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The Perception of the Divine - I
God created Man and not Man God; consequently, God defined Man and not Man God. That is why Man sensed God, perceived the Divine, and acted accordingly within the spiritual and the material universes. Due to the first fall of Man, this sense and this perception were gravely impaired. Because of this situation, the early men started developing faculties in order to catch up with what they had missed but to no avail. These faculties, which we now identify as the basics of civilization, were truly unnecessary and they only resulted in further falls.
If we consider the original sin as an infidelity, the so-called 'human civilization' was constructed on unrequested powers, skills and intelligence. This invalid, counterfeit intelligence is what exactly we read in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (3:19; ἡ γὰρ σοφία τοῦ κόσμου τούτου μωρία παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ ἐστιν / Sapientia enim hujus mundi, stultitia est apud Deum): "For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight".
Texts and representations from the scene related to the Weighing of the Heart of Ani, which took place in the Hall of Judgment (from the Papyrus of Ani); Ani and his wife Tutu (lower section, left) enter the realm of the Divine. At center, Anubis, in kneeling position, weighs Ani's heart (left plate of the scale) against the feather of Maat (right plate of the scale). He is observed by the divine forces Renenutet, Meshkenet, and Shay, as well as by Ani's own Ba (lower spiritual body which is depicted as a bird with human head). At the right end, Ammut, intending to devour Ani's soul if his heart is proven sinful, awaits the verdict. Identified as the Divine Wisdom, Thoth (with human body and the head of the bird ibis) prepares to record it. In the upper section, all supreme aspects of the Divine act as judges: (from left to right) Hu and Sia, Hathor, Horus, Isis and Nephthys, Nut, Geb, Tefnut, Shu, Atum, and Ra-Horakhty. Written by the Theban scribe Ani -for the preparation of his life in the Hereafter- in the first half of the 13th c. BCE, the Papyrus of Ani was discovered in 1888 in Luxor by the English Egyptologist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge and smuggled to the British Museum. It is a 24 m long scroll that has a width of 33 cm; the monumental document needed three volumes to be duly published (introductory analysis; transcription and translation; facsimile reproduction),
Yet, this conclusion is nothing more than the true essence of Ea's advice to Adapa (the First Human) according to the Ancient Sumerian/Assyrian-Babylonian sacred text "Adapa and the South Wind":
«At the door of Anu, Tammuz and Gishzida are standing, "they will see thee, they will ask thee; 'Sir,' For whose sake dost thou so appear, Adapa? For whom Art thou clad in a mourning garment?' 'In our country two gods have vanished, therefore Am I so.' 'Who are the two gods, who in the land Have vanished?' 'Tammuz and Gishzida.' They will look at one another and Be astonished. Good words».
In other words, in the original Paradise, there would never be any 'civilization'. Then, the quest for the original perception of the Divine is a direct, straightforward and conscious rejection of all the human cultures and civilizations. Quite unfortunately for them, all those who intend to stick to their traditions and cultures, by so doing, they bring the total collapse of the human civilization closer. This is apparently so because their civilization is flawed and putrefied, their faith nonexistent, and their perception of the Divine dishonest and erroneous.
Contents (Part I: I-VI)
Introduction
I. Man: soul, body, and character
II. Communication with the material universe
III. Communication with the spiritual universe
IV. The function of the Man: interaction among soul, body and character
V. Mind without thoughts; heart without sentiments; solar plexus without desires
VI. At the antipodes of the ancient Spiritual Sciences, Modern Psychology produces monsters, leading to the extermination of mankind
VII. The human soul, its parts, and their functionality
VIII. Soul consciousness without subconscious and unconsciousness
IX. Knowledge as self-consciousness: no need of language, writing and learning
X. Wisdom as consciousness of one's own destination in the material universe
XI. Fate: the process of all interconnections and mutual impact of all created factors
XII. Fortune: inherent sense of conditions enabling man to outdo what Fate specified
XIII. Perception of the Divine: from the Five Elements to the Twelve Supreme Beings
XIV. God & the Divine vs. the Divine & the gods
XV. The perception of God and the perceptions of gods
XVI. The human concept of the Divine: result of the malfunction of the Fallen Man
XVII. End Times: liberation from thoughts, sentiments, desires, languages & writings
Introduction
The modern Western (in fact: Western European) world, which by means of military, political, economic, academic, intellectual, educational, religious, cultural and spiritual colonization invaded and (by so doing) desecrated the rest of the world, has been based on a peremptory, 'humanist' assumption, an arbitrary, detrimental rejection of the pre-Renaissance world, a baseless, yet unprecedented historical revisionism, and a self-determination to deliberately define God. Within this vicious and calamitous context, which precipitates the total annihilation of the mankind, there is absolutely no place for perception of the Divine.
Nonetheless, it has been inevitable that several humans managed to liberate themselves from today's destitute, fake and corrupted religions, absurd and nonsensical philosophies, and various other schemes, theories and ideologies in order to find their true inner selves and in the process perceive the Divine.
In today's world, there is no self-definition of Man. This is so because the peremptory concept of Humanism constitutes an unfounded dogma and the foundation of all posterior conclusions, considerations and theories. Any spiritual-intellectual attempt to question the validity of the 'humanist' absurdity results instantaneously in utterly dictatorial persecution, hysterical rejection, and fanatical, systematized defamation. Yet, the insanity of 'Humanism' leads straight to the eradication of mankind.
As a matter of fact, for every civilization and culture, the self-definition of Man was never the first priority in terms of ancestral narratives, meditation, rumination and world view; on the contrary, the definition of God was the central, fundamental task. We do not exist of our own; we live because God created us. Contrarily to Him, we cannot say "I am who I am" (אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה; ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν; ego sum qui sum / Exodus 3:14). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am
Similarly, and more authoritatively than the Torah, the Assyrian-Babylonian sacred text of Enuma Elish (the world's paramount 'Genesis' or 'Cosmogony') in its 3rd and 4th verses stipulates the following: «apsûm-ma rēštû zārûšun; mummu Tiamat muallidat gimrišun» {Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, (and) Mummu Tiamat, she who bore them all / as per the transliteration in P. Talon, The Standard Babylonian Creation Myth: Enūma eliš; Helsinki, 2005}.
https://ia600707.us.archive.org/16/items/Holy-Books/EnumaElish.pdf
Everything, every aspect of the Divine, every later name of God or aspect of God depended on the primordial Apsu and Tiamat, the names of God before Creation. In the World History's first and foremost holy text, the narrative of the Creation starts before the Creation. After the original moments of Becoming are stipulated, all the rest follows. In other words, only because humans defined God first, they were able to determine who they were at a second stage. But to define God, men had to perceive the Divine at an earlier moment.
I. Man: soul, body, and character
In this brief presentation, I don't intend to expand on the perception of the Divine of the Ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians-Babylonians and Egyptians, thus composing a historico-religious monograph. On the contrary, I will use material and concepts, methods and approaches of the Ancient Mesopotamian monotheists, which can help today's people to best question and ultimately refute the prevailing, absurd and preposterous definition of the Divine, which has become good reason for the mankind's decay.
There cannot be mental, sentimental or sensual perception of the Divine. The brain, the heart, and the solar plexus are parts of the human body that function at the very intersection of the soul and the body within every human being; however, they still generate material functions. Through these means a human obtains perception of the material universe. However, only the human soul creates spiritual functions, and it is only through one's soul that a man can perceive the spiritual universe, the Divine, and God. In brief, there is only spiritual perception of the spiritual world.
Because the dissociation between the human soul and the human body is the result of the successive falls of mankind, today's man has lost the originally inherent ability to establish a complete synergy between the soul and the body. Many misinformed and disoriented people, who believe in the existence of the human soul and the spiritual universe, think that the thoughts, the ideas, the theories, the sentiments, the desires and the passions constitute the soul, but that's very wrong.
As driving force of life, the soul is entirely different from the body; it does however permeate the human body and, to enable the human being's major functions at the material level, it forms particular junctures within the body in the heart, the brain, and the solar plexus. At best, which means before all the Falls, the three junctures (or intersections) are totally empty, and ethereal vitality keeps the human being in perfect synergy between the soul and the body.
The electromagnetic flow is thus exemplarily processed, being uninterrupted and unabsorbed by the various, unnecessary debris formed during cases of traumatic experience. Then, this man is well-lit and bright, able to emit light, and transform his eye into a lantern for his body; this is the meaning of Jesus' famous hint "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light" (Ὁ λύχνος τοῦ σώματός ἐστιν ὁ ὀφθαλμός· ἐὰν οὖν ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου ἁπλοῦς ᾖ, ὅλον τὸ σῶμά σου φωτεινόν ἔσται·; lucerna corporis est oculus si fuerit oculus tuus simplex totum corpus tuum lucidum erit; Matthew 6:22)
Quite contrarily, in the case of the man of the Fall, the three intersections are filled with unnecessary data, pieces of 'knowledge', amounts of worthless information, endless thoughts, considerations, theories, ideas, ideologies, sentiments and desires, not to mention passions and abominable calculations, which keep the human being captive of the worst enemies of mankind. In such cases, the soul is greatly affected and clearly condemned to damnation. These unfortunate and unsubstantiated beings have thus already become 'persons', overwhelmingly filling the part of their soul that we conventionally call 'subconscious' with collateral debris, which constitute an enormous burden for the soul and gradually force her to incapacity and castigation.
The intersections of the soul and the body (solar plexus, heart and brain) create what we come to know as the character of the human being; the character is the epitome of individuality. But a human being, i.e. an individual, should never become a 'person'. The character corresponds to what many mystics call conventionally 'lower spiritual body'; this is wrongly called 'astral body' (it has nothing to do with stars). Few days after the separation of the soul from the body (i.e. the 'death'), both, the material body and the lower spiritual body, start getting disintegrated.
Being aware of the intensified spiritual attack against the mankind and the increased number of sinful humans, modern mystics wanted to find a convenient and very conventional 'solution' of the problem. They therefore invented the childish theory of generalized reincarnation. It is certain that some souls can reincarnate; spiritually and materially, reincarnation is possible. Jesus spoke explicitly about that, referring to the Men of Nineveh, i.e. the Ancient Assyrians: "The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here" (ἄνδρες Νινευῖται ἀναστήσονται ἐν τῇ κρίσει μετὰ τῆς γενεᾶς ταύτης καὶ κατακρινοῦσιν αὐτήν, ὅτι μετενόησαν εἰς τὸ κήρυγμα Ἰωνᾶ, καὶ ἰδοὺ πλεῖον Ἰωνᾶ ὧδε; viri ninevitae surgent in iudicio cum generatione ista et condemnabunt eam quia paenitentiam egerunt in praedicatione Ionae et ecce plus quam Iona hic; Matthew 12:41).
The generalized theory of reincarnation invalidates the purpose of the Creation. It is an absurdity according to which one human being can achieve perfection in three lives, another man in six lives, and a third person in nine lives; indeed, this is utterly blasphemous. If things had been arranged in this paranoid manner, God would have been snoring at the end station of this useless and otherwise comical process. Only pathetic ignorance and abject immorality can make someone think that the Moral Order does not matter and that the facts of spiritual reward and spiritual castigation are meaningless. Contrarily to this nonsensical scheme, for all early sacred texts, it matters greatly whether the Moral Order is maintained and respected by all humans or not. Without Order there is no Creation; breaching the universal Order is an act that destroys some part of the universe. That is why reward and castigation are consequential, instantaneous and inevitable.
In this regard, it is absolutely puerile to suggest that, since most humans were sinful, if we happen to believe that there will be reward for the innocent and punishment for the guilty, we will end up in a scarcely inhabited Paradise with few souls and in a densely populated Hell packed with the souls of sinners. I am absolutely convinced that this is a hypocritically childish response (pronounced in Modern times) to an inconsistent and unsophisticated sermon (given in Christian and Islamic times).
