Historical Survey
It is assumed that the stories of the Book of Genesis cover some historical facts. The analysis of the previous chapter has proved that mythological stories can represent collective memories of past events. Of course, those memories are usually encoded in some history-to-myth transfer code. One of the methods of breaking that particular code is to relate elements of the mythical tale to actual historical data. This chapter is going to do exactly that; and attempts to find the nearest chronological, geographical, ethnographical and cultural conditions to fit the stories.
The creation of this framework is imperative. The principal aim of the book is to create a historical narrative corresponding to the biblical stories, as much as possible. The biblical stories are centered on an extended family, at most a small tribe, too insignificant to be the subject of direct historical evidences. However, the story of that family should relate to a historical framework, including chronology, territory, ethnic composition, and culture. Only if the story of the family, as told by the Old Testament will be fitted within the historical framework, can it be claimed that there is indeed a close correlation between the story of the Bible and historical data. It is not an absolute proof, but it is probably the best one can hope to achieve, from a distance of over 4,000 years.
As a first step in this direction, we have to place the narrative of the Old Testament into a chronological frame. If Abraham, the first Patriarch, was a historical figure, or a composite of a number of historical figures, then some historical clues should be found which would place the story within some historical period. The narrative of the Old Testament does not help much in this particular field. The ages of the Patriarchs and the generations before them are distorted. Building acceptable chronology upon reported irrational elements as legitimate historical data would have to calculate with ages of hundreds of years. The Old Testament is not alone in this respect. The Sumerian list of kings records ages for antediluvian kings in tens of thousands of years, which gives opportunities to writers of historical science fiction stories, but does not provide much help to serious historians. It is possible that there was some internal logic in those extraordinary ages of ancient heroes, probably to enhance their claim to divine descent, but we cannot be sure. So, the Old Testament cannot provide reliable clues as to the period of the tales.
We have to proceed, therefore, in our quest for the proper historical period, on clues found in the stories themselves. There are a number of historical events mentioned in the stories of the Old Testament and they can be used as indicators:
Abraham has left Ur, his hometown, to travel to Harran and from there to Canaan. What was the most suitable period to do so? The meaning here is not the period of the year, but the historical period when the town, or towns, named Ur was in danger and it was advisable for a prosperous man like Abraham to leave the area. According to the Old Testament, Abraham has initiated a far-reaching religious reform. It was presented in the Book of Genesis as a change from the worship of El to the worship of Yahweh. (The J versus the E school in the Bible). Does this religious reform has any historical reflection, and if yes, in what period?
Abraham and his family had constant dealings with Hittites in Palestine. He bought the Cave of the Machpela from Ephron the Hittite in Hebron; his grandson Esau married two Hittite girls from Beer Sheba. Moreover, his son, Isaac, and his grandson, Jacob, married girls from the old country, Harran, which was Hittite or Hurrian country. When could the Hittite arrive to Canaan?
During an extended drought in Canaan, Abraham traveled to Egypt. There, he met Pharaoh under curious circumstances and eventually returned to Canaan. In what period was such a meeting feasible?
Abraham had contact with the king of the Jebusite town, Jerusalem. The Jebusites were a mixed Semitic-Hurrian tribe. When was the first period when Hurrians could be in Canaan?
These are the possible historical circumstances, which should be thoroughly investigated. In addition, there are Jewish and Arab legends about Abraham, both seeing in Abraham the founder of their religion. According to Jewish tradition, Abraham was born in 2165 BC and his Egyptian journey was put at 2089 BC, when he was already 76. According to Arab tradition, Abraham was born in the 23rd century BC; not very far from the date of the Jewish tradition.1
When the list of questions above are checked, we reach about the same period. The proof of it comes from historical sources, mainly from the rich archives of Ebla:
Terah, Abraham's father, decided to leave his hometown Ur underway to .Canaan He died in Harran where he had relatives. His son, Abraham, decided to continue the journey, accompanied by his nephew, Lot. Judging from later stories, it was a journey of two clans or tribes who left Harran for Canaan. The tablets of Ebla seem to have been written in the last two generations of the city, somewhere in the 23rd century BC.
According to historical data, Sargon the Great of Akkad subjugated Ebla. After Sargon's death, Ebla revolted against Akkad and reduced its cities to vassalage. Ebla's king was named Ebrum (or Ebrium), who was placed on the throne by Sargon. In 2250 BC, Sargon's grandson, Naram-Sin, conquered Ebla and put it to the torch.
If the composite person of Abraham contains the persona of Ebrum, the reformator king of Ebla, and some chieftain in the Ur Harran area, which was near Ebla, then the period of the early 23rd century BC was a very unhealthy one. It must have been a warzone. However, as Map 1 shows, there were two towns with identical names. One is Ur in southern Mesopotamia, on the river Euphrates, and the second is in the north, on the river Balikh, which is one of the tributaries of the Euphrates. If Terach and Abraham were living in Ur in southern Mesopotamia, as Jewish tradition places them, then they were near Elam, which at that time had designs and successes against the Sumerian cities, including Ur. Therefore, whether Abraham started his journey in either of the towns, named Ur, the years of 23rd century were dangerous in both places.
According to the Eblaite tablets, during the reign of king Ebrum a religious reform took place. The reform was manifested in the theophoric element of names. The theophoric element is that part of the name referring to god. So, the name of Mi-ka-ilu (Michael) was changed to Mi-ka-Yah and Ur-ri-El to Ur-ri-Yah. Professor Pettinato, the leader of the excavations in Ebla, himself stated in his article in the Biblical Archaeological Review, already referred to that "many of these names occur in the same form in the Old Testament, so that a certain interdependence of the culture of Ebla and that of the Old Testament must be granted". The religious changes in Ebla were major reforms, and it happened between the reign of Sargon I, and the destruction of Ebla, in the 23rd century BC.
The first mention of the Hittites in historical sources comes also from the 23rd century BC. Naram-Sin, who destroyed Ebla, fought against a coalition of 17 kings, among them the king of Hatti, named Pamba, and the king of the Amurru, named Huwaruwas2. Both had Indo-European sounding names.
Abraham visited Egypt and was received by the Pharaoh. In normal circumstances it seems to be unrealistic to expect for Pharaoh to receive a chief of a wandering clan. However, corresponding to the period of Sargon I and Naram-Sin, there was in Egypt the first Intermediate Period. It was after the collapse of the Old Kingdom and it was a time of total confusion, where every nome (district) had its own ruler, politely called Pharaoh. The story of Abraham is realistic in that confused period, which coincided with wars and destruction both in northern and southern Mesopotamia.
The contact of Abraham with Melchizedek, the ruler of the Jebusite town, Jerusalem, is more problematic. The Jebusites were a mixed tribe, between Amorites and Hurrians. The Hurrians were a non-Indo-European
and non-Semitic people in northern Syria southeastern Turkey. A clay seal imprint was found recently at an excavation of Tel-Mizan in northeast of Syria. The imprint was dated to the 23rd century BC and the town within that Tel was identified as Urkesh, the sacred capital of the Hurrians. The Hurrians were in close contact with the Hittites and other Indo-European peoples. At a later period, Indo-Europeans formed the aristocracy of the Mitanni, Kassite and Hittite kingdoms, while the common people remained solidly Hurrian. However, that was only at the beginning, in the 3rd millenium BC., and later the people merged with the aristocracy and additional Indo-Europeans, who reached the area, and Kurdistan, which is the direct continuation of those kingdoms, turned from being Hurrian to being fully Indo-European. It seems that the appearance of the Hurrians in Canaan might have been at the same time as of the Hittites.
