A MESOPOTAMIA TIMELINE by John D Pilkey

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The historical record of humankind in the third millennium before Christ bears the stamp of Noah's family and of the events and structures outlined in Genesis 9-11. The purpose of monogenetic study is to consolidate the Biblical explanation of human origins by generating a historical science based on the family of Noah. The goal is to create a coherent Christian synthesis of the disjointed data of antiquarian study. This goal was pursued by a variety of authors between 1650 and 1820: Samuel Bochart, Paul Pezron, William Stukeley, Jacob Bryant, Sir William Jones, George Faber, and others.

My logic resembles theirs. The difference between my work and theirs lies in the data furnished by archaeology since the discovery of the Sumerians around 1880. The challenge of my work is to combine their logic with the essential information unavailable to them. An obvious question is why this work has not been done by others.

There are several answers. The most basic is that Biblical monogenesis has been unpopular in historical science since the 1880's, largely through the influence of Darwinism. Another reason concerns the issue of eccentricity. Bryant, Pezron, and others were often perceived as eccentric. Biblical monogenesis tends to breed eccentricity because of its extraordinarily daring implications. For example, a self-evident feature of any monogenetic scheme is the role of incest, inasmuch as all males and females are members of the same universal family; but incest is just one of a series of bizarre logical consequences of Biblical monogenesis. 1The most important of these concerns the degree and type of political authority to be found in Noah's postdiluvian family. The political factor distinguishes my viewpoint, first from the Darwinian anthropologists, but ultimately from the whole tenor of empirical scholarship in the modern democratic era. To the conservatives, Noah is the passive recipient of divine instruction and of a salvation experience but is not an agent of charismatic political power. In other words, Noah has been conceived as a pious but hapless old man in a bathrobe. Whether or not the gradualist approach to antiquity compromises with Darwinism, it strikes me as unworthy of a Bible, which stresses dispensational revolutions and displays of power. Noah survived the Flood in order to build a world; and worlds are not built without the intervention of great political and creative power. Noah's family were the human building blocks of the nations and were the most powerful ruling house in the history of humankind, prototypes of the Emperors of Agade and the Pharaohs of Egypt. In fact, this understates the case. Noah's family was a kind of solar nucleus to all the primary linguistic stocks of humankind. These stocks are to Noah what the twelve tribes of Israel were to Jacob, except that Noah's postdiluvian longevity of 350 years enabled him to witness their growth from individual families to large tribes or nations, each capable of generating its own independent civilization.

The Sumerian King list refers to the descent of "Namlugal" or "kingship" out of Heaven at the outset of the postdiluvian era. This document attests to the historical reality of the dispensation of human government. By defining the earliest origin of "kingship," one also defines the principle of charismatic despotism, which will one day characterize the millennial reign of Jesus Christ, the "monos-despotes" of the Book of Jude. This phrase "monos -despotes" is especially significant for the apocalyptic link between Christ and the Noahic world. Aside from naming a divine despotism, it also highlights the monistic character of basic Christianity: the belief that all truth is summed in one person. Monism is the key attitude distinguishing Jacob Bryant or myself (Dr. John Pilkey) from the empirical scholars who have dominated historical science since the mid-nineteenth century. Now eccentric ideas are a dime a dozen. By "eccentric ideas," I mean facile speculative work lacking the refinement of approved methods of verification. Interpretive monism always means facility, the quick easy answer based on favorite doctrines. Empiricism implies solid scientific labor, even if that labor is "ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth." We all admire hard work and tend to despise mere opinion. Respect for observational labor should not cloud the issue of when and how interpretations should be rendered. The descent of the nations from Noah is an interpretive crux intimately related to the evangelical Gospel.

A creedal focal point of evangelicalism is the proposition of John 3:16, that "God so loved the world." The word "world" in this verse has an equivocal value relative to the "love of the world" which is enmity with God (1 John 2:15). These two radically different uses of the word "world" depend precisely on the issue raised by monogenetic study. The evil "world" of 1 John is the Gentile scheme of things in its status quo, abstracted from Noah and from any knowledge of Noah. The "world" of John 3:16 is the whole body of humankind, descendants of the survivors of the Flood, persons who owe their very existence to the fact that Noah "found grace in the eyes of the Lord."

