19. The Cult of Fire (§§171-184)

a. The Cult of the Metalworkers’ Fire in Mesopotamia

171. The cult of Tammuz involved the spiritualization of astral as well as seasonal phenomena. The constellation Orion and the neighboring star Sirius have been mentioned already in connection with Osiris and Tammuz. In Egypt Orion was believed to be the soul of Osiris. Looking like a giant hunter aiming his bow at the neighboring constellation of Taurus, the Bull, Orion was called in Mesopotamia Sipa-zi-ana, “The True Herder/Shepherd of Heaven.” He was believed to be a representation of the mighty hunter-fisher Tammuz. In summer he was invisible, in winter he emerged over the horizon, as if from the Underworld, and mounted the heavens in his magnificence.

172. According to post-Biblical tradition, Nimrod (Enmerkar) was deified and exalted to the stars as Orion, and the constellation is commonly identified as the giant Nimrod in Rabbinic, Byzantine and Arabic sources. This implies elements of the Tammuz cult had become attached, at some point at least preceding the post-Biblical period, to the figure of Enmerkar. The presence is acknowledged in the ancient Sumerian epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta of a tradition identifying Enmerkar’s enemy Aratta with Ninurta’s demon foe Anzu and consequently, by implication, Enmerkar with the hero-god Ninurta; but the identification of Enmerkar with Ama-ushumgal-ana (Tammuz) as spouse of the goddess Inana is equally, if not more, clear in the same epic: Enmerkar is called the “sole beloved en-priest of Inana,” that is, according to the rites of the later Tammuz cult, the royal embodiment of the god Tammuz himself. In the related epic Enmerkar and Ensukishana, Enmerkar is referred to as “the man born to be a god {Sumerian AN = Akkadian ilu = El, so the phrase might be rendered: “born to be El”}; … a man manifest as a god {or, “manifest as El”}… the lord of Unug {Erech/Uruk}” (for the text see §611.52, below, >>). Here Enmerkar is identified with AN, ilu, corresponding to the Canaanite El (Saturn). He is also identified with the royal consort of Inana, Ama-ushumgal-ana or Tammuz. Since Ninurta was the star Sirius, which was termed in ancient Mesopotamia the “Arrow” of the stellar bow of Orion, and Tammuz was the constellation Orion itself, as well as the star Sirius, the fusion of these two roles is understandable. Peri Theon claims Euechios-Nimrod was exalted to heaven 1) as the constellation Orion, specifically as attended on by the Dog-star (Sirius), and 2) as the planet Kronos (Saturn). The hero-god Ninurta was most commonly identified precisely with 1) the star Sirius and 2) the planet Saturn. This suggests Peri Theon preserved elements of the ancient mythology in its account of Euechios-Nimrod. The other god, Tammuz, was worshiped in association with the goddess Inana. Inana’s name means “Queen of Heaven” and she was the goddess of the planet Venus, but also of the constellation called the “Bow Star,” which included stars in Canis Major. Sirius was the “Arrow” of this Bow. It was Enmerkar who introduced the cult of Inana into Mesopotamia, or, whose priest, as it was put, “caused Inana to descend” into the Temple Tower Eana (Uruk List of Kings and Sages, lines 8-9): the later myth was that Inana “descended” into the Underworld, and the requirement to find a substitute to take her place there in order for her to be released from its power, led to the death of her unconcerned lover, Tammuz, — his “seizure by the demons,” — and his removal to the Underworld as her replacement. In the cult as it was practiced in later historical times, the reigning king impersonated Tammuz and a priestess Inana in the performance of a so-called “sacred marriage” to promote the fertility of the land. It is likely that major elements of this cult were already present when Enmerkar’s priest first “caused Inana to descend into Eana.” These rites of Dumuzi are referred to in the fragmentary concluding passages of the epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (see §611.1ff., below, >>). Thus the identification of Enmerkar with Tammuz predated the reign of Tammuz (Dumuzi) himself (the next king of Uruk but one after Enmerkar) and doubtless influenced the naming of the latter. There was a pre-diluvian king Dumuzi called, as the later god commonly was, “the shepherd,” who is said to have reigned in the city of Bad-tibira, the “Wall of the Metal Craftsmen,” and was worshiped as the god Nangar or Nagar, “Craftsman.” It is possible Enmerkar introduced a cult of this divinized pre-diluvian king in post-diluvian Uruk. In that case the post-diluvian Tammuz was named after the earlier, pre-diluvian, king.

172.1. Traditions relating to Nangar, the pre-diluvian Tammuz, survived into Classical times amongst the Phrygians of Asia Minor (Turkey). They had inherited them from their predecessors, the Hittites of the second millennium BC, who, in turn, borrowed them from Mesopotamia. The Phrygians had a proverbial expression “tears of Nannakos, or Annakos,” explained by a legend of a pre-diluvian king so called (Stephanus Byzantinus, s.n. Ikonion, Suidas, s.n. Nannakos, Zenobius, Proverbia, VI. 10, see further §422.1, below, >>, on the background of this account in Genesis). Suidas: “Nannakos was a person of great antiquity, prior to the time of Deukalion {the Greek flood-hero}. He is said to have been a king, who foreseeing the approaching deluge, collected everybody together, and led them to a temple, where he offered up his prayers for them, accompanied with many tears. There is likewise a proverbial expression about Nannakos; which is applied to people of great antiquity.” Zenobius: “The story of Nannakos. The proverb concerns marvels of ancient times, and people who mourn profusely. Nannakos was a king of Phrygia, as Hermogenes relates in his Account of Phrygia, before the era of Deukalion. Forewarned of the approaching catastrophe, he gathered everyone together into the sanctuary and offered up supplications with tears. Whence Herodes the composer of Iambics speaks of weeping Nannakos-like tears.” Stephanus Byzantinus: “The tradition is, that there was formerly a king named Annakos, the extent of whose life was above three hundred years. The people, who were of his neighborhood and acquaintance, had inquired of an oracle how long he was to live. And there was an answer given, that when Annakos died, all mankind would be destroyed. The Phrygians, upon this account, made great lamentations: from whence arose the proverb, the lamentation for Annakos; made use of for people or circumstances highly calamitous. When the flood of Deukalion came, all mankind was destroyed, according as the oracle had foretold. Afterwards, when the surface of the earth began to be again dry, Zeus ordered Prometheus and Athena to make images of clay in the form of men: and when they were finished, he called the winds, and made them breathe into each, and render them vital.” The latter figures are easily identified: Deukalion is Noah, the hero of the Flood, and Prometheus and Athena are “Adam” (the post-diluvian Adam, viz. Noah under another name, or in the second phase of his life) and his wife Naamah (Athena). The hint that ritual weeping was performed “for N/Annakos” suggests he is the pre-diluvian Nangar (> Nannakos) or Nagar (> Annakos), that is Dumuzi. Dumuzi was ritually mourned in the month Tammuz, under the Zodiacal sign of Cancer, and the sign Cancer was called “Nagar” (the identical word, “Craftsman”) in Mesopotamia. The region of Anatolia where the myth of Nannakos was current, a region rich in metal deposits, provided an appropriate environment for the preservation and perpetuation of the cult of this lamented, pre-diluvian, metalworker. In fact, the flood legend featuring Deukalion (Noah) was located in the vicinity, at Celaenae. The genealogical connection between the pre-diluvian Dumuzi and Noah, as the brother of Noah’s wife, will be examined infra. The gathering of the people en masse to a temple to weep for Tammuz was remembered in Harranian tradition as late as medieval times, and also Tammuz’ destruction in a flood. (See §323ff., below, >>.) The events were commemorated annually under his own name, and under that of his Iranian counterpart, Jamshid. Jamshid was the hero of an Iranian flood myth in which he similarly gathered survivors into an underground “enclosure” (“var”) to escape the effects of the “fatal winter” predicted by him. The netherworld enclosure here replaced Noah’s container as the means of escape, — an interpretation of the demise of Jamshid and his contemporaries in the Flood as a spiritual, instead of a physical, rescue by the Deity. In Mesopotamia the Temple was a duplicate of the netherworld (Apsu), and the boat of Ziusudra (Noah) was said to have been roofed over “like the Apsu.” (See §129 subsection 3, above, >>, and §130, above, >>.)

173. Sumerian tradition supports the reconstruction whereby the cult of the pre-diluvian metalworker, Dumuzi, was “reinvented” in post-diluvian Uruk. In the same epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which relates how Enmerkar brought the cult of Inana from the Iranian mountain land of Aratta to Uruk, it is said that the people of Aratta received the blessing of Inana after the Flood specifically because of her great love of Dumuzi, implying an already existing and relatively advanced cult of the goddess and her lover in that region: “They [the people of Aratta, before the rise of Enmerkar’s Uruk] are people whom she [Inana] has separated from other people, they are people whom Dumuzid [= Dumuzi, Tammuz] has made step forth from other people, who firmly establish the holy words of Inana …. After the flood had swept over, Inana, the lady of all the lands, from her great love of Dumuzid, has sprinkled the water of life upon those who had stood in the face of the flood and made the Land subject to them.” (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta [see §611.1ff., below, >>], 557-576 sub fin.) The cult of Dumuzi and Inana practiced by the people of Aratta went hand in hand, according to the epic, with a great skill in metallurgy, and Enmerkar was hoping to benefit materially from the latter, whilst adopting the former, in his construction of the temple of Eana. Aratta was a mountainous land, with rich metal deposits, and it was natural that the cult of the pre-diluvian Metal Craftsman Dumuzi would find its first or keenest post-diluvian adherents in such a place. Aratta controlled also the trade in the brilliantly azure colored and golden-flecked stone lapis lazuli, which was sacred to Inana, and was used to adorn the temples of Mesopotamia. It was mined in the mountains of Badakhshan — an extensive district forming essentially one long valley running up from the province of Balkh in Afghanistan.

174. That Enmerkar’s religious innovations were remembered long afterward, and particularly in the post-Biblical Nimrod traditions, is demonstrated by the following passage from the pseudo-Clementine Homilies, dating in their current form from around the beginning of the third century AD and based on post-Biblical Jewish and Christian sources:

Pseudo-Clementine Homilies IX. 3 “…. Many of his [Noah’s] descendants were ambitious of the kingdom, and being eager to reign, each one considered how it might be effected; and one attempted it by war, another by deceit, another by persuasion, and one in one way and another in another; one of whom was of the family of Ham, whose descendant was Mestren [= Mizraim], from whom the tribes of the Egyptians and Babylonians and Persians were multiplied. 4. Of this family there was born in due time a certain one, who took up with magical practices, by name Nebrod [= Nimrod], who chose, giant-like, to devise things in opposition to God. Him the Greeks have called Zoroaster. He, after the deluge, being ambitious of sovereignty, and being a great magician, by magical arts compelled the world-guiding star of the wicked one who now rules [= Lucifer, the planet Venus], to the bestowal of the sovereignty as a gift from him. But he, being a prince, and having authority over him who compelled him, wrathfully poured out the fire of the kingdom, that he might both bring to allegiance, and might punish him who at first constrained him. 5. Therefore the magician Nebrod, being destroyed by this lightning falling on earth from heaven, for this circumstance had his name changed to Zoroaster, on account of the scintillating [lit. living, i.e. moving, Gk. zôsa from zô, “live, revive, be quickened, move”] light-stream [‘roê] of the star [astêr] being poured upon him. (Note 1). But the unintelligent amongst the men who then were, thinking that through the love of God his soul had been sent for by lightning, buried the remains of his body, and honored his burial-place with a temple among the Persians, where the descent of the fire occurred, and worshiped him as a God. By this example also, others there bury those who die by lightning as beloved of God, and honor them with temples, and erect statues of the dead in their own forms. Thence, in like manner, the rulers in different places were emulous of like honor, and very many of them honored the tombs of those who were beloved of them, though not dying by lightning, with temples and statues, and lighted up altars, and ordered them to be adored as gods. And long after, by the lapse of time, they were thought by posterity to be really gods. 6. Thus, in this fashion, there ensued many partitions of the one original kingdom. The Persians, first taking coals from the lightning which fell from heaven, preserved them by ordinary fuel, and honoring the heavenly fire as a God, were honored by the fire itself with the first kingdom, as its first worshippers. After them the Babylonians, stealing coals from the fire that was there, and conveying it safely to their own home, and worshiping it, they themselves also reigned in order. And the Egyptians, acting in like manner, and calling the fire in their own dialect PHTHAE [= Ptah], which is translated HEPHAESTUS (Note 2) <lacuna here> he who first reigned amongst them is called by its name. Those also who reigned in different places, acting in this fashion, and making an image, and kindling altars in honor of fire, most of them were excluded from the kingdom. 7. But they did not cease to worship images, by reason of the evil intelligence of the magicians, who found excuses for them, which had power to constrain them to the foolish worship. For, establishing these things by magical ceremonies, they assigned them feasts from sacrifices, libations, flutes, and shoutings, by means of which senseless men, being deceived, and their kingdom being taken from them, yet did not desist from the worship that they had taken up with. To such an extent did they prefer error, on account of its pleasantness, before truth. They also howl after their sacrificial surfeit, their soul from the depth, as it were by dreams, forewarning them of the punishment that is to befall such deeds of theirs.”

