Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

Pre-publication of chapter XIII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XI, XII, and XIII constitute the Part Four (Fallacies about the so-called Hellenistic Period, Alexander the Great, and the Seleucid & the Parthian Arsacid Times) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapter XI ‘Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period’ and Chapter XII ‘Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty’ have already been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; they are currently available online here: https://www.academia.edu/105386978/Alexander_the_Great_as_Iranian_King_of_Kings_the_fallacy_of_Hellenism_and_the_nonexistent_Hellenistic_Period

and

https://www.academia.edu/52541355/Parthian_Turan_an_Anti_Persian_dynasty

The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.

—————————-  

The very long shadow of the Turanian Parthian Arsacids who ruled Iran (250 BCE – 224 CE) longer than the Achaemenids (550-330 BCE) and the Sassanids (224-651 CE); this silver gilt dish was found in Padishkhwargar, an Arsacid province that corresponds to Tabaristan (of Islamic times) or to Mazandaran and Gilan (of Modern times), i.e. the long and narrow region between the Alborz Mountains and the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. The dish dates back to the last decades of Sassanid rule or the very early Islamic period; it apparently follows the Sassanid artistic traditions, but the main person next to whom there is a brief Pahlavi inscription makes with his left hand a particular sign of mystical recognition among initiates. This sign reminds the typical hand gesture of Gray Wolves (a fist with the little finger and index finger raised).

Colonial historiographers and Orientalists expand much about the philhellenism of the Parthian monarchs at least for the first 250 years of the dynasty, down to the very beginning of the 1st c. CE; this is a fact. However, few questioned how functional this Parthian philhellenism was and what important purposes it actually served. It is true that after Alexander the Great’s death (323 BCE) a chaotic situation prevailed across Iran and many battles were fought by his Epigones; the Seleucid Empire, which incorporated the central Iranian satrapies, was constituted only 11 years after Alexander’s death (312 BCE).

At that moment and for a longer period afterwards, the worst hit province of the Achaemenid Empire was still Fars (Persia); Alexander the Great’s invasions did not involve any other destruction of Achaemenid city or site comparable to that of Parsa (Persepolis). Reflecting pre-existing rivalries, several populations of other Iranian – Turanian provinces may have enjoyed both, Alexander’s attitude against Fars and the destruction of Persepolis. Furthermore, the inevitable transfer of the imperial capital to Babylon must have pleased them too; it offered them space to gradually control as long as the Persian Iranians were in disarray.

Parthia was already a province of the short-lived Median Empire

Parthia as an Achaemenid Iranian satrapy

The early period of Arsacid Parthia: 250-200 BCE

The Arsacid Parthian Empire in 94 BCE at its greatest extent, during the reign of Mithridates II (124–91 BCE)

The Arsacid Parthian Empire at the beginning of the first c. CE

Parthia (P-rw-t-i-wꜣ) written in Egyptian hieroglyphic characters: it was one of the 24 subject nations of the Achaemenid Empire (from the Egyptian Statue of Darius I the Great)

Parthian soldier depicted on the façade of Xerxes’ I tomb in Naqsh-e Rustam, ca. 470 BCE

The subsequent transfer of the Seleucid capital to Seleucia in Mesopotamia was a grave mistake of the newly established dynasty, which failed to comprehend the very smart effort of Alexander to favor, befriend and utilize the Babylonians as the principal means to hold his vast empire united. Finally, the Parthians seceded from the Seleucid Empire 60-65 years after its inception. The rise of the Arsacid dynasty meant that, for the first time in History, the central Iranian–Turanian provinces were ruled under a scepter and a throne that were not located in Fars.

It is therefore normal that the Parthians -in their opposition to the Persians (of Fars)- promoted a systematic court philhellenism and contributed to Alexander the Great’s Iranian legitimation and unquestionable incorporation into the imperial identity and history, and to his posterior fame among Iranian–Turanian nations. This stance fully corresponded to their best interests, namely to secure stability across Iran’s central provinces, while facing threats from rivals among the neighboring empires and kingdoms. It is clear that the Turanian attempt was rejected by the Persian Iranians, and of this polarization we attest late echoes that date back to the Islamic times. Accepting Alexander as an Iranian was benediction to the Turanian Parthians and malediction to the Iranian Persians. But the empire (Xšāça) established by Cyrus the Great was indiscriminately Iranian-Turanian. 

Despite the Arsacid–Seleucid wars, one must rather conclude that, with their marked philhellenism, the Turanian rulers of Parthia had good relations with the various Greek and Macedonian colonies, which had been established throughout their territory and in several adjacent lands, notably Bactria.

This fact helps also explain why, despite Alexander the Great’s rather negative portrait in Sassanid and Middle Persian sources of the Islamic times’ Parsis, the conqueror of the Achaemenid Empire enjoyed splendid narratives and majestic descriptions by Ferdowsi, Nizami, and many other Islamic Iranian–Turanian poets, mystics, philosophers and historians.

