[Chapter Ten: Noah and Menes―The Ark at Thebes]

Chapter Eleven: Babel―Naram-Sin and the Egyptian Seventh Dynasty

King Gin who marched against the Land of the West,
and conquered the Land of the West,
his hand subdued the Four Quarters of the World.
―Chronicles of Sargon, translation of L. A. Waddell

The deeper we delve into the obscure (or obscured) period between Noah and the brothers Ham and Shem the more fragmented the biblical timeline becomes. This is no Velikovskian attempt to rearrange the chronology of the Near East. On the contrary, it is an attempt to extract certain chronological fragments embedded in the biblical text by those who did not quite understand their relationship to the overall development of ancient history. The most obvious of these fragments is the tale of the Tower of Babel, like an erratic boulder artificially embedded by the authors of Genesis in the middle of the so-called Table of Nations whose immediate source is just barely visible among the currently understood elements of the religious system of Hebrew-ruled Ugarit. Far from being a descendant of Ham (or Hammurabi); the builder of the Tower, Nimrod as the bible calls him, preceded Ham by close to half a millennium; and, in fact, in the bible the story of the Tower immediately precedes the continuation of the genealogy of Adam as it proceeds through Shem. That the enumeration of the 72 nations should appear at this particular point is no accident, for it is firmly tied to the very numerical and metaphorical nature of the Tower itself.

Various scholars, including science fiction and science writer Isaac Asimov, have suggested that Nimrod may have been Naram-Sin of Akkad. The latter ruled from ca 2255 to ca 2219 by the short chronology. Naram-Sin himself is credited with the destruction of the Temple of Enlil. However, from the chronology developed here, it appears to be more probable that the destruction of the temple was a result of the regularly recurring catastrophic events enumerated in the table in Chapter Eight, as were the plague and famine that followed and were attributed to it. From that table we can see that the relevant year was sometime very near 2230 BC, the 26th year of the rule of Naram-Sin. There is no direct reference in the bible to the actual destruction of the Tower of Babel, but Josephus has the following in The Antiquities of the Jews:

The Sibyl also makes mention of this tower, and of the confusion of the language, when she says thus: "When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language ...."

The image of this tower destroyed by wind survives in trump 16 of the Pythagorean Tarot deck―the Tower―where this storm is often indicated by a bolt of lightning, the card sometimes alternatively referred to as the "Tower Struck by Lightning."

Alone, the indications of the identity of Naram and Nimrod are tenuous. But when we look at the symbolic elements surrounding the Tower of Babel that have come down to us from the distant past, some of which we have already encountered in Chapter Nine where we found it closely associated with the number 72, along with a peculiarity in Manetho's description of the early dynasties of Egypt, it will become clear that this identification is more than just a convenient attempt by devout believers to rationalize the biblical account. The full list of groups totaling 72 (though sometimes truncated to 70) extracted from the Anacalypsis of Godfrey Higgins, some of which relate directly or indirectly to the Tower of Babel, is as follows:

The translators of the Septuagint,
The number of questions asked of them,
The days required to finish their work,
The generations or nations from the sons of Noah (grouped into 30, 26, and 14),
The divisions of the earth, the countries of Genesis,
The families of mankind,
The number of tongues at the confusion,
The names of God,
The angels that ascend and descend Jacob's ladder,
The bells and pomegranates on the Temple Service dress of Aaron,
The kinds of animals in the Ark,
The number of men taken by Moses from the elders of Israel,
The names of God found by the Cabalists in verses 19, 20 and 21 of Exodus xiv,
The palm trees in Numbers xxiii. 9 and Exod. xv. 27,
The shepherds in an allegory in the book of Enoch (grouped into 37, 23, and 12),
The council of the Sanhedrin,
The disciples of Jesus,
The disciples of Manes,
The sects in the religion of Mohamed,
The kings ruled over by a king at Diospolis in Iran,
The nations of the "universal empire of Cush,"
The confederates of the queen of the Cushim,
The men who came from Medina to Mohamed,
The members of the college of Cardinals,
The commanders of the Greeks against Troy,
The murderers of Osiris,
The original number of drachmae in a mina or pound,
The companions supplied to Typhon by the Queen of Ethiopia