Noah verses Natural Causes To trace the nations concretely from Noah is to consolidate the usage of John 3:16 and to picture humankind as former recipients of salvation fit for the evangelical mystery of regeneration. Without completing this task, we leave the "world" in the anonymous, profane condition through which Satan controls the lives of lost souls. In the field of history, we concede the battle to the enemy.

In the final analysis, the Genesis-10 study is an attempt to advance the cause of holiness at the expense of profanity by countering the view that the world of humankind is the anonymous result of natural causes. The goal of monogenetic study is to consolidate, in scientific terms, the Biblical view that this world owes its existence to the sacred history of Noah. My sense of authority to interpret what archaeologists observe is the immediate result of my sense of the authority of the Gospel to save souls. I would describe my work and any other persons' work in this area, not as a strategy to win souls, but as a neglected dimension of evangelical Christian testimony. It is no coincidence that Bryant's work, as eccentric, (or unsuccessful) as it may appear, was highly prized by the definitive evangelical John Wesley.

Genesis 10 Global not Local Ethnology If you look through standard Bible atlases for maps describing the contents of Genesis 10 and think about what you find, you will notice something very strange. Genesis 10 follows the account of Noah's Flood in 6-9 and carries the names of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth over into the start of the chapter. However, what you find in the atlases is a set of nations who lived relatively nearby Israel. Both Genesis and a verse in I Peter claim that the Flood reduced the population of the human race to only eight persons-a point of vast historical importance. That tiny family of eight once inhabited a single part of the earth; and the story of the Tower of Babel implies that, even when the population of this family grew sizeable, it was still living in the single location of Mesopotamia (Iraq).

If all the nationalities of mankind descend from a family living at one time in Mesopotamia, why do the Bible atlases concentrate only on nations surrounding Israel while neglecting the people of interior Europe, Siberia, the Far East, Polynesia, the Americas and interior Africa? We all agree that Israelites (*) in biblical times possessed no knowledge of those distant lands. However, knowledge of those distant lands is not at issue. Since the ancestors of all nationalities were once located in Mesopotamia, why does the text confine itself only to those nations familiar to Israel? The Bible atlases are really claiming that Genesis 10 differs radically from 6-9. After telling the story of the single family who survived the Flood, the text of Genesis is supposed to say nothing more about that family except to sample the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth living in proximity to Israel. We learn nothing about the history of Noah's family except that a remote relationship exists between Noah's sons and nations familiar to Israel.

[* This does not necessisarily mean such seafaring nations as the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Chinese, and others were ignorant of distant lands such as the Americas. There is much evidence of ancient contact between continents. Ancient worldwide rock art demonstrates the Egyptians and Chinese explored the Americas. The Chinese 'Classic of Mountain and Seas' or Shan Hai Jing mentions "Fusang" (North America) as was surveyed by the Chinese around 2500 B.C. The Chinese-Egyptian connection predates Moses a few hundred years suggesting Moses could have known about distant lands, such as China.The oppressive pharaoh noted in Exodus (1:2-2:23) was Seti I (1318-04), and the pharaoh during the Exodus was Ramses II (c. 1304-c. 1237). In short, Moses was probably born in the late 14th century BCE. Chinese historian Sima Qian's (206 BC -AD 220.) description of the topography of the Xia empire (2070 to 1600 B.C.) suggests at least a second millennium B.C. Chinese-Egyptian connection. He notes, "Northwards the river is divided and becomes the nine rivers"… "Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea." -(Records of the Grand Historian). The river in question wasn't China's famed Yellow River, which flows from west to east. There is only one major river in the world that flows northwards, "The Nile." Futher evidence for this exists with the Yin-Shang and the Sanxingdui bronze wares, which date back to ca. 1400 BC, during the Shang Dynasty 1766 to 1122 BC (Bamboo Annals calculate 1556 to 1046 BC.). These objects appeared suddenly at that time in the alluvial plain of the Yellow River, in Henan Province, central China, and from several places in southern China at roughly the same time or slightly earlier. The bronze material is similar to Egyptian bronze and was obtained in Africa, bearing the highly radiogenic lead isotopic signatures of the Africa Archean cratons.]