Although followers of Parsism (the form of Zoroastrianism that survived down to our days) in Iran and India have a very negative perception of Alexander the Great, Iranian and Turanian Muslims very much venerate him. About:    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthian_Empire#Hellenism_and_the_Iranian_revival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_formula_of_Parthian_coinage

https://www.academia.edu/40214555/Khusrow_Parwez_and_Alexander_the_Great_An_Episode_of_imitatio_Alexandri_by_a_Sasanian_King

One must have no doubt that the term ‘Hellene’ (Greek) is ‘Ionian’ for the Oriental languages. Throughout all the ancient Oriental sources, i.e. Assyrian-Babylonian, Old Achaemenid Iranian, Aramaic, Phoenician and Hebrew, there is not one mention of ‘Greeks’ or ‘Hellenes’; the only term used is ‘Ionian’. This means that in any ancient Oriental language, for the word ‘Philhellene” the corresponding term is “friendly to Ionians”.

It is essential at this point to define the ethnic and cultural links that the Arsacid Parthians felt that they connected them with the ‘Ionians’ with whom they entered in contact. The Parthians accepted the imperial concept because they were integral part of Achaemenid Iran; around 200 years later, the Macedonians, the Ionians and the Aeolians became acquainted with this spiritual notion thanks to Alexander the Great and the practices of Orientalization that he introduced for his soldiers.

However, prior to the acceptance of the imperial ideal, both the Parthians and the ‘Ionians’ had their apparently common concept of governorship that was above the fundamental level of Kurultai, which corresponds to the ‘Ionian’ Amphictyony for settled tribes. This was a military type of rule with man exercising absolute power upon condition of general approval. The traditional Turanian ruler was named in Ancient Ionian (‘Greek’) ‘tyrannos’, and it was pronounced as ‘tu-ran-nos’ with the accent on the first syllable. The term designated the typically Turanian ruler and it serves as an indication of the Turanian origin of the Ionians and the Aeolians. It was actually first used among the Lydians of the Mermnadae dynasty, whose members had apparently names of Turanian origin, notably the founder of the dynasty Gyges whose name was written in Assyrian Annals as Gu(g)gu. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurultai

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphictyonic_league

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/τύραννος#Etymology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyges_of_Lydia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kings_of_Lydia#Mermnadae

In fact, the Parthian Arsacid philhellenism sheds more light on the inculcation of Turanian populations across Western Anatolia and South Balkans during the first millennium BCE, which is a topic that colonial historians tried systematically to conceal. However, Parthian philhellenism is certainly a form of anti-Persianism, which shows that the Achaemenid times were not a period of peace and concord, as many attempted to depict.

——————— THE GALLERY OF ARSACID RULERS & SOLDIERS —————————

Silver drachma of Arsaces I (247 – 211 BCE) with inscription

Arsaces II (211–191 BCE); coin from the Ray mint

Friyapat/Priapatius (191-176 BCE); coin from the Qumis (Hekatompylos; today’s Saddarvazeh) mint

Coin of Frahat I / Phraates I (176-171 BCE)

Coin of Mehrdat I / Mithridates I (171–138 or 132 BCE), who was the first Arsacid Parthian ruler to be attributed the title ‘King of Kings’, according to Babylonian cuneiform records; the reverse shows Verethragna / Heracles, and the inscription ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΥ ΑΡΣΑΚΟΥ ΦΙΛΕΛΛΗΝΟΣ “Great King Arsaces, friend of Greeks”.

Parthian relief of Mithridates I of Parthia from Xong-e Ashdar (also known as Hung-i Nauruzi), near the city of Izeh, in Khuzestan, Iran; compared to the Achaemenid reliefs, which were the results of an official imperial art, the Parthian reliefs are relevant of provincial artists and craftsmanship; most of the Parthian reliefs are found in the southern range of Zagros Mountains. Parthian reliefs are rather secular and not religious; and not religious; they depict scenes of resting, drinking, and hunting, also including several animal figures.

Mithradat-kert (literally the city of Mithridates I of Parthia) in today’s Nisa (or Nissa or Nusay) in Eastern Turkmenistan; the entrance to the city and the walls, which had to be covered up to prevent further damage from erosion

Mithradat-kert (Ancient Greek: Νῖσος, Νίσα, Νίσαιον; Turkmen: Nusaý or Parthaunisa)

Mithradat-kert

Mithradat-kert

Frahat II / Phraates II (132–127 BCE); coin from the Seleucia mint (in Mesopotamia)

Ardawan I / Artabanus I (127–124 BCE); coin from the Seleucia mint

Coin of Ardawan II / Artabanus II (126–122 BCE)

Coin (drachma) of Mihrdāt II / Mithridates II of Parthia (124–91 BCE); the clothing is Parthian, while the style is Seleucid (sitting on an omphalos). The Greek inscription reads “King Arsaces, the Philhellene”.

Godarz I / Gotarzes I (95-90 BCE); coin from the Ecbatana mint

Coin of Mihrdat III / Mithridates III (87-80 BCE) from the Ray mint

Tetradrachm of the Parthian monarch Urud I / Orodes I (90-80 BCE) from the Seleucia mint

Coin of Sanatruq I / Sinatruces I (77-70 BCE) from the Ray mint

Frahat III / Phraates III (70–57 BCE); coin from the Ecbatana mint

Coin of Mihrdat IV / Mithridates IV (57-54 BCE)

Coin of Urud II / Orodes II (57-38 BCE) from the Mithradat-kert (Nisa) mint

Frahat IV / Phraates IV (38-2 BCE); coin from the Mithradat-kert mint

During the reign of Frahat IV / Phraates IV, there seems to have been a pacification agreement between Parthia and Rome (after the proclamation of Octavian as Emperor in early 27 BCE). According to Roman sources, the Parthians returned to Romans the standards lost in the Battle of Carrhae (53 BCE); this fact was commemorated and presented by Octavian as a victory: this coin (denarius) was struck in 19 BCE. It depicts the Roman goddess Feronia on the obverse, and on the reverse a Parthian soldier who kneels in submission while returning the Roman military standards. It is apparently a matter of utmost symbolism and not the representation of a historical event.