A significant subset of the above set of entries relate either to the rulers of the combined nations of the earth or of the regions of individual nations, people assigned to various other duties and missions in those nations or regions, or to the languages spoken there. To this list must be added the entire 70-member Egyptian "7th Dynasty" that appears in versions of Manetho and not in its totality in any of the surviving kinglists actually found in Egypt, though there is some limited indication of the kings of the 7th and 8th Dynasties in the Turin and Abydos lists. Coincidentally, the reference in the table to the kings of Diospolis is due to a gentleman writing under the pseudonym of "Nimrod" widely quoted by Higgins, and it should also be kept in mind that the name "Diospolis" was used by Manetho for the city of Thebes in Upper Egypt. The Seventh Dynasty was supposedly a period during which Memphis was losing power to a dynasty centered at Herakleopolis, later to be replaced by one at Thebes.

There are three surviving versions of Manetho's 7th Dynasty, one from Africanus and two versions of Eusebius. The version due to Africanus gives the period covered by the 7th as 70 days. Eusebius gives it as either 75 days or 75 years. These were clearly not successive kings of Egypt. Even if the unit is years and not days, there could not have been 70 kings of a significant portion of Egypt in such a short time. But look at the above table: "The kings ruled over by a king of Diospolis in Iran," and "The nations of the universal empire of Cush." Remember that Nimrod was supposedly the son of Cush in the biblical Table of Nations. Cush has sometimes been identified with the city of Kish, though in the Table it refers to northern Sudan. These and other elements of the Table point toward a central imperial ruler and 72 subordinate kings. If there is indeed a connection with Naram-Sin (purportedly Nimrod), then this "dynasty" must have begun sometime before the relevant catastrophic year of 2230 BC and after the slide into the First Intermediate Period had begun with the dendrochronologically verified catastrophic year, 2354. With this data in mind, I would like to propose the following sequence.

The Egyptian Seventh Dynasty and the Akkadian Empire

In the Akkadian text normally referred to as the Sargon Legend, according to the translation at the Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, Sargon says:

12. When I was a gardener the goddess Ishtar loved me,
13. And for four years I ruled the kingdom.
14. The black-headed peoples I ruled, I governed;
15. Mighty mountains with axes of bronze I destroyed (?).
16. I ascended the upper mountains;
17. I burst through the lower mountains.
18. The country of the sea I besieged three times;
19. Dilmun I captured (?).
20. Unto the great Dur-ilu I went up, I ...
21. ... I altered ...

Sargon was the third ruler of Akkad before Naram-Sin.

There appears to be no mention here of Egypt. There are, however, other translations of this passage. The following is due to L. A. Waddell, not the most objective of commentators, in The Makers of Civilization. Waddell's books are suspect. He has an obvious, racial, axe to grind, trying to prove that the rulers of Akkad were not Semites but descendants of what he sees as the "Aryan" Sumerians. Nevertheless, his translation of the above passage is interesting, for he manages to find a reference to Egypt not found in more orthodox translations, as well as making a bit more sense where the length of Sargon's reign is concerned:

12. As the Man of the Garden (? Oracle) the Lord Sakhar-Tar loved me.
13. For ... (? fifty) and four years the kingdom I ruled.
14. The men of the blackheaded race (Chaldees) I ruled, I ...
15. Over rugged mountains in bronze chariots I rode.
16. I (ruled) the upper mountains.
17. I (ruled) the rulers of the lower mountains.
18. To the (Upper ?) Sea-coast, I thrice advanced:
19. Iatu (or Pu) Land (Egypt) submitted;
20. The fortress of Durash (? Dur-Ilu), the great city, bended ...
21. I destroyed ... (illegible) ...

Not only does Waddell see an Akkadian presence in Egypt, a possibility that agrees with our own interpretation of the 7th Dynasty, but he sees Sargon generally as a more powerful ruler than he is normally given credit for, holding sway far beyond the already extensive confines to which his empire is normally restricted:

The extent of his empire has hitherto been only vaguely inferred and greatly underestimated from his title in the inscriptions as "King of the lands of the Lower Sea and the Upper or Western Sea"―terms in which "Lower Sea" has been supposed to be restricted to the Persian Gulf, and in which "Upper Sea" or "Sea of the West or of the Setting Sun" though rightly recognized as meaning the Mediterranean, has been interpreted by Assyriologists as meaning no more than the Syrian coast. Now, however, he is seen to have ruled an empire in the Ancient World so vast that it has perhaps never been equalled [sic] in the Old World. It is seen to have included, besides Mesopotamia and the greater part of Asia Minor and Syrio-Phœnicia, also Egypt and the Mediterranean basin, Persia and the Indus Valley with the Arabian Sea, and extending beyond the Pillars of Hercules to Britain.