Judging from those evidences, listed above, the period of Abraham was probably in the last centuries of the 3rd millennium BC.
The map of the territory, where the story of the Patriarchs was played out, is presented on Map 1, which is in the Section of Maps. Looking at the map, it can be seen that it does not much differ from modern maps of the same area. There are two major differences though. One is in the delta of the Nile and the second is at the meeting of the Euphrates and Tigris with the waters of the Persian Gulf. Both differences are the result of the silt, which was deposited by the rivers in the last 4,000 years.
In the case of the Nile the change is less obvious than in Mesopotamia, where the changes of the last 4,000 years caused that both rivers combined into one, the Shatt-el-Arab, and the combined river reaches the Gulf. On the map, there is no Shatt-el-Arab, and the two rivers reach the waters of the Gulf.
There are a number of changes in southern Mesopotamia, caused by the deposit of the silt. One is that the Persian Gulf has shrunk at least by 100 kilometers, and there is a large marshy area, where previously was the Persian Gulf. The second change, that while in the 4th and 3rd millenium BC. the city of Ur was a busy port on the Euphrates, surrounded by lush green fields , today it is a dusty mound in the middle of the desert.
At that time, the Fertile Crescent, e.g. the semicircle of territory following north the two rivers from the Persian Gulf, turning west beyond the sources of the rivers and turning south and reaching the Egyptian border, had a much better climate than today. It had mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers.3 However, the green cover which at that time was still in existence, changed the climate to being much more comfortable than it is today.
The climate of the Middle East in general and the territory of Map 1 in particular, was formed by the end of the last Ice Age, and the fluctuations which followed the last deglaciation. The period of the Younger Dryas, which lasted about a thousand years and which returned the world to renewed glaciation, submerged the area into an uncommon and extended drought. It was only the first of the series of climatic changes, where clement weather alternated with dry periods. The problem was that the periods of clement weather brought a form of demographic explosion, with sizable agricultural settlements studding the map, especially in the northern part of the area.4
After periods of plenty came again changes in climate, with people leaving the stricken areas and congregating in oases, where game, plants, and water remained plentiful. Those oases were the valley of the Nile, the valleys of the twin rivers in Mesopotamia and in the north, where there was a huge sweet-water lake, which is now the Black Sea.5 Probably, the northern oasis was the most populous, as most of the earliest agricultural settlements were found in the northern part of the Middle East. The villages of Tepe Gawra, in Kurdistan, near Mosul, or Sialk in the Iranian highlands, or Ras Shamra on the northern coast of Syria, went back to very long time. At Tepe Gawra, 26 layers of houses were excavated, which went back at least 7,000 years. At Ras Shamra, there were 40 feet of prehistoric ruins below the level of 3,000 BC. In none of these places do the excavations reach the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution. In all the levels of the excavations, perfectly formed pottery was found with mastery in pottery techniques.6
The obvious signs of a long agricultural history in the northern part of the Middle East and in Anatolia, brought Colin Renfrew to formulate his theory that agriculture has spread to Europe from that area..7 This theory was probably reinforced by a later discovery, when they found that the Black Sea has turned from a sweet water lake into a sea, by the breakthrough of the waters of the Mediterranean, raised by the water released by the deglaciation, into the Black Sea through the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. That catastrophic event caused probably the creation of the many legends of deluge in the Middle East and the dispersal of the survivals to all directions of the compass.
The catastrophe has happened just before historical times, at about 5500 BC. It was an event, which shaped the world of the Patriarchs, both their environment and ethnic composition. It is true that between the catastrophe, which happened in the 6th millenium BC and the period of the Patriarchs at the end of the 3rd millenium, there was a very long time. However, if it is correct that there was an extended period of drought before the deluge, which compelled the people to escape into oases, mainly to the lake of the Black Sea, then that catastrophe probably exterminated most of the people in that oasis. The water advanced 6 inches each day; did not leave much time for people to collect their belongings and escape. Probably, more people did escape than those did in the biblical story, Noah and family, but not by much.
It must have been a very long time, until there were sufficient number of people to create new societies, which eventually became the first urban civilizations. Here, the possible ethnic composition of the Middle East during the period of the Patriarchs is evaluated.
Who were the people in the area shown on Map 1. Here the Bible does not help much. In Gen.15 that describes the Covenant of God with Abraham, and the extent of the land of Canaan, which Abraham and his descendants are to receive, ten tribes are counted as the then inhabitants of the land between the river of Egypt and the great river of the Euphrates. The river of Egypt is not the Nile, it is a temporary watercourse, a wadi which reaches the sea south of Gaza towards El-Arish. The ten tribes are: the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaim, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. Similarly, in Gen.13.7, it is stated that "the Canaanites and the Perizzites dwelled then in the land". Who were these people and what it means from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates?.
The Hebrew commentaries do not explain much about these peoples, apart of remarking laconically that these were the tribes living in Canaan at the time of Abraham. Some of the names are familiar: like the Hittites, with whom Abraham had dealings in Hebron, the Amorites , Canaanites and the Jebusites. Of the rest not much is known, apart of some vague connections. Some of the names are directly suspicious. Kadmonim means "the Ancients" and Rephaim means probably "the Ancestors".
The ethnic description in the Bible does not suit the aims of this book, so a way has to be found to fill the map with names, which are meaningful to us. In order to do so, the analysis has to retract its steps to a number of important milestones.
The first milestone is the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, the end of the last Ice Age. It was about 11,000 years before our time, and about 6,500 years before the age of the Patriarchs. The territories on Map 1 must have been populated comparatively densely, because if had a much better climate than Europe, which was still partially under ice, and the rest had sub-arctic conditions.
It is certain that there could not have been much difference between people living in Europe and those living in the Middle East. So far as it is known from archaeological sources, Europe was populated by people emigrating from the Middle East about 50,000 years ago, so at least they had a common origin8. Their way of life must have been similar. There are no archaeological data either about their language or about their cultural and religious beliefs, but it seems that hunter-gatherer bands, which are constantly on the move, must have had occasional encounters with other bands. These encounters, either in the form of fights, of trade or exchange of brides, must have ensured a kind of homogeneity among those roving bands.
The following analysis about the influence of the conversion to agriculture on the creation of language and ethnic diversities is based upon the assumption that the number of the people in the pre-Neolithic Middle East was sufficiently large, so the roving hunter-gatherer bands had to have some contact with each other, peacefully or not. If the density of people was below that limit, then hunter-gatherer bands could have developed languages and ethnic specialization, just as it happened with settled people. The Australian aborigines have about 170 languages for 30,000 people. There is no doubt that they had a common origin at about the same time when people spread to Europe from the Middle East. However, Australia is so big, that the aboriginal hunter-gatherer bands could separate without having much contact with each other.9
The onslaught of the Neolithic Revolution must have changed that ethnic unity. The climatic change caused the retreat of the ice from most of Europe, the partial desiccation of the Middle East, and far reaching changes in human climate. Europe became more fortunate than the Middle East. After the withdrawal of the glaciers, the continent became covered with thick deciduous forests, the game animals which escaped from the desiccated Middle East, filled the forests and continued to supply the roving hunter-gatherer bands for a long time to come.