This reading of Genesis 10 has made an unfortunate impression on modern scholars of ancient times. It makes it appear that Moses has combined a story about a Flood with an entirely different, almost unrelated body of knowledge. Secular scholars draw the unfortunate conclusion that the Flood story is an isolated myth brought forward only in a vague attempt to explain where nations known to Israel came from.(**) Christians may content themselves that the nations in Genesis 10 accurately reflect the bloodlines of Noah's three sons. That belief, however, has little bearing on the general impression that Genesis 10 contains a less than universal account of nations with a Flood story put in front of it.

[** It is a false assumption that Moses was ignorant of geography and a further false assumption that the knowledge of Ptolemy outweighs early Dynastic geographical knowledge.] "Homines, non gentes" This unfortunate state of affairs is the result of a fundamental mistake made by an influential Christian writer 1700 years ago. That writer was St. Augustine. In commenting on Genesis 10 he wrote, "Gentes, non homines," "Races, not men." This opinion means that, when we read of seven sons of Japheth in 10:2, we are supposed to understand that these were not seven men in Noah's second generation but seven nations known to Israel personified in seven imaginary "eponymous" ancestors. Japheth must have actually begotten sons; but whoever they were, they lived in total oblivion long before their descendants became a race called the Gimmerai, Medes, Mushki and so forth.

For forty-five years I have studied how wrong Augustine was, how mistaken the dominant opinions arising from his opinion are and how misleading the Bible atlases have become in suggesting that the nations they display exhaust the historical value of Genesis 10. The contents of Genesis 10 have a completely different meaning. They are a historical record of the political disposition of Noah's earliest descendants and not just Shem, Ham and Japheth. Although the text contains some 77 names, I have found that they refer to 54 persons. That is because each of the clan groupings such as the sons of Cush in 10:7 is a record of a political group combining feudal sons or vassals like the ones described in Genesis 14:1-6. Because the clans combine immediate offspring with more distantly related vassals, some of the 54 persons are duplicated once or twice under different names in different clans. An extreme example is Riphath of Genesis 10:3 in the Japhethite third of the text. This person appears in all three sub-clans of the Hamite third as "Seba" in the Cushite section, "the Pathrusite" in the Mizraim (Egyptian) section and "the Amorite" in the Canaanite section.

In reality Genesis 10 consists of "homines, non gentes," "men, not races"-the reverse of what Augustine believed. These men, in turn, begot a variety of nations including the ones appearing in the Bible atlases but by no means confined to them. Genesis 10 is the Hebrew record of a body of human beings known by various names to all the most ancient cultures of Mankind. None of them was an Israelite because Jacob-Israel had not yet been born. Only a fraction of them ever spoke Semitic akin to Hebrew. In that sense that are barely "biblical characters" at all. It is a major mistake to treat Noah as a proto-Isaelite because he found grace with God to survive the Flood. Noah and his family were fathers of the Gentiles and Gentiles themselves. The Flood resulted in the origin of the Gentile world. In many cases, the persons named in Genesis 10 were better known to Gentile tradition than to the Hebrews or to Moses.

Take, for example, the four wives of the Ark. To all appearances, the Bible never names these women; but appearances can deceive. The diluvian wives receive names tucked away at the very end of the Genesis 10 list and treated as "sons" of Joktan. They are legitimately termed "sons" because females are fully capable, in the Gentile world, of holding great power and becoming political vassals. In a Sumerian record, Ku-Bau is an explicit female "king." Obviously, no reader of the Bible alone would ever guess that the Hebrew names Ophir, Sheba, Havilah, and Jobab were women and survivors of the Flood. The Bible does not intend to convey that information to us.

The only way I could discover these female identities is to get the right perspective on Hebrew tradition. The Hebrew people are West Semites, one of four divisions of the Semitic linguistic stock. As such, they shared directly in the Flood tradition along with all other primary nations. No two traditions, however, are quite alike. Moses was a strict monotheist and he had no use for "gods" and especially not for "goddesses." Among most other nations Noah's community of elite children and descendants were known as gods and goddesses like those named as such in Psalm 82 and John 10. They were rulers of almost inconceivably high status. Moses himself was enough like them as a nation-builder that the Lord told him, "You will be a god before Pharaoh and Aaron will be your prophet." The phrase "before Pharaoh" conveys the reality that human "gods" and "goddesses" pertained to the early Gentile world to which Egypt and its pharaonic institution belonged.

