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

Chapter Eleven: Sargon, 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

I am not unaware that regarding the cities named above
Ctesias of Cnidus has given a different account,
saying that some of those
who had come into Egypt with Semiramis founded them,
calling them after their native lands.
—Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History

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 2254 to 2217 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. 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 "70-day" Egyptian 7th Dynasty that appears in versions of Manetho and not in its totality in any of the surviving king-lists 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" (Algernon Herbert) 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 Eighth 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 number of kings as 70 and the period covered by the 7th as 70 days. Eusebius gives it as 5 kings who ruled for either 75 days or 75 years. 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. Some of these dates are based on the section "Decoding Manetho" below.

The Egyptian Seventh & Eighth Dynasties and the Akkadian Empire

In the Akkadian text normally referred to as the Sargon Legend, according to the translation of George A. Barton 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." Jean-Jacques Glassner in Mesopotamian Chronicles tells us that the word amaru, normally translated "flood," can mean either "a meteorological phenomenon or a fearful weapon in the hands of the warrior goddess Inanna." Perhaps it meant both and Sargon was taking military advantage of the aftereffects of Typhon. 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 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 generally those of Josephus in The Antiquities of the Jews with a few obvious additions. In particular, note the presence of the inhabitants of Crete, under the rubric of Caphtorim, within the sphere of influence of Egypt. These will become important in Chapter 14:

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=1885], I observed in comparing the Indian Epic lists of the Ancient Aryan kings with the Mesopotamian King-lists that the great Aryan king "Śakuni," occupied a relative position in the "Lunar" version of these lists corresponding to that of "Śar-gu-ni" in the Mesopotamian King-lists. Moreover, the leading kings before and after Sargon I were generally similar on both lists; and Śakuni'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 Śakuni.

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 Śakuni in the Lunar lists comes the great "world-emperor" SAGARA of Ajodhya or Ayodhya, the record of whose vast conquests generally resembles that of Śarguni 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 "Maniś-tiśśu or Maniś-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 13, almost halfway through the list 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.

Sheba was clearly Saba’ in southern Arabia. Biblical scholarship of the 19th Century saw the rest of the sons of Joktan as other Arabian tribes, no doubt influenced by the Arab genealogists who derived every little ethnic group of the Arabian Peninsula from the sons of Joktan. Yet, if these 13 names, combined, represent the southeastern quadrant of the Akkadian Empire, they must have been much more important political entities, as the presence of locations in India would tend to indicate. As we have already seen, Sargon appears in the genealogies of Rajasthan, and an equivalent personage even appears, though out of order, in the annals of the Chinese, perhaps the result of Indian influence. Other Indian identifications may be found in Sergei V. Rjabchikov, one of the few people to see past the Arabian theory, in "Quasi-Bilingual Sources for the Decipherment of the Indus Script," online in The AnthroGlobe Journal, who suggests that Hadoram was Mohenjo-Daro, Almodad was Harappa, and the name Hazarmaveth was related to that of the Sarasvati River.

The locations of Ophir, Havilah, Almodad, Hadoram, 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.

Decoding Manetho

Just looking at the first six dynasties of Manetho's chronology of the Old Kingdom, we see that there is something peculiar about it. Ever since modern historians began to look at the history of Egypt, a slow process has continued—of shortening Manetho's timeline—piecemeal for the most part, as new data came in. But no one has noticed a consistent pattern in Manetho's list of rulers. Reign lengths of 30, 40, even 60, and one of an amazing 99 years, abound in this list left by the Egyptian priest who wrote during the 3rd Century BC in Ptolemaic Egypt, just like the lists in the bible from the time of the Judges who ran the Israelite nation before the rise of kingship under Saul, completely out of line with the way things work in the real world, where the first male child normally appears long before a person reaches the ripe old age, at least in ancient Egyptian terms, of 40, not to mention the physical impossibility of a continued series of 40-year-old kings normally related as father and son. Yes, dear reader, the Hebrews did not invent the process of using a six-month unit in the enumeration of the lengths of the reigns of their kings. They appear to have borrowed it from the Egyptians, and it can be seen in full flower in the writings of Manetho as they have been preserved in Josephus and Eusebius and Africanus. I must admit it took me a while to realize this. There is something a bit hypnotic about the way modern scholars have "confirmed" some of Manetho's reign lengths. Unfortunately, the inscriptions and papyri from which they have been working suffer from this same use of a unit significantly smaller than a solar, or even lunar, year, absorbed by Manetho from his original sources. The fact is that when we halve the reigns listed by Manetho, from the First through the Twelfth Dynasties, they not only make a lot more sense and fit a bit better with modern values, they begin to fit rather well with the cycle of cataclysms observed in Chapter Eight, and they especially fit well with the period of Akkadian domination during the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties elaborated above. The data is from Verbrugghe and Wickersham, Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated.