I cannot expand further here (as this article does not concern the Structure of the Spiritual Universe), but I have to point out that it is mere theological vanity to try to interpret terms like "eternal life" and 'eternal fire" within the context of life of the Fallen Man. Sacred texts that use similar terms apparently give figurative sense to several terms that they use, since their readers will ostensibly be totally unable to fully and deeply comprehend them. I must therefore conclude that modern mystics' opposition to Christian-Muslim preachers is an intentional evildoing, although the latter clearly failed to accurately interpret their respective sacred texts.
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Spiritual Potency, the Loss & the Recovery thereof: from Adapa (Adam) to Gilgamesh to the End Times
How God created Man and men in Sumer, Akkad and Egypt fashioned the mankind by creating gods
Emperor Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) appears twice, dressed in ritual robes and holding the mace symbolizing authority; he makes a gesture of worship to Ashur depicted in a winged disc. In front of him there is the Sacred Tree of Life. Excavated by: Sir Austen Henry Layard (May 1846) in the North West Palace of Kalhu (today's Nimrud), North Iraq (then Ottoman Empire)
The present text is not a concise essay; it does not therefore cover all the topics related to the series of historical developments herein mentioned. Being part of a long exchange of emails with a friend, it merely offers readers the chance to become better acquainted with historic events that are mentioned in almost all sacred texts but comprehended poorly and confusingly. A constant but truly disastrous human mistake is the projection of assumptions, conventional thoughts, and situations from our environment onto past circumstances that were however very different. In this regard, the present text will be very helpful as it will instigate the conscious reader into active reconsidering and systematic reassessing several hitherto unquestioned conclusions that are certainly wrong.
Contents
Introduction
I. Ra, Isis and Kabbalah
II. Messiah-Christ-Mahdi: a pre-Biblical, eschatological concept
III. The Tree of Life, its loss, and its eschatological recovery
IV. Two kinds of priesthood for the descendants of Noah and a separate, third, priesthood for the incestuous remnants of sinful descendants of Adam
V. Creation, spirituality, the loss thereof (as consequence of successive falls), and its eschatological recovery
VI. Spirituality from the Flood to the Late Antiquity
VII. Spirituality, the five elements, and the wrong sources of modern Western mystics
Introduction
Many people today confuse the human soul with the mind, the heart, and the solar plexus that are the pillars on which the human character is founded, built, gradually developed and ultimately formed; that is wrong. The human character is definitely not the human soul. Only few days after the death, the body and the character start getting disintegrated, whereas the soul is immortal. As part of the spiritual universe, the human soul is a particular spiritual entity, which is ascribed to a nascent body (embryo) at the very moment of its birth.
Due to conscious (and at times unconscious) synergy between the soul and the body, a human can perform 'miracles'. All those 'miracles', like every similar act that was performed by Jesus and described in Gospels, were not truly speaking miracles but the result of spiritual potency, i.e. spiritual-material (bodily) synergy.
In fact, the narratives are true, but miracles do not exist. Simply, humans have been first fooled about the spiritual universe, which is also inside each being, because we all have souls and everything created within the material universe corresponds to its spiritual hypostasis (or soul); and at a second (and worst) level, humans have been deceived and dissociated from their souls, which in turn results in lack of spiritual potency and in the subsequent formation of the belief in 'miracles'. I will now offer few practical examples of spiritual potency, so that no one has any doubt about my approach to the topic:
A man with spiritual potency is able not to allow a bullet shot at him to penetrate his body and kill him. Back in the 1930s, it was reported that the great Hindu sage and mystic Mahatma Gandhi used to just watch English military airplanes (targeting the people of a city that had revolted against the English rule) and make it sure that the bombs dropped fell elsewhere without killing anyone.
A man with spiritual potency is able to physically walk on the sea or lake water or in the air, to be corporeally present somewhere without being seen by those who are present there, to instantly transfer himself bodily to a remote location, to literarily walk nearby wild beasts without being attacked or threatened by them, as well as to naturally stay in the depths of the oceans and deep inside the Earth without any difficulty, consequence or side-effect.
Furthermore, a man with spiritual potency is able to hide objects or physically transfer them to remote locations, make them speak, and instantly change their shape, to interact (or 'speak') with many spiritual beings, souls, spirits, intelligences and hierarchies, to bodily move back in time and invisibly attend a well-known or an unknown historical scene (meeting, conference, battle, liturgy or other event); and so on.
--------------------- Response to a friend -------------------------
My dear friend,
Thank you for the attachments, your continuous interest, your comprehensive response, and the critical points of discussion that you raise!
Recently, I wrote extensive letters to you because I wanted you to have an accurate understanding of my encounter with the spiritual universe, and of my explorations, ruminations and polarizations in view of a methodically ameliorated comprehension of the interaction between the spiritual and the material halves of all humans. For me, it is this interaction that generated History. That's why I don't believe that what people call "History" has been only the outcome of material components and constituents. I therefore try to always highlight the spiritual dimensions of the developments that took place on Earth. Consequently, it is only normal that with great joy I read your sentence "As I see you have already the basis for spiritual science, it would be a pleasure for me to give you a few hints".
I. Ra, Isis and Kabbalah
Speaking about Kabbalah, you refer to the "the magic of the word"; to me, this fact became first understood through Ancient Egyptian sacred texts as per which Isis is the only to know the true name of Ra. I interpret this narrative as revelatory that only the spiritual ancestors of the Ancient Freemasons and Rosicrucians (i.e. Isis) had this knowledge, whereas the spiritual ancestors of the Jesuits (Nephthys) did not. I understand the beginning of the Gospel by John; in fact, it is a Gnostic text. From this point to the Jesuit-promoted concept, heretic Russian Orthodox dogma, and Catholic infiltration attempt of Imiaslavie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imiaslavie) the distance is small.
All the same, it is my conviction that, by using the term 'word" for the description of Kabbalah-related exercises and endeavors, people only get confused. I believe that the truly correct term should be "sound"; this is the correct meaning of all formulas collected and analyzed by Franz Bardon. Their spiritual value is effective when they are uttered / pronounced; not when they are merely evoked in the mind of a person!
And yes! I fully agree with what you say "The book by Franz Bardon about the Kabbalah is the only one on our globe teaching the spiritual practice of this science.".
II. Messiah-Christ-Mahdi: a pre-Biblical, eschatological concept
Following my historical researches on Jesus, which were spearheaded by my studies of Robert Ambelain's books, I realized that Jesus was not the Messiah or Christ whom the Ancient Hebrews were said to expect to come at the End of Time. But when I studied Assyriology and Egyptology, I realized (as early as 1980) that the Biblical and later the Christian and then Islamic concepts of Messiah-Christ-Mahdi are nothing more than adaptations and localizations of the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian monotheistic concepts of Ninurta and Etana (two parallel perceptions of the concept of a Savior coming at the end of Times), and of the (equally monotheistic) Ancient Egyptian concept of Horus. Furthermore, several episodes of the Anatolian Hittite eschatological myth and sacred text 'Ullikummi' have been passed onto the Christian Book of the Revelation, whereas the Hittite Messiah Tasmisu managed to save the central city of the End Time days at the last moment, finally vanquishing Ullikummi, the monster that came out of the Sea (: the Antichrist).
That this approach to the Ancient Oriental civilizations is embarrassing to all, namely the Zionists, the Freemasons and the Jesuits, I can understand easily. The traditional method of academic interpretation renders all these eschatological texts mere myths that no specialist truly attempts to systematically interpret and analyze.
This situation was a constant parameter and a question that I repeatedly made to myself during my postgraduate and doctoral studies:
- Why do Biblical theologians, who study a Biblical text during the seminar (first discussing issues pertaining to the script, the language-lexicography, the grammar and the syntax), offer also a historico-religious interpretation of the text under study (of let's say Isaiah 53), whereas Orientalists teaching the Descent of Ishtar to the Nether world limit their courses only to the first section of analysis?
In any case, the fact that Jesus was not the Messiah-Christ is also confirmed by a simple fact: there cannot be a Messiah (or Savior) without the End of Time; and apparently, the time of the Roman Emperor Tiberius was not the End of Time – which means that no Messiah appeared then.
III. The Tree of Life, its loss, and its eschatological recovery
I can perhaps accept your statement ("In Kabbalah the hierarchy is called 'Tree of Life'.") but only as a metaphor. It is my absolute conviction that the Tree of Life is a real, material and spiritual, Tree, which was at the epicenter of the original Paradise. By preferring the Tree of Knowledge to the Tree of Life, Adapa (Adam in Hebrew) only condemned his posterity to 'fall'. By so doing, he provoked a series of other falls, which will be outmaneuvered and canceled only at the End of Time, following many unprecedented destructions and ruinations. Actually, this is the nucleus of every known eschatological concept and soteriological dogma from the times of the Sumerians, the Akkadians-Assyrians-Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Hittites down to our days. Further 'falls' occurred to Mankind, more paragraphs were added to the apocalyptic myths and the soteriological texts.
Many people understand that "as above so below", but few people realize that "as before so after". There is no such thing as "doomsday"; it is not an independent event or a terminal development; those who believe such nonsense are either fools or liars. A rather early phase of the End Times may eventually be described as "doomsday", but this is only the gate to the original Paradise re-established. That is why Fathers of the Christian Church and Christian theologians (thinking that he was the Messiah) named Jesus "New (or Last) Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45-58). The final Savior will be as spiritually powerful as Adam before the original sin (which caused the fall).
Every well-founded spiritual quest is therefore the search for the Tree of Life; I surely understand very well why so many mystics in so many, different, socio-cultural environments were so obstinately determined not to allow thoughts in their minds. This is a paramount effort of self-purification. Thoughts are useless forms of self-destruction. Adam, before his sin, did not 'think'; he did not need to. Angels do not think; souls, spirits, spiritual intelligences, and other hierarchies of the non-material universe do not think. Will (voluntas) is unrelated to thinking.
Cogito ergo non sum: this truth demonstrates the rotten foundations of the Western world. And you, my dear friend, as a consistent and experienced mystic, certainly know very well that Siegfried's death in Götterdämmerung is only the result of 'thinking' (and betrayal). But this was already very well known to the Ancient Mesopotamians, who used to identify 'thinking' as a parameter of the perilous domain of Enlil (: Air) and, to avert all troubles, recognized 'wisdom' as possible without thinking and as a dimension of the realm of Ea (: Soft Waters).
And by eliminating all thoughts and evacuating their subconscious, the Assyrian emperors and high priests were able to bring the Tree of Life back to Nineveh. They even were spiritually conscious and empowered to stipulate that the Tree of Life was one and three at the same time, as it was reflected at the center of the City of the Nether World and at the Gates of the Firmament.
I believe that real spiritual potency combined with transcendental moral (which is inherent to all created beings) enables humans to rise to the level of sanctity; then, the materialization (: the material appearance) of the 'Sole Tree' (: Tree of Life) in a spot, which is part of the -secret and unknown to most- holy land, can take place. But this is not up to anyone. When it happens, it will have worldwide impact and it will bring forth incalculable changes, totally changing everything in the everyday life of all the people. This is what happened in Nineveh in the 9th-8th c. BCE and for this development to be completed Prophet Jonah was dispatched there, having the absolute success that he had and contributing to the subsequent events, which irrevocably linked Assyria to the End Times. For this reason Jesus and the Quran referred to the Men of Nineveh as returning at the End Times, and to the conclusive role that they will play in rejecting and terminating "this generation" (: the prevailing system before the eschatological termin).
