Return of the Storm God - Chapter 5a

How the Hand of the Storm God Rocked the Cradle of Civilization

Introduction – from consensus to confluence

The purpose of this chapter is to establish a foundation rooted in academic consensus regarding the emergence of Sumer, while also identifying the zones of uncertainty that remain. The goal is not to speculate prematurely, but to understand what is generally accepted and to define the boundaries of current knowledge.

Methodological Note – On the Recovery of Meaning

This work proceeds from the recognition that much of what is now called “consensus” scholarship – particularly in the fields of Assyriology and biblical philology – has been shaped not solely by evidence, but by institutional imperatives to contain, fragment, and redirect the record of ancient meaning. As L.A. Waddell rightly protested over a century ago, even the most accomplished Assyriologists have often been steered – knowingly or not – into dismissing the deeper symbolic coherence of the very words they translated, severing root from resonance in service to theological or imperial dogma.

The result is a scholarly record that excels in detail, yet frequently obscures structure. Here, I restore the license to examine phonemes and morphemes – such as lu, gal, pis, gar – not only as linguistic units, but as surviving vessels of meaning whose origins were universally hydric, luminous, and alive. While some of what follows is necessarily speculative, it is rooted in demonstrable patterns attested across cultures and time. To discard such connections simply because they do not align with the boundaries of institutional codification is not caution – it is capitulation. Our task is not to invent new myths, but to remember the structure of the old ones before they were dismantled.

I will not hesitate to call out what I see as illogical, selective, or biased within the academic consensus. In fact, I will be as direct as my predecessors Massey and Waddell. Where I see distortion, I will say so. I must speak my truth plainly and unapologetically. It is for the reader to decide whether I have presented a case strong enough to justify the beliefs I hold.

Whilst Mesopotamia is celebrated as the cradle of what we now term ‘civilisation’ in the Western world, I contend that its deeper root lies in the Danube Basin – particularly around Transylvania – where the rivers and waters gave birth to the forms later refined in Sumer. It is to that source we now return. We follow the drift of the river, back to the place where the cradle was formed, rocked, and where the infant of ‘civilisation’ was first raised.

We begin by introducing the Ubaid period (c. 6500–4000 BCE) as the essential substrate from which the Sumerian world arose. This was a culture of mudbrick and marshland, canal and field - with no kings, no armies, no script - and yet astonishing in its scale and structural coherence. Before writing, before dynasts, and before Inanna, there was already a pattern: settlements anchored by shrines, aligned with water and possibly the stars.

We will briefly examine what is known of this indigenous Ubaid culture and how it contrasts with later developments. We will track the transitions - from shrine to ziggurat, token to tablet, harvest steward to king. We will also acknowledge the persistent question of origin: who were the Sumerians, and did they come from elsewhere?

While the dominant consensus still holds that there is continuity from Ubaid through Uruk, without clear evidence of mass migration or conquest, significant questions remain. The language of the Sumerians remains an isolate, to the academics. Some aspects of their system - including certain artistic motifs, metallurgical techniques, and the emergence of elite theocratic control - appear influenced by or connected to eastern upland cultures.

The consensus on the origins of the Sumerians remains unresolved. The traditional models suggesting either:

1. Indigenous evolution from Ubaid populations, possibly with links to the Arabian Gulf (Dilmun/Bahrain), or

2. An intrusive elite from further east (e.g., Iran or the Indus region), or potentially northeast Africa,

...are all still in circulation. Since Samuel Kramer’s foundational studies, the genetic, linguistic, and archaeological consensus remains fragmented. Consensus says:

· Language: Sumerian remains a language isolate, with no agreed relatives.

· Genetics: Ancient DNA from southern Mesopotamia is scarce due to preservation issues, though recent material (e.g., from the Zagros region) shows genetic continuity with early Neolithic populations in Iran.

· Material culture: There is clear continuity from the Ubaid into Uruk, but whether the linguistic Sumerians were part of this continuum or arrived within it remains unclear.

In short: the old questions remain, and the mystery is still open. The rise of Sumer appears as both an endogenous development from the Ubaid matrix and a possible confluence of wider regional influences. The next few years may clarify the picture if viable DNA is recovered from the southern alluvium.

We aim to balance clarity with curiosity, grounding the reader first in what can be known before moving toward what must be inferred. We approach this with a perspective based on a cultural drift from the north, beginning in the Danube basin and moving through Anatolia into Mesopotamia.