In the Middle East there was a general deterioration of the climate, increased desiccation and desertification. The changed climatic conditions caused the transit to agriculture and dense agricultural settlements, in the valleys of the rivers and in the northern highlands.10 The transit to agriculture changed the earlier homogenous ethnicity. Settled communities are as their name. People living in them have no need to go out and meet other people. They might have had contacts with wandering traders and craftsmen, but not with people from other settlements. Lacking any policing authority, they must have looked askance on any contact with people from other villages. Obviously, there was no higher authority, to bring them together, and keep the peace while doing so.
It is not surprising that the first democratic institutions were developed in Scandinavia, among tribes having connection between roving hunter-gatherer bands for the longest period. People, who were living in isolated communities, like Sialk or Ras Shamra, or many other similar places, might or might not had some form of internal organization, but it is doubtful that they saw in the people from other settlements, anything but potential enemies. The separation of people within settled communities had to result in eventual separation, both in language and customs, and finally in the emergence of different tribes. The Old Testament described the separation of languages and the peoples, and Chapter 15 of the Book of Genesis gave the example to it.
Thus, the conversion to agriculture was one of the factors for the creation of ethnic diversity, the environment was another. People, who lived on the northern edge of the Middle East, bordering the dry steppe, or on the southern edge, bordering the desert, had to turn to husbandry when their area become unsuitable for agriculture. The rainfall was insufficient for agriculture and they had no other, permanent source of water. The valleys of the rivers and wetter highlands were already settled and they had to make a living where they lived, on the steppe or in the desert.
The separation of the people into two separate communities, one agricultural and settled and the second cattle or sheep rearing, and nomad, had far reaching consequences. The Bible recorded that fact with an allegory, that of Cain and Abel, just as it recorded the separation of languages with the allegory of the Tower of Babel.
The Eurasian heartland is separated into two wide belts. The southern belt stretches from the Levant to China, through the Middle East and India. The northern belt is a drier steppe land, starting in the west in the Great Plains of Hungary and ending in Manchuria in the east. The steppes are bordered in the north by the permafrost of the taiga and in the south by great mountain ranges. The southern belt is bordered in the south by deserts and by some tropical lands, like Southern India and Southwest Asia.
Since the earliest of times, certainly after the ending of the last Ice Age, the changed climatic conditions compelled the hunter-gatherer groups to find new ways to secure their livelihood. The southern belt, which included the North African littoral and Western Europe too, has settled down to agriculture, adapting in each area to local conditions. Because of very special climatic conditions, Europe belonged to the moderate zone, although it was on the latitude of Canada. The settling down to agriculture was a long process, but eventually each area found the proper plants to cultivate, and the methods to do so.
They domesticated animals too, but as most of the arable lands were needed for agriculture, which provided their primary needs of subsistence, they domesticated animals of smaller size, like sheep, goats, pigs and fowls. Some of those animals were scavengers, but others needed pasture. Their general pattern of transhumance was, that the animals were driven for winter grazing to the highlands, which were unsuitable for agriculture, and they were led to the stubble of their grain fields in the summer, where the animals could graze and fertilize the land for the next sowing.
There might have been regional differences, but by and large, this was the pattern of life that developed in the southern belt during the millennia following the last Ice Age. They had agricultural communities, again with regional variations, some of them quite sizable, but no literal societies have developed. There was no need for them. They were, more or less, self-sufficient. They had grain from their fields, and protein from domestic animals, supplemented by fishing and hunting. They might not have been always peaceful, as there were always less fortunate wanting to redress their bad luck by taking from the more fortunate, or at least attempt to do so. It was probably a stable form of society, which might have remained so, if not for outside intervention. It seems that at the beginning, there was not much conflict because of low population density and sufficient land reserve. However, there was a second side of the picture and it made the change.
Those of the hunter-gatherer bands who lived on the dry steppe, north of the belt of agriculture, could not take to agriculture because their environment was unsuitable for it. As they had to make a living somehow, they went in for large-scale husbandry, domesticating mainly cattle. The economics of cattle breeding, and the problems of long-distance transhumance, caused that they domesticated other animals, like horses and camels, for riding and traction.
As a corollary of their lifestyle they developed means of transports, like wagons for their oxen and chariots for their horses. Their mode of life, as it was shaped during the millennia following the last Ice Age, caused a number of developments, which became most important to the future life of humanity.
As their whole economy was depended upon cattle, it very soon became a form of wealth and not a commodity to trade and to use. It is still so with some African tribes in the Sudan and in East Africa. There the number of cattle an individual owns is the measure of his wealth. So it was with the original Euroasian cattle nomads too. The Latin word for money is pecunia. The root of this word is pecos, meaning cattle. They could not be self-sufficient. They had animal products but no grain, at least not in sufficient quantities. They had to rely on barter or trade, if they could or on robbery and raids on settled people, if they couldn't.
Their lifestyle made them very mobile, tough and warlike. The needs of long-range transhumance, with constant travels of hundreds of miles, and the need to safeguard their herds from human and animal predators, steeled their bodies. In addition, they needed some form of transportation and carrying capabilities. The domestication of horses and the development of wagons, drawn by horses or oxen satisfied both needs. The use of the horses and wagons, changed into light chariots in warfare, was a small step. The speed and the ferocity of the nomad fighters, equipped with means of transport and fighting, created an enemy that no settled community could withstand, at least until modern times. The population density of the cattle nomads was a small fraction of the density of people in the settled agricultural communities. Settled population and mainly vegetable diet, were a sure recipe for population explosion, which was probably a desirable development in times of plenty, with sufficient reserve of land, but a sure catastrophe when the climate turned against them, as it happened in many times.
The very existence of two belts of different lifestyles, one of agriculture and the second as husbandry, was sufficient to cause a conflict, even without the points of friction, as it was explained above. There were natural barriers, separating the two belts, but with enough gaps that from time immemorial served as gates of invasion from the north to the south. There were nomads in the southern deserts too, but they had limited influence, except in special circumstances. Since very early times, certainly earlier than historic times nomadic raiders constantly roved over agricultural lands, extracting booty and slaves, until at some time they reached an obvious decision. Instead of raiding the agricultural settlements and robbing them of their surplus, they decided to remain, enslave the population and enjoy the fruit of their work in situ. The extractions of the surplus took many forms, either as a tribute, or a tax, or even as a religious tithe.
The advent of urban civilizations was the direct result of the domination of the cattle-nomads over the settled, agricultural population. When the tactics of the cattle-nomads was to carry whatever they could and return home with the booty, they could not care whether they left anything for the survivors. When their tactics changed and they remained then they had to be careful not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Domination of one class, or one people, over another, means that there must be a surplus, otherwise there is nothing to extract. It is possible that reducing the needs of most of the people, i.e. by enslaving them, creates the surplus, but it is still a surplus. The existence of a dominating class, or people, in whatever form it may appear, has its primary needs to protect and to perpetuate the domination. The means to achieve it can be by the use of priesthood, clerks, administrators and enforcers. Filling those needs they had to create tools, which soon brought on literacy. It seems that the beginning of literal, urban civilizations, the shining point in humanity's past, was the direct result of the transfer of the expertise the cattle-nomads learned in controlling their cattle, to the control of human cattle.
In plain terms, it was the domestication of humanity. In numerical terms, as the number of the cattle-nomads was always a fraction of the number of the farmers, that domestication usually took the form of a thin veneer of armed aristocracy imposed upon the mass of people. In time, they even found Ideological justification for their rule. They protected the people against outside enemies, which was real enough, as the homeland of the cattle-nomads issued wave after wave of invaders, wishing to participate in the good life. Another method was to interpose themselves between the people and the gods; creating religion and priesthood.