The decentralized administrative and royal power of the Arsacid Parthians allowed for many small, peripheral and vassals kingdoms to surface (Characene, Adiabene, Osrhoene, etc.); there are many possible interpretations of the phenomenon, which was erroneously viewed as result of military weakness in the past. Elymais (in today’s Khuzestan, SW Iran) was one of those vassal states. Coin of Kamnaskires III, king of Elymais, and his wife Queen Anzaze, 1st century BCE

Coin of Tiridat II / Tiridates II (29-27 BCE)

Coin of Frahat V / Phraates V (2 BCE-4 CE)

Vonun I / Vonones I (8-12 CE); coin from the Seleucia mint

Coin of Ardawan II / Artabanus II (10-38 CE) from the Seleucia mint

Vardan I / Vardanes I (40-47 CE); coin from the Seleucia mint

Tetradrachm of Godarz II / Gotarzes II (40-51 CE) minted in 49 CE

Tetradrachm of the Parthian king Vologases I (50-79 CE), struck at Seleucia; on the obverse, there is a portrait of the king who appears to wear a trouser-suit, bear a diadem, and have beard. The reverse depicts an investiture scene, where the king receives the scepter and the divine authority by Ahura Mazda.

The so-called Indo-Parthian Kingdom (19-226 CE) was another small, vassal and peripheral kingdom that was located east of the Parthian Arsacid Empire; it was founded by king Gondophares (Γονδοφαρης/Υνδοφερρης; 19-46 CE) whose name (Windafarm in Parthian and Gundapar in Middle Persian) means ‘May he find glory’ (Vindafarna in Old Achaemenid Iranian). Gondophares originated from the illustrious House of Suren, one of the most prestigious families in Arsacid Iran. He built his own royal city Gundopharron and this name was gradually altered to Kandahar (which is located in today’s Afghanistan). Gondophares’ coin was found in India and bears witness to a clearly Parthian style.

Roman sestertius issued by the Roman Senate in 116 CE to commemorate Trajan’s Parthian campaign

Drawing representing a Parthian archer as depicted on Trajan’s Column in Rome (113 CE)

Relief of the Roman-Parthian wars at the Arch of Septimius Severus in Rome (203 CE)

Parthian (right) wearing a Phrygian cap, depicted as a prisoner of war, in chains, held by a Roman (left); Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome, 203 CE

Parthian king making an offering to god Verethragna; from Masjed Soleyman, SW Iran. 2nd–3rd century CE (today in the Louvre Museum)

Silver drachma of the Parthian king Walagash VI / Vologases VI (208-228 CE), penultimate ruler of the Arsacid dynasty. Obverse: King wearing a tiara decorated with deers and ribboned diadem. Reverse: Arsakes I, founder or the Arsacid Parthian dynasty, seating on a throne and holding a bow. From the Ecbatana mint (today’s Hamadan).

Parthian horseman, currently at the Palazzo Madama, Turin

Parthian cataphract fighting a lion, currently at the British Museum

Stucco relief of an infantry soldier, dating back to the Arsacid times (250 BCE – 224 CE); from the Zahhak castle, in Hashtrud, Eastern Azerbaijan, Iran; currently in the Azerbaijan Museum, Tabriz (Iran)

————————————————————————–

Another fact that Western Orientalists tried always to obscure is that the religion of the Arsacids was somewhat divergent from that of the Achaemenids. I don’t mean that the Parthians had a diametrically different or a counterfeit religion; not at all! Simply, in terms of Zoroastrian cosmogony, cosmology, universalism, imperial doctrine, and apocalyptic eschatology, the Arsacids sensibly differed from the Achaemenid Zoroastrian orthodoxy. We have to also bear in mind at this point that the scarcity of the historical sources still prevents us from properly assessing the true dimensions of the religious differentiation.

However, the marked differentiation of the Arsacid monarch from his Achaemenid predecessors suggests another type of royalty, sacrality, spirituality, and morality. As an example for the average readership, I point out here that there has not been even one Old Achaemenid or Imperial Aramaic text -saved down to our days-, which explicitly mentions Zoroaster by name. All the earliest mentions of the name of the founder of the Achaemenid imperial religion are in Middle Persian and in Avestan writings – except for external but largely untrustworthy sources (Ancient Greek and Latin).

All the same, the religious differentiation between the Achaemenid and the Arsacid times did not bring about a drastic religious change, but rather another perception of the divine world; the Parthians continued worshipping Ahura Mazda and keeping themselves far from Ahriman’s attraction. But it appears that, during the Arsacid times, Zoroaster’s preaching was rather perceived as a sacred moral world order; subsequently, the metaphysical terms of the then orally preserved Avesta took a moral dimension and connotation. The spiritual interest seems to have shifted from an imperial order of worldwide salvation to a personal order of moral integrity.