Speculation has reasonable limits, but we do assert, as did Waddell, that what we call the Sumerians were heavily influenced by the same culture whose roots we have already traced - early settlers in the highlands of Van, Anatolia, and Armenia, and likely associated with the Hurrian and Hittite cultural sphere that Waddell identified with the Hatti or Khatti: his so-called ‘Sumer-Aryans’, understood here not as a racial classification, but as a cultural lineage.

From Mudbrick to Monument – The Ubaid Foundation (c. 6500–4000 BCE)

The Ubaid period refers to the earliest known phase of large-scale settlement in southern Mesopotamia, corresponding to modern-day southern Iraq. It spans from approximately 6500 to 4000 BCE and is defined archaeologically by distinctive painted pottery, mudbrick architecture, and planned village layouts. The population of this period established permanent settlements, managed irrigation agriculture, and created the basic cultural and economic structures that would later underpin the development of urban Sumerian civilisation.

Eridu, one of the most significant Ubaid sites, contains a sequence of temple foundations built atop one another, suggesting continuity of use over several centuries. These early temples were constructed from mudbrick and were relatively modest in size, but their repeated rebuilding in the same location indicates an emerging concept of sacred space.

The Ubaid economy was based on cereal agriculture supported by irrigation, alongside fishing, animal husbandry, and local craft production. Settlements were organised and stable, featuring rectangular, multi-roomed houses often built to similar plans, indicating a degree of social standardisation. Tools and ceramics were generally practical and mass-produced rather than decorative.

There is no evidence of centralised political authority or warfare during this period. No large-scale fortifications, weapon hoards, or monumental commemorations of conflict have been found. Social organisation appears to have revolved around the temple and its function as an economic and ritual centre. Clay tokens used for accounting suggest the beginnings of administrative record-keeping, though writing had not yet developed.

Among the more enigmatic finds are a group of stylised figurines with elongated heads and abstract features. Their function is unknown, though they may relate to religious practices. While the later Sumerian pantheon does not appear in this period, the presence of formalised temple architecture suggests the emergence of shared ritual structures and possibly early forms of cult activity.

The Ubaid period shows cultural continuity with the Uruk period that followed. There is no evidence of large-scale migration or abrupt cultural replacement. While the identity and language of the Ubaid population remain unknown, their role in establishing the long-term patterns of southern Mesopotamian life is clear.

The Rise of Uruk – Temple, Trade, and the Sign System (c. 4000–3100 BCE)

The Uruk period marks the emergence of the first true cities in southern Mesopotamia. Building on the foundations established during the Ubaid period, communities during this era expanded significantly in both scale and complexity. The city of Uruk (modern-day Warka in Iraq) became the most prominent centre, with a population estimated at over 40,000 at its peak.

Uruk featured distinct ceremonial and administrative precincts, including the Eanna district, associated with the goddess Inanna, and the Kullaba area, linked to the sky god Anu. These zones contained monumental mudbrick temples and public buildings. The increasing size and elaboration of these structures indicate a more centralised form of governance, likely dominated by temple institutions.

During this time, the economy became more organised and institutionalised. The use of bevel-rim bowls, mass-produced from moulds, reflects a rationing system tied to a central authority, suggesting that labourers were paid in standardised units of grain or bread. This economic system was supported by the development of proto-writing: impressed and incised symbols used on clay tablets for recording transactions, allocations, and inventories. These early administrative texts show that writing originated primarily for economic and bureaucratic purposes.

Trade networks expanded considerably in the Uruk period. Materials such as copper (from Oman), lapis lazuli (from Afghanistan), and obsidian (from Anatolia) were imported, while Uruk-style ceramics and tools have been found at sites throughout the greater Near East. This has led to the identification of a broader "Uruk Expansion" or interaction zone, in which cultural influence from southern Mesopotamia spread widely, either through colonisation, trade, or both.

The use of cylinder seals also became widespread. These engraved stone cylinders were rolled over wet clay to produce repeatable patterns and served both administrative and symbolic functions. The imagery on seals often depicts ritual scenes or figures that may reflect aspects of early Mesopotamian ideology and governance.

Religious practices continued to evolve during this period. The temples likely remained dominant social and economic institutions. The cult of Inanna appears to have gained prominence, and some scholars suggest that the sacred marriage ritual - symbolising the union between the ruler and the goddess - may have originated in this context, although direct evidence is limited.

By the end of the Uruk period, southern Mesopotamia had developed many of the core features that would define ancient Mesopotamian civilisation: urbanisation, record-keeping, social stratification, organised religion, and long-distance exchange. The innovations and structures of this period laid the groundwork for the city-state system of the Early Dynastic period that followed.