It should be mentioned here that the domination of the people from one climatic belt over people from another climatic belt was not racial but environmental. At the beginning, most of the cattle-nomad raiders were Indo-Europeans, later replaced by Mongols and Turks. Neither the methods, nor the cruelty and ferocity by which they were employed, had any difference between the racial groups. The methods of the Mongol Ghengis-Khan and the Turkish Tamerlan were used by the Indo-European Scythians and Sarmatians three millennia earlier. The environment of the steppe was permanent, and it shaped whichever people was dominant.
Not only were the methods independent of racial origin, so were the methods of selecting the victims. Neither racial group had any consideration for the victims, least of all kinship and common origin. The original Indo-Europeans overwhelmed the native Europeans who certainly were of the same stock. The later developments were like a revolving door. The Romans overwhelmed the Thracians, Illyrians and Celts, then the Germans overwhelmed the Romans and finally the Scandinavian Vikings the Germans. It was all in the family, but it did not change anything. The Indo-European Aryans destroyed the Indus civilization in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. According to scholars earlier Indo-European invaders created that civilization. The Mongols of Ghengis-Khan destroyed other Mongol tribes, and Turkish Tamerlan defeated the Othman Turkish Bajazet at Manzikert. It was no racial enmity, but one of the have-nots against the haves. The fact that the haves of today were the have-nots of yesterday made no difference.
The world in which we live was shaped by that perennial conflict, and it goes on even in modern times. The descendants of the Celts, Iberians, Goths, Suebi, Vandals and Alans, who live in the Iberian Peninsula, continued the same expansion in South America. The descendants of the Celts, Belgae, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Norwegians, who settled in Great Britain, went on to America, Africa and Australasia. Similarly, the Indo-European Aryans went on from India to continue in Sri Lanka, Cambodia and the Indonesian islands.
The immediate causes, the methods and the circumstances did have variations, but the aim was always identical: exploitation of new people and territory. So was the need to find higher justification. In the old times it was always a religious justification. The Indo-Europeans went to India with their priestly caste, the Brahmins, Ghengis Khan had his Shamans, even the Hungarians went to the Danubian basin following a white stag sent by a god to show them the way. Only in most modern times was there some modification. Modern Europeans entered Africa not only with soldiers and missionaries; they had doctors and colonial administrators too.
There were a number of reasons for their invincibility, apart of their being tough and warlike. They themselves were not organized; they were probably more like an uncontrolled rabble than an invasion force, but their opponents were even less so. Our minds is accustomed to maps, with colors denoting ethnic divisions, languages, possible religions, and certainly laws, taxes and enforcement. It is difficult to grasp that even in comparatively modern times, before the Westphalian Treaty of 1648, the concept of state was very different, even in western and central Europe. The reach of the power of the state was never longer than the reach of the soldiers of the king, and that was never very far.
The people in settled areas were tied to the land, which was their only livelihood; had no mobility, indeed they had no need for it, and not much experience in matters of war. In addition, they did not need the nomads. In prosperous years, they were self-sufficient in grain, vegetables, fruits, and protein, from their fields and the animals they kept. In lean years they had nothing to trade anyway.
The nomads, on the other hand, became completely different. They were not tied to one area, they were used to long-distance traveling when driving their herds from summer to winter pasture, and vice-versa. They were extremely tough; being outdoor most of the time, braving the elements and battling wild animals, and human rustlers. Most of all, they were experts in warfare, because of constant struggle against other nomadic tribes and sedentary people.11
Until the advent of the gunpowder weapons, the mounted nomads were the uncontested masters of the world. It was true for any of the peoples who in turn were masters of the northern steppe areas, first the Indo-European tribes,
then the Mongols and finally the Turks. No sedentary people could stand up to them, except perhaps those sedentary people, who were themselves nomads and settled down as lords of the manor, as rulers of sedentary agricultural population. All European people, including Greeks and Romans, belonged to that category.
The nomads needed the farmers more than the farmers needed them. They had animals and animal products, but not much else. Above all, they needed grain and manufactured products. They had to trade to acquire those, or get them by force. More often than not, they have chosen the second option. Eventually they reached the obvious conclusion that it is better to lord over the farmers and enjoy the fruits of their work, than raiding them from time to time and carrying away the loot. Eventually they also convinced themselves that they perform a useful function by protecting the helpless farmers from other looters. Hence the birth of future military aristocracies. Still, others, Christians and Muslims, convinced themselves that they conquer for the propagation of the faith or for the extension of modern civilization.12
It was an age-long conflict; in fact it shaped the picture of the world, including the present. The nomadic Indo-European tribes who in prehistoric times became rulers of Europe and part of Asia, continued to expand in classical times, and so did in modern times, until that expansion embraced the whole world. It was not solely an expansion of western civilization; the Iranian led expansion of Islam to the East was not less extensive. But the Iranians were also descendants of Indo-European cattle nomads.
The main reason beyond the expansion and colonization was loot and booty, some of them temporarily and some of them permanently. The expansion under the guise of spread of religion had the advantage that at least some of the subjects accepted that they being fleeced is part of the world order. After all, since time immemorial they were used of being relieved of part of their produce in the name of some divine instruction.
However, the nomadic cattle rearing tribes left us other heritages too, which are rather more than simple conquest and colonialism. Our world is full of customs, beliefs, institutions, and cultural symbols, which can directly be traced back to them.
One of the most important of those symbols is the trinity. It can be traced to their religious belief, that the Pantheon of their gods is led by a trinity of gods, where the god of the sky lords over the gods of the earth and the sea, and the god of the underworld, and over a coterie of lesser deities. Their social structure was also in the form of the trinity, the Priest, the Warrior and the Merchant/Craftsman. The common workers and farmers were below society; they were supposed to be supplied by the conquered people, the Helots in Greece, the ryots in India, the coolies in China and the fellahin in the Middle East. But the Trinity conquered all European-based institutions, from the Christian churches, through the tripartite Hegelian philosophy: thesis, antithesis and synthesis, to the division of history itself: ancient, medieval and modern.
The Indo-European trinity-based social structure had an unfortunate outcome, which is still with us. The caste system of India, and other similar but lesser known systems, was directly based on an Aryan, Indo-European concept, which can be characterized by one Sanskrit word 'varna' It means caste, but it means color too.13 The connection is obvious. It is entirely possible, as many scholars claim, that there was more than one Indo-European invasion of India, among them that of the creators of the Harappa and Mohanjo-daro civilizations. The racial prejudices of the later Aryan invaders was not diminished by the knowledge that the people who were invaded were really their brothers, who either adapted themselves physically to the environment or mixed with the indigenous population. The same sense of color exists today too. It is sufficient to examine the marriage ads in modern Indian newspapers to see how deep is the color prejudice.
There are also other, friendlier, heritages. A horseman, alone on the steppe, is more individualistic than a farmer on his field. A farmer needs to have cooperation otherwise he cannot survive. First of all, he needs to have recognized boundaries so that his boundaries should be honored. A herdsman does not need cooperation. He is alone with his herd on the endless steppe. He has all the responsibilities and makes all the decisions. In simple terms, he is an individualist. As science is an individualistic enterprise; after all, ideas germinate in single minds, modern science is one of the better heritages of those murderous nomads.
There are other heritages too. Epic poetry is one of them. The poems of the Rigveda, the Avesta, the Homeric poems, the Edda, the Niebelungen Lied, and other countless epic poems are part of the inheritance. One can hear the memories of ancient storytellers from around pastoral campfires.