IV. Two kinds of priesthood for the descendants of Noah and a separate, third, priesthood for the incestuous remnants of sinful descendants of Adam
I am glad to know that you agree with the concept of the "two kinds of priesthood" which is a constituent element of my approach to World History and a constant point of reference in many of my articles. Identifying the "good ones" with Isis (namely the spiritual ancestors of pre-modern Freemasonry) and the "evil ones" with Nephthys (i.e. the predecessors of the modern Jesuits), I exclude Zionism from both.
Actually, I don’t believe that Zionism has anything to do with historical Judaism and the descendants of the Hasmonean Jews. In fact, Zionists hijacked Judaism, stripping (Sephardic, Romaniote, Mizrahi and Yemenite) Jews of all of their Biblical and eschatological visions and expectations, and making them theirs. Actually, Zionism is the filthy product of a bastard population which does not originate from Noah but from Adam, but has been contaminated with the seed of one generation of Giants.
Early known as the (antediluvian) Guti, they infiltrated among the early Turanian Kassites whom they helped (after the Hittite sack of Babylon - 1596 BCE) by means of treachery and black magic to invade Babylon and establish a counterfeit and devilish dynasty in Mesopotamia. After Elam overthrew the Kassites and the Assyrians invaded and annexed Babylon, the Kassites formed a powerful polytheistic and idolatrous clique of priests who fueled anti-Assyrian paroxysm and survived all Assyrian invasions.
They induced Nebuchadnezzar to invade the tiny, marginal and unimportant Judah enclave in order to deliberately transport the totality of the Jewish population to Babylonia and thus expose them to efficient Kassite Zionist infiltration. By nominally accepting 7th c. BCE Judaism as religion and by arranging intermarriages, the Kassite Zionists (later known as Gog and Magog and more recently identified as Khazars) intended to substitute themselves to the Jews, rewrite and readjust the Bible at will, thus removing and adding paragraphs and sentences; they were the moving force behind the composition of Talmud to which not one pre-Exilic layman, priest, king or prophet would have ever ascribed himself.
V. Creation, spirituality, the loss thereof (as consequence of successive falls), and its eschatological recovery
Yes, I accept everything that you say in your paragraph about Christian Rosenkreuz and the earlier stages of spiritual initiation, but I find it very brief as diagram and very modest as description particularly if we take it into account, when exploring the spiritual potency which existed as inherent to all humans but later vanished from among the average people. That is why I intend now to present to you for the first time my complete perception and interpretation of the topic, namely the presence or absence of spiritual potency among humans and the true destination of Life and Creation. This is going to be the main part of my present response.
The present average human was not created by God; his condition is the result of many, successive falls, which correspond to different sins (in terms of thoughts, sentiments, desires, words and deeds) that contravened the Divine Order of Creation which is inherent to any being and which is called 'Moral' within religious context. So, to be accurate, today's man is the product of the consequences of earlier generations that go back to Adapa (Adam), the early Man whom God created.
And while all parts of the Creation have their spiritual counterparts (and this renders the division of the modern discipline of Chemistry into Organic and Inorganic a vicious and deliberate trickery), Adam was an outstanding marvel as he was able to perform hitherto unfathomable 'miracles', which are not at all extraordinary or unbelievable (as today's fallen, trivial, miserable, idiotic and pathetic humans think), but simply ordinary, regular deeds that may be absolutely necessary for the purpose of the Creation.
Naming animals, reptiles and birds (but not the fish) is an activity reported as part of the Creation, because by designating the name of these creatures, in fact Adam attributed to them their functions and traits as if he had been in a way their creator.
However, a considerable part of this spiritual potency was lost due to the early sin, which clearly involved thought, calculation, interest, and exposure to desire and lust. This is not only a simple matter of narrative, but also a clear indication of how the inherent (to all beings) code of the Creation functions. It is not God who punishes, but man who, by indulging himself into what he was not created for, gets exposed to the consequences of his 'impermissible' thoughts, sentiments, desires, words and deeds.
In fact, there is nothing 'impermissible' to humans, because Man was created free, but for everything there is an inevitable consequence. What the story of Adam and Eve reveals is that sex is evil, and therefore human reproduction as per the Order of the Creation was absolutely unrelated to the sexual intercourse, as this act has been viewed in the Late Antiquity and during the Christian, Islamic and Modern times.
All the same, the pictorial representation of the Ancient Egyptian concepts of fertility and reproduction lets us understand that the body members, which are used for reproduction, are the same, but their original functionality differed greatly from the paradisiac times to the post-paradisiac epochs. In this regard, it is essential to state that the act of reproduction was void of lust, because it was performed in total synergy between soul and body.
For this reason, according to the Ancient Egyptian Iwnw Heliopolitan dogma, when after the dismemberment of Osiris by Seth, Isis recollected the parts of the Human Well Being (: this is the real meaning of the Ancient Egypt name 'Wser', which was later distorted to 'Osiris' in Ancient Greek and Latin), she made a replica for the lost male part, which was "tossed into the river, and the lepidotus, the sea-bream, and the pike had fed upon it" (Plutarch's Moralia, De Iside et Osiride 18). Isis consecrated the phallus, but it is explicitly said that the phallus is only a simulacrum of the original male member.
The first fall must have had an enormous impact notably on the fauna; it would be absurd to think that God created wild animals. Simply, the successive falls of the Man affected them greatly; there are plenty of Biblical passages and eschatological literature as per which the original condition will be reestablished after the End Times (example: "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them"; Isaiah 11, 6).
In spite of the loss of spiritual potency, the original humans were still extraordinarily formidable and dreadful to all animals; the evolutionist scheme as per which the early humanoids had to permanently fight hard for their survival is sheer nonsense and utter aberration. In fact, various absurd theories, inconsistent assumptions, and scientific frauds, such as Darwinism, Marxism-Leninism (historical materialism), evolutionism and several other absolutely preposterous philosophical systems were treacherously adopted by academic circles thus conditioning the direct and pertinent understanding of ancient sacred texts, other historical sources, and the archaeological record.
Despite the loss of spiritual potency, the early humans were still omnipotent beings that could carry out prodigious exploits and magnificent works; this was due to the fact that they were still able to master their own electromagnetic fluids far better than the Latvian-American mystic and scientist Edward Leedskalnin (1887-1951), who first quarried and sculpted, and then transported to another location (Homestead, Florida) more than 1100 short tons of limestone (1 short ton is 907 kg) completely alone with the use of modest tools and the help of a truck driver. Explaining how he was doing the monumental structure, he called upon the skills and the capacities of the early pyramid architects and builders.
Many people admire Leedskalnin's exploits, but unfortunately, few people manage to notice (let alone assess and evaluate) key points of his life example; even fewer are capable of making the equation. Abstinence and celibacy (or chastity), rigorousness and austerity were evident to all who met him. But this means exactly what I already stated for the original Man; he was apparently created to steer clear of thought, calculation, interest, desire and lust. And this is exactly what the life examples of the prophets, as well as the behavioral standards left by selected emperors, high priests, and mystics, demonstrate.
Consequently, it is safe to claim the following:
1- Lust triggered the fall, which brought about a significant loss of spiritual potency;
2- Loss of spiritual potency caused further lust and other sins (thus starting a vicious circle); and
3- Spiritual potency recovery is impossible without elimination of lust and other sins.
As a matter of fact, numerous conspiracy theories, earlier unheard fallacies, such as the assumption about the existence of the so-called 'Extraterrestrials', and many other fraudulent postulations started being propagated in the late 19th c.: this was due to the fact that people have been gradually approaching to the End Times, when the most complicated lies and the most absurd delusions will be propagated. These monstrously devilish attempts occurred because of the determination of the evil priesthoods, which rule today's world, to permanently keep all the humans captive of deceptions, which prevent them from liberating themselves from the compact falsehood in which they have been living.
For these counterfeit and blasphemous religious leaders, it is definitely essential to prevent humans from attempting to reestablish synergy of the body and the soul in themselves. So, you understand that almost all those, who speak today against the so-called New World Order and the established academic disciplines, are integral parts of the evil system, as long as they do not admonish all the humans to focus on abstinence, celibacy, and departure (lit. exodus) from today's Western societies, as well as to deploy an overwhelming effort in order to achieve spiritual consciousness. Deception, delusion and lie were the first acts of this demoniacal priesthood, and the same nature will characterize their last acts, when they will perish in the years of upheaval during the End Times.
All the same, in spite of the existence of masterful paragons of faith like Enoch (Idris), the original fall generated conditions of life in which humans started being prone to further sins. The quintessence of those transgressions were due to the slow formation of what people now call "ego", which grows fed on thoughts, calculations, interests, sentiments, and desires, thus dragging the spiritual-material individual far from the purpose of the Creation and the inherent code of the Creation. This nefarious situation proved to be extremely useful to some evil people.
It is in Mesopotamia around the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, when we first notice that within the same early urban center some edifices start becoming larger than the rest. There are only two per agglomeration: the palace and the temple. This rivalry, as it is documented first due to archaeological data and second thanks to the early historical sources (3250-2750 BCE), bears witness to the first tensions within the then united priesthood, enabling us to correctly interpret the rise of the polytheism as an heresy and an effort to personalize, depict and humanize the Divine.
In striking opposition to the early kings and the monotheistic priesthoods that were associated to them, the devious clergy, which supported the primary sacerdotal forerunners, intended to enslave the local population and by means of falsehood to render them dependent on intermediaries between the so-called 'gods' and the humans. This was the foremost postulation of the wicked priesthood: the humans alone cannot contact God. It goes without saying that this aberration is direct rejection of the Creation.
The malicious attempt of subordination and enslavement of the early humans to some supposedly necessary 'priests' is called 'religion'; it killed spirituality, limiting the humans to merely material functions and therefore bestializing them. The evil, absurd, and inhuman claim that Man necessitates an intermediary between him and God is the epitome of Satanism. From the deeds of those days to the final split of the early sacerdotal college in Sumer, several hundreds of years passed. Insane attempts and numerous trials of promiscuous intermarriages took place back at those days, and they left an impact on the local societies, as they were repeatedly mentioned in posterior historical sources; for example, the Assyrians, considering themselves as the only true humans (in Mesopotamia), namely the descendants of the Sumerians and the Akkadians, irrevocably denounced several unclean races, notably the Guti, the Elamites, and the Kassites, as abnormal and inhuman.
It was only normal that these calamitous developments totally dissociated humans from their souls and caused further detrimental loss of spiritual potency. The evil priesthood -of which the terminal continuity is represented today by Vatican and the Jesuits- wanted to also destroy the link between men and animals, which goes back to Adam. That is why they forced the fallen humans of the antediluvian world to kill animals in order to hypothetically obtain spiritual power by taking possession of their souls. This was a lie; it could never happen and it never happened. But due to this delusion, an unnecessary, yet enormous, bloodshed took place, plunging the disoriented and victimized human into grave immorality, polytheistic superstitions, exorbitant delusions, abject materialism, black magic (representation of animals that had to be sacrificed), and utter misery.
VI. Spirituality from the Flood to the Late Antiquity
The divine punishment and the dissolution of the early society were narrated in several sacred texts as the Flood; erroneous readings, naïve considerations, and superficial approaches to Assyrian-Babylonian and other, posterior, historical sources and divine literature led to tremendous misjudgment and protracted confusion as regards this disproportionate event and phenomenal circumstance, which left an irrevocable stamp on the History of Mankind. Actually, it is not for nothing that Jesus established a parallel between the days of Ut Napishtim (Noah / Nuh) and those of the End Times.
Gullible researchers and foolish scholars, who still accept the narrative, think that the Flood was due to intense and overwhelming rain; that's hilarious! Even if all the lands and seas, continents and oceans are covered by clouds and if it rains all over the surface of the Earth, it will be practically impossible for the level of water to rise by 200 or 300 m, let alone thousands of meters as various sacred texts stipulate.