East Indian tradition is loaded with gods and goddesses and does the best job of rendering the four wives of the Ark. The advantage of this tradition is that it accurately identifies the four wives as multi-racial: black Kali, white Uma, yellow Durga, and implicitly red Mahadevi, mother of Ham and Noah's diluvian wife. The chief task of the four females who survived the Flood was to reproduce the four races that originated in Adam's family. Noah's sons could not accomplish this task because they were all sons of one father. The version of India that first arose in the Indus Valley (modern Pakistan) was one of the three earliest civilizations to arise after the Flood. The other two-Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and Egyptian-were more important. Most important of all was the Sumerian since Genesis 11 places Noah's family in Mesopotamia at an important early turning point in human history.

The Sumerian language and civilization were discovered during the course of the 19th century through study of ancient cuneiform script. This discovery gave scholars a unique opportunity to place ancient history on a firm, biblical foundation. The failure of European, British, and American scholars to do by the opening of the 21st century is one of the great tragedies in the history of human thought. This failure has resulted from two contrasting causes conspiring to the same result. Non-and anti-Christian scholars are hopelessly prejudiced against the Bible in respect to fundamental matters of origin. Christian scholars, on the other hand, have clung to the belief that Noah and his family must have been Semites (rather than Proto-Sumerians) because the Old Testament is written in a Semitic language. They have resisted giving full weight to the Sumerians because they react against the secular attempt to explain biblical origins away as a borrowing from Sumerian mythology.

I began to sense the extent of this tragedy 45 years ago in 1963. So far, my efforts to call attention to it and supply a reconstructive history of Noah's family have barely scratched the surface of public awareness. Like the tragedy itself, this failure has resulted from two causes. The academic world is largely under the control of a credentialing process in which reputations outweigh logic. It is simply impossible, in many cases, to get a hearing. Rhetorical and political skills needed to summon the attention of academic leaders in the relevant fields are largely beyond my capacity. This incapacity, in turn, is influenced by certain fashions in learning. It was not for nothing that a Christian scholar at Biola University once referred to my work as an "archaic study." It is archaic in two senses. Many Christian scholars have given up the task of placing the Bible at the concrete foundation of world origins. More important, they adhere to practical beliefs about fact gathering and verification foreign to the subject of origins. They have lost interest in the subject because they sense that it involves a mode of reasoning out of step with modern thought.

Ancient man did not possess the same worldview as modern man. Ancient texts from Sumer and elsewhere exhibit a mythological habit of thought wedded to religious rituals. In fact, a Sumerian text such as Inanna and the God of Wisdom conveys an impression of a society shaped as much by ritual as by practical trial and error. The tragic modern error concerning origins results from a breakdown in respect for ritual motivation based on a low view of the authority of symbols. Modern thought since the 18th century has been obsessed with the opposition of fact and fiction. This obsession arose from the contemporaneous development of empirical science and literary fiction beginning around 1740 in both cases. Fact and fiction have played a symbiotic role in modern thought based on their opposition.

Of course, a distinction between fact and fiction really exists. The word "fact" derives from a Latin participle of the verb facere meaning to do or accomplish (as in our word "factory"). A "fact" originally meant a deed occurring at a particular place in time and space and involving cause-effect mechanisms. These deeds or happenings have either occurred or not. There should be no blurring of the difference between events faithfully witnessed and events evoked more remotely by plausible fictions. Our capacity to recognize the difference may be limited; but scientists and historians do well to pursue pure fact as an ideal. Whenever I introduce new scenarios into my study and test them for how well they harmonize with known fact, I often state them as fact in order not to clutter up my already overloaded text with qualifiers. I hope that my readers will recognize that I am working hypothetically and recognize different degrees of certitude achieved in this way. If not, I lay myself open to the charge of plausible fiction. That charge can always be leveled at attempts at historical reconstruction. I view my attempts as an act of faith in such solid biblical truth as we possess. In all others matters certitude is a relativistic affair even though I am deeply convinced of the truth of what I offer here. John Milton's biblical epic 'Paradise Lost' contains plausible fiction but was praised by Joseph Addison for the strength of its analogy to biblical facts and truths. My goal is less literary than Milton's and aims at a higher level of factual integrity than Milton's poetic license allowed him. However, I cannot deny the debt I owe to Milton in a course taught at Tufts University in the 1962-1963 school year just prior to my earliest attempts at Noahic reconstruction. Clearly, I was attempting to do for the Noahic world after the Flood what Milton sought to accomplish for Adam and Eve at the fall. The difference is that I worked with Sumerology and took a different approach to Gentile mythology than anything Milton intended. From the outset, I sought to establish historical factso much so that my text sometimes resembles little more than a commentary on the Sumerian King List or a summary of world ethnography.