Kish and the Early Dynasts – Competing Centres and the Rise of Kingship (c. 2900–2334 BCE)

The Early Dynastic period in southern Mesopotamia marks the beginning of historical time in the region, when named rulers, cities, and military conflicts first appear in written records. This era follows the decline of the Uruk period and spans roughly from 2900 to 2334 BCE. It is characterised by the development of multiple autonomous city-states, each with its own political structure, temple system, and local pantheon.

The Sumerian city of Kish, located further north in the Mesopotamian plain, plays a central role in this phase. According to the Sumerian King List, Kish was the first city to receive kingship after the mythical flood, signifying the beginning of legitimate earthly rule. The title "King of Kish" would later become an honorific used by rulers seeking to assert dominance over rival cities.

Political power in this period was contested among several major city-states, including Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Umma, Nippur, and Adab. These cities often engaged in territorial disputes, particularly over agricultural land and irrigation rights. While temples remained central institutions, political authority became increasingly associated with individual rulers, or lugal (literally conventionally translated as "big man"), who held both military and administrative authority.

The title lugal is conventionally translated as “big man” - with lu rendered as “man” and gal as “great.” While functional, this definition is inadequate to explain the symbolic depth of the role as it emerges in Sumerian religious and cosmological contexts. I propose that lugal encodes an earlier symbolic language wherein gal refers not simply to size but to the vastness of the great water - the abyss, the deep sea, the generative womb of space - as also attested in hydronyms and the symbolic matrix of the milky way (gala). The lu, though typically rendered “man,” appears in numerous Indo-European and Semitic linguistic residues connected to light - lux, lumen, lucent, Lucifer - and may once have indicated the emergent, radiant being born of that deep. Thus, the lugal is not merely a “big man,” but an embodied point of coherence - the luminous one rising from the galactic sea, aligned with the divine breath or Enlil. He is the axis of order in human form.

(Again, in reference to my methodology in this chapter: This approach does not reject academic rigor; it reframes its purpose. It acknowledges that language and symbol were once indivisible from cosmology, that phonemes encoded not only reference but relationship - to water, light, sky, and breath. The reduction of these signs to administrative shorthand or neutral data points has severed the very life-thread they once carried. What follows, therefore, is not speculation for its own sake, but a careful re-entry into meaning as it was once lived - where to rule was to embody resonance, to speak was to echo creation, and to name was to unveil form. In this spirit, we approach lugal not merely as a bureaucratic title, but as a condensed cosmogram - a luminous axis between human and divine - restoring the mythopoetic as the original and natural language of civilisation. For a full symbolic and linguistic excavation of the term lugal see Chapter 6)

The earliest inscriptions from this period are administrative and economic in nature, but royal inscriptions begin to appear in the Mid-Early Dynastic period. These texts provide evidence of military campaigns, temple construction, and dedications to the gods. One of the earliest named rulers, Enmebaragesi of Kish, is also mentioned in later literary texts. Another semi-historical figure, Gilgamesh of Uruk, became the subject of mythological epics but may have had a real historical counterpart.

By the time of the rulers of Lagash, particularly Eannatum and later Uruinimgina (commonly Urukagina), we begin to see more elaborate royal inscriptions. Eannatum’s Stele of the Vultures records a military victory over the neighbouring city of Umma and includes both mythological and historical elements. Urukagina’s reforms, meanwhile, are notable for attempts to limit corruption and protect the vulnerable, indicating a growing codification of legal and administrative norms.

This is also the period when political actions and even commercial transactions began to be framed in terms of divine archetype. Surviving seals depict gods performing recognisably human roles - trade, diplomacy, conquest - reflecting a symbolic merging of the sacred and the civic.

In this way, recorded history in Sumer began to take on a mythopoetic dimension. Over time, however, these divine expressions were not merely symbolic - they became historicised. The mythic frame hardened into doctrine, as religion emerged as a political watershed. Priests became rulers, kings claimed divine mandate, and dogma emerged as a tool for unifying - and controlling - the city-states.

In early Sumer, the line between myth and memory, between labour and liturgy, had not yet been drawn. A farmer did not simply sow barley - he “followed the furrow of Ninurta.” A merchant did not merely exchange goods - he traded under the measure of Enki. Even routine economic activity was ritually inscribed into the divine pattern, as seen in cylinder seals and tablets from the Early Dynastic period. These seals often depict deities - especially Shamash, Enlil, and Inanna - enacting recognisably human functions: receiving tribute, overseeing transactions, standing atop mountains of grain or flanked by bundles of reeds. The intent was not decorative. This was how meaning was structured: the gods were not remote abstractions, but archetypal mirrors for daily life.