The deliberate disregard for, if not concealment of, the Biblical text (Genesis 7, 11) only contributes to the cosmological and geological bewilderment of mankind; but the text is very accurate: "on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened" (Septuagint: τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ταύτῃ ἐῤῥάγησαν πᾶσαι αἱ πηγαὶ τῆς ἀβύσσου, καὶ οἱ καταῤῥάκται τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ἠνεῴχθησαν; Vulgata: rupti sunt omnes fontes abyssi magnae et cataractae caeli apertae sunt; Masoretic text: בַּיּ֣וֹם הַזֶּ֗ה נִבְקְעוּ֙ כׇּֽל־מַעְיְנֹת֙ תְּה֣וֹם רַבָּ֔ה וַאֲרֻבֹּ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם נִפְתָּֽחוּ׃). In fact, it was a stern and formidable development, which involved unprecedented fractures of the Earth's crust and the break (: opening) of the Firmament.
Many people fail to notice that the descriptions attested in sacred texts about the antediluvian world present a natural environment totally different from the one that we see today; even worse, they fail to understand that this contrast is actually true and that the Earth that God created was also very distinct in shape and contents from what surrounds us now. In other words, it is completely wrong to imagine or believe that God created deserts, steppes, savannahs, and swamps, and that the seas (salt waters) occupied a so vast surface as in the postdiluvian world. There too, the perfect world after the End Times, a topic that is the object of several soteriological narratives, presents considerable analogies with the original antediluvian environment, which is what God created.
In Ancient Mesopotamia, which is the cradle of World History, we find
a- 'prophetic' or 'apocalyptic' texts about the Flood (which were written before the event),
b- historical texts about the Flood (which were written after the event but detailed the downward spiral of circumstances that had occurred in the antediluvian society of Akkad, leading it to ultimate collapse and decomposition), and
c- mythological texts about the Flood (which were written later for spiritual, religious and educational purposes, therefore involving symbols, analogies, specific terms, and codified descriptions that became the foundations of the transcendental comprehension of the facts by later generations).
Although the cosmological-geological changes were unprecedented, the spiritual, socio-cultural, religious, and imperial transformations were apparently even more overwhelming. The polytheistic priesthood prevailed almost worldwide, forcing therefore the true believers (: the monotheistic sacerdotal colleges) to be organized in defensive mode in order to avoid infiltration. This is how what we call now 'societies of initiation' or 'spiritual orders' came to existence. It was apparently detrimental for the entire mankind, because due to this situation, spirituality depended almost exclusively on participation in some priesthood.
Societies, nations or countries with hierarchical priesthoods and spiritual orders are abnormal, inhuman, and impossible to maintain; that is why the present world order is inevitably perishable. There cannot be any hierarchy among humans, involving the absurd withholding of information, knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual potency. This is so, because if this condition had been tolerable, God would have not created one but many Adams – one per hierarchy level.
There cannot be secrecy among humans and there cannot be secluded groups with interests common only to them within a society; this is so because such conditions of life breach the divine commandment of fraternity. The structure of the postdiluvian world is therefore unsustainable, because it is morally indefensible. The only means that prevented its total collapse was the war; the conditions of sin, injustice and inequality -in and by themselves- bring forth the end. This is so because dissociation from one person's soul and formation of egoistic, egocentric and egotistic characters cause confusion, misjudgment, failure and putrefaction.
In the postdiluvian world, people could not reestablish spiritual-material synergy except by becoming members of a priestly college. Within such an environment, the incessant clash between the polytheistic and the monotheistic priesthoods took the form of invariably composing and decomposing myths, epics, and transcendental narratives, attributing different traits to the same god (thus disfiguring God), and elaborating dissimilar variants and opposite versions of sacred texts. There has never been a religion with an unaltered holy book.
Physically strong and spiritually dwarf, Gilgamesh was an anti-Akkadian king or, if you prefer, a counterfeit Sargon whom the polytheistic and idolatrous priesthood of the Neo-Sumerian times fashioned in order to divulge, and ensure the prevalence of, the concept of Papo-Caesarism. Projecting his past at will, they made of their creature a foremost king, a legendary hero, and a divine human with a material perspective and an anti-universal worldview.
Justifying the increasing urbanism of late 3rd millennium BCE Mesopotamia and the subsequent disconnection from nature, Gilgamesh became the object of many sacred texts and narratives which promoted the counterfeit and idolatrous notion of a city being the microcosm of the universe. Consequently, the original literature about Gilgamesh facilitated evil spiritual policies of the type 'urbi et orbi'. That is why in striking contrast to the genuine Akkadian imperial universalism (or ecumenism) of Sargon of Akkad, the religious-educational cycle of Gilgamesh attempted to foster an 'internationalism' based on the interconnection of urban centers, solid disrespect for the nature, deliberate promotion of ethnic amalgamation and acculturation, and lack of any temporal dimension.
Quite contrarily, the Akkadian (and later the Assyrian) imperial universalism was founded on the sanctity of various locations (geographical determinism), exemplary respect for the nature viewed as remnant of the original Paradise, singularity of the Chosen People, namely the Akkadians-Assyrians, uniqueness of the Emperor (King of the Universe / Caesaropapism) as the permanent embodiment of the Messiah (Ninurta or Etana: two monotheistic cycles of religious-eschatological Mesopotamian literature), adoration of God in front of the Tree of Life, and endless exaltation of the Sacred Moment (as identification element on the axis of Being and Becoming).
The interminable friendliness and rivalry between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, as an odd spiritual-literary pattern, reveals the morbidity of Gilgamesh as prototype; in fact, all the Biblical and Islamic prophets followed the example of Enkidu, the paramount non-urban human. The wretchedness of the evil model of Gilgamesh can be best understood when specifying that the Mesopotamian hero-king is none other than the Biblical-Islamic Nimrud (also spelled as Nimrod & Namrud), who forced Abram-Abraham-Ibrahim to exile.
But, when we comprehensively examine all the related literary excerpts, we are certainly able to conclude that no utterance surpasses the detrimental rejection of Gilgamesh by the real vanquisher of the Flood Atrahasis (Ut Napishtim/Noah-Nuh), who lived eternally in Dilmun, having preserved around him the likeness of the antediluvian world; the fact that Gilgamesh would never attain immortality heralded the inevitable termination of the system, which produced this monster.
The predilection for the imperial model and the rejection of the priestly model was not only a fervent choice of the Mesopotamian monotheists, but also an explicit statement made by the Biblical God: "the more priests there were, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful" (Hosea 4:7).
Maintaining the material yoke over the captives was a permanent concern for the sacerdotal colleges that propagated one delusion after the other; despite the fact that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was preserved as narrative in the Torah, a) the ritualistic use of sex, b) the extraction of energy from the human lasciviousness and debauchery, and c) the utilization of the material-spiritual potency of all the initiates for purposes of social-religious prevalence and material control remained a practice for all types of priesthood. The advanced decay and the loss of the original faith were the reasons for which the ancient religions were practically dissolved or could not have a serious impact anymore.
VII. Spirituality, the five elements, and the wrong sources of modern Western mystics
During the Late Antiquity, spirituality turned out to mean desecrated spiritual potency exerted by immoral mystics, Gnostics, and high priests who had to perform always more miracles in order to attract more followers. In this regard, Christianity was only a smart project of two colleges of Iranian and Egyptian priests settled in Rome. These Mithraists and the Memphists intended to extract the energy of their believers, i.e. fanaticized people whose total dedication was offered to narratives about Jesus rather than to Jesus' preaching itself. The rise of Roman Christianity was a disaster for the Gnostics and the earlier monotheistic priesthoods, whereas the rise of Constantinopolitan and Cappadocian Christianity, as an ingenious and impetuous reaction, consisted in stark rejection of the Roman fallacy.
The arrival of Islam, which in its original form was not another religion properly speaking, but a rejection of the heretical narratives about Jesus, a strong devotion to his preaching, and an effort to ascertain his faith, consisted in an effort to offer people another chance to reestablish synergy of the body and the soul in themselves after the examples of Moses, Elijah, Jonah, Jesus, Muhammad and Ali.
From the Brethren of Purity (إخوان الصفا /Ikhwan al-Ṣafa) to Muḥyiddin Ibn Arabi to Safi-ad-Din Ardabili, a great number of mystics founded tariqas (orders) that do not differ essentially from the Hesychast esotericism of St. Gregory Palamas. But their failure to oppose and eliminate a) the theological dogmatism (within both, Islamic and Christian, contexts), b) the numerous yet absurd versions of rationalism, c) the treacherous and impious notions of nominalism, and d) the persistent but calamitous impact of Greco-Roman philosophy prevented a great number of Christian and Muslim mystics from bringing spirituality back to the epicenter of human life.
It was only a matter of time for fanatics to take possession of Islam and spread darkness and ignorance from Ottoman Constantinople; when the Observatory of Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Maaruf was attacked and destroyed (1580) by a lunatic mob guided by ignorant, silly, and vicious Sunni theologians, the indivisible corpus of Islamic science and spirituality was considered as the enemy of the prevailing bogus-Islamic dogma and therefore persecuted by the Satanic sheikhulislams.
In Western Europe both, secular spiritual movements (like the Cathars, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, etc.) and Christian orders (Benedictines, Jesuits), originated from the Gnostics and several religious priesthoods of the Late Antiquity. It was inevitable for the former to lose a large part of their documentation and spiritual potency as they were clandestine organizations and for the latter -as the winners- to indulge themselves in very immoral and sinful mindset, attitude and behavior. Even worse, the persistent clash of the two spiritual nebulae brought forth disproportionate hatred, abysmal negativity, and further spiritual loss.
There is no spirituality wherever the lie exists, let alone prevails; there is only the curse of God (קִלְלַת אלוהים/kalalt Elohim) there. This concerns not only the Jesuits and the pseudo-Freemasons (launched in England in 1717; about whom we have already discussed), but also the fake Rosicrucian orders of our times, namely the so-called Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross (1750s–1790s), the bogus-Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1887–1903), and the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (1865–present). They all usurped the name of Christian Rosenkreuz with whom they have nothing in common and whose spiritual heritage they viciously loath. On the contrary, the early 17th c. German Rosicrucians trustworthily reflected the spiritual inheritance left and the masterful example of life offered by Christian Rosenkreuz, although I don't accept all three manifestos as unbiased.
By having Late Antiquity Gnostics as their masters and points of reference, almost all the modern European mystics, psychics and magicians failed to perceive accurately and comprehensively the spiritual universe. Few great scholars and mystics make the exception in this regard, the likes of Herman of Karantania (Carinthia; 1105-1154) and Christian Rosenkreuz (1378-1484); this is so, because they traveled in Africa and Asia and contacted Muslim, Jewish, Oriental Christian, Parsi Zoroastrian masters and scholars there.
In terms of Spiritual Ontology, the most common mistake that deceitful mystics, occultists, and spiritual fraudsters, such as Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, Alice Bailey, and many others made was the absurd acceptance of the following four as the basic elements in nature: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Franz Bardon certainly broke with this erroneous and misleading tradition, by systematically stating that at the origin of all is Ether. All the same, when their sources were wrong, they were predestined to spiritual failure, moral misconduct, and final damnation.
As a matter of fact, they could not perform better, because their readings and their references were misleading. All these authors were not in a position to go through authoritative sacred texts of superior societies like those of 3rd millennium BCE Mesopotamia and Egypt and have thus access to original spirituality. The cuneiform and hieroglyphic sources, which would help them best comprehend and sense the spiritual universe, were not yet deciphered or they were deciphered but few texts were published, transliterated, and translated - let alone analyzed.