Manetho's First Seventeen Dynasties Adjusted for Temporal Inflation and Aligned with the Invasion of Sargon

The confusion in the reign lengths of the kings of Dynasty I is not as drastic as one might think looking at them written in "Arabic" (actually Indian) numerals. Africanus gives the reigns of the 1st thru the 4th of these as 62, 57, 31, and 23 years. Eusebius gives them as 60, 27, 39, and 42 years. Not much similarity there. However, the fact is that these figures were transmitted from the time of the Roman conquest of Egypt using Roman numerals, so that we have the following representations of Manetho's figures in that system, to which I have added what I believe to be the correct reconstructed values. Apparently someone in the chain of transmission was just slightly dyslexic. There is some room here for variation, but not much. Africanus gives the entire length of the dynasty as 253 years. Eusebius gives it as 252. My solutions all approximate what the linguists would call the central form of the variants:

Manetho's Early Dynasty I Represented Using Roman Numerals

What is important is that the chronology presented to us by the 3rd Century BC priest from Heliopolis is identical with that presented to us by the original sources of the bible—not similar, not close—identical. The conclusion is inescapable. Manetho was working from the same original sources as the chroniclers of Abraham and Joseph and Moses, all of whom had Heliopolitan associations and all of whom would have appeared in the very same records used by Manetho. Furthermore, we can now conclude that the Heliopolitan priests had accurate records beginning at least as early as 2999 BC and probably earlier, and those records included events from beyond the borders of Egypt as far as Akkad and Babylon. You may call it Panheliopolitanism if you wish.

We may now draw the following further conclusions resulting from the above reconstruction of Manetho:

1. Despite what the Egyptologists will tell you, neither Manetho's Dynasty XVI nor XVII appears in the Turin Papyrus.

2. The presence of Tutimaios at the inception of the Hyksos Dynasty is not the product of a corrupt translation, as some scholars would have us believe. He was the Dedumose of the Turin king-list and the last king of the XIVth Dynasty that fell to the XVth in 1718 BC.

3. The rules for Manetho's original dynasties are now seen to be flexible: They are sometimes chronological and sometimes not. The apparently anomalous nature of dynasties XVI and XVII will be explained in Chapter 13. Furthermore, the beginning of Dynasty V actually follows that of Dynasty VI, an alignment that will be reinforced at the end of this chapter. The reason for this is problematic. It may be that the Fifth was seen by Manetho as a direct continuation of the Fourth. The actual breaks between dynasties resulted from the political decline that followed the catastrophic events enumerated in Chapter Eight, or from invasion or collapse of central authority that resulted from those catastrophes. Whether the numbering of the dynasties goes back to Manetho is not immediately clear. The version of Manetho used by Josephus appears to have had no such numbering and Josephus seems to have been totally unaware of any such system.

4. The 2nd Intermediate Period was much longer than heretofore imagined. During this period the Egyptians lived under divided rule for 468 years, almost half a millennium.

5. The dates for the various subdivisions of the Bronze Age, based on Egyptian chronology, will have to be adjusted slightly to fit the correct lengths of the Egyptian dynasties. This will also affect the related ceramic timeline.

