himself might not live an absurdly long time, Jacob’s ancestors had; in particular, his ancestor Eber, who had only just died 50 years or so before, at 464 years old!
Jacob’s days were at least roughly comparable to the days of his father and grandfather; but no, they didn’t hold a candle to the days of Eber! So it was to Eber and others that Jacob compared his “few and evil years”.
Now if Pharaoh knew of the Eber-ites (Hebrews), it’s highly unlikely he didn’t also know of their namesake Eber! That’s why Pharaoh’s first question was “how old are you?” Because Pharaoh must have heard of Hebrews with impossibly long ages – from Joseph, if nothing else – and he wanted to know just how old this old man really was because he couldn’t tell by looking at him!
And that in turn is why Jacob said “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m only a little bit older than normal, not absurdly old like my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Eber!” For although Jacob was already far older than Pharaoh could ever hope to be, he knew better than to compare himself to Pharaoh and the other “average” people (2 Corinthians 10:12).
At 130 (Genesis 41:46), Jacob would have set a new world record for longevity if he were alive today. Yet he considered his days far fewer than they should have been. Because he knew the “average” was far below “normal”!
And he told us why: because his days were evil. He knew his lifespan would be nothing compared to what it would have been if he hadn’t been a liar, deceiver, and thief who insisted on learning everything the hard way. And he plainly said that it was his sorrow – his stress – that caused him to age:
Genesis 42:38 He said, “My son shall not go down with you; for his brother is dead, and he only is left. If harm happens to him along the way in which you go, then you will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sheol.”
A concept which doctors well understand today – that stress is the cause of all aging and death – but they underestimate it’s toxicity. But that’s another story – for now, let’s just focus on the examples of longevity we have:
Deuteronomy 34:7 Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.
Moses, at 120 years of age was told by God “it’s time for you to die now”; So Moses did not die of old age; he died because God forbade him to enter the promised land for his sin. But compare the vibrant health of Moses at 120 – in particular, his eyesight – to that of Job (70 at the time):
Job 17:7 My eye also is dim by reason of sorrow. All my members are as a shadow.
The text also mentions that fifty years into Enmerkar’s reign, the Martu people had arisen in all of Sumer and Akkad, necessitating the building of a wall in the desert to protect Uruk.
first, the level of detail of rulers of the city of Uruk is high, indicating the scribe had access to good records, from the city itself. More distant cities like Lagash and Mari are much more sparse, indicating less source information.
USING SYNCHRONISMS TO ESTABLISH REGNAL LENGTH
The kings of Kish, the earliest dynasty, has by far the most inflated reigns, and thus are the best candidate for our divide-by-60 trick. Doing this produces quite reasonable reigns of 7 years, 20, 15 and so on – quite normal based on many other king lists in the area. And almost all of the reigns are roundly divisible by 60, with only a few that don’t come out even (Aga at 625 produces 10.41 and Zamug at 140 produces 2.33, etc). Even so, the regnal lengths produced are consistent with what is normal around the world.
The kings of Uruk, on the other hand, are a mixed bag. The later ones have 30, 15, 8, 9, and so on – in other words, normal with no division necessary. Whereas the earliest ones, such as Enmerkar and Lugal-banda, have reigns of 420 and 1200 years, respectively – thus, these should obviously be lowered to 6 and 20 years, respectively.
In between, we have Dumuzi and Gilgamesh, with reigns of 100 and 126 years. These do not divide neatly by 60, and thus we can’t blame this on a scribal misunderstanding. We can go two ways; either guess, and put a number like 20 and 30 for each (that’s what most people do).
Or we could speculate that perhaps these people lived longer, like the Abrahamic ancestors, and perhaps they managed to hold onto rule for much longer than usual. This is quite plausible, at least for Biblical scholars.
Perhaps, building on that, we might suggest that they co-ruled, or were even different names for the same person. But thanks to the synchronism of the other list, we don’t have to do any of these things! Because if we have correctly reduced the reigns of Aga and Enmebaragesi, then they have the very reasonable reign length of 15 and 10.41 years, respectively.
It stands to reason therefore that Gilgamesh, after Dumuzi was captured, was a vassal of first Enmebaragesi and later Aga; until, no longer content in submission, rebelled and defeated and killed Aga, continuing to rule. Thus Gilgamesh, if we include his years as a vassal, could have ruled no less than 15 years, and based on his exploits and fame from later poems, likely ruled much longer. Probalby not 126 years, but at least 30.