Even more importantly, Water cannot be considered as one element, but two. Late Antiquity Gnostics were totally disoriented and misled in this regard. In striking contrast, early cosmological narratives and sacred texts clearly differentiate between Soft Waters (Apsu/Ocean) and Salt Waters (Tiamat/Sea). The latter is in fact the 'survival' (or 'maintenance') of the pre-creational chaos within the Order of the Creation. Salt Waters (Sea) is what humans must most categorically abstain from; this is what Jesus named "the Father of the Devil" (John 8:44). At this point, Modern English translations are wrong, because they repeat a mistake already made in the Vulgate. And by using this phrase, Jesus takes position against the theory as per which Elohim created the Devil; by so doing, Jesus is evidently closer to Assyrian-Babylonian cosmological standards and concepts than to Old Testament notions.
On the other hand, Fire is not an original element; it is a subordinate or derivative element that emanates from the Salt Waters. As such, Fire is a soiling substance that was duly reviled by all the early humans. Indeed, it was forcefully introduced as 'holy' element by the devilish, early Mithraic priesthood in Central Asia. Zoroaster and the Achaemenid dynasty of Iran engaged in ferocious and merciless battles against the abominable Mithraic Magi, who intended to impose their polytheistic dogma in Iran and to make the Iranians consider Fire as a 'holy' element.
It goes without saying that the ontological differentiation is considerable and stern; it impacts Spiritual Anthropology in a most disastrous way. "Four Elements" (Earth, Water, Air and Fire) instead of "Five Elements" (Ether, Earth, Soft Waters, Air and Salt Waters): this is enough to cause detrimental changes in the spiritual exercises one may make, and this development may impact enormously the ascetic soldier.
I read with great interest your email's last paragraphs about your life; for me there are not 'better' or 'worse' persons in this life. Even if many sins are involved in the life of a person, while another person committed only few and minor transgressions, the lives of the humans are independent trajectories like comets the deeper meaning and function of which only God knows. I therefore find it very normal to always expect to learn from anyone and from anything; consequently, I never comment on others' lives and life models, merely accepting or rejecting at the very personal level and on the basis of my standards (that I have progressively established during my life). That is why I admire always the people, who can offer life examples whatever their socio-professional life or economic status may be - either they lived in Iran like me or they explored India like you!
Many thanks for your time, responses, advice and attachments!
Best regards,
Shamsaddin
================
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Cosmas Megalommatis, Etana: World Mythology-1989
Κοσμάς Μεγαλομμάτης, Ετάνα: Παγκόσμια Μυθολογία, Ελληνική Εκπαιδευτική Εγκυκλοπαίδεια, 1989
Кузьма Мегаломматис, Этана: мировая мифология, Греческая педагогическая энциклопедия, 1989
Kosmas Megalommatis, Etana: Weltmythologie, Griechische Pädagogische Enzyklopädie, 1989
Kosmas Gözübüyükoğlu, Etana: Dünya Mitolojisi, Yunan Pedagoji Ansiklopedisi, 1989
قزمان ميغالوماتيس، اتانا : اساطیر جهانی، دایره المعارف آموزشی یونانی، 1989
Côme Megalommatis, Etana: Mythologie mondiale, Encyclopédie pédagogique grecque, 1989
1989 قزمان ميغالوماتيس، إيتانا : الأساطير العالمية، الموسوعة التربوية اليونانية،
Cosimo Megalommatis, Etana: mitologia mondiale, Enciclopedia pedagogica greca, 1989
Cosimo Megalommatis, Etana: mitología mundial, Enciclopedia pedagógica griega, 1989
Cosmas Megalommatis, Etana: World Mythology, Greek Pedagogical Encyclopedia, 1989
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Скачать PDF-файл: / PDF-Datei herunterladen: / Télécharger le fichier PDF : / PDF dosyasını indirin: / :PDF قم بتنزيل ملف / Download PDF file: / : یک فایل دانلود کنید / Κατεβάστε το PDF:
Cosmas Megalommatis, Gilgamesh - World Mythology, 1989
Κοσμάς Μεγαλομμάτης, Γκιλγκαμές: Παγκόσμια Μυθολογία, Ελληνική Εκπαιδευτική Εγκυκλοπαίδεια, 1989
Кузьма Мегаломматис, Гильгамеш: мировая мифология, Греческая педагогическая энциклопедия, 1989
Kosmas Megalommatis, Gilgamesch: Weltmythologie, Griechische Pädagogische Enzyklopädie, 1989
Kosmas Gözübüyükoğlu, Gılgamış: Dünya Mitolojisi, Yunan Pedagoji Ansiklopedisi, 1989
قزمان ميغالوماتيس، گیلگمش : اساطیر جهانی، دایره المعارف آموزشی یونانی، 1989
Côme Megalommatis, Gilgamesh: Mythologie mondiale, Encyclopédie pédagogique grecque, 1989
1989 قزمان ميغالوماتيس، جلجامش: الأساطير العالمية، الموسوعة التربوية اليونانية،
Cosimo Megalommatis, Gilgameš: mitologia mondiale, Enciclopedia pedagogica greca, 1989
Cosimo Megalommatis, Gilgamesh: mitología mundial, Enciclopedia pedagógica griega, 1989
Cosmas Megalommatis, Gilgamesh: World Mythology, Greek Pedagogical Encyclopedia, 1989
Скачать PDF-файл: / PDF-Datei herunterladen: / Télécharger le fichier PDF : / PDF dosyasını indirin: / :PDF قم بتنزيل ملف / Download PDF file: / : یک فایل دانلود کنید / Κατεβάστε το PDF:
History of Achaemenid Iran 1B, Course I - Achaemenid beginnings 1B
Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
Outline
Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
6- Western Orientalist historiography
The modern Western European specialists on Iran were first based on the Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin sources and on travelers' records and descriptions. On his way to China, the Italian Franciscan monk Odoric of Pordenone was the first European to probably visit (in 1320) the ruins of Parsa (Persepolis) that he called 'Comerum'. The site was then known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) and later as Takht-e Jamshid (تخت جمشید/i.e. the throne of Jamshid, a great hero of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography about which we discussed). The Venetian Giosafat Barbaro visited the same location in 1474 and, being the victim of the delusions about which I spoke already, he attributed the erection of the majestic monuments to the Jews!
After the rise of the Safavid dynasty and the formation of the two alliances (the French with the Ottomans and the English with the Iranians), an English merchant visited Persepolis in 1568 and wrote a description that was included in Richard Hakluyt's 'Voyages' (1582). Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions were first noticed and reported by the Portuguese António de Gouveia, who visited the site in 1602 and wrote about it in 1611. It is only in 1618 that the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa associated the location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in the Ancient Greek and Latin sources.
The Italian Pietro Della Valle spent five years (1616-1621) in Mesopotamia and Iran, visited Persepolis (1621), made copies of several inscriptions that he noticed there and took them back to Europe, along with clay tablets and bricks that he found in Babylon and Ur. This was the first cuneiform documentation brought to Europe. With respect to Persepolis he wrote that only 25 of the 72 original columns were still standing.
Good indication of the lunacy that Western Europeans experienced at those days due to their erroneous reading of the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historical sources about Achaemenid Iran is the following fact: after traveling in Asia and Africa, Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in his book (1638) that in Persepolis he saw several lines of strange signs curved in the walls. These were, of course, Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions, but at the time, the modern term 'cuneiform' had not been invented; however, excessively enthused with Greek literature about Ancient Iran, he 'concluded' that these characters 'resembled Greek'! He mistook cuneiform for Greek! So biased his approach was!
The term 'cuneiform' ('Keilschrift' in German) was coined (1700) by the German scholar and explorer Engelbert Kaempfer, who spent ten years (1683-1693) in many parts of Asia. The monumental site of the Achaemenid capital was also visited by the famous Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn (1704) and the famous jeweler Sir Jean Chardin, who also worked as agent of Shah Abbas II for the purchase of jewels. He was the first to publish (1711) pertinent copies of several cuneiform inscriptions.
The German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr took the research to the next stage when he copied and published (1764) the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of Darius the Great; in fact, he brought complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe. He realized that he had to do with three writing systems and that the simpler (which he named 'Class I') comprised 42 characters, being apparently an alphabetic script. Niebuhr's publication was used by many other scholars and explorers, notably the Germans Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, who published the most advanced research on the topic in 1798, and Friedrich Münter, who confirmed the alphabetic nature of the script (in 1802).
The reconstitution of the Iranian past proved to be far more difficult a task than that of the Ancient Egyptian heritage. This is so because, if we consider the Old Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphics as the earliest stages of the two respective languages and scripts, Coptic (the latest stage of the Egyptian language) was always known in Europe throughout the Christian and Modern times, whereas Pahlavi and Middle Persian (the corresponding stages of the Iranian languages) were totally unknown. For this reason, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the first French Iranologist and Indologist, played a key role in the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, although he did not spend time exploring it. But having learned Pahlavi and Farsi among the Parsis of India, he managed to study Avestan and he translated the Avesta as the sacred text of the Zoroastrians was preserved among the Parsi community. Pretty much like Coptic was essential to Champollion for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the pioneering work of Anquetil-Duperron and the knowledge of Avestan, Pahlavi, Middle Persian and Farsi helped the French Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend make critical breakthroughs and advance the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid.
Grotefend's Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1802, but it was rejected; in fact, he had deciphered only eight (8) letters until that moment, but most of his assumptions were correct. He had however to wait for an incredible confirmation; after Champollion completed his first step toward the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, he read the Egyptian text of a quadrilingual inscription on the famous Caylus vase (named after a 18th c. French collector). Then, Champollion's associate, the Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, announced that Grotefend's reading of the imperial Achaemenid name 'Xerxes' did indeed correspond to what the Egyptian hieroglyphic text testified to. This situation generated an impetus among Orientalist scholars and explorers; until the late 1830s and the early 1840s, Grotefend, the French Eugène Burnouf, the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen, and Sir Henry Rawlinson completed the task.
Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911), whereas Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905. Persepolis was excavated quite later, only in the 1930s by Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Not far from Hamadan (the ancient capital Hegmataneh/Ekbatana of the Medes), the splendid site of Mount Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum). This was due to the fact that the famous trilingual Behistun inscription and the associated reliefs were carved at about 100 m above ground level on a cliff, and explorers had to scale the cliff. Several fascinating descriptions of the extraordinary location were written by travelers and visitors, before academic work was carried out there. Putting his life in risk, Rawlinson copied the Old Achaemenid text in 1835, and this helped him advance considerably the decipherment of the script.
Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times.
Behistun (Farsi: Bisotun / Old Iranian: Bagastana, i.e. 'the place of God') was mentioned by Ctesias, who totally misunderstood the inscription, attributing it to the 'Babylonian' Queen Semiramis and describing it as a dedication to Zeus! In reality, the text is part of the Annals of Emperor Darius I the Great, duly detailing his victory over a rebellion; the Iranian monarch dedicated his triumph to Ahura Mazda. Now, Semiramis seems to be an entirely misplaced Ancient Greek legend about the historical Queen of Assyria (not Babylonia!) Shammuramat. The Assyrian queen was consort of Shamshi Adad V and co-regent with her son Adad-nirari III (during his reign's early phase). But the Assyrian Queen had nothing to do with Mount Behistun and the Achaemenid Iranian inscription.
In the early 17th c., Pietro della Valle was the first Western European to come to Behistun and sketch the remains. As a matter of fact, many European travelers and explorers visited Behistun, saw the impressive inscription, and disastrously misinterpreted it, due to their preconceived ideas, mistaken readings, and unrealistic assumptions.
A foolish English diplomat and adventurer, Robert Sherley, visited the location in 1598, and he considered the astounding reliefs and the inscriptions as 'Christian'! Napoleon's subordinate, General Claude-Matthieu, Comte de Gardane, visited the place in 1807 only to see in the monuments the representation of 'Christ and his twelve apostles'! In 1817, Sir Robert Ker Porter thought that the impressive relief and inscriptions detailed the deeds of Emperor Shalmaneser V of Assyria and the transportation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to the NE confines of Assyria. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun in 1938.