Gradually, however, this poetic mirroring shifted. What began as symbolic alignment became ontological claim. To act like the god became to act as the god. The priest no longer channelled Enlil - he became Enlil’s voice. The administrator did not merely evoke Shamash's justice - he ruled in his stead. In this way, the mythopoetic matrix crystallised into theological authority. Myth hardened into law. And from this, the structures of temple rule, dynastic theology, and institutional dogma began to emerge - not as betrayals of the earlier pattern, but as its codified shell.

Important note: Let us be clear. I do not reconstruct this history to fall into the same academic trap that has so often distorted it - the trap of assuming that a culture’s surviving inscriptions or images reflect the full interiority of its people. That trap leads us to read the surface as if it were the depth, to confuse the temple wall with the village hearth. People are people - across all time, and in all places - individuals with private doubts, quiet joys, and unrecorded sorrows. As historians, we must try to walk in the shoes of those we study, not merely catalogue their traces. In doing so, we must acknowledge that while fragments and inscriptions may reveal general tendencies - archetypes, rituals, cosmologies - they do not speak for every life lived beneath them.

It would be no less reductive to claim that because every modern courtroom displays a Bible, every citizen conducts their life as a biblical allegory. We know this is not so. And yet this very fallacy persists in how ancient cultures are often portrayed - as if every trader in Umma or farmer in Lagash rose each day in ritual performance of state theology. They did not. They lived. Therefore, we must resist judging the whole of a people by the curated echo of their elites. The mythopoetic frame was real - but it was not the only one.

The Akkadian Horizon – Centralisation, Language Shift, and Imperial Expansion (c. 2334–2150 BCE)

The Akkadian period marks a major turning point in Mesopotamian history, characterised by the consolidation of political power under a single ruler and the expansion of control across much of the region. It begins with the rise of Sargon of Akkad, who established what is often considered the first territorial empire in the ancient Near East. The Akkadian language, a Semitic tongue, replaced Sumerian as the primary administrative language across the empire, although Sumerian continued in ritual and scholarly contexts.

However, this linguistic transition may not be as straightforward as it is often presented. As L.A. Waddell observed, the elevation of Semitic as the dominant linguistic form may reflect more the biases of later Assyriological interpretation than the full historical record. Waddell identified what he believed to be evidence of an alternative language presence - which he termed “Sumer-Aryan” - but his framing was marred by racial assumptions common to his time. In this work, I have recast that category under a more precise and culturally neutral term: Gothic script. This form, which appears structurally distinct from both Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, is visible in artefacts that remain largely unacknowledged or unexamined by mainstream scholarship.

It is entirely plausible that rulers in the Akkadian period - especially those operating in transitional zones - used multiple language systems concurrently, addressing different communities or classes through different idioms. Yet the dominant consensus has treated the Semitic corpus not as one strand within a plural record, but as a monolithic replacement. This presumption of totality is not only methodologically fragile; it obscures the likelihood of a more complex interplay of linguistic authority and cultural drift - one that supports Waddell’s initial insight, but reframed here without the distortions of racialist legacy.

I feel that this confluence of indigenous languages with those arriving through cultural drift is echoed symbolically in the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel and the figure of Nimrod. Beneath its later theological framing, the Babel story may preserve a remnant memory - not of divine punishment, but of the moment when linguistic plurality emerged from cultural encounter. It recalls a time when communities that had developed in relative isolation began to overlap, producing confusion, boundary, and the early conditions of imperial negotiation. In this light, Babel is not a myth of scattering, but of meeting - of the complex, often chaotic confluence from which structured civilisation was ultimately born.

And it follows, logically, that this need to communicate across divergent languages and regions created a new imperative - not just to translate, but to unify. The development of writing as a cross-regional medium arose from this necessity. What we later identify as Semitic script and language did not appear fully formed, nor was it the result of any divine mandate. It was, rather, a crystallisation of multiple influences - a practical and political solution to the challenge of diversity. The result was not the beginning of civilisation, but a response to it.

Sargon (r. c. 2334–2279 BCE) came to power in the city of Akkad (location still unidentified, but likely situated near modern Baghdad) and quickly embarked on military campaigns that brought him control over the major Sumerian city-states, including Ur, Uruk, Lagash, and Umma. He extended his reach as far as northern Mesopotamia, western Iran, and possibly the Levant. His rule was based on both military strength and the establishment of a centralised bureaucracy.

This imperative to unify language for administrative and political coherence is exemplified in the figure of Sargon himself. Often retroactively categorised as “Semitic” - both linguistically and racially - Sargon is cited as a paradigm of early Semitic kingship. However, this view reflects more the assumptions of later Assyriological framing than the nuance of the source material itself. Sargon’s reign is marked by linguistic plurality: he commissioned inscriptions in Akkadian, but also appears to have issued communications in other forms, including older Sumerian and what I have elsewhere termed Gothic script - a structurally distinct form reflecting cultural elements from the highlands to the north and east.