As for Dumuzi, he was likely killed relatively early in the reign of Enmebaresi since kings tend to campaign more at the beginning of their reign to spread their territory. Most scholars in fact think he is fictional, however given his later deification as the better known Tammuz, God of grain and soil fertility, I think he must have actually existed – if nothing else, as an alter ego of one of Gilgamesh’s other ancestors such as Lugal-banda (more on him in a few minutes).
While I admit this is a guess, it is guided by some evidence.
conquering Aga, ruled for some reasonable amount of time; and that before that,
Thus, the exploits of Dumuzi and his son must correlate with these dates, particularly since Gilgamesh doesn’t seem to have begin reigning until His father Dumuzi was taken captive (though joint rule is always possible.
What we do know is that Gilgamesh conquered Aga, thus ending his reign. And that Dumuzi was taken captive by Enmebaragesi, thus allowing a chance for Gilgamesh to reign, therefore Dumuzi’s reign is not less than the ten years of Ag ahence, for now we can simply assign
So I see no reasonable way to make those 100 and 126 match 10 and 15 without just saying the king list is wrong about their reigns. Now if we add these up end to end, we get about 4,000 years <?> of history here, going back to about 5,000 BC, even if we assign more reasonable numbers for the more fantastically long reign lengths. Now Biblically, this would be impossible, obviously, since it would put kings in Sumer before the creation of Adam.
However, not even traditional historians believe these larger numbers. Because we know for a fact, from evidence contained within the list itself, that these kingdoms were not consecutive, as presented even though the author of the prism very much wanted to believe that they were.
There are, for example, several synchronisms (people who interacted with one another from different dynasties or cities) which prove that at least some of these apparently consecutive dynasties were in fact contemporary, and help us to rearrange them. Some of these synchronisms come from evidence in the list itself, and some of them are found in ancient artifacts that mention the people involved in this list, of which a surprising number exist.
For example, the SKL shows the last king of the first dynasty of Kish being Aga. Then it claims that the kingship was taken from Kish and the rulership of Sumer went to Uruk, whose first king was Mesh-ki-ang-gasher.
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There are two types of histories; dry, boring filled with endless dates and facts you don’t care about… And fun, interesting ones full of stories… but necessarily shy on facts. I intend to write a third type.
And there are two types of historians; those who chant “The Bible alone!” and those who chant “The Bible is a book of fairy tales, worthless as a historical source”. I consider myself a third type.
We will not dismiss any historical source, and will do our absolute best to see ancient cultures as they saw themselves, and be fair to their viewpoint, however biased. When in doubt, we will be guided by the Bible’s history, as it’s been proven right time and time again; we will not bend the Bible to fit, say, an Assyrian historian; we will, however, see if there is a way to understand the Bible that accords with the Assyrian account.
In the WB-62 Sumerian king list recension, Ziusudra, or Zin-Suddu of Shuruppak, is listed as son of the last king of Sumer before a great flood.[2] He is recorded as having reigned as both king and gudug priest for ten sars (periods of 3,600 years),[3] although this figure is probably a copyist error for ten years.[4] In this version, Ziusudra inherited rulership from his father Ubara-Tutu,[5]who ruled for ten sars.
Ten sars would be 36,000 years. Divide by 60, you get 600- the exact age of Noah at the flood!
315600 – long length from SKL preflood (Wiki). Divide by 60 = 5260
Add up all the death ages of preflood Genesis 7625 + 600 of Noah = 8225, x60 = 457500 or 493500, respectively
Assyrian [history] lists the same number of generations as the book of Moses, but produces a very different total of years. It says that the ten generations lasted for 120 sars, which is the equivalent of (?) 430,000 years.
Difference between this and the numbers above (without Noah) Is 27,500, which divided by 60 yields 458.
The reigns of all these kings, added together, make 120 sars. They are calculated in this way:
- Alorus, for 10 sars
- Alaparus, for 3 sars
- Amelon, for 13 sars
- Ammenon, for 12 sars
- Megalarus, for 18 sars
- Daonus, for 10 sars
- Euedorachus, for 18 sars
- Amempsinus, for 10 sars
- Otiartes, for 8 sars
- Xisuthrus, for 18 sars
Berossus – note that Alaparus has a vastly shorter lifespan, consistent with Enoch.