7- Early sources of Iranian History: Assyrian-Babylonian Cuneiform
The early sources of Iranian History are Assyrian-Babylonian historical documents pertaining to the military, commercial and/or administrative activities of the Neo-Assyrian kings in the Zagros mountains and the Iranian plateau; these sources shed light on the earliest stages of Median, Persian and Iranian History, when the ancestors of the Achaemenids were just one of the many tribes that settled somewhere east of the borders of the Assyrian Empire.
Since the 3rd millennium BCE, Sumerian and Akkadian historical sources referred to nomads, settlers, villages, cities, strongholds and at times kingdoms situated in the area of today's Iran. Mainly these tribes and/or realms were barbarians who either partly damaged or totally destroyed the Mesopotamian civilization and order. That's why they were always described with markedly negative terms. On the other hand, we know through archaeological evidence that several important sites were located in the Iranian plateau, constituting either small kingdoms or outstanding entrepôts and commercial centers linking Mesopotamia with either India or Central Asia and China.
For instance, settled somewhere in the Middle Zagros, the Guti of the 3rd millennium BCE constituted a barbaric periphery that finally destroyed Agade (Akkad), the world's first empire ever; and in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Kassites descended from Middle Zagros to Babylon, after the Old Babylonian kingdom was destroyed (in 1596) by the Hittite Mursilis I, and they set up a profane kingdom (Kassite dynasty of Babylonia) that the Assyrians never accepted as a heir of the old Sumerian-Akkadian civilization.
As both ethnic groups learned Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian, their rulers wrote down their names, and thus we know that neither the Guti nor the Kassites were a properly speaking Iranian nation; the present documentation is still scarce in this regard, but there are indications that some of these people bore Turanian (or Turkic) names.
For thousands of years, South Zagros and the southwestern confines of today's Iran belonged to Elam, the main rival of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. Viewed as the true negation of the genius of Mesopotamian civilization, Elam was ruled by the 'kings of Shushan and Anshan'; the two regions corresponded to Susa (and the entire province of Khuzestan in today's Iran) and South Zagros respectively. The name that modern scholarship uses to denote this nation and kingdom is merely the Sumerian-Akkadian appellation of that country. In Elamite, the eastern neighbors of the Sumerians called their land 'Haltamti'. Their language was neither Indo-European (like Old Achaemenid and Modern Farsi) nor Semitic (like Assyrian-Babylonian); it was also unrelated to Sumerian, Hurrian and Hattic, the languages of the indigenous populations in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Recent linguistic research offers tentative approaches to the relationship between Elamite and the Dravidian languages, thus making of it the ancestral language of more than 250 million people.
Elamite linear and cuneiform writings bear witness to the life, the society, the economy, the faith and the culture of the Elamites, as well as to their relations with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But they cannot help us reconstitute the History of the Iranian plateau, because the Elamites never went beyond the limits of South Zagros.
With the rise, expansion and prevalence of Assyria (from the 14th to the 7th c. BCE), we have for the first time a Mesopotamian Empire that showed great importance for the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau; consequently, this means that, for the said period, we have more texts about these regions, which earlier constituted the periphery of the Mesopotamian world, but were gradually incorporated into the ever expanding Assyrian Empire. Thanks to Assyrian cuneiform texts, we know names of tribal chieftains and petty kings, cities, fortresses, ethnic groups, etc., and we can assess the various degrees of Assyrianization of each of them; but it is only at the time of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE) that we first find a mention of the Medes and the Persians. The former are named 'Amadaya' and later 'Madaya', whereas the latter are called 'Parsua' (or Parsamaš or Parsumaš).
Assyrian cuneiform texts about the Medes and the Persians more specifically are abundant during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) and at the time of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE). It is noteworthy that the Parsua were first located in the region of today's Sanandaj in Western Iran and later they relocated to the ancient Elamite region of Anshan (today's Iranian province of Fars), which was devastated and emptied from its population by Assurbanipal (640 BCE). After the great Assyrian victory, which also involved the destruction of Susa, Assyrian texts mention the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus I, as Kuraš, king of Parsumaš. He sent gifts to Nineveh and he also dispatched his eldest son ('Arukku' in Assyrian from a hypothetical 'Aryauka' in Ancient Iranian) there - nominally as a hostage, but essentially as a student of Assyrian culture, sacerdotal organization, and imperial administration and procedures.
The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III
Tiglathpileser III
Sarrukin (Sargon of Assyria) with his son and successor Sennacherib (right)
8- Pre-History in the Iranian plateau, and Mesopotamia
During the 4th, the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, the major hitherto excavated Iranian archaeological sites are the following:
Tepe Sialk
Located near the modern city of Kashan, in the center of the Iranian plateau, and excavated in the 1930s by the Russian-French Roman Ghirshman, the site was first occupied in the period 6000-5500 BCE. The remains of the zikkurat (dating back to around 3000 BCE) show that it was the largest Mesopotamian style zikkurat. Tepe Sialk IV level (2nd half of the 4th millennium BCE) testifies to evident links with Sumer (Jemdet Nasr, Uruk) and Elam (Susa III). The site was abandoned and reoccupied in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BCE (Tepe Sialk V and VI). Its location and the archaeological findings let us understand that the site was a key commercial center that linked Mesopotamia with Central Asia and China.
Tureng Tepe
Located close to Gorgan in Turkmen Sahra (NE Iran) and excavated by the American Frederick Roelker Wulsin in the 1930s and by the French Jean Deshayes in the 1950s, the site was inhabited in the Neolithic and then continually from 3100 to 1900 BCE, when it appears to have been the major among many other regional settlements and in evident contact with both, Mesopotamia and Central Asia. There was a disruption, and the site was occupied again only in the 7th c. BCE (Tureng Tepe IV A) by newcomers.
Tepe Yahya
Located at ca. 250 km north of Bandar Abbas and 220 km south of Kerman, the site was of crucial importance for the contacts between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley; it was also in contact with Central Asia. Excavated by the Czech-American Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky, the site was inhabited from ca. 5000 to 2200 BCE and then again after 1000 BCE. The genuine 'Yahya Culture' covered the first half of the 4th millennium BCE. The Proto-Elamite phase started around 3400 BCE (Tepe Yahya IV C); few proto-Elamite tablets have been unearthed from that stratum. This period corresponds to the strata Susa Cb and Tepe Sialk IV. During the 3rd millennium BCE, the site appears to have been the center of production of hard stone carving artifacts; dark stone vessels produced here were found / excavated in Mesopotamia. Similar vessels and fragments of vessels have been found in Sumerian temples in Mesopotamia, in Elam, in the Indus River Valley, and in Central Asia.
Not far from Tepe Yahya are situated several important sites that testify to the strong ties that the entire region had with Sumer and Elam in the West, the Indus River Valley in the East and Central Asia in the North; Jiroft gave the name to the 'Jiroft culture' which is better documented in the nearby site of Konar Sandal and covers the 3rd millennium BCE. Further in the east and close to the triangle border point (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan), Shahr-e Sukhteh was an enormous site which thrived between 3200 BCE and the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. It was associated with both, the 'Jiroft culture' and the Helmand culture, which was attested in several sites in South Afghanistan. Elamite texts were also found in that site, which already offered many surprises, involving the first known artificial eyeball and the earliest tables game with dice.
Several important prehistoric Mesopotamian sites demonstrate parallels and contacts with the aforementioned sites, notably
- Tell Halaf (near Ras al Ayn in NE Syria; the Neolithic phase lasted from 6100 to 5400 BCE, and the Bronze Age covers the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE),
- Tell al Ubaid (near Ur in Dhi Qar governorate; 6500-3700 BCE),
- Tell Arpachiyah (near Nineveh; the site was occupied in the Neolithic period, like Tell Halaf and Ubaid),
- Tepe Gawra (close to Nineveh; the site was occupied from 5000 to 1500 BCE),
- Tell Jemdet Nasr (near Kish in Central Iraq; 3100-2300 BCE), and
- Uruk {near Samawah in South Iraq; type site for the Uruk period (4000-3100 BCE), it was a major Sumerian kingdom and it was the world's most populated city in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE with ca. 40000 inhabitants and another 90000 residents in the suburbs}.
In the next course, I will present a brief diagram of the History of the Mesopotamian kingdoms and Empires down to Sargon of Assyria – with focus on the relations with Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau.
Tepe Sialk
Tureng tepe
Tepe Yahya
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To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN - Achaemenid beginnings 1B
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To listen to the audio, clink the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN - Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)
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History of Achaemenid Iran 1A, Course I - Achaemenid beginnings 1A
Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
Tuesday, 27 December 2022
Outline
Introduction; Iranian Achaemenid historiography; Problems of historiography continuity; Iranian posterior historiography; foreign historiography; Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
1- Introduction
Welcome to the 40-hour seminar on Achaemenid Iran!
It is my intention to deliver a rather unconventional academic presentation of the topic, mostly implementing a correct and impartial conceptual approach to the earliest stage of Iranian History. Every subject, in and by itself, offers to every researcher the correct means of the pertinent approach to it; due to this fact, the personal background, viewpoints and thoughts or eventually the misperceptions and the preconceived ideas of an explorer should not be allowed to affect his judgment.
If before 200 years, the early Iranologists had the possible excuse of studying a topic on the basis of external and posterior historical sources, this was simply due to the fact that the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing had not yet been deciphered. Still, even those explorers failed to avoid a very serious mistake, namely that of taking the external and posterior historical sources at face value. We cannot afford to blindly accept a secondary historical source without first examining intentions, motives, scopes and aims of it.
As the seminar covers only the History of the Achaemenid dynasty, I don't intend to add an introductory course about the History of the Iranian Studies and the re-discovery of Iran by Western explorers of the colonial powers. However, I will provide a brief outline of the topic; this is essential because mainstream Orientalists have reached their limits and cannot provide us with a real insight, eliminating the numerous and enduring myths, fallacies, and deliberately naïve approaches to Achaemenid Iran.
In fact, most of the specialists of Ancient Iran never went beyond the limitations set by the delusional Ancient 'Greek' (in reality: Ionian and Attic) literature about the Medes and the Persians (i.e. the Iranians), because they never offered themselves the task to explain the reasons for the aberration that the Ancient Ionian and Attic authors created in their minds and wrote in their texts about Iran. This was utterly puerile and ludicrous.
And this brings us to the other major innovation that I intend to offer during this seminar, namely the proper, comprehensive contextualization of the research topic, i.e. the History of Achaemenid Iran. To give some examples in this regard, I would mention
a - the tremendous, multilayered and multifaceted impact of the Mesopotamian World, Civilization and Heritage on the formation of the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, and more specifically, the determinant role played by the Sargonid Empire of Assyria on the emergence of the first Empire on the Iranian plateau;
b - the ferocious opposition of the Mithraic Magi to the Zoroastrian Achaemenid court;
c - the involvement of the Anatolian Magi in the misperception of Iran by the Ancient Greeks; and
d- the utilization of the Ancient Greek cities by the Anti-Iranian side of the Egyptian priesthoods, princes and administrators.
To therefore introduce the proper contextualization, I will expand on the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Sargonid times, not only to state the first mentions of the Medes and the Persians in History, but also to show the importance attributed by the Neo-Assyrian Emperors to the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau, as well as the numerous peoples, settled or nomadic, who inhabited that region.
There is an enormous lacuna in the Orientalist disciplines; there are no interdisciplinary studies in Assyriology and Iranology. This plays a key role in the misperception of the ancient oriental civilizations and in the mistaken evaluation (or rather under-estimation) of the momentous impact that they had on the formation of the World History. There are no isolated cultures and independent civilizations as dogmatic and ignorant Western archaeologists pretend.