Consequently, examining the nature of this historical-religious change, we may be able to discern that the Achaemenid Zoroastrian orthodoxy, once deprived of its overwhelmingly imperial character, looks rather associated to the moral concepts and the spiritual tenets of Tengrism. For this reason, it is proper not to use the term ‘Zoroastrianism’ for all the historical periods after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, because religiosity differed substantially; it would then be preferable to use the term ‘Zendism’ for the Iranian religion of the Arsacid times, which is in reality a later form of Zoroastrianism in which theological exegesis (Zend Avesta meaning interpretation of Avesta) prevailed over the original faith, and the Avestan text took mainly a moral connotation and value within the socio-religious environment of those days.

The Zend commentaries of the Avestan texts, which definitely originate from the spiritual-religious background of the Arsacid Parthian (and not Sassanid) times, do reflect theological concepts and world views closer associated with Tengrism. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zend

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan_alphabet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazend

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Persian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Persian_literature

Zendism was definitely opposite to Mithraism, although perhaps not in the very strict form for which the Achaemenid emperors became famous. But it was mainly in Arsacid times that Mithraism expanded enormously both, southeastwards (India) and westwards (Caucasus, Anatolia, Syria, Greece, Europe, Rome and the Roman Empire). This does not mean that there were no Mithraic Magi left in Iran; their existence proved to be the main reason for palatial turmoil, sacerdotal plots, social unrest, and internal strives. Undoubtedly, the Magi were the absolute embodiment of Ahriman (: the evil) for the Arsacid rulers, pretty much like they had been an abomination for the Achaemenid monarchs.

In this regard, it is essential to point out that ‘Mithra’ (or ‘Mehr’) in Zoroastrianism and ‘Mithra’ (or ‘Mehr’) in Mithraism are two absolutely different divinities – pretty much like Jesus in Manichaeism, Mandaean religion, Gnostic Christianity, Roman & Eastern Roman Christianity, Nestorian Christianity, and Islam is not one being but many divergent entities or forms of divinity, each with dissimilar attributes. It goes without saying that for any concept or aspect of Tengrism, which is also a markedly monotheistic system, Mithra is a religious disgrace.

More specifically, I have to point out that within the context of Zoroastrianism, ‘Mithra’ (or ‘Mehr’) is a subordinate form of divinity that constitutes merely an expression of the unfathomable benevolence and omnipotence of Ahura Mazda, and as such it bears solar attributes. Contrarily, within the context of Mithraism, this divinity gets emancipated, becomes independent, and turns out to be the central recipient of cult, while a series of abominable and sacrilegious acts are attributed to him, notably the blasphemy of tauroctony which is part of the Mithraic eschatology. Due to the polytheistic nature of Mithraism, Mithra is intrinsically and extensively mythologized; this is so because there cannot be true polytheism without numerous narratives which attract the adoration of the faithful, and in the process, they prevent believers from focusing on the spiritual exercises, the moral principles, and the basic narratives of Cosmogony, Cosmology and Eschatology. In Mithraism, Ahura Mazda still exists as an inactive divinity of the old time, like the Roman dei otiosi.

At this point, it is essential to make one clarification; the well-known, theophoric name ‘Mithridates’, which was used by several Arsacid Parthian rulers, does not directly imply Mithraic affiliation. Certainly, the name means literally ‘given by Mithra’; it was also attested in Pontus, Commagene, Armenia and elsewhere. But every case of use is different. In some cases, it may involve the Zendist / Zoroastrian concept of Mithra; on other occasions, it may reflect a compromise among the Parthian Arsacid Empire’s imperial and the sacerdotal cliques, which were plunged in an endless conflict against one another.

Last, the use of the aforementioned theophoric name can eventually denote the pro-Mithraic tendency and affiliation of a Parthian monarch; there were indeed few Mithraists among the Arsacid rulers. This was an abomination for the monotheistic Parthian Zendist priests, and it appears that some of the pro-Mithraic Arsacid rulers were overthrown. The analysis of the reason(s) that stood behind the selection of a theophoric name in the Antiquity may be very long and complicated a topic, because usually these names heralded the nature of the imperial rule that was to be expected in terms easy to understand for the contemporaneous people and difficult to decode for modern scholarship. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophoric_name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_I_of_Parthia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_II_of_Parthia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_III_of_Parthia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_IV_of_Parthia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_V_of_Parthia

———– A SELECTION OF ARSACID PARTHIAN MONUMENTS ———

Hatra, NW Iraq: a major caravan city on the Silk Roads that prospered during the Arsacid Parthian times, being mainly inhabited by the local Aramaeans

A barrel vaulted iwan at the entrance at the ancient site of Hatra, modern-day Iraq, built c. 50 CE

Statue unearthed in Hatra, currently at the Tokyo National Museum: Aramaean amalgamation of Verethragna and an Aramaean deity into a Mithraic divinity similar to Artagnes, who is known to have been worshipped in Nemrut Dagh and Commagene in general

Temple of the Aramaean divinity Gareus, near Uruk, Southern Mesopotamia – near the borders of the vassal kingdom of Characene

Parthian ceramic oil lamp, from the province of Khuzestan, currently in the National Museum of Iran (Tehran)

Baal temple in Palmyra: a frieze relief

Grave towers in Tadmor / Palmyra / Phoinicopolis; known among Syrians as the ‘Valley of the Tombs’ (Wadi al-Qubur). Majestic funerary monuments bear witness to the extraordinary wealth of the great Aramaean caravan city (1st-3rd c. CE).

