Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation, Part VIII

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII

Let us now return to Shem, Ham, and Japheth. These were likely proto-Indo-European kings, generals, or warlords who commanded the initial expansion out of the steppes. Like the other examples of sons or generals breaking apart a vast empire, the forces of Shem and Japheth apparently allied against Ham. Japheth's people are said in Genesis 10:5 to have settled along the coasts possessed by Gentiles, suggesting this verse was written after the development of monotheistic Judaism, yet still recently enough to the purported events in question for this division of the world to appear plausible to its intended contemporary audience. Japheth's people included the Greeks, Medes, Cypriots, and Scythians. Their Semitic (the word derives from "Shem") allies were the Elamites, Assyrians, Lydians, Sumerians, and Arabians. Ham's people included the Hittites, Egyptians, Canaanites, Amorites, Philistines, as well as the far-off African lands of Punt and Sheba, and the Mesopotamian cities of Babylon, Akkad, and Uruk.

So if we do the math here, we see the book of Genesis recording a vast alliance of peoples marching to war. We see Medes and Elamites in alliance, an alliance that would eventually produce the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia. We see Greeks, Cypriots, Scythians, Assyrians, Lydians, Sumerians, and Arabians all joining forces against an Egyptian-Hittite axis formed after the Battle of Kadesh that included the Egyptian satellite states of Canaan, Palestine, as well as their trading partners.

Did the Bible just tell us about the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age collapse in a game of Chinese whispers? There are some potential issues here, mostly to do with the Philistines. The Philistines were almost certainly refugees from the Minoan civilization of Crete, who fell before the Mycenaean Greeks, and other sources tell us that these refugees, who they call the Peleset, were among the Sea Peoples. But after the defeat of the Sea Peoples in the Battle of the Delta, many of the "Peleset" entered Pharaonic service as shock troops, and were settled in the borderlands of Egypt in a place now called Palestine after them. (Irony strikes again; it wouldn't be the last time a refugee people coming from Europe was settled in the region as a buffer for a Western hegemonic power.) The Peleset were not the only Sea People to switch sides; the "Sherden" (almost certainly Sardinians) and the "Shekelesh" (almost certainly Sicilians) were settled at the mouth of the Nile Delta after they too were subdued and entered Pharaonic service. But Sardinia and Sicily may not have been as well known to the Hebrew writers of Genesis, or might have been lumped in with the sons of Javan in Genesis 10:4-5, "Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." Kittim was the Hebrew term for Cyprus, so I translated it thusly above. Tarshish might have referred to Tarsus in Turkey, or Tartessos in modern Spain. Either way, the phrase "isles of the Gentiles" was thought to cover all of them, so perhaps the Sherdana and Shekelesh were mentioned here by other names. But in any case, their having switched sides in an apocalyptic conflict which ended the Bronze Age and left only Egypt and Assyria standing would explain their inclusion within the family of Ham, and so the records of Genesis would broadly match what we know of the Sea Peoples and Bronze Age collapse. In this case, the Genesis writer's bias against Ham would be easily explicable as the bias of the starving against those whose civilizations had not yet fallen.

The Bronze Age collapse, though it did not end Egypt, certainly marked the peak of Egypt's power on the world stage. Other dynasties were yet to come, but Egypt for the Egyptians was by and large a spent force. Though the Ptolemies under Cleopatra VII came close to being the hegemon of the Mediterranean, they were foreign invaders from Macedonia ruling an apartheid state that Cleopatra had only just begun to liberalize; she was the first Ptolemy to learn Coptic. They were the lucky ones. The Hittites collapsed so thoroughly that they were believed to be an imaginary myth that proved the Bible to be a work of fiction, at least until their capital was rediscovered and the fedora atheists all m'umbled m'ea culpas. Babylon was also done, and the civilization that had produced The Epic of Gilgamesh would sputter on in obscurity until the last cuneiform was baked around the time of the first Christians (George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, lxi).

Egypt survived, Assyria survived. Though they did not survive in their initial form, the Median-Elamite alliance did survive as a unified state, as the twin wings of Zoroastrian Iran. And it was the survival of this new Iran that would be of great importance for the future, because it determined the religious belief of the half of the modern world that follows Zoroastrianism or one of its daughter faiths.

The Ziusudra that is Noah, the one that Zoroastrianism is named after, we do not know what god or gods he believed in. Different cultures telling his story offer different accounts of that. But in Zoroastrianism, the faith that took his name that lives to this day, he worshipped only one, and that one was rooted in philosophical characteristics of goodness and truth instead of being a cosmic fuckboy like Zeus.

There were other godlike deities in Zoroastrianism, the devas and the ahuras, which is evidently what the other Proto-Indo-European deities were demoted to. "Daeva" is Avestan and comes from the Proto-Indo-European "dewas" which means "sky god," and it's where the word "divine" and the Latin word for God, "Deus," come from. "Ahura" means "lord," and is almost certainly related to the "asuras" of Hinduism, and probably the "Aesir" of Norse mythology too.

According to Zoroastrianism, the ahuras are righteous if unnamed helpers of the supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, while the daevas act "at Lie's command" and ought to be rejected. Interestingly enough, in Hinduism, the devas are the good and holy gods, while the asuras are mostly evil and are the opponents of the devas in any case.

So clearly, there was a rap beef between Hinduism and Zoroastrianism from the foundation of both faiths, to the point that each other's angels are the other's devils, so to speak. This wouldn't be the first time Hinduism has created theology to handle a religious conflict with a group departing it; according to the Bhagavata Purana, the first Buddha was the ninth incarnation of the god Vishnu, sent to divert unbelievers from Hinduism and guarantee their destruction (Pandharipande, The Eternal Self and the Cycle of Samsara, 36.)

So, given all of this, it seems reasonable to conclude that the founding figure of Zoroastrianism, who may or may not have been our Ziusudra of gopherwood fame, took the pre-existing Proto-Indo-European pantheon and demoted most of them, while proclaiming the "Lord of Wisdom" (the literal meaning of "Ahura Mazda") to be the "uncreated spirit." This founding figure of Zoroastrianism would have done this after the Proto-Indo-Europeans had already spread out far past the lands of their origin, or else Zoroastrianism and not the Proto-Indo-European pantheon would have been what they brought with them. Perhaps this founder was named Zoroaster after the gopherwood gentleman. Perhaps he claimed to be him as a way to establish legitimacy, which would also be a reason for him to pretend to be centuries old and why history has recorded that very odd detail about Noah. Perhaps the founder of Zoroastrianism put these theological statements in the mouths of the long-dead gopherwood gentleman as a way to buy his new religion more legitimacy. This far back in prehistory, it's hard to say anything for certain. What I can say, though, is that somehow, Zoroastrianism was born out of a reformation of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon, and that the contemporary believers of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon took offense at this and that offense survives to this day in the Hindu doctrine of devas and asuras.

I can also say that out of Zoroastrianism would later spring Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha'i. Interestingly enough, this makes all of these faiths, at least in part, descendants of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon as well, and every "pagan" who worshipped and worships that pantheon merely heretics of a universal church dating back before antiquity. All of the memes that can be summed up as "Christianity just steals all its ideas from paganism yet condemns paganism" that you hear around Easter and Christmas have always grated on me as somehow casting Christianity itself as an inauthentic poser faith. But it isn't; Christianity has an equal right as any other proto-Indo-European faith to drink from those wells, and faiths like Wicca have certainly stol- er, "syncretized," their share of concepts from Christianity too.

But the biggest consequence of the Bronze Age collapse, one that dwarfed even the religious implications of 2.5 billion Christians and 1.8 billion Muslims in the modern world, is that it set the whole world astir for several decades. The outward expansion of the proto-Indo-Europeans was enabled in the long run by the collapse of sophisticated palace economies in the Near East that could block them. Proto-Indo-Europeans swept through the Hindu Kush, replacing the collapsed Mohenjo-Daro culture that the Sumerians once called Meluhha, and Hinduism is the last continuous living remnant of the unreformed proto-Indo-European pantheon. They swept westwards through the primeval forests of Europe, and begat Germans, Celts, and Romans. The Romans created a vast empire that encompassed, and when it collapsed, that empire begat first France, then Britain, then Spain, then the Netherlands, then Portugal. These nations begat world-striding empires that used the superprofits of their imperialism to fund the capitalist system upon which the modern world is based. And every step along the way until the Netherlands and later the United States enshrined Enlightenment ideas against it, these nations were ruled by the divine right of kings, an ideology unconsciously meant to place autistic Neanderthal DNA at the head of these societies.

So it was that the first human species that we exterminated, the Neanderthals, were instrumental in the creation of the proto-Indo-Europeans. The proto-Indo-Europeans were a nation of people who were flooded out of their homes and rejected everywhere else, and who fled to the Circassian steppe until their Neanderthal instincts taught them to domesticate horses and thereby to conquer their world. A nation without a country thus stole the countries of others, inventing the phenomenon we call settler-colonialism, and spreading in its first wave of expansion everywhere from London to Lucknow. A second wave of expansion, across the sea that slew their ancestors, involved the entire world, and now the exterminated Neanderthals live again in every autistic child throughout the world. Irony is truly the handmaiden of history.

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