Again, Waddell is far from orthodox, and I quote him mainly as an entrée into the subject of Akkadian rule of Egypt. It was he, however, who discovered the 6th Century BC birthplace of Gautama Buddha at Kapilavastu in Nepal, confirmed later by the discovery of a pillar erected by Emperor Asoka three centuries after the fact. So the man cannot be easily written off as simply a garden variety crank. His ideas may be somewhat off the beaten track but, like those of Godfrey Higgins, at least some of them are worthy of serious consideration. Later, Waddell continues:

We have seen that "Sargon" in his inscriptions at Nippur claims that: "Unto King Gin, king of the Land (or Earth), Lord Sakh gave no foe from the Upper Sea [Mediterranean] unto the Lower Sea [Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean], Lord Sakh ... subjected the lands to him." And the Omen version of his Chronicles states: "King Gin who marched against the Land of the West, and conquered the Land of the West, his hand subdued the Four Quarters of the World." [brackets in original]

Also:

This Chronicle copy reads: "King Gin, king of Agudu City, through the Weapon of Lord Sakhar Tar (or ? Lady Ish-Tar) was exalted...."

The name of this weapon and its pictorial sign are of significance. Its sign pictures what is regarded as a thunderbolt with an arrow head; and it appears to be the same weapon which is carried by the Sumerian Hercules, the top of which is sometimes figured as a cross....

One wonders what this Weapon of Ishtar was. This is not necessarily a weapon obtained from Ishtar. Ishtar herself is thought of as a weapon of some sort. Morris Jastrow of the University of Pennsylvania quotes from a penitential psalm in The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria: "But thou, O Ishtar, mighty weapon of the great gods." Whatever it was, this weapon allowed Sargon to conquer regions hitherto beyond the reach of earlier Mesopotamian despots:

... Some particulars are given of the Mediterranean basin, in one of his edicts on the boundaries of his empire. This refers amongst other things to his "conquest of the land of the Muru (Amorites)" and mentions his suzerainty over "the Tin-Land country which lies beyond the Upper Sea [Mediterranean]." This obviously refers to Sargon's sovereignty over the tin-mines of Cornwall, .... And it mentions that "the produce of the mines is taken, and the produce of the fields to King Gin has been brought." And Egypt or Misher is mentioned as being within his frontiers....

At this point Waddell proceeds to confuse Sargon with the earlier Narmer of Egypt, tries to identify Manishtusu with Menes, and generally spins off into eccentricity as he continues his attempt to ascribe the original rise of civilization to his "Aryan" Sumerians.

The Legend of Ninus

...

The Table of Nations

The so-called Table of Nations found in Genesis contains 72 purported descendants of Noah including Ham, Shem, and Japheth (Yaphet). Some of these entries represent actual genealogical data found elsewhere in Genesis, but most are simply eponymous ancestors (mythical forebears) from whom the names of these ethnic groups were supposedly taken, and some are merely names of peoples with no attempt to disguise them as individuals. The list is obviously synthetic and has been edited within an inch of its life in order to bring the total number of "nations" to 72 while maintaining the fiction that they are part of the genealogical scheme of the rest of Genesis. To the extent that the Table gives actual political divisions, it appears to be more than just an enumeration of important population centers of the ancient Near East. We have already noticed the possibility that the embedded story of the Tower of Babel may refer to Naram-Sin of Akkad, so the obvious question is whether the Table represents the organization of the Akkadian Empire under the earlier Sargon of Akkad or under Naram himself. But first, let us look more closely at the Table. The spellings are generally those of Richard Friedman from The Bible with Sources Revealed. The identifications of tribes, cities, and nations are those of Josephus in The Antiquities of the Jews:

Table of 72 "Nations" from Genesis

It is immediately obvious what has been done here. The three supposed sons of Noah have been substituted for what must have been three (or four) continental rulers under the Akkadian crown, a system clearly analogous to that finally instituted in 270 BC by the generals of Alexander after years of confusion resulting from his death in 323, and the descendants of Shem (Samsu-iluna) have then been insinuated into the lower ranks of the hierarchy of this political organization. The entire scheme has then been quite superficially converted into a genealogical foundation myth in the style of the followers of the later religion of Ugarit. Once the genealogical veneer has been stripped away, some fairly obvious patterns emerge from the Table.