Note 1. This etymology of the Greek form of the name, Zoroaster, reflects a traditional interpretation of the second element in the original Avestan name, Zarathustra, as “star,” though the proper or more original meaning was probably “camel.” The name as a whole is thought to mean “One who drives, herds, manages, cares for, cherishes (*zarat-) camels (ustra),” or, exchanging “star” for “camel,” “Careful herder of stars” — an appropriate Avestan name for the constellation Orion, which was called in Mesopotamia the “True, reliable, faithful Herder of Heaven,” and was identified with Nimrod. Another interpretation is “Glittering, or Golden-colored, Star,” which is similar to the pseudo-Clementine etymology. In Mar Abas Catina Bel the Titan, identified by Moses of Khorene with the Biblical Nimrod (Zoroaster), is destroyed by the arrows of the Armenian king and hero, Haig (Hayk), whose name means “Orion” (and the planet Mars) in Armenian. (§945ff., below, >>.) His corpse is then hung over a fire and burned by Haig on Mount Nemrut near Lake Van in sight of his wives and children. This is similar to the account in the pseudo-Clementines, but implies an identification of the consuming fire with the stars of Orion (cf. Inana = the Bow Star) rather than with Venus (Inana = Venus, Lucifer). On the slaying of Nimrod by Haig see §335, below, >>. Coals from the pyre might well have been preserved by the latter, as the pseudo-Clementine account says they were. Lighted lamps and perpetual fires played an important part in the pagan system propagated by the followers of Nimrod. The strange fusion of different figures, e.g. Ptah and Nimrod, Nimrod and Zoroaster, in the pseudo-Clementines, is explained by the belief that the slaying or sacrificing of one person by another meant the soul of the slain was absorbed by the slayer. (On this concept, see §332f., below, >>.) Here Haig (“Orion”) slays Nimrod. But Nimrod himself offered up his son in sacrifice, and that son was identified with Tammuz (§332, below, >>), and Tammuz (who was identified with Orion) was himself the murderer of Hephaestus (Ptah = Ham). (§321, below, >>.) The prophet Zoroaster, on the other hand, was consumed directly by the “fire of Orion.” (§101.19, above, >>.) Therefore the soul of Hephaestus (Ham) was absorbed by Tammuz, that of Tammuz by Nimrod, and that of Nimrod by Haig (“Orion”), who burnt Nimrod’s corpse in a fire, live coals from which were faithfully treasured by his followers, to form much later the pyre on which Zoroaster met his end.

Note 2. The Greek god Hephaistos, commonly identified with the Egyptian Ptah.

175. This remarkable passage preserves elements of a tradition the roots of which can be traced back to the third millennium BC. The celestial fire worshiped by Nimrod is identified here with the “world-guiding star of the wicked one who now rules.” This is a reference to Heilel Ben Shahar, “Shining One Son of Dawn,” in Isaiah 14, whose name is translated Eosphoros in the Septuagint and Lucifer in the Vulgate, which is a name applied in the Classical world to the two head stars of the constellation Gemini, the Twins. Heilel, Eosphoros or Lucifer is the king of Babylon. The two chief stars of Gemini represented in Enmerkar’s cult two forms of the god of the Underworld (Nergal, Mars), represented in post-biblical Rabbinic tradition as two fallen angels or nephilim, who attempted to seduce Naamah (otherwise the planet/goddess Eshterah, Ishtar or Venus), both in the prediluvian era and in the days of the Noachide Inundation and its aftermath. The goddess ascended to the stars in order to escape them. The nephilim were ousted by the Supreme God from the heavenly realm on account of their iniquity, and thrust down to the Underworld (hence Nergal is god of the Underworld). Here Heilel is that “fallen one.” His name is the Hebrew equivalent of a nominal formation from the Akkadian (Semitic Babylonian) verb elelu (= Heb. h-l-l, whence Heilel), meaning the “pure, bright, or shining, one,” and is used to translate the Sumerian MASH.MASH: this is the name of the constellation Gemini, meaning “Twins.” Otherwise the name of the constellation is written with a single sign only, MASH, and this is translated ellu, “bright, pure, shining” from the same root. Preceded by the sign for “god” the same signs MASH.MASH or MASH alone form a name for Nergal, the god of the barren Underworld. The Gemini twins themselves were viewed as two forms of the god Nergal, Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea. The birth of twins was accounted a bad omen. This was the result, it would seem clear, of the precedent set by the first set of twins, Cain and Abel. The ceremony of purification (elelu = “be purified”) was therefore intimately associated with that event. The interplay of good and evil, life and death, male and female, fertility and barrenness, amongst other oppositions, was seen in the duality of offspring. Nergal god of the Underworld held Ishtar captive in the Underworld until she was freed by the seizure and death of Tammuz, after which Tammuz and his sister alternated in the Underworld and Upperworld for six months each. As aforesaid, a ritual “sacred marriage” was performed in ancient Mesopotamia in which the king impersonated Tammuz and a priestess impersonated Ishtar (Sumerian Inana, Venus, representing femininity) in the same ritual. The Mesopotamian myth “Inana’s Descent” provides the mythological background to the ceremony. It explains specially the seasonal interchange of fertility and barrenness, six months being the average duration of the fertile and infertile seasons in Mesopotamia. Terms varied or were edited out in other versions and other climes. In the Mesopotamian interpretation of the theme, the banished god is the god of infertility and barrenness, and Tammuz the god of verdant new life.

176. The cult is said here to have been introduced into Babylonia by Nimrod (Enmerkar) from Persia, where it had its first adherents after the Flood. In the native Sumerian tradition similarly, the cult of Inana was introduced into Uruk (Babylonia) by Enmerkar from Aratta in the Iranian (Persian) highlands, where it existed in the immediate post-diluvian period. In the temple of Eana in the Jemdet Nasr period fire-pits have been found, where offerings and sacrifices were ritually burned. Nimrod is said here to have been the victim of the fiery demon (Lucifer) he worshiped, and Dumuzi in Sumerian myth perished at the hands of Inana (Venus) and her accompanying fiery demons from the Underworld. Inana represented “divine love” and in this account it was held by his devotees to have been “through the love of God his [Nimrod’s] soul had been sent for by lightning.” Note the connection already cited in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta between the love of Inana for Dumuzi after the Flood and the granting of dominion by Inana as a result — the same themes highlighted in the pseudo-Clementine account: “Inana, the lady of all the lands, from her great love of Dumuzid, has sprinkled the water of life upon those who had stood in the face of the flood and made the Land subject to them.” The third center of the cult in this tradition was Egypt, whither it was transmitted from Nimrod’s Babylonia, and where both Nimrod himself and the celestial fire were worshiped under the name of Serapis (Osiris). The migration of an élite from Sumer in the Jemdet Nasr period after the building of Eana in the Protoliterate period is well attested, and the cult of Osiris and Isis has obvious affinities to the cult of Dumuzi and Inana, as it was practiced in Southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia) from the time of Enmerkar onwards.

177. Another, and according to this account, the first, Egyptian name given to this deity was Ptah, the Greek Hephaistos, who, in the form of his embodiment, the Apis bull, was commonly identified with Osiris. (Amun [2] of the Egyptian Trinity, equated with Ptah [Greek Hephaistos] and Osiris, as in Jamblichus, De Mysteriis, VIII. 3.) But Ptah was also the Egyptian god of smithcraft, and corresponded in this role to the pre-diluvian god-king Dumuzi, the god of smithcraft, whose cult, in combination with that of Inana, seems to have been the centerpiece of, and original inspiration for, the religion of Enmerkar. In the Bible there was a pre-diluvian smith called Tubal-cain amongst the descendants of Cain (Gen. 4. 22). His sister Naamah (ibid.), according to Rabbinic tradition (Bereshith Rabba sect. 23), was the wife of Noah. Noah’s wife, in turn, was equated with Gaia, Mother Earth, the Great Goddess of the pagans, in the Sibylline Oracles and in Mar Abas Catina, who depended on them. This earliest section of the Oracles dealt with events in southern Mesopotamia (Shinar) just after the Flood, and its authoress, the Sibyl Sambethe, was alleged to be a “daughter of Berossus,” the Babylonian priest. In this context Ouranos and Gaia must represent the native Mesopotamian divinities An and Ki, Heaven and Earth. An, Heaven (Noah) was the husband of Ki, Earth (Noah’s wife Naamah). Ki was known otherwise as Antu, “Female complement of Anu (An),” and as Belet-ili, “Mistress of the gods.” Belet-ili was also identified with Ninlil, the wife of the air-god Enlil who usurped An’s position as chief of the gods, and with Ishtar, Venus, who usurped Ninlil’s role subsequently. Rabbinic tradition went on to relate of Naamah, or alternatively of one “Istehar,” that her beauty in the pre-diluvian era tempted the “sons of God” to sin. Istehar is the Babylonian Ishtar, Venus. Ishtar was the sister and consort of the smith-god Tammuz or Dumuzi. Similarly in Classical myth Aphrodite or Venus was the wife of the smith-god Hephaistos or Vulcanus (Vulcan), and his sister was Athena or Minerva. The Biblical Naamah was the sister of the smith Tubal-cain. In some MSS. of the Latin Exordium to Eusebius’ Chronicle (ed. Schoene, Chronicorum Libri Duo, Appendix II [Appendices p. 45]) Tubal-cain (“Thobel”) is said to have been the smith-god Vulcanus (and his brother Jabal, Silvanus, his other brother, Jubal, Mercurius, and his sister Naamah, Minerva): “And Ada bore Jabal [Ihobel], who was the father of those who dwell in tents, the shepherds of herds. Him they call Silvanus. And the name of his brother was Jubal [Iubal]. He it was who gave people the stringed instrument and the lyre. Some say he was Mercurius. Zillah [Sella] also bore a child, namely Tubal-cain [Thobel], and he was a worker of brass and iron. Some say he was Vulcanus. Now the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah [Noema], and some say of her, in turn, that she was Minerva.” (See further on these identifications, §140.0.1, above, >>.) Tubal-cain clearly was the pre-diluvian Dumuzi. As well as being the god of smithcraft, Tubal-cain was celebrated in post-Biblical tradition as the first cultivator of the vine, the “liquid fire.” Tammuz (Dumuzi), likewise, was the patron of viticulture, and so was his Persian counterpart, Jamshid. In Greece and Rome Dumuzi was called Dionysus or Bacchus. This god was “twice-born” because he appeared first before the Flood and a second time after it: (Diodorus Siculus III. 62. 10) “He [Dionysus] was feigned to have derived his birth twice from Zeus, because the vine [which was Dionysus in material form], like other fruits, having been destroyed in the deluge of Deukalion [Noah], and afterwards reviving from the flood, as if the presence of the God had again appeared among men, he was fabled in mythology to have arisen from the thigh of Zeus.” Just as there was a pre-diluvian and a post-diluvian Dumuzi, so there was a pre-diluvian and a post-diluvian sister of Dumuzi, the former being this Naamah, and the latter Sanchuniathon’s Athena (Anat), the daughter of Elos-Kronos (Enmerkar-Nimrod in Peri Theon). (See §337, below, >>.) Tubal-cain was noted as an “instructor” (AV), literally a “forger,” for every worker of copper (or bronze) and iron, according to the Bible, and Dumuzi of Bad-tibira (Wall of the Metalsmiths) was the god of smithcraft, as well as being a pre-diluvian king. The name Dumu-zi(d) breaks down into two elements: 1) Dumu = Offspring (animal or human) 2) zi(d) = reed, and hence to be firm or strong, or to be a support like a reed. The Hebrew name Tubal-cain is likewise composed of two elements: 1) Tubal = Offspring 2) cain = reed, from the root kwn, to be firm. Tubal-cain belonged to a family of herders, and Dumuzi of the pre-diluvian era was known as the “shepherd” or the “herder.” It seems, therefore, that Nimrod (Enmerkar) introduced the cult of his deified ancestor Tubal-cain (Dumuzi) into post-diluvian Erech (Uruk) in the form of the smith-god’s fire. Accordingly, the phase of construction and expansion at Uruk in the immediate post-diluvian era is designated by archaeologists the Chalcolithic (“Copper-Stone”) period and marks the beginning of the widespread use of copper technology. The cult was transferred subsequently to Egypt, where the smith-god was known as Ptah, and thence into Greece and Italy, where the same divinity was known as Hephaistos and Vulcanus. The fall of Hephaistos into the Underworld was well known in Greek myth, echoing the fate of his predecessor, Dumuzi, in Sumerian myth. Vulcan’s end is described by Milton in Paradise Lost as follows:

“Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From heaven, they fabled. Thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the crystal battlements; from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day; and, with the setting sun,
Dropped from the zenith, like a falling star,
On Lemnos, the Aegean isle.”

