[Chapter Nine: Seth and Typhon―Identifying the Agent of Destruction]

Chapter Ten: Noah and Menes―The Ark at Thebes

Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.
―Ignatius Donnelly, Ragnarok

The Antediluvian World

It is not known where the battle between the Amazons (or "Atlanteans") and Mopsus (or Mopsos) took place. It is commonly assumed that this was somewhere near Thrace, north of Greece, and western Scythia, but that is only conjecture based upon the places of origin of Sipylus and Mopsus. In actuality it could have occurred anywhere between Greece to the west and Syria to the east, and between Scythia to the north and Central Africa to the south. It appears that this battle was so vast in scope and scale that its memory survives as far east as India in certain elements of the story of the great Battle of Kurukshetra described in the Mahabharata, where Krishna, apparently a distant echo of Horus, takes part in the battle, driving the chariot of Arjuna, though he never lifts a weapon. But there is no indication of the Amazons ever penetrating as far east as India, though the Greeks claimed that tribes of the same name occupied the coast of the Black Sea. Or the Amazon War was only part of a much broader conflict that raged across the antediluvian world from northern Africa to the plains of India. Of course, if we could extract Krishna from the Battle of Kurukshetra, his identification with Horus would stand on firmer ground and would not be subject to any chronological problems that might arise from the suggestion that Kurukshetra was a battle from a later time. In fact, P. Lal virtually comes right out and says as much in the Introduction to his Condensed Mahabharata of Vyasa of 1980 (republished in 2006).

I have omitted most of the Bhargava [Brahmin] "additions" from my condensed transcreation [Lal's idiosyncratic term for translation]. Because he "in reality has no connection whatever with the action" of the Mahabharata [quoting V. S. Sukthankar], I have even excised the stupendous feat of the great Bhargava, Parashurama, the axe-wielding avatara of Vishnu ..., but I confess that it has not been possible to leave out the greatest "Bhargava" of them all, Krishna himself, Balarama's brother.... To expel Krishna from the epic would be to have Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

There are other indications of world war during the period just preceding the Flood of Deucalion. According to Rasmus B. Anderson's Norse Mythology, transmitted to us by Ignatius Donnelly in his Ragnarok, the Elder Edda echoes the conditions described in the bible that led to the Deluge. Even recalling the story of Cain and Abel, the Edda tells us that "Brothers slay brothers; sisters' children shed each other's blood. Hard is the world! Sensual sin grows huge." As Donnelly writes, this time referring to the Younger Edda: "The world has ripened for destruction; and 'Ragnarok,' the darkness of the gods, or the rain of dust and ashes, comes to complete the work. The whole story is told with the utmost detail, and we shall see that it agrees, in almost every particular, with what reason assures us must have happened. 'There are three winters,' or years, 'during which great wars rage over the world.' Mankind has reached a climax of wickedness."

At this point we must take a closer look at the so-called antediluvian kings compared in Chapter Eight. Is it possible to determine the underlying identities of these characters from the distant past? When exactly do they cease to be mythological and become historical? The pairs Adam & Eve and Osiris & Isis are fairly transparently the sun and the moon, the primeval Father and Mother of the ancient religion of all earth and the supposed ancestors of all of the kings and queens whose claim to power is ultimately genealogical. Seth, their purported son, is none other than the Serpent, the "comet" Typhon whom we examined in Chapter Nine. As we saw there, the third person of this trinity was later identified with the planet Venus, thus confusing Velikovsky and leading to his identification of Typhon with that planet. Only with Abel, the Apollo of the Greeks, do we come to the first incarnation of the sun on earth, the prototype for all those other avatars who claimed to be sons of the sun. Abel is synchronous with Myrina, the first queen of the Amazons and, as Maia, the first of the Seven Sisters later immortalized as the Pleiades. So Menes, or Noah, with whom we shall identify him below, is the direct descendant of this "first" true human―or rather Abel is his earliest ancestor of which any record has survived. If Abel can be identified with Apollo, then he was the father, not the brother, of Kenan, or Cain, and suddenly all of those prototypical stories of sons murdering fathers begin to make a bit more sense, so that Cain was the type of the Oedipus Rex of the Greeks after whom Freud named one of his psychoanalytic complexes. The implication of all of this is that the first historical event described in the bible is the murder of Abel by Cain and that the migration of Cain to Nod "on the east of Eden" was not a peaceful affair but points toward a missing account of the very Amazon War referred to by Diodorus.