6. Sargon of Akkad did in fact invade and conquer both Lower and Upper Egypt near 2323 BC, and by extension, the rest of the Mediterranean world. Only with the death of Man-ishtusu did the native dynasty at Herakleopolis arise. And only after the catastrophe of 2230 and the death of Naram-Sin in 2217 did Egypt finally begin to break its final ties with the Akkadian Empire.

7. Noah was indeed Menes. The so-far-tenuous identification of the Deluge with the catastrophe of 2949 BC is correct. By extension, the tree ring event of 3195 marked the Flood of Ogyges recalled even by the Greeks two-and-a-half millennia later.

8. I must admit I am bothered by the length of the reigns during the XVth Dynasty. If the overall length of the "Hyksos" or Asiatic period is correct, and it appears to be based on the precision of its end at 1534 BC, then either the succession of the kings of the XVth had nothing to do with primogeniture, and may even have been matriarchal in nature, or there are missing kings from the Hyksos period, a possibility that is becoming more probable as indications of unknown Hyksos rulers appear from the excavations at Avaris. The former possibility fits with what we have seen of the succession at Ugarit as it relates to Abraham and his bloodline. I am reminded especially of the ages of Shem and Abraham at the births of their patrilineal heirs, Arpachshad and Isaac, both at the age of 50.

9. The above reconstruction of Manetho reaffirms in sharp relief why true non-mythical Jewish history only begins with Abraham, for that is where it finally begins to seriously intersect with natively ruled Egypt and its scribal tradition. Prior to that, relations between the two camps involved the weak Egyptian administration at Thebes and the Asiatic dynasties at Xoïs and Avaris. Whatever the ultimate nature of this relationship among the various Hyksos, Habiru, and Atonist parties may have been, even if we can finally draw a sharp line among the various camps, there remains too little information to construct a consistent picture, the monument obsessed Egyptians having withdrawn to the Upper Nile for the duration.

10. Finally, there has been some speculation that the rise of the Hyksos, or their displacement from their original homeland that initially put pressure on the Egyptian state, resulted from the catastrophe of 1628. More likely, the end of the Middle Kingdom resulted from the events of 2002, and the rise of the Hyksos had its origins in the event of 1752. One cycle later, the catastrophe marked by the tree ring minimum at 1628 launched the worship at Avaris of Seth by his namesake, Sethos, the Staan of Manetho's list—we will delve more deeply into this subject in Chapter 13. Later, with the imminent event of 1526 clearly on the horizon, the Theban monarchy began to summon the courage to confront the invaders directly. Even then, despite the monuments to the contrary, the Egyptians required the aid of Abraham and his roving Chaldeo-Amorite army-for-hire to finally secure their eastern frontier. In this light, the 18th Dynasty can be seen, not as a break with Asiatic influence in Egypt, but as a new alignment in which Egypt gained the allegiance of the Hebrews against their common Syro-Phoenician and Assyrian enemies. There are lessons here for modern times in the region.

The most radical element of this part of my reconstruction is the extreme lengthening of the 2nd Intermediate Period. It has been difficult to find any absolutely probative evidence for this modification, but there are a few hints. For example, under the 3rd Dynasty of Ur, which lasted approximately 108 years beginning sometime around 2000 BC according to this reconstruction, there are no inscriptions or tablets mentioning Egypt. Some commentators have found this unusual, for Egypt was supposedly a major world power at the time, yet it does not surprise us at all, for the years that saw the rise of the last dynasty of Ur also saw the cometary event of 2002 and the beginning of the 2nd Intermediate Period when Lower Egypt was ruled from the city of Xoïs by a hitherto unknown nationality before being invaded by the Phoenician "Hyksos."