However, before the nomadic tribes, from the north and from the south, let themselves felt in the Fertile Crescent, the scene of this book, there is an important way station. After the first period of warmer weather, which started the melting of the ice cover of Europe, there were a number of climatic fluctuations. Each period with friendly climate saw a demographic explosion, which became an acute problem when the climate changed to the worse, and became hot and dry. At the beginning of the sixth millenium BC., there was again an extended period of drought, which caused the people to move into the valleys of the rivers, which until then were marshy jungles, and mainly moved around a huge sweet-water lake, the Black Sea of today. The drought affected the nomads too, but much less than the sedentary people.
When a farmer abandons his land, because of drought or war, he becomes a refugee. He cannot take his land with him, not his equipment. He could take his personal belongings, sometimes not even that. It is so in modern times and it was worse in prehistoric times. (Remember the book, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath about the refugees from the drought in Oklahoma. They had at least a Ford Model T. to carry their belongings.)
Pastoral nomads were more mobile. They were used to frequent relocations, between summer and winter pastures. They were organized; they had their riding animals, asses, camels or horses, their oxen-drawn wagons, and tents which could be dismantled, put on the wagons and move away in short time. When they experienced an extended drought in their area, they could pack and search for better pastures. They might have fight for it, but then they were used to it too.
When the waters of the Mediterranean broke through the natural dam of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, and filled a large area around the Black Sea with seawater, they flooded a densely populated territory and caused a tremendous destruction and killing. Most of the people must have been living near the water or near the rivers leading to the lake, the Don, Dnieper, Dniester and the Danube, etc. According to some calculation the water has risen about 6 inches per day, until after nearly a year they filled the basin of the Black Sea with seawater, raising the level of the sea by more than 150 meters. Most of the people around the sea must have perished in that flood. The rise of the water was so sudden that when they realized what is happening it was already too late.
It is known exactly when this catastrophe has happened. Numerous carbon isotope testing placed it at the middle of the sixth millenium, at around 5,518 BC. Those few who succeeded to escape scattered to all directions. There are some very interesting myths concerning the origin of peoples in the Middle East
Many of the ancient peoples in the south, pointed to the north, the direction of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. The Sumerians have certainly looked to the north as the homeland of their people. One of their epic poems is called "Emerkar and the Lord of Aratta".14 The poem shows a connection between Sumer and some mythical town in the north, separated by seven mountain ranges. But there are more clues to their northern origin.
They had a language, which belongs to the Ural-Altai family of languages. It was the same family of languages that counted Finn and Hungarian among its members. St. Chad Boscawen , one of the earliest scholars of the Sumerian cuneiform15 found that in Sumerian language the same ideogram is used for country and for mountain, indicating that they originated in a mountainous country. They also had individual ideograms for wolf and deer, not known in Mesopotamia, and none for lion, tiger, and jackal, which do live there. Their composite ideogram for camel showed an animal with two humps, the Bactrian camel, common in Central Asia, but unknown in Mesopotamia. Even the place of worship was a manmade mountain on the level plain of Mesopotamia, the Ziggurat.
The Iranians also claimed that they came from the north. Excavations found the remains of an ancient Zoroastrian fire temple, near the cave towns of eastern Anatolia.16 Iranian myths claim that some of the people who came and settled in Sialk, moved on to Mesopotamia and northern Syria and eventually to Egypt.
There is another people living today in the territory of ancient Sumer, the Mandaeans, a Marsh Arab tribe. They are very specific about their origin. They claim that they came from a mythical location, named the Mountain of Madai, in Iranian Kurdistan, not far from Cappadocia. They also claim that before living in Kurdistan, they originated in Egypt. Indeed, they have some words in their vocabulary, which are undoubtedly of ancient Egyptian origin.17
These tales show and prove two major facts. The first is that there was a considerable amount of wandering around the Middle East in the period before the establishment of the urban civilizations. The second is that the idea of racial origins is meaningless in any scientific way. If the Mandaeans were indeed originated in the north, then they belong either to the Indo-Europeans, the Caucasians or the Ural-Altaians. If they lived in Egypt, as their vocabulary seems to show, then they are Hamitic. But now, they are Semitic Arabs, which only shows that racial belonging has a very changeable meaning.
Map 2 shows a possible ethnic composition of the Middle East at the time of the Patriarchs. It also shows the direction of possible intrusion of nomads, both from the north, the Indo-Europeans and the Caucasian, and the Semitic from the south. The map intends to emphasize the fact that Indo-Europeans were living south of the Black Sea, and the Caucasus, and that there was also a continuing Indo-European incursion from the north through either the Caucasian Gate or the Balkans.
Before the discovery of the possibility of the Black Sea deluge in the 6th millenium BC, most scholars put the invasion of the Middle East by Indo-Europeans in the 4th millenium BC. Only Colin Renfrew18 and a few others put that date much earlier. Colin Renfrew was searching for the origin of European agriculture and found the clue to the ethnic composition of the Middle East.
According the hypothesis made feasible by the discovery of the Black Sea flood, that traumatic event has spread the survivors in all the directions of the compass. Some of the Indo-Europeans remained on the southern shore of the sea, they are therefore indigenous to the area. Other remained on the northern, European, shore, and they founded the Kurgan culture which was described by Marija Gimbutas. They eventually spread from there west to Europe, others, the Tocharians, east to Turkestan and China, and yet others south and south-east, to Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan and India. 19
So, according to Map 2 and the sources mentioned above, the Indo-Europeans were indigenous to the mountainous areas of the Middle East, in the upper tier of the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia, and they were also later intruders and conquerors. There is no contradiction in this statement. New waves of Indo-European nomads did not really bothered by the fact that their enemies were their kin, and nomads themselves a few generations before. One of the verses of the Rigveda warns the Aryans that they have to fight the dasyus the aborigines, and be on the lookout on both side to watch for new waves of invaders who would stab them in the back. When barbarian tribes attacked the Roman Empire they had the same experience.
There is an Akkadian poem "The Kuthean legend of Naram-Sin", in which there is a description of a sweep of an invading horde, the Umman Manda, which started in eastern Anatolia, all the way to the Persian Gulf, and on to the direction of India. The Umman Manda is identified as one of the Indo-European tribes who passed Mesopotamia under way to India, and who made the terrible destruction on its way.20
It was probably not the first of such a sweep, and also not the last. The town of Scythopolis in Palestine probably received its name from a similar raid which the Scythians did in the 1st millenium BC when they destroyed the last vestige of the Assyrian empire.
Thus, by the 3rd millenium BC., the Indo-Europeans were firmly established in the mountainous regions of the Middle East, and have spread out to other areas too. The Kassites who in the 2nd millenium BC played a major role in the destruction of Hamurabbi's empire, were already firmly settled in the mountains, east of Mesopotamia. Other tribes spread out into Syria and Canaan too. In order to simplify the treatment of this question, this book follows the example of the Bible. All Indo-European elements in the scene of the story, on Map 1, are called Hittite, whether they were indeed Hittite or some other related tribe.
Judging from the testimony of the Book of Genesis, and also from historical sources, the Hittites settled in the hill country, between Meggido in the north and Beer Sheba in the south. How did the Hittites reach Canaan, far from their homeland in the north? The road of Abraham to Canaan can probably be used as an example.