The major divisions under the continental rulers are clearly regional power centers. The division containing the "sons" of Ham, for example, is analogous to the Ptolemaic Kingdom and is made up of Egypt, Libya, Cush, and Canaan. The division containing the "sons" of Shem is analogous to the Seleucid Empire and, according to Josephus, encompasses "the land that began at Euphrates, and reached to the Indian Ocean," including Elam (Persia), Asshur (Assyria), Lydia (in Anatolia), and Aram (Syria), the sons of Joktan living "from Cophen [Kabul], an Indian river, and in part of Asia adjoining to it." Modern commentators identify these sons with various inhabitants of Arabia Felix, peculiarly unimportant compared to the Indians identified by Josephus. For obvious reasons, this second division does not contain either Babylonia or its Akkadian predecessors, though the interpolated Ham and Shem were kings of Babylon, and Josephus calls Arpachshad the progenitor of the "Arphaxadites," whom he identifies with the "Chaldeans" in line with our reconstruction. The third division is roughly analogous to the Antigonid Empire and, again according to Josephus, "they inhabited so that, beginning at the mountains Taurus and Amanus, they proceeded along Asia, as far as the river Tansis, and along Europe to Cadiz." It seems clear that all of the subsidiary groups listed in the Table are lesser entities, primarily cities, that fell under administrative control of the regional power centers at the top of the geographical hierarchy and, some of which, in turn served as capitals of lesser dominions.

Amazingly enough, Nimrod falls in the third generation after the father of Ham. We have already noted that Sargon was the third ruler of Akkad before Naram-Sin, though he was purportedly the grandfather of Naram-Sin and not his great-grandfather as suggested by the table. As for why he falls under Ham and not Shem, we can infer that the latter line of descent had already been taken up with the interpolated descendants of Arpachshad and that there may have also been some confusion between Cush in Africa and Kish in Mesopotamia, the first king of which city is associated by the Sumerian king-list with the first generation after the Flood, another indication of confusion in the Table between the descendants of Sargon and the kings of the early postdiluvian world. Here we have another (still tenuous but less so) indication that the empire described in the earliest version of the Table of Nations was that of Sargon the Great of Akkad and that Naram-Sin was indeed the Nimrod of the bible.

Waddell reinforces the identification of some of the members of the Table with the inhabitants of India, though it remains difficult if not impossible to determine what to take seriously from his "translations" of ancient texts, saying the following about Naram-Sin in his Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered:

Over twenty years ago [before 1905], I observed in comparing the Indian Epic lists of the Ancient Aryan kings with the Mesopotamian King-lists that the great Aryan king "S´akuni," occupied a relative position in the "Lunar" version of these lists corresponding to that of "S´ar-gu-ni" in the Mesopotamian King-lists. Moreover, the leading kings before and after Sargon I were generally similar on both lists; and S´akuni's "son" or "descendant" was "Karamb'a," which suggested some resemblance to "Naram-Sin" of the Assyriologists, who for long called him the "son" of "Sargon I," though now he is found to be his grandson, and the most famous of Sargon's "sons" or descendants.

Later, on revising at first hand from the Sumerian and cuneiform texts the readings of the Mesopotamian king's names as restored by Assyriologists, I found that the name read by them as "Naram-Sin," also reads by other recognized values for the syllabic signs of that king's name "KA-RA-AM-BA," and thus absolutely equates with the name in the Indian Epic King-lists for the "son" or "descendant" of King S´akuni.

He continues,

Moreover, in the "solar" ... version of the Indian Epic lists of these Early Aryan kings, wherein the kings often bear different (solar) titles from those on the Lunar lists ... in precisely the same relative position as occupied by S´akuni in the Lunar lists comes the great "world-emperor" SAGARA of Ajodhya or Ayodhya, the record of whose vast conquests generally resembles that of S´arguni or Sargon I of Agade―which latter city-name appears to be represented by the Ajodhya or Ayodhya of the Indian Epics.