Statue of a young Palmyrene Aramaean in fine Parthian trousers; from a funerary stele at Palmyra / Tadmor, early 3rd century CE

Mordechai and Esther. From the Aramaean Synagogue of Dura Europos (near Abu Kemal) on the Western bank of Euphrates River in Syria (right before the Syrian-Iraqi border): wall mural with representation of a story from the Book of Esther (early 3rd c. CE); artistic style known as ‘Parthian frontality’

—————————————————————————————————-

Download the chapter (text only) in PDF:

parthian-turan-and-the-philhellenism-of-the-arsacidsDownload

Download the chapter (pictures & legends) in PDF:

parthian-turan-and-the-philhellenism-of-the-arsacids-pictures-legends-1Download

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

————–

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

https://vk.com/video429864789_456239757

https://ok.ru/video/5416043547224

https://www.brighteon.com/ca749192-7c1b-4a9d-901d-5f530611c965

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1B

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_9011%2Fall

https://ok.ru/video/5452334828120

https://www.brighteon.com/491e7afe-d4f6-4100-909c-3f35b9c57323

————————   

To listen to the audio, clink the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_8990%2Fall

https://megalommatis.podbean.com/e/history-of-achaemenid-iran-1a-course-i-achaemenid-beginnings-1a/

—————————— 

Download the course in PDF:

achaemenid-iran-course-1b-textDownload

achaemenid-iran-course-1b-frameDownload

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

https://vk.com/video429864789_456239757

https://ok.ru/video/5416043547224

https://www.brighteon.com/ca749192-7c1b-4a9d-901d-5f530611c965

————————    

To listen to the audio, clink the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_8990%2Fall

https://megalommatis.podbean.com/e/history-of-achaemenid-iran-1a-course-i-achaemenid-beginnings-1a/

—————————— 

Download the course in PDF:

achaemenid-iran-course-1a-textDownload

achaemenid-iran-course-1a-frameDownload

Cognitive Science & Ancient Egypt: What did Pharaoh Narmer’s times’ Egyptians know and how?

From my correspondence with an African American who intends to study Egyptology and learn Egyptian Hieroglyphics in order to explore issues related to African Originality, Identity, Integrity and Spirituality. Although I am Muslim, I am convinced that Ancient Egypt, Egyptian History, Religions & Divine Sciences, if sought after in an unbiased and non-colonial academic manner, constitute – for any African – a more direct path to Truth than today’s decayed Islam.

 

After all, the monotheistic aspects of Ancient Egypt were tantamount to real and true Islam for millennia before Prophet Muhammad was born, and this was the quintessence of his preaching. Ancient Egyptians’ Sacred Texts revealed the same spiritual and material reality as the Holy Quran. And this truth was concealed by both, the Jesuit – Freemasonic – Zionist elites and today’s ignorant, idiotic, fake Islamic, and Satanic sheikhs, who are the globalist elite’s most dangerous tools.

 

The Triple Anubis: the Divine Aspect of Justice in the Nether World

Dear friend,

Thank you for your interest, consideration and patience!

There are still unanswered points in your letter about Pharaoh Narmer. You said: “I have many questions about this Great Man and his successors. I want to learn where did they draw upon knowledge from?”

This is a subject related to Cognitive Science; in fact, it is as if you ask how the Ancient Egyptians of the first half of the third millennium BCE knew the right method to efficiently build the great pyramid, the correct procedure to transform the body of a deceased into a mummy, the best technique to illuminate cavities hewn deeply inside the rock, and plenty of other similar exploits.

Modern Academic Scholarship’s Ignorance and Widespread Confusion

Modern Egyptologists solemnly declare that they have no answers to questions about similar topics. I still remember that my former professor in Sorbonne and the College de France, the late Jean Leclant, a leading Egyptologist and  Permanent Secretary of the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, once in a rather recent interview said that the technique used for the construction of the great pyramids was “a secret of the Ancient Egyptian state”. This says much and nothing at the same time.

In fact, the constituent elements of the Modern Western Science do not allow anyone to respond to the above questions and to many other similar queries. This is irrevocable; you can be sure that there will never be an answer to those topics, without an overwhelming rejection of the foundations of the Modern Western Science.

No modern scholar can describe the magnificent use of Djed, because of the prevailing materialistic fallacy.

When I refer to this system (‘modern western science’), I don’t hint at Humanities alone; I involve all disciplines: Natural Sciences, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Music, Mathematics, etc. I also include very important sciences of which the modern academic establishment does not accept their reality, ingenuity and identity. As example, I offer you the entire aggregation of Spiritual Sciences (‘Divina Studia’ in Latin) that the modern materialistic academic establishment obstinately denies to accept.

Of course, the limited scope and the inherent fallacy of the Modern Western Science are basically due to the fact that it is the product of a simplistic, materialistic viewpoint that not only considers the separation of the material universe from the spiritual universe as possible, but also denies the existence of the spiritual world.

Venerating the magnificent Djed

Inseparability of the material and the spiritual universes

There are two points that you must take always into consideration:

 First, all major ancient civilizations down to the Islamic Golden Era (8th – 12th c. CE) accepted as indispensable element of science, knowledge and wisdom the inseparability of the material and the spiritual universes, and identified as supreme enquiry for humans the exploration of the existing parallels between the two universes.