Abraham has decided to move to Canaan. His father started the journey, but he died on the way. It was a private undertaking. He might have done it under a divine instruction, or because of fear of war, or in search of better and less contested pastures. Judging from evidences in the Bible, Abraham must have been a man of substance. The Hittites of Hebron received him with full honor: "Hear us, my lord, thou art a mighty prince among us." (Gen. 23.6) When he wanted to free his nephew, Lot, from the Elamites, he could raise a private army of 318 men out of his retainers. In the circumstances of the 3rd millenium BC it was a substantial number. The armies with thousands and tens of thousands were still in the future. Even the great Sargon did not have more than 5000 men as his personal guard.
So, Abraham's journey was not official, but neither were the Hittites he encountered in Canaan officially there. They might have reached the place not as part of an advancing army but as individuals. The mighty Hittite empire was still in the future, they were on their own, as Abraham was. They already have settled down, when Abraham reached them. The Bible does not inform us what they were doing there, but judging what is known about them, they have already left the way of life of nomads.
When the Bible reported the conflict between the herders of Abraham and Lot, and they decided to separate in order to prevent unnecessary fights, it was done in a curious style: "And the land was not able to bear them, for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together. And there was a strife between the herdsmen of Abram's cattle and the herdsmen of Lot's cattle; and the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land." (Gen. 13. 6 7)
The mention of the Canaanite and the Perizzite shows that they were there but had no part in the conflict, neither were the Hittite. It probably means that they were sedentary farmers, or lords of manor, who lorded over native serfs, having no herds of cattle which would compete with Abram's and Lot's cattle for pastures and water.
In the origin the Indo-European tribes were nomadic pastoralists. It was a kind of livelihood, imperfect though, as it could not supply all their needs, but it was much more than that. Cattle were a measure of wealth and importance, similar to what exists now in tribes of Sudan and East Africa. The Latin word for money is pecunia, whose root is the word pecos meaning cattle. Still, when the Latins reached Latium, they settled down and became sedentary farmers. The Hittites in Canaan might have experienced a similar transformation.
It seems that they reached Canaan the same way as Abraham and Lot, but settled down as lords of the manor, owners of estates worked by local serfs, exactly as other Indo-Europeans did since time immemorial. Hermann Kulke wrote21 that when the Aryans conquered India, west of the river Ganda, there were many of the Aryans who escaped to the uncontrolled east. They preferred the more egalitarian organization of earlier times to the twain tutelage of the king and his Brahmin priests. They relied on their martial abilities to carve out estates and hold on to them. Similar developments happened also with the Normans in the 11th century AD. who left Normandy for Sicily and Albania, far from the rule of Duke William. The Hittites of Canaan, and probably Abraham and Lot too, might have been similarly motivated.
What was the world Abraham and Lot found, when they reached Canaan. They certainly did not go to explore unknown lands. It is difficult to say from a distance of over 4,000 years but people did know the world and were in contact with each other. It might not be true for the simple people, the serfs, but it was certainly true for those of the higher classes as Abraham seemingly belonged to them. There was international trade, there were caravans, there was probably a near continuous warfare, or at least raids for loot. And last, but not least, at that time was the beginning of that kind of an international organization of rulers, who knew each other, exchanged letters, gifts and ambassadors. 22
It is assumed here, and in the Old Testament too, that there were Hittites in Canaan at the time of the Patriarchs, and they became sedentary farmers, or exploiters of native serfs. But the area of Ur Harran, place where Abraham came from, was not Indo-European alone, it was Hurrian too.
It is known that Hurrians were in Canaan too. The Jebusites who were living in Jerusalem was a mixed Semitic-Hurrian tribe. One of their ruler, probably the last one, before Jerusalem was seized by David, was called Abdi-Heba, a name which was partly Semitic and partly Hurrian. Most of the scholars who are occupied with the question of the Hurrites, think that they were of Caucasian origin. Their language was certainly Caucasian, akin to Chechen, Lez and Georgian. They were the majority of the common people in Hatti and Mitanni, where the aristocracy was of Indo-European origin. Eventually, there was a further influx of Indo-Europeans, and the descendants of the Hurrians, called the Kurds today, are accepted as Indo-Europeans.23
According to this, the Hurrians were in subordinate position to the Hittites. Curiously, the Kurdish scholars who are searching for the identity of the Kurdish people do not think so. They see the relationship more as a friendly coexistence. There is important evidence to support this opinion.
The word Aryan means noble or freeman. The same meaning has the word Hurrian in Hebrew. The expression for a free man is bnei Horin, in direct translation the Sons of Hurrians. It is so in modern colloquial Hebrew and it was so used in the Old Testament. The expression appears there 13 times, always in the context of free man, or even as a noble (Nehemia, 5.7). Indeed, for the last two millennia every Jew says at the Passover feast, that their fathers were in bondage in Egypt, but now they are free. (Bnei Horin). If the origin of that expression is indeed Hurrian, then it is a powerful evidence and it certainly leaves open the possibility that the name Hittites, can cover not only Indo-Europeans but Hurrians as well.
Map 2 has one more important element. It is the Semites who have infiltrated the Middle East from their original homeland to the Arabian peninsula. They infiltrated Mesopotamia, Canaan and Syria. Eventually, they became the majority in all those countries.24
The area of Map 2 was, therefore, an ethnic caleidoscope. Indo-Europeans and Hurrians in the north, Semites in Syria, Canaan, and Mesopotamia, Iranians in the east and the Elamites , who were neither Semites nor Hurrians, but Dravidians, in the south-east. One should not forget the Sumerians too, who also came from the north after the Black Sea deluge. They created the Ubaid culture, out of which the first Mesopotamian civilization has evolved. At the time of the Patriarchs they were still there, but were in the process of completely overwhelmed by the Semites. In the story of the Patriarchs they have no role to play, except as builders of the city of Ur, if indeed Abraham has started his journey in Ur of Sumer.
There is one more element, which should not be forgotten. The ethnic groups mentioned above, were the rulers, who reaped the fruit of the work of the serfs, whose name changed according the area, but had one common characteristic. They were the indigenous people, who have scratched a living out of the land, were continuously fleeced by their native, or foreign, rulers, and their ethnic definition has constantly changed according their changing rulers.
Map 3 shows the possible ethnic division of Canaan during the time of the Patriarchs. The Canaanites, who were a north-Semitic people, probably separated into a number of tribal subdivisions, occupied the west, north and east of the country, and probably also to the east of the Jordan. The Hittites were occupying the central hill country, between Meggido in the north and Beer Sheba in the south. The Amalekites were living in the south of the country, on the border with the desert. They were a Semitic beduin tribe, much different from the north-Semitic Canaanites.
The last question at the beginning of this chapter concerned the cultural scene of the area and the period of the Patriarchs. The simplest and the most truthful answer is 'religion' and nothing else. It is certainly a correct answer but it deserves a further explanation. The centrality of religion does not mean that it was a backward society, On the contrary, it definitely was not. In Egypt, the building of the pyramids was in the distant past. In Mesopotamia, the great ziggurats were also built a long way in the past. They were even in use, what cannot be said of the pyramids of Egypt.
They had agriculture, husbandry, mining, industry and commerce. They had, of course, wars and weapons development. There were international relations and commerce. Indeed, they had everything what any society has, adjusted to the general level of technology. Those, who had, the ruling elite, had a good life. Those, who had not, managed as best as they could; some better, some worse. Just like modern times.