178. Copper, or, bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin or arsenic, was one of the metals forged by Tubal-cain. Copper in its native state was used as early as at least the ninth millennium B.C.: a piece from that era has been found at a cave-site in Shanidar in Iran. Copper tubes are attested at Çatal Hüyük, dating from around 6000 B.C., in Turkey. In Palestine, prehistoric copper has been found at Tell Abu Matar near Beersheba. Though copper had to be imported into Mesopotamia, metallurgy developed rapidly there in the pre-diluvian period. Bronze, however, was not in common use till after the dispersion from Babel, the Early Bronze Age being roughly coterminous with the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Meteoric-iron beads have been found in Egypt dating from the predynastic Naqada II period. The Sumerian word for iron is an-bar meaning “sky-fire.” Meteoric iron may have been the earliest form discovered. This, of course, was derived from falling stars and Inana in the Dumuzi myth is precisely a fallen star. Sanchuniathon records of the Phoenician woman-cum-goddess Astarte (= Nin-sumun, the mother of Tammuz, identified with Gula or Ishtar) that “in traveling round the world she found a star that had fallen from the sky, which she took up and made the object of a cult in the holy island Tyre.” (§397, below, >>.) However, the use also of terrestrial iron is attested in Mesopotamia, and of arsenical bronze at Tepe Yahya in neighboring Iran, already in the pre-diluvian period.

b. The Metalworkers in Egypt

179. It has been pointed out that the kingdom of Egypt was founded by an Hamitic warrior élite which migrated to Africa from Mesopotamia after the Tower episode. They brought their metal technology with them and this explains the efficiency and rapidity of their conquest of the Nile valley. In later tradition they were known as the “Mesentiu” or metal-workers, and Shemsu-Hor, “Followers of Horus.” The first king of Egypt was Mizraim, son of Ham, called Mer-nar (“Narmer”) and Men in Egyptian. His nephew was Nimrod-Enmerkar. The latter played a major part in the construction of the Temple Tower Eana and the city around it, but apart from the statement that the beginning of his kingdom was Babel (Eridu), Erech (Uruk) and other places in the land of Shinar, and that he directed his first “step” out of that land towards Assyria, the Bible is silent about his activity abroad, particularly in the post-Babel period. Archaeology confirms that Nineveh, the city built in Assyria by Nimrod before the dispersion (Genesis 10. 11), was founded in the Jemdet Nasr period, and this was precisely the era of the Tower. It was named after Enki, the Greek Kronos, under the name of “the Fish,” Nin or Nunu, and this Kronos was Nimrod. As regards his later movements, Sanchuniathion relates that El (“Elos”) or Kronos migrated from Trans-Euphrates to the “Land of the South” and there granted Tauthos (= Thoth, the Second Hermes) the whole of Egypt as his “royal dwelling-place.” Peri Theon claims Nimrod-Enmerkar, called Kronos, migrated in the latter part of his life to the regions west of Babylonia as far as Libya, i.e. the western bank of the Nile and the African hinterland beyond. This was Hamitic territory. The eastern bank of the Nile was part of what the Greeks called Asia, the land of the Semites. The earliest phase of Egyptian history was taken up with the conflict between the Hamites of southern Egypt, whose proper territory was the west bank of the Nile, and the Semites of the north and the eastern bank. The Samaritan chronicle Asatir c. 10th century AD records that immediately following the Dispersal from the Tower Nimrod assisted the Canaanites in their war against the Semitic Ludites of Egypt, who resented the Canaanites’ occupation of Semitic territory in the Levant, §626.25.1, below, >>. His uncle Mizraim-Men’s achievement was to weld the two kingdoms of Shem and Ham in the land of Egypt itself into one, but only by brutal subjection of the Semites. Mar Abas Catina lists Nimrod as “son” (which may simply stand for “nephew”) of Mizraim, and identifies him with Kronos, the Egyptian Geb. He identifies his father Cush with the Egyptian Sun-god (Amun-Ra, Helios), and consequently with Bel of Babylon, or earlier Asari of Eridu, the god of magic, and of the moon as well as of the sun. In his lunar aspect Cush was the Egyptian Thoth or Hermes, the second of that name, who was believed to have migrated from Babylonia to Egypt (Sanchuniathon’s Tauthos). It can be concluded, on this evidence, that Nimrod (Enmerkar) and his father Cush (Mes-kianga-sher) both migrated to Africa at the dispersion, along with Mizraim (Men), the founder of the Egyptian royal house, and were worshiped there as gods. In Sumer, the divinized kings were the immediate successors of Nimrod, — that would be, those he left to take his place on the throne of Uruk, — viz. Canaan (Lugal-banda) and his sons, Tammuz (Dumuzi) and Amraphel (Gilgamesh). Deification seems to have occurred in the same family at one and the same time, both in Egypt and in Sumer. Traditionally this was a consequence of the prophetic teaching of the eldest of them, the “Second Hermes,” Cush (Kasu, Mes-kianga-sher), son of Ham (Ammu, Utu or Puzur).

180. More famous than Geb was Geb’s son, Osiris. He was identified with the Phoenician Adonis, Tammuz, and with the Greek Dionysus. The tradition in the pseudo-Clementines was that Nimrod reigned amongst the sons of Ham and was worshiped as Ptah (= Apis = Osiris) in Egypt, or, otherwise, was the same figure as Ninus, the founder of Nineveh, who, according to the Excerpta Barbari, was the Egyptian god Serapis (Osiris). Ninus was the son of Nimrod, according to Peri Theon. Nimrod sacrificed his son and absorbed his personality, hence the fusion of the two figures. (See §332f., below, >>.) Nimrod was Geb (Kronos) and he was also Geb’s son Osiris (= Tammuz). The mythologies of Geb and Osiris became intertwined.

Left: Mizraim (Narmer Men) terrorizing the native inhabitants of Egypt Above: Mizraim’s successor Mut (“Den”) doing likewise

180.0.0.1. By way of preface to the following remarks and in order to elucidate somewhat the complicated family relationships between the figures, we shall preempt the conclusions drawn at a later stage in the study, and summarize the results here. Cross-references are found throughout the subsequent account to background assertions made and deductions drawn. The three first kings of Egypt were Men, Hor-Aha and Djer. These are the Biblical figures Mizraim son of Ham, Ayyah son of Zibeon the Horite, and Sidon son of Canaan. All three were identified with the god Khenty-Amentiu in the earliest Dynastic period of Egyptian history, and Khenty-Amentiu was later more famously known as Osiris. The Greeks called Osiris Dionysus (Gk. Dionusos). Because they were identified with the same god, the mythologies of these figures became inextricably confused, like those of Geb and Osiris referenced supra. Mizraim-Osiris was the founder of the Egyptian kingdom. His consort was Isis (known as Balthi, Baalat in Syria), originally a concubine of Noah, who had been kidnapped and corrupted by Nimrod son of Cush son of Ham. Mizraim-Osiris was adopted into the family and religious circle of the pagan Canaanites by Ayyah (son of Zibeon), who called himself “Horus” (the Horite) and the “son of Isis.” As a son of Isis he might also be counted a son of Mizraim-Osiris, as he was in antiquity, and is so commonly reckoned today. When Mizraim-Osiris perished by accidental drowning during an hippopotamus-hunt on the Nile, his body was committed to the sea. His remains were subsequently sought for disconsolately by his consort Isis, who traveled to Byblos in Canaan to find him. She failed in her quest but brought back from Byblos to Egypt a son of Canaan and Eshterah called Sidon, whom she believed to be the living re-embodiment of her husband. Sidon is the man-god called Tammuz in Mesopotamia, and Osiris, as we have seen, earlier Khenty-Amentiu, in Egypt. His name Sidon is from the root ṣ-d, “to circle round, prowl, hunt,” which is nigin in Sumerian, otherwise spelled nin, whence the name Ninus and Nineveh. (See §94, above, >>. and §334ff., below, >>.)

Sumerian nigin (and its synonym shu-nigin) also means “enclosing of a complete number of objects,” and therefore, “total, all,” and its synonym in this sense is Sumerian dur, which can also be translated into Akkadian as ṭurru, “(encircling) band,” or “yarn,” including “flax yarn.” The same idea of “encircling” and “total” is conveyed by the Egypian djer (cf. the similar-sounding Sumerian dur and Akkadian ṭurru) written with sign representing bound flax stalks, hence this person was called Djer in Egypt. Sumerian nin (nigin, shu-nigin) is otherwise translated saharu, taru and eseru in Akkadian, meaning “to go round, encircle, bind, ensnare” in which the bi-consonant root is s-r or t-r, the initial consonant of which alternates between the sounds s and t, and corresponds to the Egyptian dj (otherwise transcribed z) in Djer. The latter is simply the archaic Egyptian way of writing the same Semitic word for “encircle, enclose, ensnare.”

When grown to manhood, and having become king of Egypt, Sidon (Djer) perished mysteriously, he too whilst on an hunting expedition, in the mountains of Syria. Because his remains were available for burial, his tomb became the tomb of Osiris par excellence in Egypt and a great center of pilgrimage. Khenty-Amentiu, the god of the dead with whom all these kings were identified on their decease, was called Nin-gish-zida in Mesopotamia, and Damu, “The Son,” being originally Asari, the divine “Son” of the god Enki of Eridu and his wife the goddess Damkina, and also at a later period Damu the divine “Son” of Ninurta and his wife Gula. He represented the third function, the “Sonship,” in the Father-Mother-Son Triad. He was a dying-and-reviving god, whose revivification was believed to be evident in the renewal of natural life in the Spring. We shall now examine in greater detail the history and the mythology of these figures and of certain others in their circle.

180.0.0.2. From at least the time of the Middle Kingdom in the 19th century BC the Egyptians believed the god Osiris was a deified king of the First Dynasty; that he was, in fact, the next-but-one successor of Mizraim-Men, called Djer (also written Zer), whose tomb in Abydos was the site of the mysteries in midsummer already referred to. The practice of human sacrifice peaked in his time, as evidenced by the many subsidiary burials surrounding his tomb. The name Djer (meaning, “totality,” lit. “encircling”) was written with the sign of the bundle of flax. The Greek word for flax, flax yarn and fishing-net made of such, was “linos,” and a person known as Linos (“Flax”) was one of the children of the Phoenician Astarte. Astarte was the wife of El, i.e. of Kronos, Geb or Nimrod, before she became the wife of Canaan. Linos, a.k.a. Maneros, is also said to have been the “son” of the first king of Egypt (Herodotus II. 79), viz. of Menes or Mizraim. Nimrod consorted with Isis, called Balthi (Baalat) in Syria (see §321ff., below, >>), and Isis was the wife of Mizraim-Osiris, so at the minimum in this way, through Balthi’s liaison with Nimrod, Linos was Mizraim’s “son,” i.e. subordinate male relative. The Egyptians lamented Linos’ death because he was “cut off before his time.” Note the similarity to Djer, who was the next-but-one successor of Men, the first king of Egypt, and who was ritually lamented each year at the heliacal rising of Sirius. The cult of Maneros, according to Plutarch, was introduced into Egypt by Isis from Byblos. The temple of Baalat Gebal, Isis the “Mistress of Byblos,” in Byblos itself, dates from the same era as Djer’s tomb in Abydos. Isis failed to find the corpse of her “husband” Osiris when she went searching for it in Byblos, and instead came away with a wooden pillar which supposedly “contained” him, and with Astarte’s son, Maneros, his living embodiment. Tombs were dedicated to Linos (Maneros) at Thebes and Argos. The married and single women of Argos bewailed him in the month Arneios, when the sun was in Aries, as a boy brought up among lambs and, in this version of the myth, torn in pieces by dogs. Conon Narr. c. 19. Paus. II. 19. 1. comp. Propertius II. 10. 8. Connected with this ceremony was a festival called Arnis or Cynophontis at which a number of dogs were publicly slaughtered. Aelian N. A. XII. 34. Statius Theb. VI. 65. Conon ut sup. Athen. III. p. 99 F. The dog represented Sirius (called the “Dog-star”) and the summer heat (the “Dog days”) associated with the heliacal rising of Sirius, which caused the death of the lamented vegetation-god in the oriental, as well as in this Greek, interpretation of the myth. Horus was identified with Sothis-Sirius in Egypt, hence the Greek god Apollo, the equivalent of the Egyptian Horus, is said also to have been the slayer of Linos. Linos was a son of Hermes in Greek myth. The next-but-one successor of Meni (= Men, Menes), called “It,” or “Itet,” in the Abydos king-list, is thought to be Djer (as Djer, in a similar dynastic position, is called “It[et]” on the Cairo Stone), and this name “It(et),” along with that of his predecessor, “It(et?)” (so in the fragmentary Turin Canon), is transcribed identically “Athothis” in Eratosthenes (Athothis I and II, representing the two immediate successors of Menes), and interpreted, in its first occurrence, to mean Hermogenes, “Born of Hermes.” Linos (“Flax”) son of Menes, who was worshiped as a form of Dionysus or Osiris, can only be, on this evidence, Djer (“Bundle of flax”), the next-but-one successor of Men, who was similarly worshiped as Osiris.

180.0.1. Linos, therefore, the child brought by Isis from Byblos in Canaan, was the Egyptian king Djer, whose name was written with the hieroglyphic “bundle of flax.” The name Osiris, given to him at a subsequent period, was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics with a sign composed of a throne and an eye, pronounced “Asari,” or something similar. Asari, Osiris, was identified with the moon-god, as well as with the sun-god Amun-Ra. The Sumerian divine name Asari was likewise written with the sign ASAR, composed of an eye and a throne, and Asari was identified with the moon-god, as well as with the sun-god Bel-Marduk. Asari was the son of Enki, whose name means “Lord of the Earth,” and Osiris was the son of the Egyptian earth-god Geb. In the names Asari and its alternative form Osiris were represented the following concepts: 1) “The woman,” the “leading, or elder, lady,” written with the sign of the throne, which meant “chief one” (urun) in Sumerian, and in Egyptian stood for the word aset which was the name of the goddess Isis, the deified throne (ashte in Sumerian also = “throne”).