For the Ancient Egyptians and for all other civilizations’ leading explorers, wise elders, and spiritual mystics, the modern western science is indeed a villainous antihuman deception. I don’t say ‘would be’ but ‘is’, because this is a fact and not an eventuality; the remaining evidence of the ancient civilizations, in and by itself, denies the purpose, the scope, the approaches, the methods and the essence of the modern Western scientific establishment, definitely viewing it as the useless result of a low level fallacy.

In other words, the great pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) in itself is a proof that modern scholarship is devious, self-deceiving and deceptive. It is not a matter of quantitative but qualitative difference; the modern scientific establishment is lower, went adrift, and will never be able to deliver the great masterpieces that the Oriental Antiquity did.

Balancing electromagnetic fluids by means of Ankh

Not only today’s scientific establishment cannot achieve what ancient scholars did, but in its totality it is genuinely unable to understand how the great mystics and the erudite priests of the Oriental Antiquity managed to deliver the masterpieces that they did. The impediment of the devious modern establishment is the disregard of the spiritual universe and the erroneous, calamitous assumption that it does not exist.

Representation of the celestial part of the universe perceived in its analogies with the respective part of the spiritual universe

Deviate Modern Science opens the Way to Confusion

Second, because of the mistaken nature of the modern scientific establishment, many real questions are left unanswered, as you already know, and this contributes to an enormous confusion that brings forth only disaster to all humans. We know very well that any time in History confusion prevailed, the civilization collapsed and disaster hit the land in confusion. In fact, confusion is sick and evil; however, confusion is overwhelming in our days.

The celestial part of the universe in its vitality

There is an incredible amount of confusion about the ‘knowledge’ of the Ancient Oriental scholars, wise men, and high priests. Due to this disorientation, various men exposed to negative spiritual activities come up with evil and inhuman theories, which further damage our collapsing societies. I cannot herewith provide a list of fake interpretations concerning the pyramids and their constructors, but I am sure that you have an idea about the theory of the extraterrestrials which appeared only in the last century; according to this evil and nonsensical theory, non-humans are accredited with the construction of the pyramids.

Given that for many long millennia of civilization and spirituality not one man advanced this aberration, but when the corrupted Mankind entered the final stage of its collapse (20th c.), everyone started writing absurd and silly novels or fake academic work to possibly ‘prove’ that the extraterrestrials built the pyramids, created the humans by means of DNA manipulation in monkeys, and similar nonsense, I conclude that a gigantic fraud is underway and that these inhuman theories are promoted by vicious circles implementing antihuman plans and the extinction of the Mankind.

Your question still remains unanswered and I have now to first illuminate the major stumbling block that prevents you and others from clearly assessing how the spiritual, priestly, academic and intellectual establishment of Narmer’s Egypt knew what they knew and whether they needed to literarily learn what they knew.

Late Antiquity Egyptian Study and Interpretation of the Heliopolitan and the Hermupolitan religious – theological systems

Today’s Mankind: Sunken & Drowned in an Ocean of Evil Evolutionism

Darwinism has indeed affected far more sectors than Natural Sciences and Anthropology. It affected History and History of Religions; it reduced Mythology and Metaphysics (Philosophy) to low level fairytales for children. Even worse, it produced a fallacious diagram about the historical evolution. This is a major trouble.

According to this fallacious diagram, which is accepted by Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics and atheists alike, man knew few things in the Neolithic (and even fewer in the Mesolithic and the Paleolithic). I must now say that these three terms are fake and they originate in the vicious desire of materialists, evolutionists and atheists to impose the sick theories of their perverted minds and their historical forgeries as a worldwide accepted dogma. I don’t expand on this, as it is vast and irrelevant to your question. Subsequently, these academics interpret Ancient History as a scheme whereby man progressed from lower civilizations to higher throughout the last five – six millennia. For the needs of their forgery, ‘earlier’ meant ‘lower’.

Revealing the spiritual power to the initiates, the Hierophant acted as a vessel of transmission.

This is the most monstrous distortion of the Ancient Oriental History, because we know very well that the Egyptians of the times of Akhenaten (ca. 1350) were not in a position to construct a pyramid as great as that of Khufu (Cheops). And this is one example out of many possible. So, there was an evident decline, a fall, and a decadence in Egypt from the 3rd to the 2nd millennium BCE and this continued onwards to the 1st millennium BCE. Vicious materialistic pseudo-historians are not ashamed in taking fake measures, when establishing their theories according to which there was progress and not decay in Egypt (or Mesopotamia) from the 3rd to the 2nd millennium BCE; they argue that for instance Thutmose III developed a strong army and was able to acquire vast lands in both, the Sudan and Canaan, i.e. territories that were out of the ‘smaller’ kingdom of Khufu and Khafra (Chephren). Same for Ramses II! But they fail to explain why no pharaoh dared to choose again Khafra (‘His Radiation is Ra’) as his name in the 2nd or the 1st millennium BCE!

On the other hand, when it comes to Senwosret (Sesostris) III, Egyptologists reject Egyptian and later sources describing in detail the military campaigns of the Pharaoh who reached deep in Sudan’s South and also campaigned far beyond Canaan in Anatolia (Turkey) and Scythia (southern Ukraine). How do they proceed? When it comes to genuine (: contemporaneous) historical sources in Egyptian hieroglyphics, they misinterpret them, playing with toponyms. When it comes to posterior historical sources in Ancient Greek and Latin, they pretend that those texts are mythological and not historical of character. Shameful but regular for colonial academia: they don’t want to accept the reality that numerous Oriental monarchs occupied large territories or campaigned in Europe.