To take only those inscriptions in the Semitic register and treat them as representative of Sargon's identity in full is not merely reductive - it is methodologically indefensible. As Waddell long ago insisted, and as the surviving evidence still affirms, the written corpus of this period is plural, not singular. The notion of Sargon as a “Semitic” ruler in both linguistic and racial terms reflects not ancient reality but modern construction. It is the product of selective emphasis - a tendency shaped by the racialised academic paradigms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which sought to align archaeology with biblical validation.

The conflation of language and race - the framing of “Semitic” as an ethnic or biological category - was not a neutral scholarly position. It was politically motivated, emerging from a cultural project aimed at reinforcing biblical authority and securing the religious narratives that underpinned colonial and theological institutions. Those early archaeologists who were tasked, often explicitly, with “proving the Bible” encountered overwhelming evidence that its version of history was partial at best. In response, linguistic identification - especially of Semitic languages - was racialised to preserve the narrative frame.

This legacy has not been entirely undone. Even today, terms like “Semitic people” is commonly used in ways that conflate a language group with a single ethno-religious identity - most often Jewish. This is historically inaccurate and intellectually indefensible, though it remains politically convenient. It serves to uphold structures of narrative control rooted not in linguistic science but in institutional dogma.

To move forward honestly, we must deconstruct this conflation and allow the complexity of the historical record to speak without being filtered through inherited theological anxieties.

Under Sargon and his successors, including his grandson Naram-Sin, the Akkadian state implemented standardised systems of taxation, administration, and record-keeping. Cuneiform script was adapted for the Akkadian language, and royal inscriptions became more detailed, describing divine favour, military victories, and monumental building projects. Naram-Sin (r. c. 2254–2218 BCE) declared himself "King of the Four Quarters" and was the first Mesopotamian ruler to claim divinity during his lifetime, marking a shift in the ideology of kingship.

The Akkadian period also saw significant cultural integration between Semitic-speaking populations and the older Sumerian tradition. Administrative practices, religious concepts, and artistic styles merged, and Sumerian literary works were copied and preserved by Akkadian scribes. The role of the temple remained important, but it was increasingly subordinated to royal authority.

One key figure from this period is Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon and high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur. She is the earliest known author in history whose name is recorded. Her hymns to the goddess Inanna demonstrate both literary sophistication and the use of religion to support dynastic legitimacy.

The Akkadian Empire eventually weakened due to internal unrest, overextension, and environmental stress, including drought. Around 2150 BCE, it collapsed under pressure from the Gutians, a group from the Zagros Mountains. Despite its relatively short duration, the Akkadian period established administrative and ideological models that would influence Mesopotamian civilisation for centuries to come.

From Collapse to Continuity – The Isin-Larsa Period and the Rebuilding of Southern Mesopotamia (c. 2025–1763 BCE)

Following the collapse of the Ur III dynasty around 2004 BCE, southern Mesopotamia entered a phase of political fragmentation and regional competition known as the Isin-Larsa period. During this time, no single city held dominance over the region. Instead, city-states such as Isin and Larsa emerged as rival centres, each claiming continuity with the Sumerian past. This period was marked by efforts to maintain traditional institutions, temple economies, and scribal culture, even as power shifted between competing elites.

The rulers of Isin positioned themselves as inheritors of Ur III legitimacy, preserving the Sumerian language in inscriptions and restoring older cult centres. In response, Larsa’s rulers focused on economic development, especially in agriculture and canal infrastructure, using that base to build political and military strength. Several important rulers from Larsa, including Rim-Sin I, would eventually challenge Isin's authority directly.

While no empire emerged during this time, the period is crucial for the continuity of Mesopotamian legal (lugal?) and administrative traditions. The famous Code of Lipit-Ishtar from Isin predates Hammurabi’s code and shows a similar format of legal preamble and enumerated laws. The rivalry between city-states also helped shape a more developed form of political rhetoric, in which rulers portrayed themselves as restorers of divine order amid decline.

The Isin-Larsa period laid the foundation for the rise of Babylon, as centralised state structures were gradually rebuilt. It also represents the final phase in which the Sumerian language was still used actively in official inscriptions, though Akkadian had already become the dominant spoken and administrative language.

