Breasted, James Henry – Born in 1865 at Rockford, Illinois, Breasted studied at Yale, where he first met W. R. Harper, the founder of Chicago University, who promised he would award the first ‘Chair of Egyptian’ to Breasted. Breasted continued his studies in Germany, where he mastered a number of oriental languages and became interested in archaeology. He spent many years in Egypt and Nubia concentrating his efforts on documenting all known Egyptian inscriptions. In 1919 J. D. Rockefeller Jr. was motivated by Breasted to endow the Oriental Institute of Chicago and they became close friends, with Rockefeller referring to him as ‘one of the prophets’. As the ‘father’ of American Egyptology, Breasted’s best known works are his volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt, and The Dawn of Conscience.
Calendars
Jewish
The Jewish calendar, which is essentially lunar-based, dates the creation of the world as year ‘zero’, and as being, for example, year 5757 between the autumns of 1996 and 1997.
Prior to about 360 CE, the beginning of the Jewish month was marked by the first visual sighting of the new moon. With the threatened demise of the Sanhedrin (the ruling Jewish religious authority in Palestine) and the need to coordinate timings with communities dispersed after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, Hillel the Younger introduced a calculated calendar. This Rabbinic Calendar was modified up to about 850 CE and from then on has remained essentially the same as that used by Jews all over the world today.
Calculations to predict the date of a particular festival or event are extremely complicated and are mainly based on lunar (and partly on solar) movements. The Jewish year comprises twelve lunar months, normally of alternating lengths of 29 or 30 days, but to keep in line with solar-dominated agricultural festivals, the lunar year of 354 days is augmented by adding a full month seven times in a nineteen-year cycle.
Qumran-Essenes
A purely solar-based calendar, relying exclusively on the sun’s movement, giving them a year that contained 364 days. This was divided into twelve periods of 30 days (approximating to months) and one of four extra days was added at the end of each three-monthly period.
Ancient Egyptian
Their year was based on the coincidence of the helical rising of the Sirius star with the rising of the sun, and made up of twelve periods of thirty days (approximating to months) with five intercalary days added at the end of each year.
Muslim
The Muslim calendar is purely lunar, each month closely following the moon’s movements, and as a result it cycles through all four seasons during a period of thirty-three years.
Christian
Hellenic astronomers of the Ptolemaic Egyptian period, c.250 BCE, added the missing 1 ⁄ 4 day to the Egyptian calendar (a true year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds) by adding an extra (leap) day every four years. This approach was eventually adopted by the Romans, under Julius Caesar, in 46 BCE. The only modification to the ‘Roman’, or ‘Julian Calendar’ was made in 1582 CE, by Pope Gregory. His astronomical advisors suggested dropping the leap year whenever the year ended in two zeros – giving us the ‘Gregorian Calendar’, which is in use throughout the world today.
Carbon Dating – The use of heavy Carbon 14 isotopes for dating materials containing carbon by radioactive decay measurement. The half-life of Carbon 14 is about 5,730 years.
There is a strange coincidence relating to carbon dating, the Jewish Calendar, and life-form creation. The two most momentous dates in the modern history of the State of Israel and the Jewish people almost certainly occurred in 1947 and 1967. The first year had its own ‘miracle’ related to the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The second, a remarkable coincidence relating to carbon, one of the most useful tools for historical dating and the building block of all organic life – the date Jerusalem was finally unified within the Jewish State after the Six Day War, 29 June 1967, was exactly 5,728 years after the base date from which the Jewish calendar is deemed to have started. It is a lapsed time period also virtually identical to the length of the radioactive half-life of Carbon 14 used in carbon dating!
Scientific creation assigns the beginnings of life to about 3.7 billion years ago, but multicellular life-forms, the real beginning of creatures, burst forth in a very strange event known as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ (between the Precambrian and Paleozoic eras) when the first living organisms with hard parts made their sudden prolific appearance on earth. The riddle of this ‘explosion’ has not yet been resolved and even Charles Darwin had to concede that the event undermined his entire theory of evolution. There was, and still is, no sensible explanation of why multicellular life-forms took so long to appear, nor why these complex creatures have not been heralded in the Precambrian era by fossil finds that can demonstrate a gradual evolutionary development of their antecedents.
One of the great authorities on early life-forms, Roderick Impey Murchison, described the Cambrian Explosion as: ‘God’s moment of Creation’. The ‘hard’ evidence for this explosion of life came from a remarkable find of soft-bodied animals in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, which revealed an inexplicably enormous range of new arthropod and other life-form groups, considered to exceed in anatomical range the entire spectrum of invertebrate life in the world’s oceans (Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life – The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Penguin Books, 1991). Here a weird coincidence occurs.
The date of this find, by the famous American paleontologist, Charles Doolittle Walcott, was July 1909, or 5670 in the Biblical calendar. The date of the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ of life-forms – ‘God’s moment of Creation’ – is estimated to have been 567,000,000 million years ago, ± 5 per cent. It looks rather like the Bible got its dating right and assumed everyone would obviously know that five extra noughts were always intended to be there!