There was, however, one glaring difference what separated them from our concept of society. People were and still looking for answers to the main questions of life. In our modern world, there are many sources for answers; science, art, ideology and politics. Admittedly, religion is still one the sources; powerful in some parts of the world, much less so in others. In the period, which is discussed here, religion had no competition; there was no alternative.
Thinking about religion in the context of the modern western world, one relates to belief, morality, and a certain standard of behavior. One might even think that religion is extremely important, if one belongs to one of the fundamentalist denominations, but even the most extreme western person would not associate religion with politics, law, economy and every other facet of daily life.
The attitude of non-western peoples is different. It is certainly true for Muslims but for others too. For them, religion is a central column, which holds up the whole edifice of their existence. Religion is the only law they know, and accept. Economy, education and politics, to count only a few, are parts of religion. If bank, then it should be an Islamic bank and so on.
These examples were brought here neither to denigrate nor to praise. They are facts of life, having very long roots going back at least to the period which is under consideration here, or even before. Western liberal way of life seems to be an exception, although a dominant one, and the rest of the world has remained much nearer to ancient sources.
The centrality of religion, at the period of the Patriarchs, did not belong solely to the peoples of the Middle East; it was universal. Fustel de Coulanges, made a study on the origin of the social and religious aspects of Indo-European societies. It was mainly about those of Greece and Rome, although he used India too for illustration. Coulanges claimed that the centrality of religion originated in the ancient cradle of that civilization, somewhere in Central Asia, and it has changed and adapted by various degrees to the different countries, they migrated to. In the West, it reached the level of social clubs, apart of having seemingly eternal symbols; in the East, like in India, it retained its near complete centrality.25
Centrality of religion meant in ancient times, that the law belonged to one people, as it was part of the religion. The law belonged only to those who were part of the religion. No one could leave his religion, as it meant that he left his people, and remained without law, friendless and powerless in a strange world. That was the reason why in the classical world, exile was the strongest punishment a citizen could receive, apart of the death penalty.
The law was, therefore, part of the religion and part of a national and ethnic belonging. There was no concept of universal law as there were no universal people. The 10 Commandments were part of the Jewish law and they applied to Jewish people alone. The same was true to the laws of Hamurabbi and Solon. The first belonged to Babylonians and the second to Athenians.
The centrality of religion remained in force everywhere, at least, until the fall of the classical world. They had nothing else, apart of religion. Laws applied to people within one religion. In Rome they had a magistrate called praetor peregrinus who had to adjudicate conflicts between strangers, living in Rome, and between strangers and Romans. He could to rely only on commonsense, as Roman laws were not applicable to strangers. When two peoples went to war, it was a war between their gods. Even in historical times, conquest of a territory by Rome ended when the gods of the defeated people were transferred to Rome and housed honorably in a temple.
One cannot be surprised about that centrality in the period of this book. It was more than 4,000 years ago; life was difficult, unpredictable and cruel. Apart of those fortunate few who were on top, life was a Hobbesian jungle. What possible defense could the people have and what possible explanation could they give to the happenings?
If suddenly, the water in a lake, near which people were living since time immemorial, tturns from sweet to salty water and starts to rise 6 inches a day, ruining and drowning everything, what explanation could anyone give then to such an event? What explanation could anyone give today to such an event? Or, how people could adjust to the period of the Younger Dryas, when it suddenly turned cold and unfriendly, with starving families because the crops were ruined by the bad weather? It went on so for nearly a thousand years. We are talking about historical, or even geological, times and a thousand years does not seem to be too long. But a thousand years is about 50 generations. Did the people at that time thought of the time before their current nasty existence, as the lost Paradise and search for the reason they were expulsed from it? Could anyone at that time know the correct answer? More important, did anyone at that time have the mental capability to understand, if someone would have told them?
If everything was unpredictable, the only possible defenses were the gods. If things went bad, as they usually did, the gods did not help because they were offended by some transgressions. No one could have predicted that the water of the lake will start rising 6 inches a day and turn from sweet to salt water. It must have been the wrath of god, and that is how it is written in the Old Testament.
If the gods alone had the power to inflict or deflect natural catastrophes, then they must be served at all times, with prayers, sacrifices and taxes. It explains the great power organized religion had in all civilizations at all times. They were the go-betweens to the gods. The head of the state religion in Rome was called Pontifex Maximus meaning the chief bridge builder; the bridge being between gods and men.
Priests were not solely tithe collectors. There are many Mesopotamian myths, which claim that the first cult places and their priestly personal emerged as a therapeutic institution for beclouded people in need of counseling, after natural disasters inflicted destruction on their habitat.26 The temples received tributes from the peasants in exchange for a source of healing (or salvation) by the eliminations of panic and anger through sacrificial release of catastrophe-inflicted aggression. Between the catastrophes, the priests also functioned as prognosticators of the next disaster.
According to modern psychology, advise reaction in adults after some traumatic experience can be so severe that disaster victims pass their fear and insecurity to their children. Even to children yet to be born. This past experience replaces the child's sense of a secure world with a fearful worldview. This syndrome is well known to the second generation of Holocaust survivors. In addition, it is well known that there is a direct correlation between disasters and armed conflict. The conflicts are not caused by the disasters. They are caused by the fear of scarcity resulting from unpredictable repeat of the catastrophe. As the priests were the experts in avoiding catastrophes, they had unprecedented power. They also filled the place of modern psychiatric treatment.
It is no wonder that the names of people were theophoric, meaning that the name of the god chosen by the man to protect him, was part of his name. So when a citizen of a city state in northern Syria at the time of the Patriarchs,
has changed his name from En-na-ni-Il Il should have mercy on me to En-na-ni-Ya Ya should have mercy on me it was an extremely important decision. The wearer of the name knew that both Il and Ya were powerful deities, but for some reason he decided that Ya was more powerful than Il in his protection, and moreover Ya will protect him even from Il, if that one will take umbrage at his desertion.
This particular decision, the changes in the theophoric names is probably connected to the age of the Patriarchs. It certainly has a reflection in the Book of Genesis, between the J Jahvist and E Elohist sources. One can add that the use of theophoric names is common to this day, albeit without the potential conflict embedded in them. The use of theophoric names is not a religious expression today, just as the use of the word Friday, for example, does not make one the worshiper of the goddess Freia. These names are relics of time immemorial and possibly will be with us for a long time to come. However, when they were first coined, they must have had an explosive nature. We know of the religious wars in Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, and they were bad enough. It is possible that the change of theophoric names generated similar passions.
When did this change occur and how it is related to the age of the Patriarchs? The city of Ebla, where a large archive of clay tablets was found, had a short-lived existence as a major power. There were 5 kings only in the list of kings of that city, in its particular existence. The fourth of the kings in that list was named Ebrum, Ebrium, or Ibrium.27 Ebrum was put on the throne by King Sargon I of Akkad. Eventually Ebla revolted against Akkad, occupied its cities for a short while, but was destroyed finally by Naram-Sin, the grandson of Sargon. It seems, that under the rule of Ebrum, there was a religious revolution in that northern Syrian town, which was one the northern outpost of the Semites. The visible sign of that reform was the change of El or Il in the theophoric parts of the names to Ya. What exactly signified that change?
El or Il was the name of the chief Semitic God. The name Ya(h) or Yahu (Iahu) have diverse roots, one of them of Indo-European origin, the other is Egyptian and yet another shows some Sumerian connection. The widespread use of the variation of the name makes it a distinct possibility that it has originated in that misty past before physical separation of peoples created separate and mutually unintelligible languages.