A Note on Sothic Dating

According to the Sothic dating system, The "heliacal" rising of Sirius occurred synchronously with the first day of the 365-day Egyptian civil year in 1322, 2782, and 4242 BC, every 1460 years or thereabouts, based on the alignment of AD 139 reported by Censorinus. It seems that the star Sirius, "Sothis" in the Greek rendering of the Egyptian name, rose just before the sun almost precisely every 365.25 days (one-quarter day longer than the civil year) over the entire history of Egypt. This, in turn, places the seventh year of Sesostris III in the year 1872 BC, since the Egyptian records supposedly mention the heliacal rising on the 16th day of the eighth month of that year. This is a full 162 years after our date of 2034 and requires an explanation. The obvious one is that there were two versions of this calendar in use, one in Lower Egypt until the end of the Middle Kingdom and perhaps into the 2nd Intermediate Period, and one in Upper Egypt that was transferred to Lower Egypt with the arrival of Kamose in 1549. For example, if we adjust the Sothic year of 2782 upwards by 162 years, we get 2782+162=2944 BC, a scant six years after the beginning of the 1st Dynasty in 2950. This is what one would expect if the early years of King Menes marked the beginning of a new epoch in North African civilization, which it clearly did. By the time of the reign of Amenhotep I, however, the Upper Egyptian calendar had been transferred to Lower Egypt, so that his reign is found to have begun in 1525 BC, strictly in accordance with the current reconstruction.

Sothic Years One

The practical significance of the heliacal rising of Sirius was that it marked the beginning of the flood season in the Delta, an event that would have been of much less significance in Upper Egypt.

Decoding the Sumerian Chronicles

Now that we have used the world empire of Sargon and the realization that many an ancient chronology was padded using multiplication by small whole numbers, we might as well tackle the problem of the Sumerian chronicles in an analogous fashion. I must admit this took me a bit longer than the hour or two that it took me to decode Manetho ... but not too much longer.

First let me say that when the Chronicler tells us that kingship at City Y followed kingship at City X in the land of Sumer, he was not just making it up. The notion that the dynasties of Sumer were coeval and one was rising as the other was fading, as suggested by Jean-Jacques Glassner, and that the succession of these kingdoms can be represented by a kind of spiral pattern is—how shall I say it without offending someone?—logically indefensible. When one cuts the lengths of reign during the various periods of Sumerian history down to size, none of these scholarly gymnastics are required. The relevant units for the postdiluvian period are as follows:

1. Sargon and after: one unit per year.

2. Dumuzi the Fisherman of the Dynasty of Eanna until the advent of the Dynasty of Akkad in 2334: one month per unit, or twelve units to a year.

3. From the 1st Dynasty of Kish until the year 2723: 4 days per unit, or 90 units per year. It took me a while to realize they were not using a unit of 6 days, or 60 units per year, as one might expect from a civilization using a sexagesimal or base-60 numbering system.

2723 was an important year. It marked the rise of Dumuzi II to the throne of Eanna, followed at his death by Gilgamesh of the widely read epic thereof. This year was marked by catastrophe, though obviously not the one associated with Noah/Menes. In short, there were two major catastrophes in Sumerian history, both marked by a change of scale of the related historical records, one at the beginning of the 1st Dynasty of Kish and the second at the beginning of the reign of Dumuzi II. The rise of the latter king was also exactly 400 years before the conquest of Egypt by Sargon, so that one might wonder whether Sargon was making some kind of chronological statement when he chose that year to invade. The following table contains the relevant information. The data is from Glassner's Mesopotamian Chronicles:

The Chronicle of the Single Monarchy from the 1st Dynasty of Kish
through the Dynasty of Akkad—Adjusted and Aligned