Utu/Shamash’s wife was Serida (in Akkadian, Aya), the goddess of the dawn who, by the Old Babylonian Period (c. 2000-1600 BCE), was the patroness of the naditu. These were cloistered women who had dedicated themselves to the divine, similar in some ways to certain orders of Catholic nuns in the European Middle Ages and the present day. The naditu are routinely associated with Utu/Shamash because their cloister was attached to his temples, but they actually worshiped and served his wife Serida/Aya.\
After Jacobson wrote his book, an older version of the SKL was discovered was discovered which indicated that parts of the list date back to the time of Sargon, about -1890[ does the USKL show dynasties?]. What these two kings have in common, Utu-Hegal and Sargon, is that each was a new, powerful dynasty that had just overthrown a long-established regime and had a desperate need to feel themselves to be the legitimate heirs of power in Mesopotamia. Thus the need to write themselves into history.
And by arranging history so that it seemed to show a divinely-appointed succession, only ever allowing one dominant power in Mesopotamia at a time, they attempted to discourage rebellion by showing that the gods only ever appointed one king at a time, and since it was him, it couldn’t be you.
As a side note, the worship of the queen of heaven probably goes back to Eve herself, based her role in opening mankind’s eyes to wisdom (Genesis 3:6-7), and on the prophecy given to her of her seed destroying the evil serpent (Genesis 3:14-15). The worship of the mother figure was amplified over time, and various historical women claimed to be her incarnation or representative, in particular the wife of Enmerkar whom we’ll meet later.
Much later, Gilgamesh – great-grandson of Enmerkar, if the SKL is to be believed – took a long trip “to the source of the rivers”, where he met with Utnapishtim (the Sumerian name for Noah) – who lived 350 years after the flood, and would definitely have still been alive at the time of Gilgamesh ~200 years after the flood – to find the secret of immortality.
Why would he seek that from Noah? Because Noah appeared immortal, having already outlived countless generations of his descendants, save only for the direct line Abraham’s ancestry as recorded in the Bible, who managed to buck the trend of more-or-less normal 70-year-or-so modern lifespans by adhering closer to Noah’s teachings (but that’s a whole other article).
So naturally, Noah would be perceived as immortal, and at the time of Gilgamesh Noah’s home, though not called Aratta in that later story, is nonetheless described as the mountain where the Tigris and Euphrates come from; a place that Gilgamesh’ great-granddad well knew, having been born there.
When in ancient days heaven was separated from earth, when in ancient days that which was fitting ……, when after the ancient harvests …… barley was eaten (?), when boundaries were laid out and borders were fixed, when boundary-stones were placed and inscribed with names, when dykes and canals were purified, when …… wells were dug straight down; when the bed of the Euphrates, the plenteous river of Unug, was opened up, when ……, when ……, when holy An removed ……, when the offices of en and king were famously exercised at Unug, when the sceptre and staff of Kulaba were held high in battle — in battle, Inana’s game; when the black-headed were blessed with long life, in their settled ways and in their ……, when they presented the mountain goats with pounding hooves and the mountain stags beautiful with their antlers to Enmerkar son of Utu —
20-34. — now at that time the king set his mace towards the city, Enmerkar son of Utu prepared an …… expedition against Aratta, the mountain of the holy divine powers. He was going to set off to destroy the rebel land; the lord began a mobilization of his city. The herald made the horn signal sound in all the lands. Now levied Unug took the field with the wise king, indeed levied Kulaba followed Enmerkar. Unug’s levy was a flood, Kulaba’s levy was a clouded sky. As they covered the ground like heavy fog, the dense dust whirled up by them reached up to heaven. As if to rooks on the best seed, rising up, he called to the people. Each one gave his fellow the sign.
35-46. Their king went at their head, to go at the …… of the army. Enmerkar went at their head, to go at the …… of the army.
2 lines unclear
At that time there were seven, there were seven — the young ones, born in Kulaba, were seven. The goddess Uraš had borne these seven, the Wild Cow had nourished them with milk. They were heroes, living in Sumer, they were princely in their prime. They had been brought up eating at the god An’s table. These seven were the overseers for those that are subordinate to overseers, were the captains for those that are subordinate to captains were the generals for those that are subordinate to generals. They were overseers of 300 men, 300 men each; they were captains of 600 men, 600 men each; they were generals of seven šar (25,200) of soldiers, 25,200 soldiers each. They stood at the service of the lord as his élite troops.
71-86. Lugalbanda, the eighth of them, …… was washed in water. In awed silence he went forward, …… he marched with the troops
Lugalbanda and the mountain cave; black headed, Lugalbanda referred to as king later, but not son of Enmerkar, blackheaded people were blessed with long life
based a lot of the information on this part of the history on the work of noted Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobson in his seminal work “Sumerian King List”; his collation of the dynasties of the SKL was brilliant, although like every work, my own included, it was not without mistakes.