The Rise of Babylon – Hammurabi, Kassites, and the Babylonian Legacy to the West (c. 1894–539 BCE)

Babylon first emerged as a minor Amorite-led city-state during the early 2nd millennium BCE, but under Hammurabi (r. c. 1792–1750 BCE), it became the dominant political and cultural centre in Mesopotamia. Hammurabi’s military campaigns united much of southern and central Mesopotamia under his rule, and his legal code became one of the most influential documents of the ancient world.

Although Hammurabi’s dynasty declined soon after his death, the prestige of Babylon endured. Later dynasties, including the Kassites (c. 1595–1155 BCE), maintained Babylon’s importance as a religious and cultural capital. The Kassite period was notable for its diplomatic relations with other great powers of the Late Bronze Age world, including Egypt, the Hittites, and Elam.

Babylon’s religious institutions, particularly the cult of Marduk, became central to the city’s identity. The city’s scribal schools preserved and transmitted a vast body of Mesopotamian literature, including creation myths, epics, and astronomical texts. This intellectual tradition would continue for centuries and shape later cultures.

By the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE, Babylon again rose to imperial status under the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, notably under Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BCE). This phase included the conquest of Jerusalem and the deportation of segments of the Judahite population to Babylon in what is now referred to as the Babylonian Exile.

The Babylonian Exile marks a pivotal point for both Mesopotamian and Israelite history. While the administrative and religious structures of Babylon remained strong until its fall to Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, the Judahite experience in Babylon would give rise to major developments in Jewish thought, scripture, and identity.

At this point, we will temporarily part ways with Babylon and follow the Judahites westward, as the legacy of Mesopotamian civilisation enters a new phase through its transmission into emerging traditions. But what of the foundational beliefs and cults of early Mesopotamia?

The Aratta–Uruk Axis and the Myth of Kingship

The threshold between shrine culture and urban civilisation is not marked by conquest or invention alone, but by the harmonisation of cosmology with ancient memory. Between the Aratta plateau and the marshlands of Sumer, something emerged: a way to bind observation, devotion, authority and sky.

The early Neolithic shrine cultures at sites like Şanliurfa (Urfa), Göbekli Tepe, and Aratta (mythical, but directionally consistent with Jiroft and highland Iran) are not primitive. They are already codifying symbolic field logic – through circular enclosures, celestial alignment, and iconographic layering.

As populations descend toward the river basins, this symbolic infrastructure fuses with hydrological abundance. The result: proto-cities like Eridu, and finally the emergence of Uruk, where the goddess Inanna rules and the temple is not a site of worship, but a field-mirroring engine.

It is here that priest-kings emerge: not tyrants, but field-navigators. They are aligned to sky patterns, cycles of fertility, and harmonic law. The Enmerkar legend, where the king builds the ziggurat and contends with the land of Aratta, encodes this moment: the transfer of spiritual sovereignty from highland shrine to lowland city.

Kingship in this world is not military. It is celestial. The king becomes a human axis mundi, embodying the conjunction of the heavens with the earth. He must measure, harmonise, sacrifice, and transmit.

In this first phase, we witness:

• The collapse of tribal ritual into centralised ritual logic

• The descent of shrine geometry into urban form

• The transformation of shaman into king

• And the embedding of the sky – the actual stars and their movement – into brick, calendar, and grain

What is born here is not governance. It is field coherence through human structure. This is the seed of what will become Sumer – and eventually be stolen, broken, and rewritten.

But in this first moment, it is true.

The Inanna Paradigm – Priestess of the Heavens and the Origins of the Gala and Galli

Long before the Sumerian empire or formal theology, the goddess Inanna presided over Uruk not as an abstract deity but as a vivid and central figure in early Mesopotamian life. She was associated with fertility, love, battle, cosmic order, and the planet Venus. Her mythic cycle, especially her descent into the underworld, was rooted in astronomical observation and ritual performance.

Her descent is more than metaphor. It mirrors the astronomical cycle of Venus as it disappears from the sky and re-emerges – a process observed and ritualised over generations. The “seven gates” Inanna passes through correspond to calendrical thresholds and symbolic reversals – marking her as a goddess of cosmic liminality and transformation.

Through her cult and temple rites, a distinct class of ritual attendants emerged: the Gala-priests. These were typically male but assumed feminine speech, manner, and roles – specialists in lamentation, ritual mourning, and the Emesal dialect associated with women’s voices. Their function was not ecstatic frenzy, but sacred grief, inversion, and ritual boundary-crossing. Some may have been castrated, though no explicit Sumerian record confirms this. What is clear is their liminal social status, consistent with Inanna's dominion over transgression, inversion, and the sacred in-between.

