There Were Giants Upon the Earth
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after, is that he was instructed to seek out a certain mountain with subterranean passageways in the Sinai Peninsula for angelic encounters, and then proceed to Babylon to the temple of the Babylonian god Marduk.
That latter instruction probably stemmed from one of the "secret things" that Alexander had learned in Siwa: That Amon was an epithet meaning "The Unseen" that had been applied in Egypt to the great god Ra since about 2160 B.C., when he left Egypt to seek dominion over the whole Earth; his full Egyptian name was Ra-Amon or Amon-Ra, "the Unseen Ra." In my previous books I have shown that 'Ra-Amon' established his new headquarters in Babylon in Mesopotamia—where he was known as Marduk, son of the olden god whom the Egyptians called Ptah and the Mesopotamians Enki. The secret presumably revealed to Alexander was that his true father, the Unseen (= Amon) god in Egypt, was the god Marduk in Babylon; for within weeks of learning all that, Alexander set out for distant Babylon.
As summer began in 331 B.C., Alexander reassembled a large army, and marched toward the Euphrates River on whose banks, south of midstream, Babylon was situated. The Persians, still led by Darius, also assembled a great cavalry and chariot force and awaited Alexander, expecting him to take the traditional route southward along the Euphrates River.
In a great outflanking maneuver, Alexander swerved instead eastward^ toward the Tigris River, outflanking the Persians and reaching Mesopotamia in what had historically been Assyria. Learning of Alexander's strategy, Darius rushed troops to the northeast. The two armies met on the eastern side of the Tigris River, at a place called Guacamole ('E' on map, Fig. 1), near the ruins of the erstwhile Assyrian capital Nineveh (now in the Kurdish part of northern Iraq).
Alexander's victory there enabled him to recross the Tigris River; without need to cross the wide Euphrates River, an open plain led to Babylon. Rejecting a third peace offer from Darius, Alexander marched on to Babylon; he reached the renowned city in the autumn of 331 B.C. and rode in through its magnificent Ishtar Gate (reconstruction, Fig. 5;
Figure 5
having been excavated and reassembled, it is now on display in Berlin's Museum of the Ancient Near East).
The Babylonian noblemen and priests welcomed Alexander, delighted to get out of the sway of the Persians who had defiled and "demolished Marduk's great temple. The temple was a great ziggurat (step pyramid) at the center of Babylon's Sacred Precinct, rising in seven precise astronomically defined stages (a reconstruction, Fig. 6). Wisely, Alexander let it be known ahead of time that he is coming to pay homage to Babylon's national god, Marduk, and to restore Marduk's defiled temple. It had been a tradition for new Babylonian kings to seek legitimacy by having the deity bless them by grasping their extended hands. But this Alexander could not attain, for he found the god lying dead in a golden coffin, his body immersed in special oils for preservation.
Though surely aware that Marduk had been dead, the sight must
have shocked Alexander: Here lay dead not a mortal, and not just his rumored father, but a god—one of the venerated "Immortals." What » chance, then, did he, Alexander, a demigod at best, have to avoid death? As if determined to defy the odds, Alexander enlisted thousands of . workmen to restore the Esagil, spending scarce resources on the task; and as he left to continue his conquests, he made it clear that he had decided to make Babylon the capital of his new empire.
In 323 B.C., Alexander—by then master of the Persian empire from Egypt to India—returned to Babylon; but Babylonian omen priests warned him not to reenter the city, for he would die if he did. Bad omens, which occurred soon after Alexander's first stay in Babylon, continued although Alexander held off entering the city proper this time. He soon fell ill, seized with high fever. He asked his officers to keep vigil on his behalf inside the Esagil. By the morning of what we now date as June 10, 323 B.C., Alexander was dead—attaining immortality not physically, but by being remembered ever since.