Even worse, they link the fallacious diagram of constant progress and rise across three millennia of Oriental History with another, colossal falsehood, the so-called Greco-Roman world, which they describe as ‘Classical’ (from Latin ‘classicus’ meaning ‘of higher class’). Classics is a fallacy that antedates the formative years of Orientalism; it goes back to the Renaissance, when heinous and Anti-Christian intellectuals shaped the erratic idea that the pre-Christian Antiquity of the Greeks and the Romans was ‘superior’ to the Christian civilization. This is another vast topic, but I will not expand, because it is unrelated to your question.

Positive (right) and negative (left) electromagnetic fluids

Linking the evolutionist diagram of the Ancient Oriental History to the distorted presentation of the Greco-Roman civilization and then adding to the diagram the Christian times’ period, the Renaissance, and the Modern times is the way modern scholarship composed a monstrous, bogus-historical dogma only to serve the purpose of preconceived evolutionism. Hidden behind all lies, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, concealments, and forgeries elaborated within all branches of Humanities, and more particularly History and History of Religions, lies the supreme target: the imposition of the evolutionist theory on the entire mankind. That’s why History looks so inconsistent to many. For this reason people don’t find the whole diagram as trustworthy, and scholars fail to respond to simple questions.

 

The Undeniable Truth: the Lost Great Past – ‘Earlier’ means ‘Higher’!

 

Even worse, all authentic historical sources directly contradict and categorically reject the modern academic establishment’s false representation of facts and mistaken interpretation of textual and archaeological evidence. And this is systematically concealed by all historians and historians of religions.

Channeling or containing the energy

Ancient Greek and Roman poets, philosophers, historians, and writers considered the Ancient Orient as the origin par excellence of all valuable forms of Knowledge, Science, Erudition, Wisdom, Spirituality and Potency. And they were very right in their conviction, because the ancient Greek and Roman temples were mere kiosks, if compared to the immense temples of Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt.

The Oriental temples were at the same time high places of cult and faith, universities; monasteries for theological disputes; seminars in Symbolism, Mythology, Eschatology, Messianism and Transcendental Wisdom; research centers; laboratories; observatories; libraries; museums; oracles and centers for divination studies; administration centers for agricultural and urban planning; artistic ateliers; philosophical schools; conservatories; meditation venues; and spirituality circles whereby – and in absolute contradiction with lesser and later edifices of posterior civilizations – the Great Hierophant used to make full revelation of the Sacred Spiritual Power (‘the mysteries’) in front of the selected apprentices who had passed their initiation with success.

Analyzing the spiritual matrix and the five elements

Contrarily, ancient Greek and Roman temples were tiny buildings dedicated to cult, with no spirituality, no mysteries, no knowledge, and no hierophants. That’s why the first Greek philosophers went all to the Oriental temples to study: in order to return back to their cities and oppose the ignorant, uneducated, dark and evil clergy of their low, small and useless temples.

In either Mesopotamia or Egypt, the identification of the site where a new temple had to be erected was the result of extensive research in geographical determinism (in order to understand the particular nature and traits of the place) and the outcome of high level spiritual studies and investigations that specified the exact correspondence between the topographical location and its spiritual counterpart. Nothing of the sort occurred in the case of the Greek and Roman temples, because those priesthoods did not have a clue about the sciences and the knowledge of the Oriental priesthoods.

And yet, when we study Ancient Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian texts of the first half of the first millennium BCE, we are immediately confronted with the veneration and the respect with which the then authors spoke about their past that they always identified as higher, better, more powerful, more luminous, and utterly golden. The great grandfather of Assurbanipal became Emperor of Assyria in 722 BCE, after overthrowing Shalmanaser V, and selected as his own imperial name that of Sarrukinu (Sargon) of Akkad, who had reigned 1600 years earlier. In fact, all Assyrian Emperors and Babylonian Kings in their rivalry attempted to reconstruct the ideal, superior and perfect Empire of Sargon of Akkad.

Sargon of Akkad & Sargon of Assyria (below right)

Throughout all the sacred texts in either Mesopotamia or Egypt we get the impression that the antediluvian times were a period of greater strength, intuition and prosperity. The distinction made by modern Western scholarship between mythological and historical texts is overwhelmingly annulled by all the historical texts of the Ancient Oriental nations that make it very clear that their authors viewed as also historical the texts that modern Western scholarship categorizes as ‘mythological’ and that they considered the spiritual and divine realm as inextricably inherent to the material world.

The greatest of the Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian Emperors compared themselves with the Epic hero Gilgamesh and tried to duly train themselves to stand as strong opponents of the maledicted hero, who in turn failed forever to reach the paradisiacal level of Ut-Napishtim, the archetypal figure of Noah, the vanquisher of the Flood.

Gilgamesh as represented in Neo-Assyrian bas-reliefs and Cuneiform tablet with the Flood Epic Atrahasis (another name for Utnapishtim)

The search for the ideal, higher, sublime past marked not only the first but also the second millennium BCE. The Narrative of the Shipwrecked is a great mythical text of the Ancient Egyptians, written at the times of the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2100 – 1750 BCE), that consists in the first worldwide mention of the mythical Atlantis. The term ‘Atlantis’ is used by Plato almost 1500 years after the Ancient Egyptian text was first composed, but the concept of Atlantis (the Utopia before the Deluge) is identical and its origin is found in the Narrative of the Shipwrecked. The text sets the story at the times of the antediluvian Old Kingdom (ca. 2750 – 2250 BCE); the description concerns the ideal, perfect and infallible world before the Flood, which ended abruptly.