The remains of the Temple of Baalat Gebal at Byblos, Lebanon

The Site of the Temple of Baalat Gebal at Byblos

Sketch map of Byblos

The name Isis was translated into Greek as Palaia, “elder, or ancient, lady” (Diodorus Siculus I. 11. 4). The Canaanite divine name Baal (Bel) was interpreted similarly to mean vetustas (“aged state”) by Jerome (De Nominibus Hebraicis), and vetus by Isidore (l. 8. c. 11), i.e. “elder/senior male,” so the female form Baalat meant “elder/senior lady,” the goddess Baalat of Gebal (the “Lady of Gebal,” also known as Baalti, Balthi, “My Lady, Madonna”) being identified with Isis; Isis and Baalat, in other words, were equivalent names in Canaanite and Egyptian. Confirming this conclusion by another line of reasoning, the Sumerian word urun (“chief one”) could be written not only with the throne sign mentioned supra, but also with the sign EN, and EN is more commonly read in the Semitic dialect of Mesopotamia as “belu, beltu,” “lord, lady,” the latter or female form being identical to the Canaanite Baalat. Thus, the title Baalat, “Mistress/senior woman,” might be written with the sign EN in Sumerian, which could be read alternatively as urun “chief lady.” Urun, in turn, might be written with the thone sign as well as with the sign EN, and it was in the throne form that it was adopted in Egypt to represent the same person’s title, though in Egypt the throne sign was commonly read aset, “Isis, throne,” which had the effect of disguising its original Semitic pronunciation “Baalat.” The meaning of the throne element in the name, and sign, Asari is, therefore, “The Woman” (par excellence). The other concept represented in the name, and sign, Asari is: 2) “The Seed, or, Son,” written with the sign of the eye, which signified in Sumerian, amongst other things, damu, “son” (Antagal Frag. nn, line 8, at http://psd.​museum.​upenn.edu/​epsd/illl/html/Group/​Antagal_Frag_nn.htm, online 9-21-07). Damu was a name of Tammuz. Damu or Dumu was translated into the Semitic language of Babylonia as zēru, “seed,” in the sense “genetic offspring.” (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Volume Z, p. 89b, lexical section, from Antagal, ṭu-mu [= du5-mu, dumu] = MIN [viz. zēru, “seed”].) The equivalent Hebrew word, zera, “seed,” means “only child,” the sole heir to the inheritance. Under the figure of a lamp the same concept (son, heir, seed) was expressed in the translation of the Sumerian divine name Asari as Nur-ili “Lamp, or, Light of the gods, or, Great light:” the throne sign in this case indicated divine majesty and power (cf. Canaanite Baal, Baalat, “Senior, Elder, Powerful One”), and the eye sign a light or lamp. The oriental mind viewed the heir to the inheritance as the “torch-bearer” of the family line, that is, the fulfillment of the expectation for its continuation: the Hebrew word nir, corresponding exactly to the Babylonian nur in the divine name Nur-ili, meant literally “light,” “torch,” or “lamp,” but was always used in the symbolic sense “seed, heir” (Gesenius-Tregelles, s.v.). The eye was seated on the throne, as the child Horus, the Egyptian light-god, and the reincarnated Osiris, was commonly depicted seated on the lap of Isis, the deified throne. The name Asari, therefore, meant “The Woman’s Promised Seed.” The Sumerian name Asari was sometimes followed by the epithet “lu-hi,” in which the sign “hi” could be read alternatively “dug” or “duga,” “He (lu) who has been granted as a boon/​gratification/​satisfaction​ (duga).” Osiris, likewise was commonly titled Wenen-nefer, “He whose coming is a boon/​gratification/​satisfaction.” The same Sumerian word duga formed the last element in the name of the pre-diluvian ab.gal, or patriarch, Enme-duga, who corresponds to the Biblical patriarch Seth (§449, below, >>). The latter name means in Hebrew “appointed.” Eve interpreted the name as follows: “God has appointed me (Heb. shet = Seth, “appointed”) another seed (Heb. zera) instead of Abel whom Cain slew” (Gen. 4. 25). Her reference was to the Messianic “seed of the woman,” promised (“appointed”) since Eden to crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3. 15), in some future conflict flowing from the enmity “interposed” (ibid., the same Hebrew word shet) between the woman and the serpent and between her seed and the serpent’s seed.

180.0.2. Osiris reincarnated in Horus was the Egyptian equivalent of the Messiah. The serpent, according to the prophecy in Gen. 3. 15, was to afflict the heel of the seed and then receive from the seed a deadly wound to his head. The Egyptian myth told how Osiris was murdered by his brother, the god of confusion and disorder, and then avenged by the son in whom he was reincarnated, the serpent-slaying Horus. Horus was commonly depicted piercing the head of a serpent with a spear. Osiris was equated with the constellation Orion and consequently with Zoroaster, the Messiah of the Magi, in certain sectarian movements which operated on the fringes of early Christianity and incorporated elements of Zoroastrianism. The name Zoroaster was interpreted to mean “Scintillating light of the Star (Eshterah, Venus).” (§258, below, >>.) Isis was assimilated to the Egyptian Hathor and the Canaanite Astarte (Eshterah). (§340, below, >>.) Thus, the meanings of the two names, Osiris (Asari) and Zoroaster, are identical: literally “Light of Isis/Eshterah,” and figuratively, “The Woman’s Promised Seed.” Some sectarians went further, and promoted the idea that Osiris “the Good God” (Wenen-nefer) had descended amongst the Jews in the form of the Messiah Jesus, and was now embodied in the bread of the eucharist, as he was believed to be embodied in the grain of the Nile valley in native Egyptian paganism (Refer to this link [http://www.christianhospitality.org/​resources/​first-church-rome-online/​content/first-church-rome4#footnote27|region].)

180.0.3. The “Seed of the Woman” was symbolized in Egypt as an eye, representing the light-god Horus, seated on a throne. The eye of Horus was the subject of a whole complex of Egyptian myths. The sun was one eye of Horus, the moon was the other. The moon was a dissected or dismembered eye which was made whole again. By dismemberment was symbolized the waning, and by recomposition the waxing, of the moon’s light. Hence the moon represented, amongst other things, the dismembered sacrifice, and more particularly the child sacrifice, which was the most “sacred” of all in the perverted system of Nimrod-Enmerkar. The curious statements in Egyptian myth that the eye of Horus was “eaten” refer to the devouring of this abominable sacrifice. See further on the eye of Horus as the sacrificed child, §333, below, >>, §613, below, >>.

Excursus on the Libyan Dionysus Huas and his connection with Osiris and Maneros/Linos:

180.1. The Egyptian Osiris (Maneros/Linos) was commonly identified with the Greek god Dionusos, Latinized as Dionysus. Dionysus originally was the Zeus (Dio-) of Nysa (-nysus) in Arabia. He was a dying and reviving god, like Osiris. He was also known as Narkissos (Narcissus) and Antheus. Narkissos was believed to have died like Maneros/Linos by falling into water. Antheus was a by-name of Dionysus (Paus. VII. 21. 2). Dionysus was also known as Huas, and this name was associated with the mourning-ritual performed by the worshipers of the dying and reviving god for the following reasons. The Zodiacal sign Aries was the sign of Linos, as it was the sign of Tammuz in Babylonian astrology, and his death was mourned by his female devotees in the same pathetic manner as that of Tammuz and Osiris in the East. Sappho sung of Oitolinos (= Linos) in tandem with Adonis. See Suidas s.v. Linos, Diogenes Laertius Prooem. 4. Oitolinos means “Woe-Linos.” An alternative form of the name was “Ai-linos,” in which the initial element was the Semitic word “Ai” (ay, spelled with the letters aleph and yod), meaning “Woe.” He was so named because the original Semitic-speaking people who lamented his fate used that word in their mourning ritual. Yet another form of the name was “Aias” or “Ajax,” the initial letters of which, AI, AI, could be traced on the petals of the flower known in antiquity as the Hyacinth (the modern Tall Bearded Iris, Iris Germanica), rendering it sacred to the youthful dying god. Hence also he was called Huakinthos (Hyacinth). The name Huakinthos begins with the Greek rough breathing followed by Y (upsilon), representing the Semitic he + waw respectively, and spelling the word “Ho,” which, along with he+waw+yod, “Hoy,” is an alternative form of ay, “woe” (see further infra). The pattern on the hyacinth was read Y as well as AI, showing the Y represented the same cry of woe as AI. (The rough breathing, the initial h-sound, was counted as included in the pronunciation of the Greek letter Y.) An iota is found in the petal-markings, as in the case of the reading alpha, alongside the Y: YI, YI. This combination might be read in Greek as an aspirated upsilon followed by an iota, corresponding to the Semitic he+waw+yod, “Hoy,” “Woe;” but it meant nothing in Greek, so the aspirated Y alone is mentioned in Classical sources. Recalling the identity of Huas and Dionysus, the hero Huas, — whose name began with the aspirated Y, — was slain by a Tuphonic boar, or some

Opposite: The letters AI or Y (or YI) repeated on the petals of the ancient Hyacinth, the modern Tall Bearded Iris, Iris Germanica. Below: The ancient Greek A, alpha, looked something like an upturned capital Y. Qumran Cave7, Exod 28, 2nd/1st BC, papyrus roll.

other ferocious beast, that is, in an accident whilst hunting, in Libya, and mourned by his sisters the Huades (Hyades). These were represented by the stars in the shape of the letter Y in the face of the constellation Taurus, the Bull. Similarly, in post-Biblical Rabbinic tradition (Sefer Ha-Yetzirah, V. 1f.), the letter waw (= Greek Y) was represented in the Zodiac by Taurus. The Egyptians identified Taurus as Osiris. On Linos-Narkissos see Eustathius ad Iliad. XVIII, 570, p. 1223. Narkissos means “Torpid flower,” and that flower was sacred to Dionysus (= Osiris and Tammuz). Narqys (Narkissos) is found in Midrash Shir-ha-Shirim, on Song of Solomon 2. 1, as an interpretation of the Hebrew “Rose of Sharon,” and this, according to Rabbinic tradition, was a smaller version of the flower called in the same verse the “Lily of the Vallies.” (Jastrow, Talmudic Dictionary, s.v. Ḥavaṣṣelet.) Jesus Christ is the “Lily of the Vallies,” the Messianic King or Son of David of the Song of Solomon, the offshoot of the stem of Jesse, and hence in Christianized Europe the Lily of Song of Solomon 2. 1 was adopted as the symbol of Christian royalty. It was displayed, especially, on the equipment of the fifth-century Frankish king Clovis and of later kings of France, as the Fleur-de-lis (Lily Flower), which is known today as the Tall Bearded Iris. The flower’s religious-cum-regal associations reach much farther back into antiquity. It is found already in symbolic religious contexts in the palaces of Minoan Crete (see infra), and there it was an importation from the more ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Of the irises or fleurs-de-lis here mentioned, the only difference between the Narcissus and the Hyacinth was that the latter was a purple or blue iris bearing the markings interpreted as letters (hyacinthus scriptus), whereas the former was an unmarked iris. (Palladius, De Re Rustica, I. 37: “the Hyacinth, called Iris [lit. “rainbow”], or Gladiolus [lit. “little sword”], on account of the likeness of its leaves [to those things].”) In the Song of Solomon the “rose” or “lily” of 2. 1 was red, as it was used later (5. 1) in a simile to describe the color of the beloved’s lips. The Narcissus’ red color in Greek myth represented the blood of the fallen hero. In the Eleusinian version of the oriental mysteries of Osiris and Tammuz, Kore was picking narcissus when she was seized by Plouto, and taken down to the Underworld, after which time the flower bowed its head in grief. Narkissos had a beloved twin sister Echo, perfectly like him, corresponding to Geshtinana, the sister of Tammuz, in Sumerian myth. When Echo died, Narkissos mourned for her incessantly, and finally drowned, contemplating his own image (i.e. Echo) in a pool. (On the identity of Echo and the connection with Geshtinana, see §337, below, >>, and §422, below, >>.)