* * *
The tale of Alexander the Great's birth, life, and death has been the subject of books, studies, movies, college courses, and whatever else for generations. Modern scholars do not doubt the existence of Alexander the Great, and have written endlessly about him and his times, ascertaining every detail thereof. They know that the great Greek philosopher Aristotle was Alexander's teacher and mentor, have established Alexander's route, analyzed the strategy of every battle, recorded the names of his generals. But that respected scholars engage in that without an ounce of shame is amazing; for while they describe every aspect and twist in the Macedonian court and its intrigues, they laugh off the part that triggered it all—that of the belief in that court, by Alexander himself, by learned people in Greece—that a god could father a son by a female mortal!
This disdain for "myth" extends to the wider subject of Greek Art. Volumes that make private and public book shelves buckle deal with every minutiae of 'Greek Art' in its varied styles, cultural backgrounds, geographic origins; museums fill up galleries with marble sculptures, bronzes, painted vases, or other artifacts. And what do all of them depict? Invariably—anthropomorphic gods, heroic demigods, and episodes from the so-called mythical tales (as this depiction of the god Apollo welcoming his father, the god Zeus, accompanied by other gods and goddesses, Fig. 7).
For reasons that defy understanding, it is the norm in scholarly circles to classify the records of ancient civilizations thus: If the ancient tale or text deals with kings, it is considered part of Royal Annals. If it deals with heroic personalities, it is an epic. But if the subject is gods, it is classified as Myth; for who in his right scientific mind would believe, as the ancient Greeks (or Egyptians or Babylonians) did, that the gods were actual beings—omnipotent, sky-roaming, engaged in battles, scheming trials and tribulations for heroes—and even fathering those heroes by having sex with human females?
Figure 7
So it is ironic that the saga of Alexander the Great is treated as historical fact, although his birth, oracular visits, itineraries, and end in Babylon could not have taken place without including such 'mythical' gods as Amon, Ra, Apollo, Zeus, and Marduk, or such demigods as Dionysus, Perseus, Hercules—and possibly Alexander himself.
We now know that the lores of all ancient peoples were replete with tales—and depictions—of gods who, though they looked like us, were * different—even seemingly immortal. The tales were essentially the same^ all over the globe; and though the revered beings were named differently in different lands, the names in the diverse languages had by and large the same meaning: an epithet denoting a particular aspect of the named deity.
Thus, the Roman gods called Jupiter and Neptune were the earlier Greek gods Zeus and Poseidon. Indra, the great Hindu god of storms, attained supremacy by battling rival gods with exploding thunderbolts, just as Zeus had done (Fig. 8); and his name, spelled syllabically In-da-ra, was found in god lists of the Hittites in Asia Minor; it was another name for the Hittite chief deity, Teshub, the god of thunders and lightnings (Fig. 9a)—Adad ("Wind Stormer") to the Assyrian and Babylonians,
Figure 9
Hadad to the Canaanites, and even in the Americas where, as the god Viracocha, he was depicted on the "Gate of the Sun" in Tiwanaku, Bolivia (Fig. 9b). It is a list that can go on and on. How could that be, why was it so?
Advancing through Asia Minor the Greeks passed imposing Hittite monuments; in northern Mesopotamia they came across the ruins of Assyria's great cities—desolate, but not yet buried by the sands of time. Everywhere, not only the deities’ names, but also the iconography, the symbols, were the same—dominated by the sign of the Winged Disk (Fig. 10), which they encountered in Egypt and everywhere else—even on the monuments of Persian kings as their supreme symbol. What did it represent, what did it all mean?
Soon after Alexander's death, the conquered lands were split between two of his generals, for his rightful heirs—his four-year-old son and his guardian, Alexander's brother—were murdered. Ptolemy and his successors, headquartered in Egypt, seized the African domains;
i
Figure 10
Seleucus and his successors, based in Syria, ruled Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the distant Asian lands. Both new rulers embarked on efforts to learn the full story of the gods and lands now under their control. The Ptolemies, who also established the famed Library of Alexandria, chose an Egyptian priest, known as Manetho, to write down in Greek Egypt's dynastic history and divine prehistory. The Seleucids retained a Greek-speaking Babylonian priest, known as 'Berossus', to compile for them the history and prehistory of Mankind and its gods according to Mesopotamian knowledge. In both instances, the motives were more than mere curiosity; as later events showed, the new rulers sought acceptance by suggesting that their reigns were a legitimate continuation of dynastic kingships that stretched all the way back to the gods.