Robert Graves, the expert of Mediterranean mythology put the name Iahu into Egypt of the 3rd millenium BC., as one of the titles of Set, and also of Horus. He also recorded that Iacchus, the Cretan counterpart of Dionysius, was derived from the root, as was Iahu-bel in Canaan.28 In Sumer, Iahu was one of the titles of the Moon Goddess, who had a temple in Harran as well.
The second possible origin of the name is a proto-Indo-European god of Yayash, Yah or Yave, a protective god whose symbol was a tree. It has been dated back to 2900 BC to the Indus Valley civilization.
In the context of the Old Testament, Yahweh seems to be a sky god a god of thunder and lightning. He was associated with mountains. The manifestations of Yahweh were often connected with fire, as at Mount Sinai and the burning bush. That was the reason that Sigmund Freud characterized Yahweh as a volcano god.29 In the context of Egypt and Sinai, it is not a realistic characterization, as those areas have no volcanic activity. So, the characterization is possible only if it is associated either with the Arab peninsula, or with northern Mesopotamia. According the Ebla tables, the connection might have originated there.
Is it possible that Ebrum or Ebrium or Ibrium of Ebla was the same as Eber of the Old Testament, and so directly connected to the patriarchal stories? It is a possibility but it is a wild hypothesis. It is also a possibility that Ebla accepted the Syrian deity Iahu-bel as its chief patron with some change in the name. There is, of course, another possibility too. Abraham has visited Egypt. He accepted the circumcision as an outward sign of the Covenant. Circumcision was a specific Egyptian custom. At that time no peoples apart of the Egyptians used it. Iahu was one of the names of Horus. The unifiers of Egypt called themselves the Followers of Horus and the coastal road connecting Egypt and Canaan was called The Road of Horus, meaning that Horus had some Canaanite or Asian connection. It is possible that together with the circumcision, Abraham has accepted Horus too, under its Iahu name. But, there is another possibility that seems to be the most feasible.
Ebla, whose main god was Yah, a shortened version of Yahweh, after the reforms of Ebrum, was on the northern border of the Semitic world. Their northern neighbors were the Hittites and the Hurrians, and they might have influenced Ebla. It is also possible, that Ebrum knew well that eventually Ebla will come into conflict with Akkad and attempted to organize possible alliances. Accepting Yah from the Indo-European Pantheon as its chief deity, might have been an attempt to ensure their sympathy. Judging from the results, it was insufficient.
However, it was a case of Ebla and not of Abraham. If Abraham was the originator of the religious reform that received its expression in the use of Yahweh in the Book of Genesis, then he might have received the inspiration from the familiar name, if he was a Hittite or a Hurrian from Ur of Kasdim, north of Harran. If not from there, then it was an inspiration from his Egyptian journey, together with the circumcision. Judging from the format of the word, it is more likely that the Indo-European form served as his inspiration, because the word was written as Yahweh, once even as Ya (Exodus 15.2) and not as Iahu. That form is used only as the theophoric part of names and not a stand-alone word.
This is the religious aspect of the age of the Patriarchs. It will return in later chapters too, as it is not possible to touch that period without being involved in religion.
NOTES:
| 1. |
Magnus Magnusson, The Archaeology of the Bible Lands, "Arab historians traditionally dated Abraham to 2300 BC
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| 2. |
O.R.Gurney, The Hittites, Pelican Books, Harmondsworth, 1952, p.18, David Frawley, The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India, Reprint from the India Times, 19.6.94, p.3/5
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| 3. |
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, W.W.Norton, New York, 1998,pp,134 138
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| 4. |
Walter Pitman and William Ryan, Noah's Flood, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1998,pp.171,233
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| 5. |
Idem, p. 167
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| 6. |
Gordon Childe, What Happened in History?, Penguin Books, New York, 1946,p.44
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| 7. |
Colin Renfrew, op.cit. pp.83, 147
|
| 8. |
Roger Lewin, Ancestral Echoes, Reprint from New Scientist, 5.7.97, p.2/10
|
| 9. |
Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, The Free Press, New York, 1999,p.39
|
| 10. |
Peter J. Richerson, Complex Societies, University of California, June 1997, p.2/36
|
| 11. |
Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline, The Free Press, New York, 1999,pp.431 432
William McNeill, The Rise of the West, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963, p.90
|
| 12. |
V.S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief, Vintage Books, New York, 1998 p.336. Naipaul muses about the origin of Pakistan and states a simple fact, probably better than any book of history:
"
in Bawhalpur we can get closeto the fourteenth century and perhaps even to the eighth, at the start of the Muslim dominion. It was for those serf revenues, after all, that the conquest was made" This sentence is true for all conquests and colonizations, from the 6th millenium on.
|
| 13. |
A. C. Bouquet, Comparative Religion, Pelican Book, Harmondsworth,1954,p.121 |
| 14. |
Samuel Noah Kramer, History begins at Sumer, Doubleday Anchor Book, New
York, 1959, pp. 17 28, see also Charles Dombi, The Controversy about the Origins and Early History of the Hungarians, Canadian Hungarian Studies Association, 1996, Reprint p. 7/22
|
| 15. |
St. Chad Boscawen, Historical evidence of the migration of Abram, Transactions of the Victorian Institute No.920, 1996
|
| 16. |
Muhammed Yusuf Khan, Zarathustra and his Faith, Review of Religions, August 1996, p.2/13 |
| 17. |
Andrew Collins, The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race, New Dawn, No.40 42, May-June 1997, Chap. II.pp. 1-2/13, 5/13
|
| 18. |
Colin Renfrew, op.cit.,p.205; David Frawley, op.cit. : "the evidence so far is that people of mountainous regions of the Middle East were Indo-Europeans as far as recorded history can prove." Robert Drew, The Coming of the Greeks, Princeton University Press, 1989,pp.29-30, puts it later, in the middle of the 5th millenium BC
|
| 19. |
Pitman and Ryan, op.cit.p.212, John Keegan, A History of Warfare, Vintage Books, New York, 1994, pp. 167 168, Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, Aurora Publications, 28.10.1999, Reprint p. 6/24; Hermann Kulke, A History of India, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1986,p.37 Subhash C. Kak, The Indus Tradition and the Indo-Aryans, Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 32, 1.4.92 Reprint p.3/15, 9/15
|
| 20. |
Robert Drew, op.cit. p.229
|
| 21. |
Hermann Kulke, op.cit.,p.5
|
| 22. |
Robert Drew, op.cit.p.179: There was contact between rulers of the whole of the Middle East and later with Crete and Greece too. There were embassies and commercial connections. It was not an unknown world
|
| 23. |
Mehrdad R. Izady, Exploring Kurdish Origins, Kurdish Life, No.7, Summer 1993, p.4/9
Gordon V. Childe, The Aryans, Dorset Press, London, 1987, p.160
|
| 24. |
James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt, Bantam Book, New York,1964,p.214
|
| 25. |
Fustel de Coulanges, op.cit.,pp.113,198
|
| 26. |
Gunnar Heinsohn, The Rise of Blood Sacrifice and Priest Kingship in Mesopotamia, Reprint of a paper read at the Conference CATASTROPHISM 2000, University of Toronto, August 17,1990
|
| 27. |
Pablo Matthiae, Ebla,An Empire Rediscovered, Doubleday & Co. Garden City,1981,pp.162-167
|
| 28. |
Robert Graves, The White Goddess, op.cit., pp.369 370
|
| 29. |
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Vintage Book, New York, 1985, pp.39,61
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