181. Plutarch records the belief in his day that the boy who fell into the water was Palaistinos, that is, that he was the eponymus of the Philistines, and, — according to the etymology of Plutarch himself, — of the Delta city Pelusium on the Mediterranean seaboard. See §620, below, >>. We shall find this eponym represents the last king of the First Dynasty of Egypt, Qaa, who was identified with the god Horus as a living king and Khenty-Amentiu (Osiris) when dead, and whose mythology was thus fused with that of the first three kings of the same Dynasty, identically identified. The place-name Pelusium is derived from the Greek word pelos, “mud.” It was a marshy area, hence the term used to describe it. Hebrew Peleshet, Pelishti or Pelethi, “Philistia, Philistine,” is derived from a root “probably kindred” (Gesenius-Tregelles, s. v. p-l-š), to p-l-t or p-l-ṭ, meaning “be smooth, sleek, hence slip away, escape,” the latter of which, in turn is the same as m-l-ṭ, whence meleṭ, “mortar,” from the idea of being “smoothed over.” The verb p-l-š means “roll (in mud, dust etc.).” Thus the Hebrew root of the name Philistine denotes a “smooth, slippery” substance, or activity in, or with, such a substance, and has a semantic affinity to the Greek pelos. The presumption of the etymology of Plutarch is that Maneros perished near Pelusium, and the tradition that a “pool” was the site of the fatal accident, points more precisely to the Sirbonian lagoon adjoining Pelusium, which was the lurking-place of Osiris’ murderer, Seth-Tuphon. The Philistines, so named after Palaistinos, are said in Genesis 10. 14 to have originated from Mizraim, or, alternatively, to have migrated from Caphtor, the land of the Caphtorim, who are listed with the Philistines amongst the descendants of Mizraim (Deut. 2. 23, Jer. 47. 4, Amos 9. 7, Gen., ibid.). This implies the Philistines were originally the “People of Pelusium,” who spread eastwards and north-eastwards along the Mediterranean coast from the Nile Delta.

181.1. There was a significant Hivite component in the population known as “Philistine” (= “Pelusiac”). The Hivites, a Canaanite people, were known to the Greeks as “Minaeans,” “Minyans,” or “Minoans.” The particular Minaeans/Minyans/Minoans referred to here were those “of Jerusalem” (“Solumoi” in Greek): that is, Hivites, a portion of whom, having survived the Hebrew conquest by a ruse, served as assistants in the Temple at Jerusalem. (On this and the following points relating to the Minaeans and Hivites see §140.2, above, >>.) Minoa was an ancient name for the Philistines’ principal city Gaza. It was so named from Minos of Crete (Stephanus Byzantinus s.nn. Minoa, Gaza), and Minos was the eponymus of the Minaeans. The Minaeans/Hivites inhabited parts of Canaan, and also desert regions between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Akaba, and along the coast of the Red Sea further to the south. From at least c. 800 BC the Minaeans of Yemen and other parts of Arabia acquired a script of their own, and the Minaean inscriptions confirm the importance to them of Gaza, which was the terminus of their caravan-route from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and a shipping outlet to the coasts of the Mediterranean.

181.2. The Hivites-cum-Minaeans were one of the nations of Canaan dispossessed by the invading Hebrews from some areas of Canaan, though not from the coastal areas around Gaza. The people later known as Philistines immigrated into Gaza and its environs from Caphtor, after the Hebrew occupation, towards the end of the second millennium BC, and it was these newcomers who ousted the Minaeans/Hivites from the coastal plains. The dispossessed population, the earliest known inhabitants, are referred to as “Avvites” in Deuteronomy 2. 23.

181.3. The ethnic name “Avvite” is formed from the root ‘-w-h, which is cognate to ’-w-h, meaning variously to “mark a limit or boundary, incline towards, curve, bend, twist, yearn after, cry,” etc. The latter, with initial aleph instead of ayin, is the root of the name Ayyah (earlier Avyah, Gesenius-Tragelles s.v.). Ayyah features in Genesis 36. 24 as a member of a notable Hivite clan. This suggests “Avvite” was the gentilic of a clan bearing the Hivite name Avyah or Ayyah. The Byzantine tradition was that Minoa (Gaza) was so named from Minos, when he set forth with his brothers Aiakos and Rhadamanthos (Stephanus Byz., s.n. Gaza), and these three names are surely the eponymi of the Hivites or Minaeans (Minos), of these same Avvites or Ayyites (Ai-akos), and of the Arabian Rhadamaei or Raamathites (on the last see §140.2, above, >>). The name Ayyah could be interpreted as “Cry of Woe,” and is identical in meaning, and in its initial two letters, to the Semitic “Ai” in the name Ai-linos, and the initial three letters of Avyah similarly spell the word ’-w-y, “woe.” A cognate word is “Ho” (h-w, also h-w-y, Gesenius-Tregelles s.vv.), with initial he (h, replacing aleph, Gesenius-Tregelles s. letter h), and this is the “Hu” (rough breathing = he, upsilon = waw) in Huakinthos. The Greeks seem to have preserved the eponymus of the Avvites, that is of the Minaean (Hivite) or primitive Philistine inhabitants of Gaza, in the form Ai​(-linos), or Ai-a-kos, or Ai-a‑s, or Hu-a​(-k-inthos = flower [inthos = anthos = Semitic n-ṭ–‘, “plant”] of Hua[s]), and the Hebrews in the form Ayyah or Avyah.

181.4. A Huakinthos-like fertility god was worshiped in Minoan Crete (§292, below, >>), and representations of the flower, the iris or Fleur-de-lis, in religiously significant settings, have been found by archaeologists in Minoan levels on the island. Just as Ai-linos, or Aias, under the name of Narkissos, had a sister called “Echo,” so the particular Ayyah named in Genesis 36. 24 had a sister called Anah, which is Hebrew for “Echo” (Gesenius-Tregelles s.v. Anah). Ayyah, according to Genesis 36. 24, “found” his sister Anah “at the hot pools in the wilderness.” Genesis 36. 24 should be translated as follows: “And the children of [the Hivite] Zibeon included Ayyah [LXX: Aie], as well as Anah: that was the Anah whom he [viz. Ayyah] found at the hot pools in the wilderness, at the time he was tending the shoals of mud for his father Zibeon.” The reading, “That was the Anah who found the pools [or, giants, or, mules] in the wilderness, when he was tending …. etc.,” though grammatically possible, implies Anah was male, and contradicts the plain statement of Genesis 36. 2 that Aholibamah, Esau’s wife, was the “daughter of Anah the daughter of Zibeon.” The usual explanation that “daughter” in both

The Huakinthos-like “Priest-King” of Minoan Crete with tall irises (hyacinths) in the background and wearing a crown and necklace of irises: “Glistening blue-black curls as handsome as the hyacinth’s.” — Lucian, Amores c. 26. A figure in plaster relief (reconstructed) from the end of the Corridor of the Procession leading to the Central Court of the Palace of Minos, Knossos, Crete.

instances here is in apposition to Aholibamah, wrests the Hebrew, and smothers the implication, surely intended, that females had more status than was customary in Hebrew patriarchal society, both in the culture of the Hivites, and in the personal life of Esau. Another genealogy tracing the wife of a clan chief through two generations of females occurs in the very same chapter (verse 39). Similarly, the translation “shoals of mud” is preferable, in the context (“hot pools”), to “asses.” The note in Genesis is a reference to the otherwise insignificant event which gave rise to an important pagan cult in Egypt and the further West. That is, Ayyah “found” his sister Anah at the Sirbonian lagoon. In the various Greek versions of the tradition, Ayyah was identified with minor deities (Narkissos, Linos etc.), as well as with the major deity Dionysus. So with Anah. Her name was translated “Echo” in the Narkissos myth, but it was also transcribed Anat in the Canaanite dialect (where the termination -t was exchanged for -h), and Anat was identified with the notable Greek goddess Athena. That we are dealing with the same historical figure, the Hivite Anah, under the name Athena, is evident from the fact that Athena was “found” in the same way Anah was “found:” Athena was abandoned as an infant at the lake “Triton,” — Triton being a name for the Nile, extended, as it was in antiquity, by the merging of its waters with those of the Sirbonian lagoon, — but was discovered there, and adopted by Dionysus, titled the Libyan Jupiter after his father Ammon. (§889.35, below, >>.) This is precisely the scenario envisaged here, in which Anah was “found” at the hot pools by her brother Ayyah (= Huakinthos, Narkissos, Dionysus, etc.). Not only that, but Libyan Ammon (Amun), Athena’s adoptive father, was the third in the series of Amuns (Zeuses or Jupiters) already discussed (§122.1, above, >>). In post-Classical medieval mythology (Boccaccio, Genealogiae, 1511, pp. 16ab, 40a, Raleigh, Works, vol. II, Oxford, 1829, p. 170f., Shelshelet ha-Kabbalah, Biegeliesen, New York, p. 222, Hottinger, Smegma Orientale, Heidelberg, 1658, p. 321ff.) he was depicted as a mortal man, a contemporary of Ninus son of Bel Nimrod and of Abraham, who was subsequently deified under the name Jupiter Lycaeus (the common Classical name), Jupiter, otherwise, Lycaon (sic Baronius Annales Eccl., s. ann. 259, para. 19, note 2, of the god worshiped on Lycaonia, the island in the Tiber) or Lycaonius (an astral name, see infra). He was held to have migrated to Athens from Arcadia, and to have been the father of Athena (Minerva), the tutelary goddess of that city, as well as of Dionysus. The name is found Hebraized as “Lisaniya,” presumably from the late Latin transcription Lichaonius = Lycaonius, with soft medial ch as in medieval French. This is said to have been the personal name of the deified Arcadian king. There is sometimes confusion in the medieval sources as to which of the three Jupiters he was, but he is always represented to be the Jupiter who was father of Athena. In Arcadia he overturned the altar of infant human sacrifice at Trapezous, and bore the name of that wicked one who offered the sacrifice, Lycaon (Gk. Lukaon). Lycaon was the founder of the earliest city in Greece, Lycosura, meaning that the idolatrous Lycaon clan was credited with bringing urban civilization thither. Lycaon and Lycaonius were alternative Classical names of the constellation Bootes, the constellation into which Lycaon was transformed, from a word meaning “wild dog” or “hunting dog” (Gk. lukos). In Hebrew the same constellation Bootes is called Zabua (ṣābû‘a), “hunting dog” or (less accurately) “hyena,” in Arabic Zibean (ṣib‘ā’n) = Heb. Zibeon. Lycaon means “he who has the character of a hunting dog,” and this is identical in meaning to the Hebrew personal name Zibeon (from zabua = lukos). See further §337.1, below, >>. Thus Athena and Dionysus the children of Jupiter (Ammon) correspond precisely to Anah and Ayyah the children of Zibeon.

181.4.0.1. According to the Defloratio Berosi the name of Ammon, viz. Jupiter (H)ammon, was bestowed on Hammon’s son Dionysius, and later by Dionysius on Mizraim-Osiris, who was adopted into his family, and thus became known as Jupiter Ammon and Jupiter Olympicus. This last was the Jupiter who consorted with Niobe the daughter of Phoroneus of Argos. (See §894.1, below, >>.) Niobe’s human husband, Amphion, the grandson of Lycaon, was instructed in the art of playing the heavenly lyre by Apollo, or alternatively, by Hermes. Niobe herself ended up transfigured into stone by the judgment of Zeus (Jupiter) or Apollo. Clement of Alexandria (2nd century AD, Protrep. ed. Migne, PG VIII., col. 220) identified Niobe with Lot’s wife, who was similarly transfigured, in her case into a crystalline pillar. If the Libyan Ammon = Lycaon, and Clement’s identification is accepted, we might expect there to be some similarity between the Greek mythology of Lycaon and the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The connection, in fact, between the stories is clear. Lycaon’s family is said to have been wicked in the extreme and to have practiced child sacrifice and cannibalism. Zeus decided to investigate their crimes for himself, and determine the accuracy of the reports he had heard about them. He therefore took on human form and paid a visit to their city in the guise of a stranger. The Lycaon clan set before him a meal of human flesh. Zeus overthrew the table (Gk. trapeza) on which the gruesome repast was laid, giving its name to the place where the event transpired (Trapezous in the Peloponnese, see further on Trapezous = Sodom, §894.1, below, >>). He then blasted the town with thunderbolts, turning Niobe, the wife of Lycaon’s grandson, into stone, and destroying all but one of the sons of Lycaon. This fortunate one escaped through being hidden away on a mountain by Mother Earth. Likewise in the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: God came down to investigate the sins of Sodom and its twin city in human form, accompanied by two angels. The cities were inhabited by Canaanite clans (Gen. 10. 19), and were included in the territory of the Horite clan of Zibeon (= Lukaon, Lycaon), Gen. 14. 6, 36. 20ff.: Zibeon is also referred to as an Hivite, which is equivalent to Hittite (see §140.2, above, >>), and Sodom is described as the “sister” city of Jerusalem, whose “mother” was an Hittite (Ezek. 16. 3, 44-56), which implies Sodom was originally Hittite-cum-Hivite, like Zibeon. The northern border of Mount Seir inhabited by the Horites (= Hivites) ran roughly along the southern edge of the Dead Sea, which, before the destruction, was where the cities were located (Gen. 14. 3). Having found the reports of their wickedness to be true, God destroyed the cities by fire, but allowed Lot and his immediate family to escape. Lot’s wife, however, looked back on the burning cities, contrary to God’s instruction, and was turned into a pillar of salt. Thereafter Lot found refuge in a cave in the mountains east of the plain where the cities were located. (The most famous individual peak in that range is Mount Nebo, named after the planet-god Nebo, — viz. Mercury. Mercury is the Greek Hermes and/or Apollo, the heavenly tutor of Niobe’s husband in the Greek mythological account, — and Nebo, with transposition of the vowels and a Greek grammatical termination, produces the name Niobe. The implication is that Lot’s wife was transformed into the fabric of the mountain.)