Hieratic text & Hieroglyphic transliteration: The Narration of the Shipwrecked

The Reconstitution of the Oriental Myth: the Semiotics of the Spiritual Truth

With the above introduction, I intended to show that, if we try to read original ancient texts, without projecting onto them our world’s preconceived aberrations, mistakes and deceptions, we will discover clearly the reality that I shared with you in my earlier emails: the History of the Mankind is a History of Falls.

This automatically answers your question about the knowledge that Narmer and his times’ wise elders had and how they acquired it. Earlier means higher, better and stronger. Advancing backwards, we will reach the Assyrian – Babylonian Adapa, the first Man. The name itself is at the origin of the Biblical – Islamic Adam. Adapa was created by Ea, the divine aspect of Wisdom and Love (among the five elements, this aspect corresponds to the Soft Waters).

The Assyrian – Babylonian Epic of Adapa (Adam)

In Egypt, as I said in a recently published correspondence, there was never one religion but many different religions that only misleadingly are presented by modern Egyptologists as just one religion; this is due to the fact that the spiritual, cosmological and theoretical differences among these systems were definitely greater than the divergences between Christianity and Islam  (https://www.academia.edu/34439637/In_Ancient_Egypt_at_any_given_moment_there_was_never_one_Egyptian_Religion). However, none of the main Ancient Egyptian religions (the Heliopolitan, Hermupolitan, Memphtic and Theban systems) expanded much on the Creation of Man, and quite rightfully. Even within the Biblical context, the Creation of the World matters; the creation of the Man is a secondary episode. The religious – theological system that gives greater focus on the Creation of Man in Ancient Egypt is that of Khnum, the ram-headed god of Elephantine island at Aswan. For the Creation of the Man, it involves clay and the potter’s wheel. To help you understand what this means, I only state that it clearly shows that in reality the potter’s wheel antedates the first physical man!

Khnum creates the First Man

However, irrespective of the spiritual and theoretical background related to the myths about the Creation of the Man, it was always clear to the Ancient Oriental peoples that the early life in the Garden of God(s) was the supreme stage of the Mankind, which was lost when the early humans were forced out (the first fall). The vicinity of the Holy Tree (the Tree of Life) was a condition that always characterized the ancient Oriental nations’ effort to recapture and reconstitute the early, ideal stage.

We can therefore fully understand that both the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians viewed the Creation of the Man and the Mankind’s early stage as the supreme condition that humans ever experienced. And this is how it truly happened.

Scene around the Holy Tree

God did not create a silly and scared humanoid who (or that?) had to incessantly be on the run in order to avoid the leopard and the lion, the wolf and the jackal. As created, Man had supreme spiritual power and ability to live at a totally different level. Indicatively, although animals were created before Adam, it is he who was asked by God to name them! Giving the name to an already created being is tantamount to having absolute power over it; the early man did not need to study about the trees and the plants that surrounded him, because absolute knowledge of everything was inherent to him as per the code of the Creation.

Full knowledge of, and absolute power over, natural phenomena and meteorological conditions were only some of the early man’s capacities. Complete understanding of the structure of the universe and of the Earth, communication with all the spiritual hierarchies and the material beings, and impeccable moral conscience were some of his characteristics. The early man was able to live without eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse. His spiritual and material power was formidable, and this was exactly what great mystics, high priests, and wise elders of later periods tried to recapture after the series of early setbacks (as symbolized by the expulsion from the Paradise, the Flood, the Babel Tower, etc). Every setback and fall meant always a direct loss of spiritual potency, knowledge, and intuition, and this brought about loss of intellectual accuracy and confusion.

Not only the man was different at that stage, but also the animals, and they did not eat one another – at all. In Kom Ombo, they managed to keep domesticated crocodiles until very late. We can safely infer the aforementioned, because it is known that, after the End of Times and the anticipated re-constitution of the early ideal world by Etana – Ninurta – Horus – Tasmisu – Shosyant – Maitreya – Messiah – Christ – Mahdi (and any other mythologized or theologized figure of Ultimate Savior), the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling[a] together; and a little child will lead them. 7 The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. 8 The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. 9 They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah XI, 6-9). If the re-constituted ideal society after the elimination of the Evil comprises of this description’s details, we can assume that this was also the ordinary life before the falls started.

The Assyrian – Babylonian Eschatological – Messianic Myth (:Prophecy) of Etana

The fight between the Messiah (Horus) and the Antichrist (Seth) as depicted …

on the walls of Horus’ Temple at Edfu: The Antichrist is depicted as crocodile …

or hippopotamus.

Please notice the excerpt’s last sentence! Isaiah’s reference to waters (: soft waters) covering the sea makes surely no sense to you. But it would definitely make sense to Pharaoh Narmer and his times’ wise elders, high priests, and average people. This is due to the fact that the world was very different before the Flood. That’s why it makes sense that you ask me about the stars playing a role in Narmer’s decision making process. This will be the topic of my next response.

Best regards,

Shamsaddin

Download this text in Word doc

Cognitive Science & Ancient Egypt P