Only if one studies and evaluates correctly the colossal impact of the Ancient Mesopotamian world on Iran, can one truly understand the Achaemenid Empire in its real dimensions.
2- Iranian Achaemenid historiography
A. Achaemenid imperial inscriptions produced on solemn occasions
Usually multilingual texts written by the imperial scribes of the emperors Cyrus the Great, Darius I the Great, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Darius II, Artaxerxes II, and Artaxerxes III, as well as of the ancestral rulers Ariaramnes and Arsames.
Languages and writing systems:
- Old Achaemenid Iranian (cuneiform-alphabetic; the official imperial language)
- Babylonian (cuneiform-syllabic; to offer a testimony of historical continuity and legitimacy, following the Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, who presented himself as king of Babylon)
- Elamite (cuneiform-logo-syllabic; to portray the Persians in particular as the heirs of the ancient land of Anshan and Sushan that the Assyrians and the Babylonians named 'Elam' and the indigenous population called 'Haltamti' / The first Achaemenid to present himself as 'king of Anshan' is Cyrus the Great and the reference is found in his Cylinder unearthed in Babylon.)
and
- Egyptian Hieroglyphic (if the inscription or the monument was produced in Egypt, since the Achaemenids were also pharaohs of Egypt, starting with Kabujiya/Cambyses)
Imperial inscriptions are found in: Babylon (Cyrus Cylinder), Pasargad, Behistun, Hamadan, Ganj-e Nameh, Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, Susa, Suez (Egypt), Gherla (Romania), Van (Turkey), and on various items
B. Persepolis Administrative Archives
This consists in an enormous documentation that has not yet been fully studied; it is not written in Old Achaemenid as one could expect but mainly in Elamite cuneiform. It consists of two groups, namely
- the Persepolis Fortification Archive, and
- the Persepolis Treasury Archive.
The Persepolis Fortification Archive was unearthed in the fortification area, i.e. the northeastern confines of the enormous platform of the Achaemenid capital Parsa (Persepolis), in the 1930s. It comprises of more than 30000 tablets (fragmentary or entire) that were written in the period 509-494 BCE (at the time of Darius I). The tablets were written in Susa and other parts of Fars and the territory of the ancient kingdom of Elam that vanished in the middle of the 7th c. (more than 130 years before these texts were written). Around 50 texts had Aramaic glosses. More than 2000 tablets have been published and translated. These texts are records of transactions, distribution of food, provisioning of workers, transportation of commodities, etc.; few tablets were written in other languages, namely Old Iranian (1), Babylonian (1), Phrygian (1) and Greek (1).
The Persepolis Treasury Archive was found in the northeastern room of the Treasury of Xerxes. It contains more than 750 tablets and fragments (in Elamite) and more than 100 have been published. They all date back in period 492-458 BCE. These tablets are either letters or memoranda dispatched by imperial officials to the head of the Treasury; they concern the payment of workmen, the issue of silver, and other administrative procedures. Only one tablet was written in Babylonian.
The entire documentation offers valuable information as regards the function of various imperial services, namely the couriers, the satraps, the imperial messengers, the imperial storehouse, etc. The archives shed light on the origin of the imperial administrators, as ca. 1900 personal names have been recorded: 10% were Elamites (who had apparently survived for long far from their country after the destruction of Susa by Assurbanipal (640 BCE), fewer were Babylonians, and the outright majority consisted of Iranians (Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Sakas, Arians, etc.).
C. Imperial Aramaic
The diffusion of the use of Aramaic started already in the Neo-Assyrian times and during the 7th c. BCE; the creation of the 'Royal Road', the systematization of the transportation, the improvement of communications, and the formation of the network of land-, sea- and desert routes that we now call 'Silk-, Spice- and Perfume- Road' during the Achaemenid times helped further expand the use of Aramaic. The linguistic assimilation of the Babylonians, the Jews and the Phoenicians with the Aramaeans only strengthened the diffusion of the Aramaic, which became the second international language ('lingua franca') in the History of the Mankind (after the Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian). Gradually, Aramaic became an official Achaemenid language after the Old Achaemenid Iranian.
Except the Aramaic texts attested in the Persepolis Administrative Archives, thousands of Aramaic texts of the Achaemenid times shed light onto the society, the economy, the administration, the military organization, the trade, the religions, the cults, the culture and the spirituality attested in various provinces of the Iranian Empire. At this point, only indicatively, I mention few significant groups of texts:
- the Elephantine papyri and ostraca (except Aramaic, they were written in Hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Coptic, Alexandrian Koine, and Latin) – 5th and 4th c. BCE,
- the Hermopolis Aramaic papyri,
- the Padua Aramaic papyri, and
- the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents from Bactria (48 texts written on leather, papyrus, stone or clay, dating from the period 353-324 BCE, and mainly from the reign of Artaxerxes III whereas the most recent dates from the reign of Alexander the Great).
Here I have to add that the widespread use of Imperial Aramaic and its use as a second official language for Achaemenid Iran brought an end to the use of the Elamite (in the middle of the 5th c.) and, after the end of the Achaemenid dynasty and the split of the state of Alexander the Great, contributed to the formation of two writing systems, namely Parthian and Pahlavi which were in use during the Arsacid and the Sassanid times. Imperial Aramaic helped establish many other writing systems, but this goes beyond the limits of the present seminar.
3- Problems of historiography continuity
There are no historical references to the Achaemenid dynasty made at the time of the Arsacids (Ashkanian: 250 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanids 224-651 CE); this situation is due to many factors:
- the prevalence of another Iranian nation of probably Turanian origin, namely the Parthians and the Arsacid dynasty,
- the rise of the anti-Achaemenid, anti-Zoroastrian Magi who tried to impose Mithraism throughout Iran during the Arsacid times,
- the formation of an oral epic tradition and the establishment of a legendary historiography about the pre-Arsacid past during the Sassanid times, and
- the scarcity of written sources and the terrible destructions that occurred in Iran during the Late Antiquity, the Islamic era, and the Modern times (early Islamic conquests, divisions of the Abbasid times, Mongol invasions, Safavid-Ottoman wars, Western colonial looting, etc.).
This situation raised Western academic questions of Iranian identity, continuity, and historicity. But this attempt is futile. Iranian historiography of Islamic times shows that these questions were fully misplaced.
4- Iranian posterior historiography (Iranian historiography of Islamic times)
With Tabari (839-923) and his voluminous History of Prophets and Kings we realize that there were, in spite of the destructions caused because of the Islamic conquests, historical documents on which he was based to expand about the Sassanid dynasty; actually one out of the 40 volumes of the most recent translation of Tabari to English (published by the State University of New York Press from 1985 through 2007) is dedicated to the History of Sassanid Iran (vol. 5). And the previous volume (vol. 4) covers the History of Achaemenid and Arsacid Iran, Alexander the Great, Nabonid Babylonia, Assyria and Ancient Israel and Judah.
Other important Iranian historians of the Islamic times, like Abu'l-Fadl Bayhaqi (995-1077), Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318) who wrote the truly first World History, Alaeddin Aṭa Malik Juvaynī (1226-1283), and Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi (ca. 1370-1454), did not expand much on pre-Islamic periods as the focus of their writing was on contemporaneous developments.
However, the aforementioned historians and all the authors, who are classified in this category, represent only one dimension of Iranian historiography of Islamic times. A totally different approach and literature have been illustrated by Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (Book of Kings). Abu 'l Qasem Ferdowsi (940-1025) was not the first to compose an epic in order to standardize in mythical terms and legendary concepts the pre-Islamic Iranian past; but he was the most successful and the most illustrious. That is why many other epic poets followed his example, notably the Azeri Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209) and the Turkic Indian Amir Khusraw (1253-1325).
Within the context of this poetical historiography, historical emperors of pre-Islamic Iran appear as legendary figures only to be then viewed as materialization of divine patterns. The origin of this transcendental historiography seems to be retraced in the Sassanid times, but all the major themes are clearly of Zoroastrian identity and can therefore be attributed to the Achaemenid world perception and world conceptualization.
It is essential at this point to state that, until the imposition of modern Western colonial academic and educational standards in Iran, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and the corpus of Iranian legendary historiography was the backbone of the Iranian cultural, intellectual and educational identity.
It is a matter of academic debate whether an original text named Khwaday-Namag, written during the Sassanid times, and now lost, is at the very origin of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography. The 19th c. German Orientalist Theodor Nöldeke is credited with this theory that has not yet been proved.
All the same, the spiritual standards of this approach are detected in the Achaemenid times.
5- Foreign historiography
Ancient Greek (in reality, Ionian and Attic), Ancient Hebrew and Latin sources of Achaemenid History exist, but first they are external, second they appear to be posterior in their largest part, and third they often bear witness to astounding inaccuracies, fables, untrustworthy data, misplaced focus, excessive verbosity without real substance, and -above all- an enormous and irreconcilable misunderstanding of the Iranian Achaemenid reality, values, world view, mindset, and behavior.
The Ancient Hebrew sources shed light on issues that were apparently critical to the tiny and unimportant, Jewish minority of the Achaemenid Empire; however, these Biblical narratives concern facts that were absolutely insignificant to the imperial authorities of Parsa. One critical issue is concealed by modern scholars though; although all the nations of the Empire were regularly mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions and depicted on bas reliefs, the Jews were not. This undeniable fact irrevocably conditions the supposed 'importance' of Biblical texts like Ezra, Esther, Nehemiah, etc. All the same, these foreign historical sources are important for the Jews.
The Ionian and Attic accounts of events that were composed by the Carian renegade Herodotus, the Dorian Ctesias, and the Athenian Xenophon present an even more serious problem. They happened to be for many centuries (16th – 19th c.) the bulk of the historical documentation that Western European academics had access to as regards Achaemenid Iran. This situation produced grave biases among Western academics, because they took all these sources at face value since they had no access to original documentation. The grave trouble persisted even after the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing and the archaeological excavations that brought to daylight original Iranian imperial documentation.
Only recently, at the end of the 20th c., leading Iranologists like Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg started criticizing the absolutely delusional History of Achaemenid Iran that modern Western scholars were producing without even understanding it by foolishly accepting Ancient Ionian myths, lies and propaganda against the Iranian Empire at face value. This grave problem had also two other parameters:
- first, there was an enormous gap of civilization and a tremendous cultural difference between the Iranian imperial world view, the spiritual valorization of the human being, and the Zoroastrian monotheism from one side and the chaotic, disorderly and profane elements of the western periphery of the Empire. The so-called Greek tribes in Western Anatolia and in the South Balkans were not only multi-divided and plunged in permanent conflict; they were also extremely verbose on common issues, they desecrated the divine world with their nonsensical myths and puerile narratives, and they defiled human spirituality with their love stories about their pseudo-gods. But, very arbitrarily and quite disastrously, the so-called Ancient Greek civilization had been erroneously taken as 'classics' by modern Europeans at a time they had no access to Ancient Oriental sources.
- second, the vertical differentiation between Imperial Iran as the blessed land of divine mission and the disunited and peripheral lands of conflict, discord and strife that were inhabited by the Greek tribes was reflected on the respective, impressively different types of historiography; to the Iranians, few words written by anonymous scribes were enough to describe the groundbreaking deeds of divinely appointed rulers. But for the Greeks, the useless rumors, the capricious hearsay, the intentional lie, the nefarious expression of their complex of inferiority, the vicious slander, and the deliberate ignominy 'had' to be recorded and written down.
The fact that Herodotus' and Xenophon's long narratives have long been taken as the basic source of information about Achaemenid Iran demonstrates how disoriented and misplaced modern Western scholarship is. But by preferring to rely mainly on the Ancient Greek lengthy and false narratives, and not on the succinct, true and chaste Old Achaemenid Iranian inscriptions, they totally misrepresent Ancient Iranian History, preposterously extrapolating later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations.