What we know of the writings of those two savants transports us to the very prehistoric times and events of the intriguing Genesis 6 verses; it takes us beyond the issue of whether "myths" might somehow be true—a collective memory of past events—and catapults us to the discovery that they are versions of actual records, some of which are purported to be from Days Before The Flood.
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BABYLON AND MARDUK
Called Bab-lli (= 'Gateway of the gods') in Akkadian (from which Babel in the Bible), it was the capital city that gave its name to a kingdom on the Euphrates River, north of Sumer & Akkad. Until archaeological excavations begun before World War I brought to light its location and imperial extent, its existence was known only from the Bible—first from the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, then from historical events recorded in the books of Kings and the Prophets.
The rise and history of Babylon were closely interwined with the fortunes and ambitions of the god Marduk, whose main temple—a ziggurat called the E.sag.il (= 'House Whose Head is Lofty')—rose within a sprawling sacred precinct, where a plethora of priests hierarchically arranged ranged from cleaners and butchers and healers to administrators, scribes, astronomers, and astrologers. Mar.duk (= 'Son of the Pure Mound') was the firstborn son of the Sumerian god Ea/Enki, whose domains were in Africa (where, I have suggested, they were worshipped as the gods Ra and Ptah, respectively). But Marduk sought overall dominion by establishing his own 'Navel of the Earth' in Mesopotamia proper—an effort that included the failed 'Tower of Babel' incident. Success finally came after 2000 B.C., when a resplendent Marduk (see illustration, next page) invited all the other leading gods to reside in Babylon as his subordinates.
Babylonia attained imperial status with the dynasty started by King Hammurabi circa 1800 B.C. The deciphering of cuneiform texts found all over the ancient Near East provided historical data about its religion-motivated conquests and rivalry with Assyria. After a decline that lasted some five centuries, a Neo-Babylonian empire rose again, lasting to the 6th century B.C. Its conquests included several attacks on Jerusalem and the destruction of its Temple in 587 B.C. by King Nebuchadnezzar II—fully corroborating the biblical tales.
The city of Babylon, as an imperial capital, a religious center, and the symbol of its kingdom, came to an end in 539 B.C. with its capture by the Achaemenid-Persian King Cyrus. While he was respectful of Marduk, his successor, Xerxes, destroyed the famed ziggurat-temple in 482 B.C., for by then it only served as a glorified tomb for the dead Marduk. It was those ruins of the ziggurat-temple that Alexander attempted to rebuild.
II
In the Days before the Flood
Enlisted by King Ptolemy Philadelphus circa 270 B.C., Manetho (Greek from Men-Thoth = 'Gift of Thoth') compiled the history and prehistory of ancient Egypt in three volumes. The original manuscript, known as Aegyptiaca, was deposited in the Library of Alexandria, only to perish there with other irreplaceable literary and documentary treasures in natural and man-made calamities, including its final burning by Moslem conquerors in A.D. 642. We do know, however, from quotes and references in the writings of others in antiquity (including the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus) that Manetho listed gods and demigods as reigning long before human Pharaohs became kings in Egypt.
The Greeks were not completely ignorant of Egypt and its past, certainly since the historian-cum-explorer Herodotus visited the land two centuries earlier. On the subject of Egypt's rulers, Herodotus wrote that Egyptian priests "said that Men was the first king of Egypt." True to apparently the same sources, Manetho's list of Pharaohs also began with one called Men (Menes in Greek); but it was Manetho who was first to arrange the succession of Pharaohs by dynasties—an arrangement followed to this day—combining genealogical affiliations with historical changes. His comprehensive List of Kings gave their names, lengths of reign, order of succession, and some other pertinent information.
What is significant in Manetho's list of Pharaohs and their dynasties is that his list begins with gods and not with Pharaohs. Gods and demigods, Manetho wrote, reigned over Egypt before any human Pharaohs did!