One of Albert Einstein’s favourite expressions was ‘Gott wurfelt nicht’ – ‘God does not play dice’. A strong determinist, he could not easily come to terms with the uncertainties and probabilities of quantum mechanics. However, experimental practice has subsequently verified Quantum Theory. God does indeed appear to play with numbers!
CE – ‘Common Era’, after the birth of Jesus.
Circumcision – For Jews the ritual circumcision ceremony takes place when a male child is eight days old, or for proselytes at a later age. The practice of circumcision has also been adopted by the Muslims, who follow many of the teachings of Moses (Quran, Surahs 2, 20, 26, 28, etc.) and acknowledge Ishmael (the elder son of Abraham, whose circumcision was taken as a sign of a covenant with God), as the founder of the Arab nations.
Contemporary Movements – Many previously insular modern-day religious institutions are now beginning to look outside their own barricades and are trying to break down the barriers that separate them from other religions. One of the most remarkable of these attempts is currently being pursued by the Catholic Church under the direction of Pope John Paul II. It was the avowed hope of His Holiness to celebrate prayers with representatives of all religions on Mount Sinai at the new Millennium on 1 January 2000 CE.
There are many organizations working for the elimination of prejudice and for increased understanding between religions, including the World Congress of Faiths, the Calamus Foundation and the Maimonides Foundation.
Dead Sea Scrolls – A collection of scrolls and fragments discovered in the caves above Qumran, on the shore of the Dead Sea, generally ascribed to belong to a Community of Essenes who lived there between c.150 BCE and 68 CE. (The term is sometimes used to include any ancient scrolls found along the shores of the Dead Sea). The first scroll material was discovered in the Spring of 1947 by Bedouin and, subsequently, up to 1956, ten other caves yielded further examples. The Scrolls include items from every book of the Old Testament, except Esther, apochryphal and pseudepigraphic material, and other works written, copied or collected by the Qumran-Essenes. To date some 95 per cent of the material has been translated and published, although this does include
all of the major works.
DNA – Each human cell has forty-six chromosomes grouped in twenty-three pairs (except ova and sperm which only have twenty-three chromosomes). Aligned in single file along each chromosome are thousands of genes. Genes are short strands of DNA. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a molecule that carries coded heredity details. It is found in the nucleus of almost every cell of all living organisms, except some viruses. It consists of two double helix chains with instructions for the body on how to make the structural proteins or enzymes that control the body’s biochemistry – including the production of new copies of DNA.
Essenes – A religious group, centred at Qumran, Judaea, by the Dead Sea at the time of the Second Temple. They practised an abstemious lifestyle with their own versions of ritual washing, calendar, religious outlook and philosophy. Those who did not wander the country evangelizing devoted themselves to prayer and writing, including many works now considered as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Freud, Sigmund – As well as being the father of psychoanalysis, Freud had an abiding interest in studying ancient religions and archaeology, particularly that of Egypt. In 1931 he wrote a study on the origins of Moses entitled Moses and Monotheism, which attracted considerable criticism and reprobation, largely because he portrayed a first Moses as having been murdered by the Hebrews and the arrival of a second Moses. The work was heavily influenced by his own ‘angst’ in dealing with his Jewish parentage and feelings of guilt over his own non-conformity.
In 1938 the Freuds fled from Vienna to London to avoid the impending Nazi invasion and settled at No. 20 Maresfield Gardens, in Hampstead. His passion for collecting ancient artefacts can be seen in the family house, which is open to the public, and still contains many of the personal possessions he lived and worked amongst.
Hellenism – Greek influences in language, literature, philosophy, art and design that spread across the Middle East after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE.
Hyksos – Semitic invaders from the east who dominated most of Egypt from about 1640 to 1538 BCE. They made their capital at Avaris in the Delta region of the Nile and worshipped Seth, Anat and Astarte.
Josephus, Flavius (37–100 CE) – Jewish historian who became a Roman citizen and wrote, inter alia, about the Essene community and their settlement on the Dead Sea.
Judaea – Southern region of ancient Israel, including the area of Qumran and surrounding desert region.
Kabbalah – Based on revelations by Shimon bar Yohai, dating from the time of Christ, Kabbalah was codified in the Zohar in the thirteenth century CE, in Spain. It claims to give the true meaning behind the Torah in two forms – one basic and the other secret. Its teaching was prohibited until the sixteenth century, but parts of its doctrine – of mystical piety and concentration on the presence of God – were absorbed into Hasidism (a branch of Orthodox Jewry) around the eighteenth century.
Part of the Kabbalah philosophy is that:
the Torah contains a secret code and that the Zohar can unlock the code
Judaic astrology can shed light on the meaning of the universe
meditation can enhance praying, human potential, and elevate consciousness
the Messiah will come through study of Kabbalah
There are some similarities in its teachings with Buddhism, Confucianism and Indian religious ideas of inner awareness, and in the ten levels of attainment before oneness with God can be achieved. There are also overtones of Egyptian mythology in the visible and invisible aspects of God, the judgement of the soul after death and allocation to paradise or hell, or transmigration into animal or other human form where restitution may be sought.