The Sumerian texts and mythological systems of other ancient nations are partly factual and fictional. The factual part is more extensive than commonly supposed. Take for example the "Libyan" family of the Hellenic god Poseidon. Conventional mythologists such as Robert Graves dismiss this family and other structures like it as fabrications gotten up out of Greek knowledge of other nations such as Phoenicia. I have discovered that one Hellenic family group-the Titan line of Hellen-has been fabricated out of two or three parts for thematic reasons. The "Libyan" family, in contrast, is historically flawless except for the rather artificial character of Poseidon's wife "Libya" ("Africa"). The tradition claims to present a father, two sons and a set of grandsons; and that is exactly what it does. In the process, it yields Hellenic names for the four "sons" (vassals or political sons) of the Japhethite Javan in Genesis 10:4-"Agenor" for Elishah, "Phoenix" for Tarshish, "Cadmus" for Kitt(im) and "Danaus" for Rodan(im) (or Dodanim). Only two of these four matching names are cognates (terms of common origin); but a variety of converging evidences confirm the relationship so thoroughly that I am convinced of its basis in fact in the early postdiluvian period when Noah was still alive. In fact, the application of the term "myth" to these names is misleading. They are a form of historical record.

William Hallo states the opinion that the Sumerian Flood is nothing but a rationalization of Sumerian ideas of prehistory. Everything beyond the scope of their records, he thinks, is treated by them as occurring before the Flood. This demeaning opinion reflects more on Hallo than on the Sumerians. It reflects a systematic error in modern thought so deeply engrained that it can only be explained in theological terms. It arises from a standard modern theme of "science" versus "superstition" rooted in an exaggerated emphasis on the contrast between fact and fiction. Dual systems or oppositions like this have a way of breaking down under scrutiny from a third angle.

Consider what the Bible is calling on us to do at the outset of the "apologetic" verse in I Peter 3:15: "But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts." What does it mean to "sanctify" the Lord as a spiritual exercise within our power? The meaning is to confer on the Lord the highest degree of importance, which we can possibly muster. Probably no two of us are alike concerning how much importance we can confer on anything; but we are to reserve the highest degree for the Lord. That practice of conferring importance is precisely what goes on in the development of ritual mythology. The only reason why Gentile priests called on their followers to perform symbolic rituals is that these acts were intended to confer sanctity or the highest level of importance-even when the names of gods introduced by these priests were unworthy of such devotion.

Hallo realized that the Sumerian Flood was connected in some way with the biblical Flood. He knew that Christians confer a high level of importance on the biblical Flood. From his opinion on the Sumerian use of the Flood tradition, I am forced to conclude that the high importance Christians confer on the Flood offends him intellectually and in other ways. We know from II Peter 3:1-7 that the Flood is a spiritually "hot topic." Something about it seems wrong to an unbeliever. It carries implications. In the mind of a secular scholar, the Flood must be reduced to a harmless "folkway," a whimsical vagary of ancient thought. Otherwise, it poses a threat to the entire modern, secular worldview. One wonders what was going through the mind and heart of the professor at Biola University, in spring 1985, when he referred to my work as an "archaic study." At the risk of appearing self-defensive, I call attention to the emotion which taking Noah's Flood seriously can evoke in some circles.

The study embodied in this postdiluvian timeline takes the Flood as seriously as it can be taken. Instead of reasoning about the Flood, it reasons from the Flood. That is what faith does. It "sanctifies" subjects by conferring on them the value of presuppositions rather than debate topics. I do not engage in debates about the Flood. I put the Flood to work by deducing the whole of ancient world history from it. Logically I cannot do otherwise. If the Flood happened and reduced the human race to four men and four women, it holds the key to every scrap of evidence deriving from human existence in the second half of the third millennium BCE.

