SUDDEN CIVILIZATION

Sumer was not a mysterious, distant land, but the early name for southern Mesopotamia, just as the Book of Genesis had clearly stated: The royal cities of Babylon and Akkad and Erech were in "the Land of Shin'ar." (Shinar was the biblical name for Shumer.)

Once again, the biblical verses gained in significance.

And Kush begot Nimrod;
He was first to be a Hero in the Land....
And the beginning of his kingdom:
Babel and Erech and Akkad.

Many scholars have speculated that Sargon of Akkad was the biblical Nimrod.

And the beginning of his kingdom:

Babel and Erech and Akkad, all in the Land of Shin'ar.
Out of that Land there emanated Ashur where
Nineveh was built, a city of wide streets; and Khalah, and Ressen - the great city
which is between Nineveh and Khalah.

If one reads "Kish" for "Kush" in the above biblical verses, it would seem Nimrod was indeed preceded by Kish, as claimed by Sargon.

"He defeated Uruk and tore down its wall ... he was victorious in the battle with the inhabitants of Ur... he defeated the entire territory from Lagash as far as the sea."

This capital of the Assyrian king had as its center a magnificent royal palace whose walls were lined with sculptured bas-reliefs, which, if placed end to end, would stretch for over a mile.

Commanding the city and the royal compound was a step pyramid called a ziggurat; it served as a "stairway to Heaven" for the god

SUDDEN CIVILIZATION

FOR A LONG TIME, Western man believed that his civilization was the gift of Rome and Greece. But the Greek philosophers themselves wrote repeatedly that they had drawn on even earlier sources. Later on, travelers returning to Europe reported the existence in Egypt of imposing pyramids and temple-cities half-buried in the sands, guarded by strange stone beasts called sphinxes.

When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study and explain these ancient monuments. One of his officers found near Rosetta a stone slab on which was carved a proclamation from 196 B.C. written in the ancient Egyptian pictographic writing (hieroglyphic) as well as in two other scripts.

The decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and language, and the archaeological efforts that followed, revealed to Western man that a high civilization had existed in Egypt well before the advent of the Greek civilization. Egyptian records spoke of royal dynasties that began circa 3100 B.C. - two full millennia before the beginning of Hellenic civilization. Reaching its maturity in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., Greece was a latecomer rather than an originator.

Was the origin of our civilization, then, in Egypt?

As logical as that conclusion would have seemed, the facts militated against it. Greek scholars did describe visits to Egypt, but the ancient sources of knowledge of which they spoke were found elsewhere. The pre-Hellenic cultures of the Aegean Sea - the Minoan on the island of Crete and the Mycenaean on the Greek mainland - revealed evidence that the Near Eastern, not the Egyptian, culture had been adopted. Syria and Anatolia, not Egypt, were the principal avenues through which an earlier civilization became available to the Greeks.

Noting that the Dorian invasion of Greece and the Israelite invasion of Canaan following the Exodus from Egypt took place at about the same time (circa the thirteenth century B.C.), scholars have been fascinated to discover a growing number of similarities between the Semitic and Hellenic civilizations.

Greek and Latin writing, and thus the whole foundation of our Western culture, were adopted from the Near East can easily be demonstrated by comparing the order, names, signs, and even numerical values of the original Near Eastern alphabet with the much later ancient Greek and the more recent Latin.

Yet all was not that simple. In spite of the assumed foreign origin of these invaders, the Old Testament treated them as part and parcel of biblical events. Cyrus, for example, was considered to be an "Anointed of Yahweh" - quite an unusual relationship between the Hebrew God and a non-Hebrew.

According to the biblical Book of Ezra, Cyrus acknowledged his mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and stated that he was acting upon orders given by Yahweh, whom he called "God of Heaven." Cyrus and the other kings of his dynasty called themselves Achaemenids - after the title adopted by the founder of the dynasty, which was Hacham-Anish.

It was not an Aryan but a perfect Semitic title, which meant "wise man."

By and large, scholars have neglected to investigate the many leads that may point to similarities between the Hebrew God Yahweh and the deity Achaemenids called "Wise Lord," whom they depicted as hovering in the skies within a Winged Globe, as shown on the royal seal of Darius.