Nitocris and Sargon

Once we have the correct relative dates for the kings of the Egyptian and Sumerian lists, we are in a position to understand the events surrounding the rise of Queen Nitocris (also spelled Nitokris), identified by Herodotus with separate women in Egypt and at Babylon. As he says, "The name of the ['one native Egyptian'] queen was Nitocris—the same as that of the Babylonian queen." It turns out that the seriously corrupted and mythologized stories of both Nitocris and Semiramis, the latter often identified with Queen Sammu-ramat of Assyria and placed by Herodotus five generations before Nitocris in Assyria, may refer to a single Egyptian individual closely allied with Sargon I of Akkad, perhaps before and certainly after his conquest of Egypt and his founding of the Seventh Dynasty. As Deborah Levine Gera writes in Warrior Women: The Anonymous Tractatus de Mulieribus, "The two Babylonian queens nonetheless sound remarkably alike and scholars suspect that they are, in fact, one and the same figure." She also tells us that Nitocris, despite Manetho, was an exclusively Egyptian name—there is no Assyrian equivalent—making the historical Nitocris an Egyptian. The three most important characters in the story of Nitocris/Semiramis are the queen herself; Sargon the Great of Akkad, masquerading as Ninus in Diodorus and Herodotus; and her earlier husband, called Onnes by Herodotus and identified by him as a general of Ninus, though the author of the Tractatus calls him "a governor of the king." In reality, according to our reconstructed history of Manetho, Nitocris was queen and ruler at Memphis while Onnes (the Onnos of Manetho) ruled at Elephantine. Onnos was Unas of the Pyramid Texts, as well as General Una. According to The Encyclopædia Britannica of 1890, Una was appointed governor of Upper Egypt by Merenra, the Menthesouphis of Manetho and the brother of Nitocris. Here we have further confirmation of the relative dates for the Memphite and Elephantine dynasties of the 25th and 24th Centuries and, in fact, a virtual lock on the entire dynasty, since Menthesouphis ruled for less than a year, a period at least part of which fell within the year 2329 BC.

The full name of Nitocris according to modern scholars was Netjerikare Menkare, suggesting that Manetho's Menkare, who ruled Egypt at the beginning of the Seventh Dynasty, was Nitocris and that she ruled under the authority of Sargon. If we take the myths at all seriously, what we have is Nitocris taking the throne of Lower Egypt from her brother Menthesouphis in 2329, marrying Onnos who had taken the throne of Upper Egypt the same year and thus opening up the possibility of joint rule, then collaborating with Sargon in his conquest of Lower Egypt in 2323. That Semiramis/Nitocris was supposed to have been a queen of Babylon is not terribly surprising, for Sargon is supposed to have built Babylon near Akkad. That Nitocris was credited by Manetho with building the third pyramid at Giza may be explained by his confusion of Nitocris Menkare with the king of the Fourth Dynasty he calls Menkheres, if he is not simply thinking of an Akkadian ziggurat. It should also be pointed out that the line of Egyptian kings whose names ended in kheres (Higgins's cheres) ended abruptly in 2329 with the appearance of Onnos, foreshadowing a change of dynasty just prior to the arrival of Sargon on the Lower Nile.

The first of our two legendary queens, Semiramis was supposed to have been the wife of Ninus, the eponymous builder of Nineveh and son of Belus—the god Baal, identified by the Greeks with their own Zeus. Belus, in turn, was the son of Libya. These are all clearly mythological characters, and Semiramis herself has been identified with the goddess Astarte, the Syrian equivalent of Ishtar, whose weapon Sargon claimed to have wielded, so at the very least, if she was human at all, her subjects would have seen her as an incarnation of the Goddess. This was exactly the position of the kings and queens of Egypt. They were literally gods on earth. As we shall see in Chapter Thirteen, it was one of these "gods" that visited Lot before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. According to Diodorus, Semiramis continued to rule after "Ninus" had died. This would bring her well into the reign of Rimush, the supposed son of Sargon. In fact, it should become immediately clear to the reader who this Rimush must have been. She was the wife of Sargon under the shortened form of her Akkadian name, rendered into Greek as Semiramis, and she ruled for nine years after Sargon died. In 2269, Semiramis/Nitocris herself left the throne and was replaced by Man-ishtusu. If Diodorus is correct in ascribing a 42-year reign to Semiramis, she must have become co-ruler with Sargon in 2311, the year after Onnos died. 2254 saw the death of Man-ishtusu and the rise of Naram-sin, the ill-fated Nimrod of the bible, and the appearance of the Ninth Dynasty at Herakleopolis, which marked the beginning of the end of Akkadian rule in Egypt.