Sumerian sources suggest additional layers of meaning surrounding the gala. The cuneiform signs used to write the word, UŠ.KU, appear to carry deliberate sexual puns: UŠ can mean “penis” or “male,” while KU can refer to “anus” or “buttocks.” This encoding reflects the ritual-sexual ambiguity of the role. A Sumerian proverb captures the tone directly: “When the gala wiped off his anus [he said], ‘I must not arouse that which belongs to my mistress.’” These elements suggest a symbolic or ritualised sexual dimension in their service. Yet despite their feminised and liminal role, many gala are attested in administrative records as having wives and children. Some were women. The role was not biologically fixed, but socially and ritually constructed in alignment with Inanna’s domain.

Much later, in Phrygian and Roman contexts, a separate priesthood emerged in the cult of Cybele – the Galli. These were ecstatic, castrated male priests who performed wild, frenzied rites and public rituals. The Galli were:

Attendants of Cybele and her dying-consort Attis
Participants in ecstatic ceremonies and ritual possession
Castrated in imitation of Attis’ death
Regarded as transgressive mediators between male and female, human and divine

While symbolic parallels exist between Inanna’s boundary-breaking domain and the later ecstatic practices of Cybele’s Galli, they are not apparently historically continuous. The Galli are not descended from the Sumerian Gala, we are told. They represent a separate manifestation of the goddess-priest inversion archetype, shaped by the myth of Attis, not by Inanna. Yet this tendency to treat such similarities as coincidental typological echoes is exactly how modern academia encourages us to dismiss pattern across time and geography.

How can a cult from 300 BCE in Anatolia relate meaningfully to a priesthood from 2000 BCE Mesopotamia? The answer lies in typology - and in the geography itself. Once we acknowledge Anatolia as a shared node between Mesopotamian, Phrygian, and later Mediterranean religious expressions, the ground opens for deeper comparison. What we uncover is not cultural dependency, but shared symbolic logic: the goddess and her priest-servants as expressions of nature, inversion, fertility, rupture, and renewal.

To understand the evolution of kingship, writing, ritual, and law in Sumer, we must begin with Inanna – and to do so cleanly, we must distinguish the lamentation rites of the Gala from the ecstatic castration rites of the Galli. Both served goddesses of fertility and transformation, but in different times, regions, and registers.

What is striking, however, is that both the Gala and the Galli - within our reconstructed drift culture - appear to emerge from the same general region: Anatolia. Both were feminised, and both known for their ritual un-manning. The Gala were associated with homoerotic speech and behaviour, ritual lament, and feminine language. The Galli, centuries later, took this further through physical castration - a symbolic surrender of the masculine body to the goddess. In both cases, the logic is the same: to transcend normative male identity and draw closer to the feminine principle that underlies life, death, and rebirth.

Here is a more thorough analysis of the typology of the goddesses Inanna of Sumer, Ishtar of Akkadian/Assyrian Babylonian, and Cybele of Phrygia

1. Planetary Identity

• Inanna: Planet Venus – Morning and Evening Star

• Ishtar: Planet Venus – Disappearance and return in celestial cycle

• Cybele: Planet Earth – Embodied mountain axis and seasonal regulator

2. Domains of Power

• Inanna: Fertility, love, war, cosmic regulation

• Ishtar: Fertility, sexuality, vengeance, planetary transitions

• Cybele: Fertility, wild nature, mountains, protection of cities and thresholds

3. Mythic Descent

• Inanna: Descends through seven gates into the underworld; stripped and reborn

• Ishtar: Descends and unleashes cosmic disorder; restored through negotiation

• Cybele: Descends into ecstatic mourning and seasonal withdrawal; her return signals spring

4. Ritual Function

• Inanna: Sacred sexuality expressed through the hieros gamos (sacred marriage), ritual lamentation, and temple-based symbolic economy

• Ishtar: Open celebration of sexuality, war, and vengeance - associated with temple rites, gender fluidity, and fertility power

• Cybele: Ecstatic rites centred on ritual frenzy, drumming, and gender inversion - including priestly castration and feminisation as devotion to the goddess

5. Threshold Role

• Inanna: Descends into the underworld and returns reborn - regulates the boundary between life and death, identity and inversion

• Ishtar: Crosses the threshold of the underworld, unleashing cosmic disorder - restored only through ritual appeasement and cosmic recalibration

• Cybele: Withdraws into ecstatic mourning - her return marks the seasonal shift from death to life and restores vegetative and social balance

6. Animal Symbolism

• Inanna: Lions (sovereignty, wrath), doves, owls

• Ishtar: Lions, serpents, birds

• Cybele: Lions (draw chariot), bees, boars, birds of prey

7. Sacred Objects

• Inanna: Date palm (as sacred tree of life), knotwork belt (umbilical/fertility symbol), rod and ring of kingship, lapis mirror