[Editor: All images and pictures are removed to reduce page numbers, and can be found from the remaining "links" and from John Pilkey's other books. Gundestrup Caldron panel images may be referred to in Volume-2, "Noah's Family Speaks."] The ideal goal of Genesis 10 study is to destroy secularism. Secularists believe that they possess a logically coherent worldview proving that the Bible cannot be comprehensively true concerning origins. They worked out this consensus in the 19th and 20th centuries through a constant pressure of rebellion vigilant to select and interpret data seemingly inconsistent with the Bible. Several key components go to make up their belief system: the traditional chronology of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, a critical use of "eponym ancestry," anthropological and psychological assumptions about mythology and, in contrast, certain misconceptions among Biblicists such as the belief that linguistic and racial diversity did not exist prior to the Tower of Babel.(*)

[*Before the Babel episode there are different languages already associated with the various clans that descended from the sons of Noah (Gen. 10:5, 20, 31). In other words, languages "tongues" existed in the world before the Tower of Babel came onto the scene, according to the Bible. The confusion derives from God's destruction of a universal language, not from a creation of all new languages. A modern analogy would be the destruction of English.]

At the root of modern secularism lies the 18th century trend known as the "Enlightenment." This movement derived from the desire by Europeans to put an end to the religious strife of the previous two centuries. Thinkers in the 18th century searched for and found a common ground between Protestants and Catholics in a general avoidance of religious themes by a re-focus on natural philosophy or "science." This re-focus gained rapid recognition through the practical benefits of scientific study. Theological insight began to appear abstract and impractical. Religious faith seemed to have caused more harm than good. Even devoted Christians began to adopt an ideal of the Brotherhood of Man, at odds with religious sectarianism.

Semites verses Indo-Europeans

The two dominant cultures that existed before and after 1740 were adversarial in many ways. Theology was not the only issue. The earlier, Renaissance culture emphasized social, political, and intellectual eminence. After the time of Voltaire, the "enlightened" culture came to mean egalitarian democracy. Both sides in this conflict of values were ill equipped to appreciate the biblical account of origins. The Renaissance culture was crippled by racism and contempt for the masses. The enlightened culture, as it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, was prejudiced against the central element in postdiluvian times-kingship built from the monogenetic top down. When the crucial science of Sumerology became known, the Sumerian assertion that "kingship descended from heaven after the Flood" could no longer be appreciated as a foundational truth.

In their embittered rivalry, the Renaissance and Enlightened viewpoints both crippled the modern capacity to appreciate biblical origins. Latter-day Renaissance types like L. A. Waddell in the 1920s understood that radical kingship held a key to origins but centered their concept of eminence in an anti-Semitic bias in favor of ancient Indo-Europeans. Waddell despised the Bible as a Semitic document. He found the Renaissance principle of eminence in a set of ancient, exclusively Indo-European rulers of universal, imperial scope. He could not imagine that the rulers he admired derived from a multi-racial and polyglot elite at the core of Noah's expanding family. Neither he nor other secular scholars could reckon with the high longevities, which made this elite a practical reality. Another type of Renaissance mindset, loyal to the Bible, reacted inappropriately toward Semitism in a way that failed to appreciate the Sumerians and other non-Semites. These Biblicists reacted to the opposite extreme and were offended to discover that neither the Sumerians nor Elamites-the latter assigned to Shem's family in Genesis10:22-were Semitic speakers. They kept looking for Semites as though Noah himself were a Semite.

Meanwhile the ardently democratic, mainstream culture processed antiquity in a plausible but equally false manner. On the Christian side, the central emphasis on the Brotherhood of Man seemed to make common cause with biblical monogenesis: the unity of human origins in Adam and Noah. This stress on radical unity came to rest, however, in the mistaken assumption that humanity was united in race and language throughout history prior to the Tower of Babel event. As early as the Christian fifth century, St. Augustine laid a false foundation for the "enlightened" view with two mistaken beliefs about Genesis 10-11. First, that humankind was strictly unified in race and language before Babel, and secondly, that the names in Genesis 10 refer to "races not men,." and that these names, taken as persons, must be viewed only as eponymous ancestors without concrete historical reality. Augustine and other early Christians added the equally mistaken assumption that polytheism is the same thing as idolatry. They neglected the form of polytheism affirmed in Psalm 82.