Their names, order, and lengths of reigns—"fabulous," "fantastic" scholars say—began with a divine dynasty headed by the god Ptah, ancient Egypt's Creator God:
Ptah
reigned
9,000 years
Ra
reigned
1,000 years
Shu
reigned
700 years
Geb
reigned
500 years
Osiris
reigned
450 years
Seth
reigned
350 years
Horus
reigned
300 years
Seven gods
reigned
12,300 years
Like his father Ptah, Ra was a god "of Heaven and Earth," having arrived in earlier times from the "Planet of Millions of Years" in a Celestial Barque called the Ben-Ben (meaning 'Pyramidion Bird'); it was kept in the Holy of Holies of a shrine in the sacred city Anu (the biblical On, better known by its later Greek name Heliopolis). Though benefiting from unbridled longevity and playing a role in Egyptian affairs for millennia to come, Ra's reign as Ptah's successor was cut short— abruptly—after a mere one thousand years. The reason, we shall find, was significant to our quest.
The first divine dynasty that ended with Horus, Manetho reported, was followed by a second one, headed by the god Thoth (another son of Ptah, but only a half-brother of Ra). Its reign lasted a total of 1,570 years. In all, Manetho said, gods ruled for 13,870 years. A dynasty of thirty demigods followed; they reigned a total of 3,650 years. All in all, Manetho wrote, divine and semi-divine rulers reigned a total of 17,520 years. Then, after a chaotic intermediate period that lasted 350 years, with no one reigning over the whole (i.e., both Lower and Upper) of Egypt, Men began the first human dynasty of Pharaohs, ruling over a unified Egypt.
Various modern archaeological discoveries that corroborate Manetho's Pharaohnic list and order of succession include a document known as the Turin Papyrus and an artifact called the Palermo Stone, so named after the museums in Italy in which they are kept. The corroborating finds also include a stone inscription known as the Abydos List, in which the 19th dynasty Pharaohs Seti I and his son Ramses II, who reigned a thousand years before Manetho's time, depict themselves (Fig. 11). Carved on the walls of the main temple in Abydos, a city in Upper Egypt, it lists the names of seventy-five of their predecessors, beginning with "Mena." The Turin Papyrus corroborates Manetho's divine, semi- divine, and chaotic-interval lists, and (including subsequent Pharaohs) names a total of 330 rulers, just as Herodotus had been told.
The famed Egyptologist Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie excavated a group of tombs in a most ancient cemetery on the outskirts of Abydos. Stelas that served as tombstones and other inscriptions identified the place— located beside a purported Tomb of Osiris—as the burial grounds of First and Second dynasty Pharaohs; the sequence of tombs, from east to west, began with one bearing the name of Ki
ng Menes. Petrie identified tombs bearing the names of all of the First Dynasty Pharaohs, and in his masterwork, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty (1900/1901), acknowledged that the finds confirmed Manetho's list. Moreover,
Figure 11
he found tombs with names of pre-dynastic kings, nicknaming them "Dynasty 0." Subsequent Egyptologists have identified them as rulers during the Chaotic Period listed by Manetho, corroborating that part of his listings too.
The importance of such corroborated data goes beyond the issue of divine and semi-divine dynasties in pre-Pharaonic times: It throws significant light on the subject of the Deluge and pre-diluvial times. Since it is now known with certainty that Pharaonic rule began in Egypt circa 3100 B.C., Manetho's timeline takes us back to 20,970 B.C. (12,300 + 1,570 + 3,650 + 350 + 3,100 = 20,970). Climate and other data presented in my books The 12th Planet and Genesis Revisited led to the conclusion that the Deluge occurred some 13,000 years ago, circa 10,970 B.C.
The resulting difference of 10,000 years (20,970-10,970) is exactly the length of the combined divine reign of Ptah (9,000years) and the abruptly cut short reign ofRa (1,000years). This is a significant synchronism that links the Manetho timetable to the Deluge. It suggests that Ptah reigned before the Deluge, and that Ra's reign was abruptly cut short by the Deluge. It confirms the reality of the Deluge and its timing on the one hand, and the veracity of Manetho's divine and demigod data on the other hand.