It is remarkable that in the Biblical account Lot’s daughter begot a son by her own father Lot and called this son Ben-ammi, otherwise Ammon, which name includes the Canaanite divine name Ammi (Ammon). By calling her son Ben-ammi, “Son of Ammi,” Lot’s daughter was effectively identifying the father of the child with the god Ammi or Ammon. The Spanish antiquarian Sota, based on the reference in Clement of Alexandria and medieval and Renaissance traditions springing from it, identified this Ammon of the Biblical account with the Libyan god Ammon. (Francisco Sota, Chronica de los Principes de Asturias y Cantabria, Madrid, 1681, pp. 104ff., 111, 113ff., 118.) Lot was, indeed, a descendant (and therefore also a reincarnation, according to the ancient Canaanite belief) of the Libyan Ammon (= Zibeon, Lycaon), because he was a grandson of Terah, the son-in-law of Nimrod, and Nimrod was the son of Mizraim (sic Mar Abas Catina), that is, of Mizraim-Osiris or Jupiter Ammon, the adopted son and namesake of the Libyan Ammon (= Zibeon, Lycaon etc.). Thus, Ammon (Zeus, Jupiter), in the form of Lot, was the husband of Niobe. Niobe’s husband was also known as Amphion, and this name seems simply to be a transliteration of the divine name Ammi (with dissimilation of the medial -mm- > -mb- > -mp-), followed by the termination -on, as in the alternative form of the Oriental name Amm-on. Just as Lot’s daughter (and consort) had a son called Ammon, because he was the “son of Ammi” (Ben-ammi), so Niobe is said to have had a son Amphion, bearing the same name as her husband. It was Amphion who was tutored in lyre-playing by Apollo and/or Hermes. Amphion built Thebes in Greece miraculously, as it was thought, by moving the stones to the god-instructed strains of his lyre, as Ammon (the god Ammon, viz. Amun) was the divine constructor of Thebes in Egypt, known as No-Ammon, or “Abode of

The Niobids or children of Niobe (Lot’s wife) fleeing from the fiery darts of Apollo (a fresco found, appropriately, in the ruins of Pompeii)

Amun,” the more ancient original, and mystical archetype, of the Greek city. As regards the name of the latter Malalas (Book 2. 35, trans. Jeffreys) says: “35. Amphion, the lyre player, immediately built a very large city which had twelve gates and was formerly the village known as Enchilia. The brothers called this city Thebes after their father, at their mother Antiope’s command. They reigned over Thebes for many years and then, the region round it was also called Thebes. The emperor Lykos, Dirke’s husband and their uncle, died in the war. Kephalion has written these facts truthfully but the most learned Euripides wrote a play poetically, saying that Zeus in the form of a satyr seduced Antiope, and that from this were born Zethos and Amphion, the musicians. He meant that their father Theoboos was descended from Picus Zeus by the process of metempsychosis, when he stated that Zeus seduced Antiope after being transformed into a satyr, which in the Boiotian language means into another more lowly body.” Here Theoboos, the eponymus of Thebes, and a “satyr,” is a reincarnation of Zeus and the father of Amphion and Zethos. “Satyr” = Seirite, and the Zeus of Thebes is Ammon (Amun), otherwise Zibeon (Lukaon). This suggests the name Theoboos is a simple transcription of the name of the Seirite Zibeon or Zabua, with Greek theta for initial sade in the oriental name (as likewise in the form Thabion, see §337.2, below, >>). Thebes would be, according to this understanding, the “City of Zibeon.” An alternative tradition (Hyg. Fab. 7) held that Lukos (Lykos in the citation supra) was the husband of Antiope. He was suspected also by his second wife (Dirke) to be the father of Amphion and Zethos: but Lukos is the “wild dog” referenced in the name Lukaon (see further infra), and here means that particular animal-form of Zeus. Amphion had a brother Zethos, as Ammon (Ben-ammi) had a brother Moab. (Malalas, ibid., 37, names the native village of the Sphinx which afflicted Thebes in the era following Amphion and Zethos “Moabe.”) The name “Sheth” (Heb. Shet) was given to Moab, Num. 24. 17), and the Greek Zethos duplicates precisely the form of this name Sheth, in which the initial Greek “z,” as elsewhere, stands for the Oriental initial “sh.” (See §290, below, >>, §352, below, >>.) “Sheth” has been taken to be an allusion to the Egyptian god Seth, who was the god of the Asiatics of Canaan. The Hebrew Ammon and Sheth (Moab) would correspond, in that case, to the Greek Amphion (Ammon) and Zethos (Sheth, Moab). Amphion and Zethos were the Dioskouric twins of Thebes, representing the two chief stars of Gemini, which were, in turn, identified with Hermes and Apollo. (In an Egyptian context, and in relation to Gemini, Apollo is a name for Ares, Mars, god of the underworld, see §342, below, >>, §613, below, >>, §626.17.4, below, >>, the two chief stars of that constellation being twin forms of the god of the underworld; but one of them is said to have had the “same quality as Hermes,” or is outright identified with Hermes, hence Hermes here.) The divine tutor(s) of Amphion, Apollo and/or Hermes, represent the Egyptian divine twins, Horus and Seth, the rising and setting forms of Hermes/Mercury (= Nebo, viz. Hermes = Min, or Amun-Min). Horus (= Amun) and Seth correspond, in turn, to Ammon (ancestor of the Ammonites = Amphion) and Moab, ancestor of the Moabites. As can be seen in the Manethonian Supplement to Berosus (c. AD 736), §890.1, below, >>, sections 6 and 7, the Latin Zetus (Greek Zethos) is used to represent the name of the brother of Amphion of Greek myth and legend, as well as the Egyptian royal name Seti, of the first king of Manetho’s Dynasty XIX (called the Dynasty of the “Larthi” in the Supplement), which latter is formed from the name of the god Seth. That the Zet(h)us of the pair Zet(h)us and Amphion in the Supplement is the same as Zet(h)us of Dynasty XIX, as the text itself implies, is proven by the designation of the whole dynasty as that of the “Larthi,” since the latter is the Etruscan form of the Latin Lares (Roscher, Lexikon, s.v. Lares), who are the Curetes, or Korubantes, viz. the Dioskouroi (Nigidius in Arnobius Adv. Pag. III. xli.). Zethos and Amphion are the Dioskouroi of Thebes, the prototypical Dioskouric pair, and here in the Supplement similarly they stand at the head of the “Larthi,” that is, of the “Dioskouroi,” of Dynasty XIX. The idea seems to have developed as a result of the fact that multiple sets of fathers and sons, and/or pairs of brothers, called Sethos (or Sethos-Ramesses) and Ramesses, the ancestors and first kings of Dynasty XIX, were identified in Manetho with Aiguptos, the eponymus of Egypt, who was originally Mizraim or Osiris, or Osiris re-embodied in Horus, the brother and binary oppositional form of Seth. (Go to this link for further information on Aiguptos and the Ramessid succession: http://​www.​christianhospitality.​org/​resources/​exodus-online/​content/​exodus10.html​#Section202bfn [§S-202b, footnote].) Mizraim-Aiguptos was the head of the First Dynasty of eight Kabeiroi (otherwise Dioskouroi), duplicating the original Kabeiroi of Noah’s container (§626.2, below, >>, with cross-reference). Osiris (Ammon) and his brother Seth are therefore in the context of Dynasty XIX Sethos (Seti, “he of Seth”) and Ramesses (Osiris), Seti being also titled Ramesses (= Aiguptos = Osiris) after his father. As the kings of Egypt were all identified with Osiris/Horus, Dynasty XIX might be viewed as a series of so many Osirises, Horuses, Seths, or Ammons, and therefore as a series of Dioskouroi. (On multiple sets of Kabeiroi, Dioskouroi, Larthi, or Curetes, subsequent to the First Dynasty see §613, below, >>.) The first of the Larthi of the Manethonian Supplement was “Zetus” (Manetho’s “Sethos-Ramesses”), that is, Seti I, the founder of Dynasty XIX. Aiguptos (Seti I) expelled his brother Danaos (Haremheb), according to Manetho, and the latter fled to Argos in Greece, whither he was followed shortly thereafter by the “sons of Aiguptos.” Lynkeus, “son of Aiguptos,” became the next king of Argos, and the progenitor of its royal line. Zethos (Zetus), that is, Aiguptos under another name, also expelled Kadmos (Cadmus) from Thebes, according to the Manethonian Supplement. In the context this is a reference to the spread of Egyptian hegemony under the New Kingdom pharaohs of Dynasty XIX, through their interaction with the royal line of Argos, into the Canaanite zone of Thebes in Boeotia. Qedem (“East”) was the Egyptian name for Canaan and Syria, which Seti I himself subdued (and this would be equivalent to Zethos’ subduing of Kadmos [Qedem]); whilst Boeotian Thebes, originally known as Kadmeia after the Canaanite eponymus Kadmos (Qedem), was held to have been founded by Canaanites. This Boeotian settlement now became the “Abode of Amphion” or Thebes, so named after the Egyptian “Abode of Ammon,” No-Ammon, Thebes, when Zethos and Amphion campaigned against it with their Argive allies, seized it, and “miraculously” built its walls. The subsequent campaign of the Seven against Thebes and the Epigonoi under king Adrastos of Argos, has been thought to be a reflex of the oriental motif of the war of the “Seven” rebel sons of Enmesharra (the god of the underworld, corresponding to the Egyptian Seth), against the gods. The figure of Enmesharra was anciently traced in the stars of Gemini: the Dioskouroi of that asterism are twin forms of Enmesharra. Here again, in effect, the Argives descended from Aiguptos, are identified with the Dioskouroi.

For Egyptian Seth/Shutekh = Zibeon, see §148.1, above, >>. Zibeon himself also bore the name Ammon, supra, and thus the name Seth/Shutekh could pass down from Zibeon to Lot and his offspring, as well as the name Ammon. Lot’s wife was a subject (Heb. “daughter”) of the king of Sodom, Bera (Heb. b-r-‛), Gen. 14. 2. The name Bera means “place where one finds food/pasture.” (§209.3, below, >>.) In the Greek myth Niobe is referred to as the “daughter of Phoroneus.” The name Phoroneus is derived from the Greek word phoros = (of a geographical location) “productive of food/pasture.” The Hebrew consonants in the name Bera correspond to the Greek consonants in phoro- (b-r-‛ = ph-r-), with Gk. p (phi), as commonly in other instances, for Heb. b/p. The two names have the same form and meaning. Therefore Bera = Phoroneus. The spread of these traditions from the region south of the Dead Sea to Greece and the further West may be presumed to have to do with the flight of refugees from that region following the devastating campaigns of Amraphel against Bera towards the end of the third millennium BC, and the even more devastating consequences of the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah a short while thereafter. Some chronological confusion was introduced into the Greek accounts because those refugees included Oguges (Og) of Hebron (in Palestine), alternatively of Thebes (in Greece), and the Oriental Og was dated variously, and confusingly, to the time of the Noachide Flood (being a remnant of the pre-diluvian giants), and/or to the time of Abraham’s razzia against Amraphel (Og the “escaped one” from Sodom), and/or to the time of Moses (Og of Bashan). (See §112, above, >>, and go to this link: http://​www.​christianhospitality.​org/​resources/​exodus-online/​content/​exodus10.html, sub fin., §S-206e, footnote 36a.) For that reason the destruction of the house of Lycaon and the Niobids was misdated in some Greek accounts to the first of those eras, namely to the period immediately preceding the flood of Deukalion-Noah, instead of the second, viz. the overthrow of Sodom.