And whereas Ancient Roman authors, who wrote in Latin (Pliny the Elder, Seneca the Younger, etc.), and Jewish or Christian historians, who wrote in Alexandrine Koine, like Flavius Josephus and Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, reproduced the style of lengthy narratives that turns History to mere gossip, the great Babylonian scholar Berossus was very reluctant to add personal comments to his original sources or to allow subjective considerations and thoughts to contaminate his text.
In any case, the vast issue of the multilayered damages caused by the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historiography to modern Western academics' perception and interpretation of Achaemenid Iran is a topic that deserves an entirely independent seminar.
--------------
To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN - Achaemenid beginnings 1Α
By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
------------------------
To listen to the audio, clink the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN - Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)
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Download the text in PDF:
Assyria - World History, Greek Pedagogical Encyclopedia, Ekdotike Athenon
Ασσυρία - Παγκόσμια Ιστορία Εκδοτικής Αθηνών 1990
Ассирия - всемирная история, Греческая педагогическая энциклопедия, Экдотика Афинон
--------------------------
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Ashurbanipal: the Coming King – Part II (1987)
Ashurbanipal: the Coming King - Part II
In this 2-series article (published back in 1987), I present a brief diagram of the Messianic Assyrian dynasty of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE), who ruled Nineveh as the exemplary universal empire of the World History; accepting Jonah's preaching, Sargon of Assyria (722-705 BCE) and his son and grandson, Sennacherib (705-681 BCE) and Esarhaddon (681-670 BCE), ushered the world to the Messianic Era of Ashurbanipal (669-625 BCE), who lived a first life as the Suffering Messiah, on the basis of contemporaneous historical texts and personal declarations, only to leave to posterity the claim to his exulted return and celestial reign. All posterior adaptations and identifications being fraudulent, the Second Coming of Ashurbanipal is instantly corroborated by the nature of his magnum opus. The two titles of the series are: "Ashurbanipal: the Righteous Suffering" and "Ashurbanipal: the Coming King".
Ашурбанипал: грядущий царь - Часть ΙI
В этой 2-серийной статье (опубликованной еще в 1987 г.) я представляю краткую схему мессианской ассирийской династии Саргонидов (722-609 гг. до н. э.), правивших Ниневией как образцовой универсальной империей Всемирной истории; приняв проповедь Ионы, Саргон Ассирийский (722-705 гг. до н.э.) и его сын и внук Сеннахирим (705-681 гг. до н.э.) и Асархаддон (681-670 гг. до н.э.), открыли миру мессианскую эру Ашшурбанипала (669–625 гг. до н. э.), который прожил первую жизнь как Страдающий Мессия, на основании современных ему исторических текстов и личных заявлений, только для того, чтобы оставить потомкам притязания на его ликующее возвращение и небесное правление. Все последующие адаптации и отождествления являются мошенническими, и Второе пришествие Ашшурбанипала немедленно подтверждается характером его великого произведения. Два названия сериала: «Ашурбанипал: Праведный Страдающий » и «Ашурбанипал: грядущий царь».
Ασσουρμπανιπάλ Ερχόμενος – Τμήμα Β'
Σε αυτή την σειρά δύο άρθρων (δημοσιευμένων το 1987), παρουσιάζω ένα σύντομο διάγραμμα της Μεσσιανικής Ασσυριακής δυναστείας των Σαργονιδών (722-609 πτεμ), οι οποίοι κυβέρνησαν τη Νινευή ως την υποδειγματική παγκόσμια αυτοκρατορία της Παγκόσμιας Ιστορίας. Αποδεχόμενοι το κήρυγμα του Ιωνά, ο Σαργών της Ασσυρίας (722-705 π.Χ.), καθώς και ο υιός και εγγονός του, Σεναχειρίμπ (705-681 πτεμ) και Ασσαρχαδδών (681-670 πτεμ), οδήγησαν τον κόσμο στη Μεσσιανική Εποχή του Ασουρμπανιπάλ (669-625 πτεμ), ο οποίος έζησε μια πρώτη ζωή ως ο Πάσχων Μεσσίας, με βάση τα σύγχρονα τότε ιστορικά κείμενα και τις προσωπικές του διακηρύξεις, μόνο για να αφήσει σε όλους τους επόμενους την αξίωση για την εξυμνηθείσα επιστροφή του και την ουράνια βασιλεία του. Καθώς όλες οι μεταγενέστερες προσαρμογές του θέματος και ταυτίσεις προσώπων είναι ολότελα δόλιες, η Δευτέρα Παρουσία του Ασουρμπανιπάλ επιβεβαιώνεται ακαριαία από τη φύση του μεγάλου έργου του. Οι δύο τίτλοι της σειράς είναι: «Ασσουρμπανιπάλ Πάσχων» και «Ασσουρμπανιπάλ Ερχόμενος».
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Main units:
Introduction
The flight of the Assyrians and of the ten tribes of Israel
The exile and the return
Ashurbanipal as the Coming King
Ashurbanipal - the Righteous Suffering
Appendices:
Assyria and Nomads
Assyrians, Medes and Urartu
in: Inexplicable, February 1987, pp. 44-54
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Основные главы:
Введение
Бегство ассирийцев и десяти колен Израилевых
Изгнание и возвращение
Ашшурбанипал как грядущий царь
Ашшурбанипал – Праведный Страдающий
Приложения:
Ассирия и кочевники
Ассирийцы, Мидийцы и Урарту
в: Необъяснимое, февраль 1987 г., стр. 44-54
--------------------------
Κυρίως ενότητες:
Εισαγωγή
Η φυγή των Ασσυρίων και των δέκα φυλών του Ισραήλ
Η μετοικεσία και η επιστροφή
Ο Ασσουρμπανιπάλ ως Ερχόμενος
Ο Ασσουρμπανιπάλ-Πάσχων
Παραρτήματα:
Ασσυρία και Νομάδες
Ασσύριοι, Μήδοι και Ουραρτού
στο Ανεξήγητο, Φεβρουάριος 1987, σ. 44-54
--------------------
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Ashurbanipal: the Righteous Suffering - Part I / Ασσουρμπανιπάλ Πάσχων – Α' (1987)
Ashurbanipal: the Righteous Suffering - Part I
In this 2-series article (published back in 1987), I present a brief diagram of the Messianic Assyrian dynasty of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE), who ruled Nineveh as the exemplary universal empire of the World History; accepting Jonah's preaching, Sargon of Assyria (722-705 BCE) and his son and grandson, Sennacherib (705-681 BCE) and Esarhaddon (681-670 BCE), ushered the world to the Messianic Era of Ashurbanipal (669-625 BCE), who lived a first life as the Suffering Messiah, on the basis of contemporaneous historical texts and personal declarations, only to leave to posterity the claim to his exulted return and celestial reign. All posterior adaptations and identifications being fraudulent, the Second Coming of Ashurbanipal is instantly corroborated by the nature of his magnum opus. The two titles of the series are: "Ashurbanipal: the Righteous Suffering" and "Ashurbanipal: the Coming King".
Ашурбанипал: Праведный Страдающий - Часть I
В этой 2-серийной статье (опубликованной еще в 1987 г.) я представляю краткую схему мессианской ассирийской династии Саргонидов (722-609 гг. до н. э.), правивших Ниневией как образцовой универсальной империей Всемирной истории; приняв проповедь Ионы, Саргон Ассирийский (722-705 гг. до н.э.) и его сын и внук Сеннахирим (705-681 гг. до н.э.) и Асархаддон (681-670 гг. до н.э.), открыли миру мессианскую эру Ашшурбанипала (669–625 гг. до н. э.), который прожил первую жизнь как Страдающий Мессия, на основании современных ему исторических текстов и личных заявлений, только для того, чтобы оставить потомкам притязания на его ликующее возвращение и небесное правление. Все последующие адаптации и отождествления являются мошенническими, и Второе пришествие Ашшурбанипала немедленно подтверждается характером его великого произведения. Два названия сериала: «Ашурбанипал: Праведный Страдающий » и «Ашурбанипал: грядущий царь».
Ασσουρμπανιπάλ Πάσχων – Τμήμα Α'
Σε αυτή την σειρά δύο άρθρων (δημοσιευμένων το 1987), παρουσιάζω ένα σύντομο διάγραμμα της Μεσσιανικής Ασσυριακής δυναστείας των Σαργονιδών (722-609 πτεμ), οι οποίοι κυβέρνησαν τη Νινευή ως την υποδειγματική παγκόσμια αυτοκρατορία της Παγκόσμιας Ιστορίας. Αποδεχόμενοι το κήρυγμα του Ιωνά, ο Σαργών της Ασσυρίας (722-705 π.Χ.), καθώς και ο υιός και εγγονός του, Σεναχειρίμπ (705-681 πτεμ) και Ασσαρχαδδών (681-670 πτεμ), οδήγησαν τον κόσμο στη Μεσσιανική Εποχή του Ασουρμπανιπάλ (669-625 πτεμ), ο οποίος έζησε μια πρώτη ζωή ως ο Πάσχων Μεσσίας, με βάση τα σύγχρονα τότε ιστορικά κείμενα και τις προσωπικές του διακηρύξεις, μόνο για να αφήσει σε όλους τους επόμενους την αξίωση για την εξυμνηθείσα επιστροφή του και την ουράνια βασιλεία του. Καθώς όλες οι μεταγενέστερες προσαρμογές του θέματος και ταυτίσεις προσώπων είναι ολότελα δόλιες, η Δευτέρα Παρουσία του Ασουρμπανιπάλ επιβεβαιώνεται ακαριαία από τη φύση του μεγάλου έργου του. Οι δύο τίτλοι της σειράς είναι: «Ασσουρμπανιπάλ Πάσχων» και «Ασσουρμπανιπάλ Ερχόμενος».
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Main units:
Introduction
Who were the Assyrians?
Jonah's Sermon at Nineveh
The structure of Assyrian society and power
The transfer of the Ten Tribes of Israel to Assyria
Sennacherib: the destroyer of "nations"
The Assassination of Sennacherib
Esarhaddon and the Tree of Life
The Great Opus and Ashurbanipal
The Particularities of Ashurbanipal
The last conspiracy
Appendices:
Assyrian expansion and obstacles
Ashurbanipal and ... Sardanapalus
in: Inexplicable, January 1987, pp. 212-223
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Основные главы:
Введение
Кем были ассирийцы?
Проповедь Ионы в Ниневии
Структура ассирийского общества и власти
Переселение десяти колен Израиля в Ассирию
Синаххериб: разрушитель «наций»
Убийство Синаххериба
Асархаддон и Древо Жизни
Великий Опус и Ашшурбанипал
Особенности Ашшурбанипала
Последний заговор
Приложения:
Ассирийская экспансия и препятствия
Ашурбанипал и ... Сарданапал
в: Необъяснимое, январь 1987 г., стр. 212-223.
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Κυρίως ενότητες:
Εισαγωγή
Ποιοι ήταν οι Ασσύριοι
Το Κήρυγμα του Ιωνά στη Νινευή
Η δομή της ασσυριακής κοινωνίας και εξουσίας
Η μεταφορά των Δέκα Φυλών του Ισραήλ στην Ασσυρία
Σεναχειρίμπ: ο εξολοθρευτής των "εθνών"
Η δολοφονία του Σεναχειρίμπ
Ο Ασσαρχαδών και το Δέντρο της Ζωής
Το Έργο και ο Ασσουρμπανιπάλ
Οι ιδιαιτερότητες του Ασσουρμπανιπάλ
Η τελευταία συνωμοσία
Παραρτήματα:
Ασσυριακή εξάπλωση και εμπόδια
Ασσουρμπανιπάλ και ... Σαρδανάπαλος
στο Ανεξήγητο, Ιανουάριος 1987, σ. 212-223
----------------------
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