Eliminating some of the noise from the table of antediluvian kings and adding the Greek equivalents, we are left with the following:

At first I couldn't quite wrap my brain around the fact that some of the kings in the Egyptian list matched those in the Hebrew and other lists and some didn't. It wasn't until I was reading Robert Graves on the aid rendered by the Amazons to King Ammon that I realized that the various antediluvian kinglists were not simply local variations on the same list, but individual lists of local kings where some of the entries appeared on more than one list due to the shifting fortunes of war, as a result of which the king of one country sometimes found himself ruling over another. In short, the kings of the antediluvian world were not simply legendary. They were real figures living in the real world where idealized lists of primordial kings were a future product of the fading memories of a later age and not an accurate representation of contemporary events. More importantly, the source of Graves' account, Diodorus Siculus, beginning with Chapter 68 of Book III of his Library of History, tells us just exactly where Ammon, the fifth member of the above list, ruled―and it was not the "Upper Egypt" of the postdiluvian world. According to Diodorus, Ammon, who was synchronous with Methusaleh, was king of Libya, specifically "that part of Libya" mentioned in his previous paragraph, the region from the ocean, apparently the Atlantic, to the island of Nysa, including the Ceraunian Mountains, a range that turns out to be in modern Albania. The city of Nysa was located on this island "surrounded by the river Triton" and is clearly identical with Plato's island of Atlantis and the biblical Eden. The Triton matches Wadi Inharhar on the map from Chapter Eight. So again we have the motif of an empire that runs from central Africa all the way to southern Europe. The identification with Eden is supported by the following description from Diodorus derived from the writings of Dionysius.

The land of the island is rich, is traversed at intervals by pleasant meadows and watered by abundant streams from springs, and possesses every kind of fruit-bearing tree and the wild vine in abundance .... The whole region, moreover, has a fresh and pure air and is furthermore exceedingly healthful .... Everywhere along the lanes, the account continues, springs of water gush forth of exceeding sweetness, making the place most pleasant to those who desire to tarry there.

Now Dionysius has Ammon at Nysa, where he leaves his son Dionysus to be raised, so that we have ancient testimony that this King Ammon visited the island where Poseidon supposedly founded the capital of Atlantis. Ammon was driven from power by Cronus, who is also concurrent with him in the above table, fleeing to Crete. He only regained power with the help of Dionysus, the Nysean allies of Dionysus, as well as the Libyans and the Amazons, the latter of whom fought under Athena. These Amazons lived across from Pharos in Egypt according to Graves, the implication being that they had lost control of most of their former African territory by this time, four generations after Myrina, and that it was now in the hands of whichever power was represented by Ammon.

The Antediluvian World from Horus to Menes

Earlier, Hercules, the Hebrew Jared or Irad, ruled the kingdom part of which would next be ruled by Ammon. According to Philostratus, in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the empire of Hercules ran all the way to India. He calls this Hercules "Egyptian." Diodorus Siculus echoes this with a terribly mangled account of the conquests of this Egyptian Hercules, placing the kingship in the hands of the mythical Osiris, the sun god, but identifying Hercules as "general of all the land under his sway." Diodorus further tells us in Chapter 39 of Book II that according to the Indians this Hercules

was born among them and they assign to him, in common with the Greeks, both the club and the lion's skin.... And marrying several wives, he begot many sons, but only one daughter; and when his sons attained to manhood, dividing all India into as many parts as he had male children, he appointed all his sons kings, and rearing his single daughter he appointed her also a queen. Likewise he became the founder of not a few cities, the most renowned and largest of which he called Palibothra. In this city he constructed a costly palace and settled a multitude of inhabitants, and he fortified it with remarkable ditches which were filled with water from the river.

In support of the Indian account, upon constructing a family tree of the various kings in the table it turns out that virtually all of the later ones―the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, and the Greeks―were descendants of Uranus/Her/Jared, the Egyptian "Hercules" of Diodorus, and through him the earlier Abel/Apollo, so that the ebb and flow of power in the primordial age had more to do with familial relations than national boundaries. And, if Gaia the mother of Cronus turns out to have been a descendant of Myrina, then her marriage to the father of Cronus would have linked the Amazon throne to the thrones of the descendants of Cronus.

Later, after Tutu had ruled in Ammon's stead, Zeus became king. This Zeus appears in the king list of Manetho as Sosos, who preceded Menes. Diodorus has Dionysus installing Zeus on the throne, and the form of his name would suggest this connection, dios being the genitive form of the nominative Zeus and Dionysus being formed, according to one account, from the elements dios and Nysa, the place of his birth. Dionysus was in turn the father of Priapus, the Greek version of Min, worshipped at the town of Qoph just north of the Egyptian Thebes and a deified version of Menes, the successor to Sosos, as Minos was the son of Zeus, so that we have here an ancient dispute over whether Menes was the grandson of Ammon or the usurper Cronus.

The Deluge

The notion of a flood that covered the entire earth, that washed across the mountain tops like a giant tidal wave, is, of course, quite ridiculous, a fantasy of those who would see the miraculous in the merely catastrophic. Certainly, the Deluge was no mere summer cloudburst. It must have rained heavily for a long time, and the result was massive flooding of at least some of the early river valley civilizations as they existed at the very beginning of the 3rd Millennium before the Common Era. The accounts of this event vary from nation to nation, and river to river, and to some extent there may have been an intermingling of the accounts as its global nature began to dawn on the literate peoples of the ancient world, but the specific variation found in the Hebrew Scriptures would appear to have had its origin in the description that survived of this Deluge as it played out in Egypt.