181.4.0.2. A traditional connection between the Arcadian god Lycaeus and the Hivite clan of Zibeon is found in Roman mythology also. The Arcadian immigrants who accompanied Evander to the Palatine hill on the future site of Rome towards the end of the second millennium BC brought with them the cult of the Lycaean god of their native land, Arcadia. As a form of Amun, this god was identified with the Greek Pan (Egyptian Min = Amun) and the sun-god Apollo (Amun Ra), as well as with Zeus (Amun = Jupiter as supreme god). Evander’s people worshiped him under the name Pan Lycaeus, Pan being known as Faunus in Italy. They introduced a festival of the god called the Lupercalia (from the Latin “lupus,” wolf or wild dog, corresponding to the Greek “lukos,” as in Lycaeus). Faunus was titled Lupercus, the “wolfling,” which is a translation of the divine title Lycaeus. The immigrant worshipers of Lycaeus named the hill where they settled Palatine, after their native town Pallantium in Arcadia, which, in turn, was named after Pallas, the giant “father” of Athena. Pallas bequeathed on his daughter Athena her common title “Pallas.” Pallas is an alternative translation of Zibeon, meaning the “brandisher.” (See further on this §337ff., below, >>.) The Hebrew root of the name means to “dip, or, immerse, sink into, to ravine, brandish, seize,” and from this was formed the Hebrew word for “hunting dog,” that is the “ravining beast.” In Italy the adoptive father Ayyah son of Zibeon was called “Faunus” (see §148.1, above, >>, with cross-references, on Ayyah = Hor-Aha = Faunus, and amongst the cross-references particularly §626.15, below, >>, §626.4, below, >>), and the adopted daughter Anah was called “Pallantia” (or, “Palant[h]o”). It was the custom in this line to identify kings with the god Amun ([H]ammon, the Libyan Zeus, Jupiter, Pan, Faunus, etc.) and both Ayyah and Zibeon were so identified. (Ayyah = Dionysius, the Libyan Jupiter, Zibeon = [H]ammon, the Libyan Jupiter his father, §889.35, below, >>.) The daughter was otherwise known in Italy as Lavinia, alternatively Launa, or Dauna, alternatively Duna. In the Hebrew medieval chronicle Yosippon ([Book I] Pereq 2f.) Lavinia is called Yaniyyah (or Yoaniyyah), and she is identified with the Hebrew demoness Lilith ([Book I] Pereq 3), who is, in turn, identified in Rabbinic literature with Naamah, the sister of Tubal-cain, and Naamah in the Exordium of Eusebius’ Chronicle (§140.0.1, above, >>) with Minerva (Athena). The name Lavinia is from the Latin lavo, “dip, immerse” (compare the meaning of the Hebrew name of the chief of her adoptive clan, Zibeon), and the form with initial d is probably not a mistake, but an alternative form, as d‑v‑‘‑n (whence Dauna, Duna) = Hebrew z‑b‑‘‑n (ṣ-b-‘-n), whence Zibeon: d alternates in Hebrew and Aramaic with ṣ as well as with l, so Dauna (Davinia) = Lavinia = Zabinia = “the Zibeonite.” Palanto-Pallantia-Lavinia is described variously and significantly as the daughter of Faunus, and of Latinus. Latinus is the eponymous ancestor of the Latins, and in Rabbinic sources is identified with the Hivite Lotan, the brother of Zibeon (Gen. 36. 20). See §889.89.3, below, >>. For Anah (Palanto-Pallantia-Lavinia), as the daughter of Ayyah (Lupercus-Lycaeus-Pan-Faunus) son of Zibeon, was also the “daughter” (dependent female relative) of Lotan (Latinus). Given that l-v-n (or d-v-n) in the name Lavinia represents the Hebrew/Aramaic ṣ-b-‘-n, as in Zibeon, it is obvious Latinus’ brother Lavinus (= “Davinus”), the eponymus of the city of Lavinium, is Zibeon himself. Pallas (Zibeon) was believed to have attempted to rape Athena (Anah), but was slain by her in consequence. This is doubtless the same event commemorated in the popular Classical myth which relates how Pan (Zibeon) seduced the nymph Echo (Anah), and begot by her the wryneck (Iunx, whence “jinx”): the bird, which hisses like a snake, was bound to a revolving wheel as a charm to recover unfaithful lovers, and hence its name came to mean “spell,” as well as “Panspipe” or Syrinx. As Pan was an incubus, the rape was probably understood to be a spiritual, not a literal, event, and the avian-cum-spiritual fruit of the supposed union is indicative of the same.

181.4.0.3. Gen. 36. 24 reads, according to the common translation: “That was the Anah who found the yemim [variously understood: mules, pools, monsters, etc.] in the desert when he shepherded the asses of his father Zibeon.” The most important Rabbinic commentary on this passage, Midrash Bereshith Rabba, nowhere specifically translates it as if (the male) Anah is the subject of the verb “found,” but it was so understood in the Targums and other Rabbinic sources. Indeed the Yerushalmi text of the Midrash represents Ayyah and his father Zibeon as the subjects of the action of the verb “found,” as if drawing on an earlier interpretation of the Hebrew. Originally it was Ayyah who “found” Anah “at” the hot pools, not Anah who “found” the “pools” (or “mules” etc.). The common understanding arose, it seems most likely, on account of the sexual ambiguity of Anah/Anat in the underlying tradition, since she was known for her love of the male art of combat. If Anah was understtod to be male, the male subject of the verb “found” might be thought to be Anah rather than Ayyah. In the pagan system Anah’s male aspect became liable to be identified and confused with the god-man whose name she bore by adoption (into the family of Ammon or Zeus, being therefore known as “Pallas” = Zeus Pallantios), as well as finally, and more conclusively, by the “robbing of her soul” on the part of her father Elos-Kronos (Elos = El = Zeus), according to Sanchuniathon, when he decapitated her in a fit of anger, and thus fused his personality with hers. (On the decapitation of Athena-Anat-Anah, and her identification with Elos-Kronos and with her adoptive father Pallas etc., see particularly §337ff., below, >>, amongst the other passages referenced supra.) Commenting on Gen. 36. 24, which describes, according to this later understanding, how Anah discovered the yemim, Midrash Bereshith Rabba c. 82 says the “poisonous lamiae [Heb. tanney ha-esh, lit. ‘lamiae (sic LXX for tannim) of fire’] and hybrid creatures [kilaayim]” were not made in the six days of creation, but they were created in the days of Anah: the word yemim is here interpreted to mean hybrid creatures. In view of the earlier mention of “lamiae” (tanney ha-esh) in the Midrash in parallel with “hybrid creatures,” and the fact that under the term “lamiae” were subsumed “empusae,” or ass-footed hybrid creatures, otherwise onokentauroi or ass-centaurs, which latter had a human torso and the lower body-parts of an ass, the Rabbis may be taken to be referring, more generally in this instance, to hybrid creatures with a human torso and body parts of an ass. (Empousai = lamiai, Philostratus, Vit. Apoll. IV. 25, and Theodoretus, Ad Esai. XIII. 21: Empousai was the ancient, and onoskelidai [“ass-legs”] the modern name for what the Bible calls onokentauroi.) It is likely the reference is to yemim in the sense emim, “giants, monsters,” as in some of the Targums and in the Samaritan version, since these terms were used to denote creatures combining the body-parts of different animals. The word yemim means literally “the hot ones,” and signified originally the “hot pools” beside which Ayyah found the abandoned Anah. However, the word “hot” in Hebrew could mean also “hot with rage,” and, with an initial aleph in the form emim, was used to denote “raging ones” or “giants” (that is, nephilim, strictly, “fallen spirits” incarnated in giants) who terrorized the Hebrews when they first entered the land of Canaan.

181.4.0.4. Hot, sulfurous pools were themselves the kind of place inhabited by “fallen spirits,” so when Anah was discovered beside the “hot pools,” according to the original meaning of the text, she might also be understood to have been found “in the company of” (eth = “beside” or “in the company of”) these “giants” or “monsters” (reading yemim as emim). This meaning clung to the word in later times, and when also the male aspect of Anah came to prevail over the feminine aspect and the male Anah was believed to be the subject of the verb “found,” then “he” (Anah) was held to have “discovered emim,” viz. hybrid monsters, in the desert when he was tending Zibeon’s asses. This stage of the tradition is illustrated by the midrashic expansion of the Biblical verse in Sefer ha-Yashar (ed. Haktav Institute, Jerusalem, 1987 [www.​hebrewbooks.​org,​ 2009], p. 113f. = trans. Noah, 36. 28ff.): there (the male) Anah is surprised one day as he is shepherding the asses of his father Zibeon by the emergence out of a troubled sea (yemim = bubbling hot pools) of compound monster-beings (yemim = monsters), having the body-parts of different animals, who leap upon his asses and ride off with them into the desert, never to be seen again. The ass-centaur (half-ass, half-man), like the simple centaur (half-horse, half-man), may be considered, with Palaephatus (Peri Apiston 1), to be a mythic representation of a human riding an equid, viz. an ass or horse. In the above account the “ass-centaurs” are monstrous spirits riding asses, but still hemionoi, literally “half-asses” or “hybrid asses,” in the sense described

181.4.0.5. Some ancient commentators preferred a rationalistic interpretation of the verse. Then the hemionoi or “hybrid asses” extrapolated from the Biblical reference to yemim were understood to be a literal breed of equids invented (“found”) by Anah. More specifically Anah was thought to have been the first to breed “Liburnian” (= Venetian) equids, by crossing wild asses (onagers) with his own domesticated she-asses: Liburni, “Liburnians,” was a name applied to the Veneti (Gk. Enetoi) in Northern Italy, who were famous for breeding horses. This understanding is illustrated by the Targum of Jonathan on Gen. 36. 24 : “This is the Anah who bred wild asses with she-asses and in time found Liburnians who sprung from them.” (See Buxtorf, Lexicon, s. b-r-n, k-d-n, and Jastrow Talmudic Dictionary s.v. Burniy, “Liburnian,” reading Burniyyatha, “Liburnians,” with some texts of Targum Jonathan on Gen. 36. 24 [corr. “2” to 24 in Jastrow]. Buxtorf and Jastrow preferred to emend the text, because they took the word “Liburnian” here to be the common adjectival noun, meaning “Liburnian ships,” that is triremes, and that made no sense.) Venetian equids (hemionoi) were famed in the ancient world, and are mentioned already in Homer, in connection with the Gk. Enetoi = Latin Veneti (otherwise Liburnians). Homer, Iliad 2. 851f.: “And the Paphlagonians did Pylaimenes of the shaggy heart lead out from the Enetoi, whence is the breed of wild hybrid asses [hemionoi].” Eustathius comments on this passage: “The Enetoi are a nation located in the vicinity of Paphlagonia, where the idea of a breed of hybrid asses [hemionoi] was first realized.” (As regards Homer’s assertion that the Paphlagonians came “out from the Enetoi:” the Liburnians were Mashites descended from Mash son of Aram, §888.8, note, below, >>: “Further on this side of the range of Mount Adula reaching as far as Mesembria, you will find the Mesei Lyburni, from the chieftain Mesa [Mash son of Aram].” Thus Mashites = Liburnians or Enetoi/Veneti, and Mash was the father of Nimrod (Yaqubi, Masudi), Nimrod (Kronos) father of Picus-Zeus, father of Libya, mother of Agenor (Peri Theon, John of Antioch, ed. Muller, FHG IV, p. 544, frag. 6. 14, 15), father of Phineus, father of Paphlagon, eponymus of the Paphlagonians; hence the Paphlagonians were descended from the Enetoi.)

181.4.0.6. The actual reading “Liburnians” in the Targum (Burniyyatha) is to be preferred to the common modern emendation (favored by Buxtorf and Jastrow) kudnayyatha, “mules,” because mules are hybrids of horses and asses and there is significantly no mention of horses in the Targum. The “she-asses” there are said to have been mated with “wild asses,” that is, onagers, not horses. So in Aristotle (Hist. An. vi. 36. 1): “In Syria are found the so-called hybrid asses [hemionoi], a different race from the hybrids between the horse and the ass {that is, mules}, but resembling them in appearance …. These hybrid asses propagate between themselves, as is evident from the fact that a herd of them came to Phrygia in the time of Pharnaces the son of Pharnabazos, and still exists. There are now three of them, but it is said that there were once nine.”

181.4.0.7. The eponymus of the Enetoi (“Liburnians”), famed in the Classical world for the breeding of these onager hybrids known as hemionoi, was Ainos or Aineas (otherwise spelled Ainas), and the Biblical name Anah is spelled in some of the Greek interpreters (LXX and Aquila [Hexapla]) precisely Ainos or Ainas. Therefore, the Greek belief that the Enetoi (Veneti) produced a special breed of hemionoi is dependent on the Anah tradition of the Seirites, as proposed first in the Renaissance by Ludovicus De Dieu (ad loc., though he was ignorant, or careless, of the confirmatory reading Burniyyatha = Liburnians in the Targum). The Enetoi bore the name of their eponymous ancestor, Anah or Ainos (Aenas, Aineas, Aineias, Latin Aeneas). Ainos means “praise” in Greek and the Enetoi also were the “praised ones” (Enetoi = Gk. ainetoi, Lat. laudabiles, Jordanes, Getica XXIX, Paul the Deacon, Hist. Longobard. II. 14). Gk. aino is equivalent to Heb. anah in the sense “chant, repeat, celebrate in song, sing [praises etc.],” and is almost certainly and ultimately a borrowing from the latter. The Greek eponymus appears a number of times in the traditions relating to the wanderings of Aeneas (Gk. Aineas, Aineias), consequent upon the destruction of Troy. Aineas/Aineias/Aeneas, clearly, is a generic rather than a personal name, equivalent to Ainos and Ainas, and means “chief of the Veneti (Enetoi).”

