THE SUDDEN CIVILIZATION
FOR A LONG TIME, Western man believed that his civilization was the gift of Rome and Greece. But the Greek philosophers themselves wrote repeatedly that they had drawn on even earlier sources. Later on, travelers returning to Europe reported the existence in Egypt of imposing pyramids and temple-cities half-buried in the sands, guarded by strange stone beasts called sphinxes.
When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study and explain these ancient monuments. One of his officers found near Rosetta a stone slab on which was carved a proclamation from 196 B.C. written in the ancient Egyptian pictographic writing (hieroglyphic) as well as in two other scripts.
The decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and language, and the archaeological efforts that followed, revealed to Western man that a high civilization had existed in Egypt well before the advent of the Greek civilization. Egyptian records spoke of royal dynasties that began circa 3100 B.C. - two full millennia before the beginning of Hellenic civilization. Reaching its maturity in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., Greece was a latecomer rather than an originator.
Was the origin of our civilization, then, in Egypt? As logical as that conclusion would have seemed, the facts militated against it. Greek scholars did describe visits to Egypt, but the ancient sources of knowledge of which they spoke were found elsewhere. The pre-Hellenic cultures of the Aegean Sea - the Minoan on the island of Crete and the Mycenaean on the Greek mainland - revealed evidence that the Near Eastern, not the Egyptian, culture had been adopted. Syria and Anatolia, not Egypt, were the principal avenues through which an earlier civilization became available to the Greeks.
Noting that the Dorian invasion of Greece and the Israelite invasion of Canaan following the Exodus from Egypt took place at about the same time (circa the thirteenth century B.C.), scholars have been fascinated to discover a growing number of similarities between the Semitic and Hellenic civilizations. Professor Cyrus H. Gordon (Forgotten Scripts; Evidence for the Minoan Language) opened up a new field of study by showing that an early Minoan script, called Linear A, represented a Semitic language. He concluded that "the pattern (as distinct from the content) of the Hebrew and Minoan civilizations is the same to a remarkable extent," and pointed out that the island's name, Crete, spelled in Minoan Ke-re-ta, was the same as the
Hebrew word Ke-re-et ("walled city") and had a counterpart in a Semitic tale of a king of Keret.
Even the Hellenic alphabet, from which the Latin and our own alphabets derive, came from the Near East. The ancient Greek historians themselves wrote that a Phoenician named Kadmus ("ancient") brought them the alphabet, comprising the same number of letters, in the same order, as in Hebrew; it was the only Greek alphabet when the Trojan War took place. The number of letters was raised to twenty-six by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century B.C.
That Greek and Latin writing, and thus the whole foundation of our Western culture, were adopted from the Near East can easily be demonstrated by comparing the order, names, signs, and even numerical values of the original Near Eastern alphabet with the much later ancient Greek and the more recent Latin.
The scholars were aware, of course, of Greek contacts with the Near East in the first millennium B.C., culminating with the~ defeat of the Persians by Alexander the Macedonian in 331 B.C. Greek records contained much information about these Persians and their lands (which roughly paralleled today's Iran). Judging by the names of their kings - Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes - and the names of their deities, which appear to belong to the Indo-European linguistic stem, scholars reached the conclusion that they were part of the Aryan ("lordly") people that appeared from somewhere near the Caspian Sea toward the end of the second millennium B.C. and spread westward to Asia Minor, eastward to India, and southward to what the Old Testament called the "lands of the Medes and Parsees."
Yet all was not that simple. In spite of the assumed foreign origin of these invaders, the Old Testament treated them as part and parcel of biblical events. Cyrus, for example, was considered to be an "Anointed of Yahweh" - quite an unusual relationship between the Hebrew God and a non-Hebrew. According to the biblical Book of Ezra, Cyrus acknowledged his mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and stated that he was acting upon orders given by Yahweh, whom he called "God of Heaven." Cyrus and the other kings of his dynasty called themselves Achaemenids - after the title adopted by the founder of the dynasty, which was Hacham-Anish. It was not an Aryan but a perfect Semitic title, which meant "wise man." By and large, scholars have neglected to investigate the many leads that may point to similarities between the Hebrew God Yahweh and the deity Achaemenids called "Wise Lord," whom they depicted as hovering in the skies within a Winged Globe, as shown on the royal seal of Darius.
It has been established by now that the cultural, religious, and historic roots of these Old Persians go back to the earlier empires of Babylon and Assyria, whose extent and fall is recorded in the Old Testament. The symbols that make up the script that appeared on the Achaemenid monuments and seals were at first considered to be decorative designs. Engelbert Kampfer, who visited Persepolis, the Old Persian capital, in 1686, described the signs as "cuneates," or wedge-shaped impressions. The script has since been known as cuneiform.
As efforts began to decipher the Achaemenid inscriptions, it became clear that they were written in the same script as inscriptions found on ancient artifacts and tablets in Mesopotamia, the plains and highlands that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Intrigued by the scattered finds, Paul Emile Botta set out in 1843 to conduct the first major purposeful excavation. He selected a site in northern Mesopotamia, near present-day Mosul, now called Khorsabad. Botta was soon able to establish that the cuneiform inscriptions named the place Dur Sharru Kin. They were Semitic inscriptions, in a sister language of Hebrew, and the name meant "walled city of the righteous king." Our textbooks call this king Sargon II.
This capital of the Assyrian king had as its center a magnificent royal palace whose walls were lined with sculptured bas-reliefs, which, if placed end to end, would1 stretch for over a mile. Commanding the city and the royal compound was a step pyramid called a ziggurat; it served as a "stairway to Heaven" for the gods.
The layout of the city and the sculptures depicted a way of life on a grand scale. The palaces, temples, houses, stables, warehouses, walls, gates, columns, decorations, statues, artworks, towers, ramparts, terraces, gardens - all were completed in just five years. According to Georges Contenau (La Vie Quotidienne a Babylone et en Assyrie), "the imagination reels before the potential strength of an empire which could accomplish so much in such a short space of time," some 3,000 years ago. Not to be outdone by the French, the English appeared on the scene in the person of Sir Austen Henry Layard, who selected as his site a place some ten miles down the Tigris River from Khorsabad. The natives called it Kuyunjik; it turned out to be the Assyrian capital of Nineveh.
Biblical names and events had begun to come to life. Nineveh was the royal capital of Assyria under its last three great rulers: Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurhanipal. "Now, in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah, did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the walled cities of Judah," relates the Old Testament (II Kings 18:13), and when the Angel of the Lord smote his army, "Sennacherib departed and went back, and dwelt in Nineveh."
The mounds where Nineveh was built by Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal revealed palaces, temples, and works of art that surpassed those of Sargon. The area where the remains of Esarhaddon's palaces are believed to lie cannot be excavated, for it is now the site of a Muslim mosque erected over the purported burial place of the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale when he refused ID bring Yahweh's message to Nineveh.