It will be useful at this point to reproduce a table, due to the Abbé Jacques-Jules Bonnaud in his Défense de l'Abbé Guerin de Rocher, abstracted from the Abbé de Rocher's Histoire Des Temps Fabuleux and found in Higgins' Anacalypsis in its original French.

Bonnaud's Table of Thebes and the Ark

Menes is unique among all the members of the antediluvian kinglists that have survived to the present day (see Chapter Eight), for only he can be identified with a real living person, the first king who ruled over Lower and Upper Egypt at the very beginning of the Dynastic Period that would last for three thousand years, the great unifier of all Egypt from the Nile Delta to the island of Elephantine. According to Herodotus, as recently translated by Robin Waterfield, when Menes (or Min) ruled over Egypt, "the whole of Egypt, except for the Thebaïd province, was a marsh and the whole present country below the lake of Moeris ... was under water." Clearly, this was a temporary phenomenon, for they were building pyramids at Giza by the 26th Century BC. It is thus not unreasonable to see this lack of solid ground below Moeris as a result of the Noachian Deluge. The notion of some Arab historians that the Great Pyramid was built as a refuge from that same deluge is thus lacking in verisimilitude, though there is no reason to believe that it had nothing to do with some deluge or other catastrophic event. The one that we have placed near 2723 BC is a prime suspect. There is physical evidence of an earthquake at Giza in the form of severe cracking of the horizontal ceiling stones of the inner chambers of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) sometime in its early history.

The Global Presence of the Flood Story

I will not reproduce here the extensive literature documenting the worldwide presence of the Flood Myth, as Alan Dundes calls it in his compilation of scholarly papers on flood stories from around the world. Graham Hancock also uses these stories, mainly from the New World, as evidence for his theory of prehistoric civilization in the Ice Age (à la Hapgood), in his more popularly oriented Footprints of the Gods. Suffice it to say that there is overwhelming evidence that the story of the Flood may be found everywhere except the darkest reaches of sub-Saharan Africa. What is not clearly understood by many of these researchers is that the presence of the story is not evidence of a universal deluge. What it is evidence of is the nearly universal presence of what is essentially a primary element of a religious system. This is not to say that the Deluge itself didn't happen―somewhere. The underlying events may even have had their local variations around the world, but the fact is that civilization had not reached a sufficient level of development in many of these places to allow for the preservation of local accounts of their consequences. Despite attempts by some scholars to explain these so-called myths as universal psychological motifs, there is really only one convincing reason why this historical account, solidly embedded within its religious context, should appear globally. We can only conclude that some earlier form of the religion within which the story of the Deluge was ultimately perpetuated in the Near East managed to penetrate vast expanses of the populated world sometime after the events described, events that occurred, by the current reconstruction, somewhere toward the middle of the 30th Century BC. Whether the spread of such a nearly universal religious system followed in the footsteps of some sort of global political authority, a vast empire, is not immediately obvious, but there is at least limited evidence that it did. As we shall see in the next chapter, Sargon of Akkad may well have conquered a vast swath of the civilized world, including Egypt, where the Akkadians would have encountered the historical and religious records of the Egyptians. His conquest of Egypt may be placed somewhere near the year 2305 BC, about six and a half centuries after the Egyptian Deluge, and the account of this event would then have been available for diffusion throughout the empire by means of the systems of communication and transport of the time. All surviving fragments of the Assyro-Babylonian and Sumerian flood stories date from not much earlier than 2000 BC, three centuries after the apparent invasion of Egypt by Sargon and almost a thousand years after the actual event.

In the 19th Century an attempt was made to explain the presence of certain elements in the bible with obvious parallels in the newly discovered Babylonian mythological system by postulating diffusion from the civilization of Babylonia, the so-called theory of Panbabylonism. Unfortunately, as we have just seen, the actual flood described may very well have occurred in Egypt rather than Mesopotamia, and though the term Panheliopolitanism has a certain ring to it, we will forgo for the present any attempt to coin a new term for the currently developing theoretical construction and remain content with simply looking at some of its more peculiar elements, in hopes of finding further clues to its underlying structure.

...

Descendants of Noah (Menes) to the End of the First Dynasty of Egypt

Diodorus of Sicily tells us that the first 52 kings of Egypt beginning with Menes formed an unbroken line of descent and that they ruled for a total of 1040 years. The latter figure clearly results from assigning a nominal period of 20 years to each reign, but 52 is the approximate number of kings from Menes until the beginning of the 7th Dynasty, depending on the source consulted, a period of approximately 676 years at the end of which Egypt may have fallen into the hands of the Assyrians, as we will discuss in the next chapter.

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

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