The secular worldview can be shattered at its foundation by a number of perceptions based on a harmony between the biblical account of origins and observed data: racial fixity of type; the module value of thirty-year periods in Genesis 11; the recognition that linguistic unity of language was the sin under judgment in the Tower of Babel event; a reinterpretation of eponym ancestry; evidence of both euhemerism (the equation of men and gods) and a theology of diversity of the names of God in the polytheism of the earliest nations; and the steady emphasis on kingship in the earliest records of Sumer, Egypt and India.

An accurate understanding of biblical monogenesis must be built, not on generalities, but on specific identifications of ancient names with a core of elite human beings listed in the text of Genesis 10-11. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 refers to 'races' and 'men' according to a pattern of interlocking feudal relationships.

A systematic study of these lists by means of comparison with selected historical and mythological names results in certain surprises. Twelve of the names refer to women: three scattered through the Mizraim clan, four at the close of the Canaanite clan and five at the end of the Joktanite clan. At the time of the Flood, the four female survivors gained high importance as genetic carriers of the Adamic heritage of four races.

For thematic reasons the Bible practices tact by refusing to acknowledge these female identities. To do so would have meant dealing with racial diversity explicitly. The Bible diverts attention from race to realities that all men and women share in common. Race remains implicit and so does the female presence in Genesis 10. Compiled by Moses by the time of the Exodus, the Book of Genesis is in some ways an anti-Egyptian document. Hebrews of Moses' time were fully aware of the great goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon and preferred an account of origins purged of such persons. There was no room for a "goddess" in the Hebraic worldview. To specify female members of the community of names in Genesis 10 would have simultaneously promoted a distractive knowledge of racial diversity and brought to light the "Mahadevi tetrad" of the East Indians: the four female survivors of the Flood conceived as a four-in-one sect of women under the label "Mahadevi," "Great Goddess."

Another peculiarity of Genesis 10 is that it combines a minority of physical paternities with a majority of feudal sonships by oaths of loyalty. The Japhethite section is typical. Only the first three names in 10:2 refer to physical sons of Japheth. The fourth name refers to a grandson. The remaining three are vassals of Japheth recruited from the family of Shem. The three vassals of Gomer in 10:3 were all postdiluvian sons of Noah; and the four vassals of Javan in 10:4 combined one son and three grandsons of Sidon, son of Canaan son of Ham. Although the text places emphasis on Noah's three antediluvian sons, the full body of persons referred to throughout the text reveals an intertexture of genetic and political relationships.

These conclusions have relatively little to do with biblical exegesis. The study recorded in this book lays hold of all relevant data from high antiquity under guidelines furnished by Genesis 10-11.When I name the patriarch Ashkenaz of Genesis 10:3, for example, I am simultaneously referring to Wakan-Tanka of the Dakotas, Skan of the Sioux, Kanati of the Iroquois, Yarlaganda of the Gutians and Yarilo of the Slavs. Each name in Genesis 10 draws to focus light gathered from the ends of the earth.

This exercise in reconstructive history depends so heavily on hypotheses concerning the cross-cultural transmission of proper names that it is always subject to criticism by conventional skepticism based on academic linguistics. This sort of criticism is deeply entrenched in academia because it reflects the time, effort, and social prestige involved in the mastery of ancient languages. It reasons from fine nuances of phonetic habit and preference in specific languages as well as grammatical, syntactic, and idiomatic practices. Despite its usefulness in some cases, this critical method is fundamentally illogical in dealing with cross-cultural transmission of "foreign" names such as Persian "Ashkenaz" or "Arphaxad" in the Hebrew Bible. False assumptions are made about the closed character of linguistic cultures; and these in turn are based on popular, nationalistic or "Nativist" views of human origins as opposed to the imperial-international view developed in this study.