181.4.0.8. Aineias is said to have migrated from Asia Minor with the Enetoi after the fall of Troy and founded several cities called Ainos or Ainon around the shores of the Aegean. The Lavinia whom he married also was the daughter of one Anios (the name evidently a variation on Ainos, Aineias) with whom he is said to have sojourned on his travels on the isle of Delos and hence Lavinia is called Yaniyya in Yosippon (employing the Hebrew way of writing Aineia, “daughter of Ainos/Aineias”) and is equated there with Lilith, who otherwise is equated with Naamah = Minerva/Athena. (See the refs. supra.) Thus the female eponymus of the Enetoi (Aineia), corresponding to the (original) female Anah in Gen. 36, is a form of Athena/Minerva. In the Roman myth of Anna Perenna Minerva is said to have been impersonated by Anna, daughter of (the Canaanite) god-king Belus, sister of the Carthaginian (Canaanite) queen Dido, and lover of Aeneas, in order to deceive Mars into thinking he was consorting with Minerva. The name Anna Perenna means “recurring [perenna] cycle of the year [annus],” which corresponds to the Heb. onah, a “cycle of time,” from the same root anah = “recur, repeat (of time).” Anna is a variation on Aineia (Yosippon’s Yaniyya). Anna perished out of unrequited love of Aeneas by throwing herself into the waters of the river Numicus, and was variously equated thereafter with Io, Luna (the moon-goddess), and one of the Melian nurses of Jupiter, viz. one of the Zamzummim or Emim (§209.2.2 sub fin., below, >>). Her male alter ego Aeneas perished the same way in the same river, according to some accounts, and came to be worshiped as Jupiter Indiges. On the mountain named Ainon or Ainos in Cephallenia, Greece, the male eponymus Ainos was worshiped similarly as Jupiter, viz. Zeus Ainesios. “Aenesi” (= Aenesii, Gk. Ainesioi) was the word used to describe the “companions of Aeneas” (gloss on Paulus, the epitomator of Festus, Roscher s. Aineias, col. 174). In these cases the eponymus represents Anah either as female, and therefore as equivalent to Athena and Minerva, or as male, and therefore as equivalent to the male aspect of Pallas, so named after the father Pallas, that is, Zeus (Pallantios) or Jupiter. The female aspect of Anah is represented in Classical mythology by Athena or Minerva, and the male aspect by Zeus or Jupiter. Thus the deaths by drowning of the male and female eponymi, Anna and Aeneas, representing the recurring cycles of the year, hark back ultimately to the “finding of Anah” at the hot pools by Ayyah, and the corresponding fate of the Greek Narkissos in his pining for Echo, or the alternating periods of six months spent in the Underworld by Dumuzi (Dionysus [the Zeus of Nysa] = Huas, Huakinthos, Ayyah) and Geshtin-ana (Persephone), and to the escape from Typhon by water of Venus (the Athena-like Anunitum = Anat = Anah) and Cupid (= Dionysus, Ayyah), or rather of Venus carried across the water by Cupid (Anah carried away from the Sirbonian lagoon by Ayyah). In fact the goddess and god of lust (Latin libidinis), corresponding to Venus and Cupid in the latter myth, were known in Rome as Libentia (Venus) and “Burnus” (which is the actual reading of the text, generally understood to be an abbreviation for “Liburnus”), according to Arnobius, Adv. Gen. IV. 9. “Burnus” is identical to the Heb. Burniy (for Liburnus) in Targum Jonathan, which likewise is an adjectival form of the eponymus Liburnus = Venetus = Enetos = Aineias/Aeneas, otherwise the (male) Anah of Gen. 36.

181.4.0.9. In other sources Athena/Minerva is explicitly identified with Naamah, Naamah with Lilith, the “ass-centaur” (Lilith is translated onokentauros, “ass-centaur,” in the LXX), and Lilith with the Queen of Sheba, famed in Ethiopian and Arabic legend for having ass-like legs. Lilith is equated in Yosippon with the Libyan Yaniyya the bride of Aeneas.The origin of the monstrous ass-centaurs in the Midrash is implied to be a variation on the more famous post-Biblical tradition that Adam produced demons and monsters from his consorting at night with his “first bride” Lilith (meaning in his sexual fantasies) before the creation of Eve. The supposed male Anah corresponds to Adam here and the female Anah to Lilith. Lilith (= Algol = Gorgo, 337.1, below, >>), in other words, is Athena, or, rather, Athana, the “She-Ass,” from whom spring the hybrid-half-human, half-animal yemim. This presumed Semitic form of the name Athena explains Plutarch’s etymology, “I came from Myself,” §337, below, >>, since atha in Aramaic means “come from” and the personal pronoun ana or any means “myself,” hence atha-ana (Athena). Doubtless the real origin of the name is athana = “she-ass,” as afore said, in allusion to Anah the female “Hamorite” or “ass” (Hamor = [male] ass). The word athana, “she-ass,” actually derives from the root athan, “to come with light or quick steps,” though in this case, the latter part of the word was doubtless held also to comprise the Aramaic verb ana or any (initial aleph) = Heb. anah (initial ayin), that is the personal name Anah.

181.4.1. Returning now to the story of Echo and Narkissos: Narkissos’ mourning for, and morbid obsession with his sister, once dead, associated with the waters of the lagoon, depended, no doubt, on the events surrounding the discovery of her as a child at the Sirbonian lagoon in the underlying tradition: the death of the mourning god appears to have been interpreted as a “rediscovery” of his sister in the otherworld, whither she had departed, comparable to his initial discovery of her in that location at birth. (On the blending of different elements of mythology in this tradition, see further §334.0.7, below, >>.) According to the Libyan myth summarized supra, the family of Ammon, including Dionysus and Athena, was also associated with the beginnings of Libyan settlement in Crete. This confirms the reason suggested for the prominence of Narkissos-Huakinthos in Cretan mythology.

182. Dionysus is a title, not a name. The Zeus of Nussos or Nusa, Latinized as Nysa, that is, Dio-nysus, was Iakkhos, — so called, it was alleged, from the cry “Ia” (Gk. phone, Suidas s. iakhemata, and cf. Etym. Mag. 462) uttered by his worshipers. Iakkhos is a variation on the similarly onomatopoeic Huas, Heues, Hueus, which Greeks referred to as the “foreign” name of their wine-god (Dionysus), and of the equally “foreign” (“Phrygian”) god Sabazius, who was equated with Dionysus. Sabazius = Sabus, “Sabine,” and is an eponymous title, meaning “he of the Sheba clan” or “Sabaean.” The Cushite Sabaeans migrated from the border of the Indian Ocean, via Kassite (= Cushite, Cossaean) Iran into Asia Minor, and from there into Italy. Their home territory, however, was in Africa, on the western edge of the Indian Ocean: they were the people of Meroe, Meroe being the capital of Sheba (Saba), near the junction of the Blue and White Nile. (On Sabazius = Sabus = Sheba, and the migration of the Sabaeans and of their ruling elite of the related tribe of Sabtah into Italy, see §354.10.2f., below, >>.) The Sabaean “Dionysus,” and “he of the Sheba clan,” Sabazius, whose proper name was Iakkhos, was specially associated with Nysa in Arabia (Sinai). The Sabaeans were otherwise known as Minaeans, the Min-folk, and included Hivites in the highlands between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Akaba. Cf. Sophocles apud Strabo 15 p. 687: “Nysa which the bull-horned Iakkhos pastures as his own sweetest land.” On Nysa = Sinai see §316.1, below, >>. The name “Sinai,” derived from the famous mountain where the Law was given, was extended in the first millennium BC to the whole mountain chain in the south of the Sinai peninsula and to its outliers in the east and north reaching to the Dead Sea. The particular region within that chain associated with Iakkhos (Dionysus) is indicated by Dionysus’ local Arabic appellative, Dusares, which is Dhu el-Shera, that is, “He of Shera:” Shera is the (Sinaite = Nysaean) mountain range within the territory of ancient Edom south and eastward of the Dead Sea. The same is indicated by the Latin name “Liber Pater” given to Jupiter, and subsequently to Dionysus, in Italy. This name is said by the commentator on the Defloratio Berosi to be a translation of the Hebrew Ab Hor, “Chief Freeman,” or “Chief Hor” (or “Chief of the Horites, Freemen”) of Seir/Edom. (See §140.2, above, >>.) We are looking, therefore, for a “Dionysus,” of the patriarchal era soon after the flood of Noah, 1) whose proper name was Iakkhos, Hu-as/es/eus (representing the sound of a cry), 2) located in the ancient territory of Edom, at that time under the control of the Cushites of Sheba (the Min-folk), 3) who was known as the discoverer of the lost “Athena” (original name Anat-Anah) at the banks of a pool. This can be, for the reasons already given and those adduced here, no other than the Hivite Ayyah (cf. Gk. “Ia”) of Genesis, who found Anah “at the hot pools.”

183. According to Diodorus Siculus and the Defloratio Berosi (§337.3, below, >>, §889.33, below, >>, §889.35, below, >>, §889.51, below, >>), this Nysaean god-man was closely associated with the foundation of the Egyptian monarchy, particularly with the establishment of its first king Osiris-Mizraim (Men, Menes), otherwise known as “Zeus” or “Jupiter,” so titled by “Dionysus” himself after his own father (Jupiter Hammon). The Dionysius under consideration is called in the Defloratio Dionysius Libycus (in the section titled Posterity of Saba Thurifer in the Chart, Defloratio Book II, §886.2, below, >> ), the “Libyan Dionysius,” who was the Huas slain in Libya in a hunting accident, §180.1, above, >>. We see in this instance that the “Zeus of Nysa” is differentiated from Osiris, rather than being identified with him, though both are said to have borne the title Hammon (= Amun, Zeus, Jupiter): Dionysus had a secondary role in relation to Osiris (Mizraim) as respects the kingdom of Egypt, helping and supporting his claim to the throne. The same is implied in the account of the Arabic Dionysus, Dusares, preserved in Epiphanius’ Panarion (Haer. LI, ms. Marcianus 125), which reads as follows (trans. Mede, modified): “Indeed, the leaders of the idol-cults, filled with wiles to deceive the idol-worshipers who believe in them, in many places keep highest festival on this same night of Epiphany {Jan. 6, the Egyptian New Year’s Day}, so that they whose hopes are in error may not seek the truth. For instance, at Alexandria, in the Koreion as it is called — an immense temple — that is to say, the Precinct of the Virgin; after they have kept all-night vigil with songs and music, chanting to their idol, when the vigil is over, at cockcrow, they descend with lights into an underground crypt, and carry up a wooden image lying naked on a litter, with the seal of a cross made in gold on its forehead, and on either hand two other similar seals, and on both knees two others, all five seals being similarly made in gold. And they carry round the image itself, circumambulating seven times the innermost temple, to the accompaniment of pipes, tambourines and hymns, and with merry-making they carry it down again underground. And if they are asked the meaning of this mystery, they answer and say: ‘To-day at this hour the Maiden (Kore), that is, the Virgin, gave birth to Aion.’ In the city of Petra also — the metropolis of Arabia which is called Edom in the Scriptures — the same is done, and they sing the praises of the Virgin in the Arab tongue, calling her in Arabic Khaabou, that is, Maiden (Kore), and the Virgin, and him who is born from her Dusares, that is, Alone-begotten (Monogenes) of the Lord. This also takes place in the city of Elousa {in Nabataea} on the same night just as at Petra and at Alexandria.” The “Kore,” that is, the wife of Plouto at Alexandria, was the wife of Serapis (= Plouto), the chief god of the city, viz. a form of Isis, and their son, here called Aion, was a form of Horus son of Isis. He is the same as the Nabataean Dusares (the “Zeus of Nysa,” Dionysus), and the Iakkhos of the Eleusinian mysteries, the reincarnated Dionysus Zagreus. In short, Zagreus (the “hunter”) was torn in pieces by the Titans in the form of a bull but was resurrected from the remains of his heart as Iakkhos. Dusares was a solar god, equated with Sol Invictus in Roman times, and with the Greek war-god Ares, as well as with Dionysus. Similarly Horus son of Isis was principally a god of the sun, was merged and identified with Arueris, the Elder Horus, or Egyptian Ares, and was the reincarnated Osiris (Dionysus, Serapis, Plouto). Thus, the Dionysus of Diodorus Siculus and the Defloratio Berosi was Horus son of Isis. Closely associated, in a secondary role, to Mizraim-Men, was the historical king of the First Dynasty of Egypt listed immediately after him, Hor-Aha (Horus Aha). What appears to be the title “Son of Isis” is found for the first time on a label from his reign. He is connected in the glyphs inscribed on other labels dating from his reign with the cult of Neit (Athena), and with the name Men (Menes, Mizraim), which Eratosthenes interprets to mean “Dionios” (“of Zeus” or “of Jupiter”): Dionysus is said to have named Osiris-Mizraim “Jupiter.” (See further §626.4, below, >>.) Hor-Aha was Horus (the sun-god, and the Elder Horus, Ares-Mars) whilst a living king, and Khenty-Amentiu (= Osiris, Dionysus), when deceased. There can be little doubt that Hor-Aha is the historical figure underlying the Dionys(i)us of Diodorus Siculus and the Defloratio Berosi. The significant element in his name Aha means “to fight, conflict, be contentious” and also “be inauspicious, unlucky” when used of a day in the calendar. Hence he is the “Contentious (Aha) Falcon (Hor).” His name precisely represents the meaning of the Hebrew root ‛-w-h, “twist, be perverse, refractory, contentious,” which is related to the roots ’-y-h, ’-w-h, “twist in agony, be woeful.” One might also compare the dual meaning of the Hebrew noun Ayyah, root ’-y-h, “Woe” and “Falcon” (from the screeching, woeful, call of the falcon).

184. Further on Djer-Linos-Maneros and on the identification of Djer with Sidon son of Canaan, see §334.0.7f., below, >>, with cross-references. On the adoption of Osiris-Mizraim (Men[es]) by Dionysius (Ayyah, Hor-Aha), see §337.4, below, >>, with cross-references. And on Ayyah and Anah, on the discovery of Anah by Ayyah at the lagoon, and Anah’s descent on one side from Zibeon, and on the other from Elos-Kronos, viz. Nimrod-Enmerkar, and on the connections of their family with the settlement of Crete, see §337f., below, >>.