And further,

Now the "son" of Sagara in the Solar Indian Epics is "Asa-Manjas," who apparently corresponds to Sargon's eldest son the "Manis´-tis´s´u or Manis´-tusu" of the Mesopotamian King-lists and inscriptions.

According to Waddell's translation, Sargon claimed to be ruler of the "four quarters of the world," yet there appears on the surface to be a missing quarter in the Table. If the northwestern quadrant was Europe; the southwestern quadrant, Africa and Canaan; the northeastern, Mesopotamia and Iran; the southeastern quadrant must have included parts of India and Arabia, especially near the Indian Ocean; and, interestingly enough, as we have already noticed, Josephus places the sons of Joktan, a particularly numerous subdivision, in that very region, so that we can imagine that this Joktan was a fourth substitution―along with Ham, Shem, and Japheth―for the original continental ruler under Sargon of Akkad. It is even conceivable that he was the actual historical ruler of south Asia under the Akkadian crown. Thus we have the following political organization under Akkad during the period between Sargon and Naram-Sin:

28 Provinces of the Akkadian Empire

At first glance this table appears to be excessively weighted to the southeast, but when we look for the entry―we will henceforth call them provinces―midway between the two extremes, we find that Assyria falls at position 14, half of 28, when traveling clockwise along an arc beginning at Cush. It should also be noted that the city of Akkad has never been found. It is normally assumed to have been somewhere between Sippar and Kish, but this is merely a supposition.

It is difficult to identify many of the provinces listed under Joktan in the Table of Nations, the region that, from what we have learned so far, appears to have been the southeast quadrant of the Akkadian Empire. There are, however, a few clues that may be helpful in identifying some of these locations in or near modern India. To begin with, as we have already seen, Josephus tells us that the "sons of Joktan" lived "from Cophen, an Indian river, and in part of Asia adjoining it." The Cophen is the modern Kabul River―if anything about Afghanistan can be said to be modern―that rises near the city of Kabul and flows into the Indus. Josephus also identifies Ophir, the most prominent of all of the provinces in this part of the empire, with Aurea Chersonesus, now the city of Malacca near the extreme end of the mainland of Southeast Asia, though 19th Century scholars who wished to place the sons of Joktan in India, including Carl Ritter, Christian Lassen, and Max Müller, saw Ophir as the ancient country of the Abhiras where the Indus flows into the Indian Ocean. The identification with Abhira makes a bit more sense from a practical point of view, it being a relatively short hop by ship from the head of the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Indus, and we can even imagine the ships of Solomon and Hiram plying the sea lanes from Ezion-Geber to the Indus in search of gold, silver, ivory, precious stones, "almugwood," apes, and peacocks (or baboons), it being less imaginable that they should have sailed all the way to Malaysia and back, though Stecchini presents strong evidence that the ancient cartographers were aware of the exact location of the Malay Peninsula. Josephus further identifies the river Pishon, which flowed about the land of Havilah according to Genesis, with the Ganges, so, by extension, Havilah was a land somewhere near the river Ganges. The same book has Jobab as one of the kings of Edom, suggesting that Jobab was Edom, this important area appearing nowhere else in the Table.

The locations of Ophir and Havilah and even of Cophen at one of the sources of the Indus suggest a geographical distribution based upon sea lanes anchored at the head of the Persian Gulf and reaching to the farthest regions of subcontinental Asia and possibly even farther to the east. This distribution of provinces along significant waterways was not limited to the southeastern quadrant of the empire. The southwestern region was made up of provinces arrayed along the eastern and southern Mediterranean coasts and the Nile River, and the northwestern follows the northern coast of the Mediterranean all the way to Spain and includes provinces accessible from the Black Sea. The northeastern quadrant of the empire was made up of subject states within or adjacent to the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley. These aquatic avenues of conquest are precisely those that were later used by Seti II in his conquests noted by Manetho during the time of the Trojan War, in the latter case beginning at the Red Sea rather than the rivers of Mesopotamia.

.....to be continued

[Chapter Twelve: 208 BC―The Mystery of Mithras]

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