The replication pattern shown in Appendix V and VI furnishes positive proof of the validity of our method and basic premise. Thirteen contiguous tribes in Ptolemy's chart of ancient Germany tell an unambiguous story. As named and located, they display an ancestral memorial of the early postdiluvian heartland from Lydia in the northwest to eastern Arabia in the southeast and including Akkad and Sumer. "Nativist" assumptions about the origin of such tribes are quite false. Humankind once belonged to a vast, worldwide empire shaped by an elite set of fifty-four persons whose lives extended over the second half of the third millennium BCE. "Nativism" is democratic sentiment misapplied to ancient history. The opposed term "Diffusionism" is inadequate to convey the precise and explicit nature of man's imperial origin.

For believers in the Bible, there is no reason to study mythology to identify a few more instances of the Flood tradition. The purpose of the present study is to expand and develop knowledge of the early postdiluvian world community. This society was so extraordinary that knowledge of it constitutes prophetic insight. Awareness of the early postdiluvian period can reshape worldview. To appreciate, for example, what the Sumerian Myth of Zu means by "theft of the Enlilship" involves theocratic logic of a specifically prophetic type contrary to mainstream democratic thought.

Since the eighteenth century, democratic society has painted world history in its own image. In that century, Europeans sought to put an end to the fierce conflict between Protestants and Roman Catholics. They found a solution in the minimalist approach to religion suggested by Baron Montesquieu's Persian Letters. Thinkers like Benjamin Franklin turned to natural science as a means of being useful rather than wasting time on theological speculation and debate. Because the Protestant-Catholic war had been waged by rival authorities, an inevitable step was to strip religious authority of political power and reduce religion to a moral influence. Theocracy perished and was replaced by secular democracy through the pressure of a common desire for peace and security grounded in spiritual neutrality. We give this neutrality various names such as "separation of Church and State," "consent of the governed," "freedom," "the rule of law," "objectivity," "evolution," or "pluralism"-but it all amounts to the same thing-the lack of theologically explicit leadership.

The eight persons who survived the Flood lived and breathed theocracy. Efforts to interpret these persons from a modern, democratic perspective have been ludicrous. In fact, the democratic mind despairs of ever understanding them and translates that despair into denial. Modern man doubts the Book of Genesis because he cannot cope with its political implications. The early postdiluvian lived in a context where gods, heroes, kings, and priests were given. "Kingship descended from heaven," reports the Sumerian King-List.

Secularists have done their best to suppress this reality. They instinctively shun conflict based on the rivalry of theocratic power. Much of the narrative content of this study concerns such conflict. The West Semitic myth of Baal and Anath makes the struggle seem petty as all conflicts appear from an irresponsible distance. In his character as Mummu, Aliyan Bal, Lugalzaggesi and Teutates, the patriarch Shem may appear to have been a petty tyrant struggling against other petty tyrants. However, nothing about the early postdiluvian world was petty. During the 350 years that remained to Noah after the Flood, his family created a political universe as evidenced by the systematic appearance of Sumerian city-states and the voluminous Sumerian King-List. We still live in the outer precincts of that universe. -Noah's Family Speaks, Vol-II.

A Mesopotamian Timeline

The purpose of this composition is to narrate the history of Noah's family in chronological order.

The Nomadic Age -2518-2368

Noah's Flood occurred in 2518. His family spent the next 150 years after the Flood in constant migration at a time when their population remained too small to colonize fixed locations representative of a world already familiar to them from antediluvian times. Their purpose in migration was to encompass that world in a giant circle beginning in Syria and proceeding southeastward through Mesopotamia to Elam and Persia before crossing the Persian Gulf to Arabia and then westward through Hadramaut and Yemen across the Red Sea to Ethiopia and northward through Egypt and Canaan back to Syria. In completing this circuit, fifteen members of the family established domains as the basis for settlement and political authority.

The specific lands the fifteen claimed appear in two complementary documents: an inscription listing eight lands under the control of Sumerian ruler Lugalannemundu and seven figures in the Braided Goddess panel of the Celtic Gundestrup Caldron found in Denmark in the early 1890s. The fifteen claimants were the eight survivors of the Flood and seven postdiluvian children of Noah appearing as three vassals of Gomer in Genesis 10:3 and four of Canaan in 10:17-18. Each of the fifteen stages of this migration consumed a module of ten years making up a total of 150 years from 2518 to 2368. Because the standard Noahic era was a module of thirty years, the fifteen domains should be grouped in five sets of three as follows: