Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation, Part VI

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VII Part VIII

Later on, in the Bronze Age collapse, famines and earthquakes caused a massive refugee crisis across the Mediterranean, as people fled Sardinia, Sicily, and almost certainly other, less-well-defined places towards the epicenters of surviving civilization: first for food and shelter, later for conquest. Pharaonic propaganda called these refugees "The Nine Bows Raised Against Egypt" and slaughtered their first few waves before hiring a couple of them to defend against the rest. It's doubtful that societies even more primitive than this would have any more enlightened attitudes towards refugees from the sea, seeing them as a threat. For what it's worth, the behavior of the Sea People suggests that may have been a correct summation at the time.

What all this means is that the survivors of the Great Flood would have had a rocky reception. Some of the traders may have been able to buy their way into neighboring societies, but the genealogy offered in Genesis suggests something else. It suggests that multiple leaders of these refugee groups sooner or later led them in different directions. Whether Japheth, Ham and Shem were literally the sons of Ziusudra or not, they stand in for the ruling class of these refugees, and they and their descendants spread far and wide. If we take the hypothesis of Neanderthal DNA accumulating in the bourgeois leadership of the Black Sea basin as true, then we can assume that Shem, Ham, and Japheth would have had their share of it too.

This is the first of two times I will return to the association I make between my fellow autistic people and the Neanderthals, and my point seemingly comes clear out of left field. The political-religious doctrine of the divine right of kings is still formally held by the United Kingdom, and as far as I can tell, its very first enunciation comes from ancient Babylon. In that poem of Atram-hasis describing the creation of the world to the Great Flood, the creation of kings is described as different from the creation of other humans. "You have created man the human, fashion now the king, the counsellor-man! Form the whole of his figure sweet, make perfect his countenance and well-formed his body!" In the Epic of Gilgamesh itself, kingly heroes are described, as in Genesis and Pharaonic propaganda, as tall (George,The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin 1999, xli-xlii). So kings are described as tall and different from men, like the Nephilim were; and suited to be counsellors, like high-functioning autistic people.

There was clearly some kind of understanding among its adherents that divine right was carried in the blood. This is why Egyptian pharaohs, all the way down to the Cleopatra you've heard of, married their siblings: to keep their bloodlines as divine as possible. It's also why the Habsburgs inbred for themselves some weapons-grade chins, why Tsar Nicholas II's son was a hemophiliac easily used to manipulate him by Rasputin. Everyone understood at some level that God, or the gods, was conferring this right based on heredity, not any other factor, and so royalty was a race of humanity separate from the rest. Where would this notion have come from, if some kind of preternatural ability derived from breeding two different hominids hadn't allowed their offspring to take over their world and oppress it with wickedness?

This is where I share some family history to illustrate why I think the divine right of kings is just a way to describe an ideological system once meant to keep high-functioning autistic people in power. As I explained earlier, I'm autistic and from an autistic family, and my relations are at all points on the spectrum. For full disclosure, the particular point on that spectrum I reside on is schizoid personality disorder. When I was in school, I regularly won awards for scholastic achievement, and testing revealed me to be in the top percentile or two for every subject of kids in my grade. I never played, but I am barrel-chested like an American football player. And it can't be a coincidence that my mother, a genealogist, discovered we're related to the kings of Scotland as well as Tecumseh, a Shawnee general and brother to the prophet Tenskwatawa. The autistic Neanderthal spark, I believe, is whence comes the founders of dynasties and ideologies, and prophets crying in the wilderness. (When I first read Marx and Lenin, their autistic qualities leapt off the pages.) I can't cite that like I can an ancient poem, but it is fundamentally as true and self-evident to me as I live my life.

All of this is to say that, when the poem of Atram-hasis cites people like the Biblical Nephilim but adds that they were made by the gods to rule, it seems obvious in retrospect that they describe in religious terms the same secular phenomenon of Neanderthal DNA making its way across the modern human population. Three outlandish theses nonetheless support one another remarkably well for seemingly having been Ancient Aliens'd out of thin air: that Neanderthal remnants were the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis 6, that Genesis 6 describes real history on some level, and that the divine right of kings was invented to justify the rule of half-Neanderthal autistic wunderkinder.

So what became of these refugees? I do not believe that Shem, Ham, and Japheth were literally the children of Ziusudra. The incident of Ham's son Canaan covering up Ziusudra's nakedness seems like a later redaction meant to justify war on the Canaanites and also possibly the enslavement of African people captured in war. Ancient Egypt warred upon Canaan and Nubia, and ancient Israel displaced the Canaanites and as a trading center would have passively participated in slave trading routes from Egypt to points east. Either of them would have had reason to redact this to insert an insult against their enemies.

Rather, I think Shem, Ham, and Japheth were kings who oversaw the eventual expansion of this refugee people, millennia after the Great Flood filled the Black Sea. The sons of Japheth are described in Genesis as "dwelling in the tents of Shem," while the sons of Ham are cursed. This strikes me as reminiscent of the falling out of Jochi with his brothers as Genghis Khan divided up the Mongol conquests between his children, or Alexander's generals making alliances with and plots against one another after his death. Shem, Ham, and Japheth were probably the first generation of kings of these refugees after they enjoyed military success therefore unparalleled in history.

But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. First I have to explain the role of irony in history, because I have little else to base the positioning of many of these events on. Irony is the ever-attendant handmaiden of history, and this is a function of the dialectic. A thesis clashes with an antithesis, and in the process creates one or two syntheses, each a combination of parts of the thesis and parts of the antithesis. For a recent example, the Democrats opposed George W. Bush's attempt to send sea people of his own to Mesopotamia, while the neocons in the Republican Party supported it, and won elections. So the Democrats recently welcomed the neocons into their party to win elections, while a GOP base demoralized by the human cost of war they're disproportionately paying has turned against American imperialism. There is still a party of war and a party of peace in Washington, but the dialectic ironically swapped them.

Continue to Part VII