It may also be possible to fill in some of the events that occurred during this period of time by referring to the surviving legendary material. For example, Onnes is supposed to have committed suicide upon learning of the demand of "Ninus" that he hand over his wife Semiramis to him, and Ninus's threat to have him blinded if he did not comply. Did the real Onnos actually kill himself upon learning of Sargon's intention to marry Nitocris? We cannot be certain, but there is no obvious reason to assume otherwise. The legends also tell of Semiramis fighting alongside of Ninus during his campaign in Bactria. We have already seen that Sargon bragged about his possession of the "weapon of Ishtar," which could very well refer to the military prowess of his new bride, if not also to some special weapon she possessed, perhaps forged from meteoric material from the comet of 2354. I am reminded of the sword of King Arthur, the Excaliber of legend. Beyond this, there are multiple references to the building activities of Semiramis. The construction of Babylon, in particular, fits the time period and the common claim that it was Sargon who was responsible for the new city. No doubt there are other elements of the legends that will in the future shed further light on the events that surrounded the Akkadian conquest of Egypt.

The Timeline in India

Father Bacchus was the first who invaded India,
and was the first of all who triumphed over the vanquished Indians.
—Megasthenes of Arachosia, Indica

If Waddell is correct and Sargon is the Sagara of the Indian solar king-list, then it should be possible to reconstruct the Indian timeline back to Icshwaca, the brother-in-law of that earliest Buddha (Colonel James Tod calls him Boodha) of the lunar list whom Godfrey Higgins identifies as an earlier incarnation of Krishna:

I shall now shew that Buddha and Cristna were only renewed incarnations of the same Being, and that Being the Solar power, or a principle symbolized by the Sun―a principle made by the sun visible to the eyes of mortals: and particularly exhibiting himself in his glory at the vernal equinox, in the heavenly constellation known by the name of Taurus, as BUDDHA, and subsequently in that of Aries as CRISTNA....

Buddha is allowed by his enemies, the Brahmins, to have been an avatar. Then here is divine wisdom incarnate, of whom the Bull of the Zodiac was the emblem. Here he is the Protogonos or first-begotten, the God or Goddess Мητις of the Greeks, being, perhaps, both male and female. He is at once described as divine wisdom, the Sun, and Taurus. This is the first Buddha or incarnation of wisdom, by many of the Brahmins often confounded with a person of the same name, supposed to have lived at a later day. In fact, Buddha or the wise, if the word were not merely the name of a doctrine, seems to have been an appellation taken by several persons, or one person incarnate at several periods, and from this circumstance much confusion has arisen.... The mother of Buddha was MAIA ....

Both the names Menes and Noah appear in the Indian lists, Menes as Manu in the solar list and Noah as Nohas in the lunar list. It should be noted that Nohas is made the great-great-grandson of Manu, thus demonstrating the synthetic nature of the upper reaches of the combined tree and suggesting that these are not actually genealogical tables but lists of kings, thereby explaining the presence of Sargon in both lists. The following table is extracted from Col. Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han. Unfortunately, the Indian "genealogies" fail to give reign lengths, perhaps in the interest of maintaining the illusion that these constitute family history and not political succession, so that we can only calculate an approximate 19-year average reign for the sequence.

List of the Kings of India from Menes until Sargon

In conclusion, and according to the present reconstruction, the 1st Dynasty of Egypt at Thinis began in 2950 with King Menes. The 1st Dynasty of Sumer at Kish began very early in the year 2949 with King Gishar. The Indian solar succession is very nearly synchronous, beginning with the death of Menes in 2920. For all practical purposes, the three dynasties began at the same time. Their beginning marked the most important geophysical event of the past five millennia—whose effects included the Deluge in Egypt, the Flood in Mesopotamia, and the desiccation of the Sahara—all caused by a close encounter of the earth with the comet Typhon. These encounters with Typhon would mark significant transitions in the history of the peoples of earth for at least another 3000 years, leading ultimately to the establishment of a group of religions in the Near East whose influence would finally spread to the four corners of the world. It is to this later period in the development of cometary religion that we will turn in Chapter Twelve, before returning again to the subject of the Egyptian timeline in Chapter Thirteen.

[Chapter Twelve: Tangled Bloodlines]

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