The Sudden Civilization

When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study the ancient monuments there.

One of his officers found near Rosetta a stone slab on which was carved a proclamation from 196 B.C. written in the ancient Egyptian pictographic writing (hieroglyphic) as well as in two other scripts.

The decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and language, and the archaeological efforts that followed, revealed that a high civilization had existed in Egypt well before the advent of the Greek civilization.

Egyptian records spoke of royal dynasties that began circa 3100 B.C.—two full millennia before the beginning of Hellenic civilization.

It reached its maturity in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Greece was a latecomer rather than an originator.

Was the origin of our civilization in Egypt?

As logical as that conclusion would have seemed, the facts militated against it.

Greek scholars did describe visits to Egypt, but the ancient sources of knowledge of which they spoke were found elsewhere.

The pre-Hellenic cultures of the Aegean Sea revealed evidence that the Near Eastern, not the Egyptian, culture had been adopted:

• the Minoan on the island of Crete
• the Mycenaean on the Greek mainland

Syria and Anatolia, not Egypt, were the principal avenues through which an earlier civilization became available to the Greeks.

The following happened around the same time 13th century BC:

• The Dorian invasion of Greece
• The Israelite invasion of Canaan following the Exodus from Egypt

Scholars have been fascinated to discover a growing number of similarities between the Semitic and Hellenic civilizations.

Professor Cyrus H. Gordon (Forgotten Scripts; Evidence for the Minoan Language) opened up a new field of study which showed that an early Minoan script, called Linear A, represented a Semitic language.*

He concluded that:

• “the pattern (as distinct from the content) of the Hebrew and Minoan civilizations is the same to a remarkable extent”
• pointed out that the island’s name, Crete, spelled in Minoan Ke-re-ta, was the same as the Hebrew word Ke-re-et (“walled city”) and had a counterpart in a Semitic tale of a king of Keret.

The English and Latin alphabets come from the Hellenic alphabet which came from the Near East.

The ancient Greek historians wrote that a Phoenician named Kadmus (“ancient”) brought them the alphabet, comprising the same number of letters, in the same order, as in Hebrew.

It was the only Greek alphabet when the Trojan War took place. The poet Simonides of Ceos in the 5th century BC increased the number of letters to 26.

The Aryans

Greek records had much information about Persia.

The names of their kings were Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes.

The names of their deities belonged to the Indo-European linguistic stem.

They were part of the Aryan (“lordly”) people who came from near the Caspian Sea towards the end of the 2nd millennium BC. They spread:

• westward to Asia Minor
• eastward to India
• southward to what the Old Testament called the “lands of the Medes and Parsees.”
  • The Old Testament treated them as part and parcel of biblical events.

Cyrus, for example, was considered to be an “Anointed of Yahweh”.

• This is unusual for the Hebrew God and a non-Hebrew.
• The biblical Book of Ezra writes that Cyrus:
  • acknowledged his mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem
  • said he was acting upon orders given by Yahweh, whom he called “God of Heaven.”

Cyrus and the other kings of his dynasty called themselves Achaemenids from the title adopted by the founder of the dynasty– Hacham-Anish.

It was a perfect Semitic title, which meant “wise man.”

The cultural, religious, and historic roots of these Old Persians go back to the earlier empires of Babylon and Assyria, whose extent and fall is recorded in the Old Testament.

The symbols that make up the script that appeared on the Achaemenid monuments and seals were at first considered to be decorative designs.

Engelbert Kampfer visited Persepolis in 1686. He described the signs as “cuneates,” or wedgeshaped impressions. The script has since been known as cuneiform.

They were written in the same script as inscriptions found on ancient artifacts and tablets in Mesopotamia, the plains and highlands that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Intrigued by the scattered finds, Paul Emile Botta set out in 1843 to conduct the first major purposeful excavation. He selected a site in northern Mesopotamia, near present-day Mosul, now called Khorsabad.

Botta was soon able to establish that the cuneiform inscriptions named the place Dur Sharru Kin. They were Semitic inscriptions, in a sister language of Hebrew, and the name meant “walled city of the righteous king.” Our textbooks call this king Sargon II.

This capital of the Assyrian king had as its center a magnificent royal palace whose walls were lined with sculptured bas-reliefs, which, if placed end to end, would stretch for over a mile.

Commanding the city and the royal compound was a step pyramid called a ziggurat; it served as a “stairway to Heaven” for the gods.

The layout of the city and the sculptures depicted a way of life on a grand scale.

The palaces, temples, houses, stables, warehouses, walls, gates, columns, decorations, statues, artworks, towers, ramparts, terraces, gardens—all were completed in just 5 years.