Akhenaten shunned magic and mysticism and it was also strongly resisted in ancient Judaism. Mysticism, magic, divination and sorcery were and are severely frowned on in Rabbinic teaching. Nevertheless, after the Exodus, residual beliefs lingered on in superstition and folklore and eventually found expression in the form of ‘Kabbalah’ – which can be traced back as far as ancient Egypt.
Maccabees – Jewish priestly family whose head was the High Priest, Mattathias, whose son Judah led a successful revolt against the Greek Seleucids under Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BCE and reoccupied Jerusalem in 164 BCE. His rededication of the Second Temple at Jerusalem is now remembered by celebration of the Festival of Chanukah.
Manetho – Third century BCE Egyptian priest from Sebennytus, in the Delta region of the Nile, who wrote a history of Egypt, probably at the behest of Ptolemy II – Philadelphus. His works listed the kings of Egypt and gave two versions of the Exodus from Egypt.
Mesopotamia, Sumeria and Babylonia – Sumeria was composed of city states that emerged about 3400 BCE, in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, modern Iraq, generally referred to as early Mesopotamia. Babylonia was a kingdom in the southern portion of Mesopotamia formed under Hammurabi around 1790 BCE. Its capital, Babylon, was about 80km to the south of today’s city of Baghdad.
Biblical references to these areas are few and sparse in detail. Abraham sends his servant (probably Eliezer) back to Nahor to find a wife for his son Isaac, but there is little description of the place or its inhabitants. Nineveh is mentioned in the Book of Jonah, as ‘an exceeding great city’ he is called to try and redeem from its evil ways. Nineveh also features in the Book of Nahum, where it is similarly berated by the Prophet Nahum for its evilness, as he describes its destruction. Apart from these relatively uninformative passages, there is little else.
References to Babylon, where the Jews were carried off to in 597 BCE, are similarly few and far between, and geographic descriptions are vague and generalized.
The City of Ur, located in Mesopotamia, was overwhelmed by a flood in about 4200 BCE, but re-established its importance to became the capital of Sumeria c.3000 BCE. The Temple of Uruk testifies to the wealth and advanced construction techniques, building and craftsmanship of the people at this period. One of Ur’s main trading partners was Dilmun, modern Bahrain. Ur was sacked in 2000 BCE but soon recovered its regional trading position, only to start going into decline around 1800 BCE as Babylon to the north took over the lucrative trade with Persia. By the fourteenth century BCE Ur was somewhat restored to its former glory.
As part of the region’s cultural development numerous mythological stories emerged – one of the best known being that of the King of Uruk, Gilgamesh. In this epic, Gilgamesh sets out on a quest for eternal life – and encounters a Sumerian ‘Noah’. Conventional exegesis of the early Old Testament stories relate creation, Noah and the Flood, and the lives of the Patriarchs, to episodes from Babylonian and Assyrian (the Northern portion of modern Iraq) records. This ‘tracing’ only holds true for limited parts of the early Bible, and soon becomes problematic as the major influence that takes over is Egyptian.
In the Babylonian ‘Epic of Atrahasis’, written c.1635 BCE, there are a number of clear examples of early ‘borrowings’. It tells the story of numerous gods busy digging canals and tilling the land, but they find the work too hard. They complain to the senior god ‘Enlil’ who decides to kill the strike leader and create man from a mixture of that first unfortunate trade union leader’s flesh and blood, and clay.
And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. (Genesis 1:27)
Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7)
(The Hebrew word for formed – ‘yatzar’ has the same sense of a potter moulding clay into a vessel. In the written verse it is recorded with an extra letter (yod) for the forming of man but only one yod for the forming of animals. One rabbinical interpretation of this is that man alone is endowed with two moral inclinations – one good and one evil. A theme picked up in Buddhism and Taoism.)
Back to ‘Atrahasis’, where man multiplies and his noise disturbs the gods, who decide to inflict plagues, famines and droughts on
man, and finally decide to destroy him altogether by sending a great flood. ‘Enki’, the creator god, warns his favourite man Atrahasis of the plot to destroy mankind. Atrahasis builds a huge boat to escape the flood and save his family and animals. After the flood he offers sacrifices to the gods who readily accept the offerings. Parallels in the Old Testament can readily be discerned.
And God said unto Noah: ‘The end of all flesh is come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; with rooms shalt thou make the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is how thou shalt make it; the length of the ark three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.’ (Genesis 6:13–15)
And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it was lifted up above the earth. (Genesis 7:17)
Other Sumerian legends record that as the flood subsided, on the seventh day after the ark came to rest on a mountain (thought to be the Mount Ararat of the Bible) Utnapishtim (the Noah of this version) sent out a dove and a swallow. They both returned to the ark, implying that they had not been able to yet find dry land. Later on he sent out a crow, which did not return. Utnapishtim celebrated his survival by making a sacrifice on the mountain to Enlil, who rewarded him and his family with transportation to a promised land and immortality.
And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen…And he sent forth a raven, and it went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth…And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came into him at eventide; and lo in her mouth an olive-leaf freshly plucked; so that Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 37