He unfortunately never tumbled to the idea that the reigns were accidentally multiplied by sixty due to a scribal error, which led him to assign arbitrary (and somewhat too long, in my opinion) reigns of 20 or 30 years wherever the reign lengths were excessive.
Regardless, his scholarship was excellent and is still respected today, despite 80 years of new discoveries no major revisions of his work have proved necessary (although historians will always argue about the details).
\
Inana ……. Her song was pleasing to her spouse, Ama-ucumgal-ana. Since that time, she has made it perfect in the holy ear, the holy ear of Dumuzid, has sung it and has let the words be known. (Enmerkar and the lord of Aratta)
This argues, as does Lugalbanda, that Dumuzi and Inanni were real people alive at the time of Enmerkar
Come, my king, I shall offer you advice: let my counsel be heeded. I shall speak words to you; let them be heard. Let the people choose a man …… of the foreign lands, and let the people of Aratta speak ……. When I go from here, the ever-sparkling lady gives me my kingship. (This argues that the messenger is himself Lugalbanda, who becomes king after Enmerkar)
All the more so, since Enmerkar ruled after the long and eminent Semitic dynasty of Kiš, after Enmebaragsi and Akka.
The author chose the only Sumerian cultural hero, whose activities are recorded only by three tales. Otherwise Enmerkar does not appear in inscriptions or god lists. The paucity of material is incompatible with his status as a king in the Sumerian tales. Moreover, Enmerkar was not deified like his successors Lugalbanda and Gilgameš despite his proclaimed divine ancestry. Since the Babylonians believed that the dead ancestor turns into a personal god by force of a proper funerary ritual, not being deiied would suggest to them that he did not even have the traditional cult of the ancestors. A Babylonian would then conclude that either Enmerkar died in the wilderness or on the battlefield. Both cases would be regarded as a punishment. Death on the battlefield, however, would mean that he ignored the will of the gods, which is revealed in divination.
Whoever sins against the gods of that city, his star shall not stand in the sky,
[28′] his kingship will end, his scepter will be taken away, his treasury will become a heap of ruins […].
[29′] And the king of heaven and earth said thus:
[30′] “The gods of heaven and earth […] the behavior of each former king of which I hear to […].
[31′] Akka, son of […]
[32′] Enmekar, king of Uruk, destroyed the people […].
[33′] The sage Adapa, son of […]
[34′] heard in his holy sanctuary and cursed Enmekar.
[35′] He/I gave to him rule over all lands and his rites.
[36′] He/I beautified like the heavenly writingnote and in Esagila the king
[37′] who controls the whole of heaven and earth for his 3,020 years. (Wiedner Chronicle)
The bad reputation of Enmerkar followed him to the Weidner Chronicle. 28 Un-
fortunately the passage in the chronicle that refers to him is fragmentary. It is clear
that Enmerkar committed a sin, but its nature unknown. The Chronicle is about
the cult of Marduk in Esagila which means that the ofense took place in Babylon.
The remains of the text indicate that he was cursed by Adapa. I cannot explain how
these two characters could meet outside the bookshelves. The one is an antediluvian
character, and the other postdiluvian. The location in Babylon is anachronistic, far
detached from the Sumerian literary landscape, as if the dimensions of time and
place shrank. Is it possible that the chronicle is based on an unknown old tradi-
tion that considered Enmerkar as a contemporary of Adapa, but went out of hand?
Whether or not this is possible, once they are mentioned together, a later text can
pick it up as a fact.
Enmerkar also has a place in the introduction to an incantation of the series Bīt
mēseri listing sages (apkallu), as the irst king after the lood who had an apkallu. A
Seleucid Uruk version that lists the sages with their kings, he was the last king to
have a sage. Later kings had an ummānu. The positive remark about his apkallu, as
opposed to the rest, suggests that Enmerkar too was looked upon positively
The Middle Eastern version of the same triad is the account from Ctesias of Ninus, his wife Semiramis, and the child Ninyas Zames. In that account after the death of Ninus, the wife took the throne by pretending to be a man, and raised her son Ninyas to be coregent. She proposed to marry her son, but he killed her instead. From Ctesias we have reigns for the three, with Ninus reigning 52 years, Semiramis 42 years, and Ninyas reigning either 38 or 26 years, as there appears to have been a 12 year coreign between him and his mother, as confirmed by the Irish account which gives her 30 years, and him 38.
This could be Bar-sal-nunna of Kish and his son Samug