• Ishtar: Tree of life motif (often flanked by guardians), sacred garden, fruit-bearing branches, star (Venus) and bow

• Cybele: Pine cone (regeneration and semen-symbol), evergreen tree, wreaths of oak and wild flora, tympanum (ritual drum of vegetation pulse)

8. Colours and Scents

• Inanna: Red and gold, lapis, myrrh, cedar

• Ishtar: Blood-red and gold, frankincense, cedar

• Cybele: Crimson robes, gold, oak resin, pine

9. Geographic Centre

• Inanna: Uruk (Eanna temple complex)

• Ishtar: Babylon, Nineveh

• Cybele: Pessinus (Phrygia), Mount Dindymon, later centralised in Rome

10. Core Archetype

• Inanna: Sovereign goddess of descent, inversion, and cosmic rebirth

• Ishtar: Planetary goddess of destruction, regulation, and seasonal return

• Cybele: Earth Mother whose withdrawal and ecstatic return govern the agricultural cycle

11. Water Symbolism and Liquid Thresholds

• Inanna: Crosses the watery boundary of the underworld; associated with purification basins, ritual lustration, and the cosmic river of descent

• Ishtar: Linked to sacred rivers (Euphrates, Tigris), fertility through flooding cycles, and ritual bathing before descent or vengeance

• Cybele: Associated with mountain springs, river origins, and ritual libation; sacred water used in ecstatic rites and initiatory purification

  ---

Now for the consorts:

1. Mythic Role

• Dumuzi: The divine shepherd-king - lover of the goddess, sacrificed to ensure the renewal of life

• Tammuz: Known as “the Shepherd” - consort of the goddess whose death marks the seasonal turning and whose mourning renews fertility

• Attis: The shepherd of the goddess - youthful consort who dies and returns to animate the vegetative cycle

2. Vegetation Archetype

• Dumuzi: Grain spirit - cut down, buried, and regrown; his death is the drought, his return the rain

• Tammuz: Dying plant god - fades with harvest, mourned in the dry season, returned with fertility

• Attis: Vegetation consort - dies beneath the pine tree, his blood nourishes the earth; his return brings the spring bloom

3. Seasonal Function

• Dumuzi: Dies in the dry season, returns with the rains; marks the agricultural year

• Tammuz: Mourned in midsummer, returns as fertility resumes; tracks the solar year

• Attis: Dies near the spring equinox, rises with new growth; defines vegetative rebirth

4. Death Motif

• Dumuzi: Dragged to the underworld in exchange for Inanna; struck down and ritually mourned by the community

• Tammuz: Taken by divine decree; his death marks the fading of life and is lamented annually by women in sacred rites

• Attis: Dies in sacred frenzy beneath the pine tree; mourned ecstatically by Cybele and her followers; his death initiates seasonal mourning and ritual grief

5. Ritual Expression

• Dumuzi: Grain burials, ritual lamentation, sacred marriage to the goddess, annual songs of death and return

• Tammuz: Funerary mourning by women, symbolic burial rites, seasonal lamentation, sacred spousal role enacted in ritual

• Attis: Mourning festivals led by Cybele’s followers, sacred marriage sealed by self-castration, ritual lamentation, tree-felling, and ecstatic rites of rebirth

6. Fertility Function

• Dumuzi: Ensures crop renewal and soil fertility through sacrificial death and cyclic return

• Tammuz: Ensures the return of fruitfulness by passing through death and lament

• Attis: Ensures the fertility of the earth through blood, sacrifice, and seasonal rebirth

7. Gender Stereotypical Role Reversal

• Dumuzi: Power reversed - becomes the one offered, not the ruler; held in feminine-coded lament

• Tammuz: Object of grief and loss - role reverses from king to passive receiver of mourning

• Attis: Renounces masculinity entirely - full submission through self-castration in devotion to the goddess

8. Symbols and Imagery

• Dumuzi: Bound sheaf of grain, shepherd’s crook, horned crown, lying beneath the harvest field

• Tammuz: Shepherd’s crook, grain stalks, funerary figurines, seated or recumbent posture

• Attis: Shepherd’s crook, pine cone, Phrygian cap, reclining beneath the pine tree

9. Rebirth Mechanism

• Dumuzi: Returns from the underworld seasonally, or part-time; embodies natural resurrection

• Tammuz: Revived symbolically through ritual and collective mourning; reborn in memory

• Attis: Rises on the third day of the spring rite; enacted annually by priests as literal rebirth

10. Core Archetype

• Dumuzi: The sacrificed consort - dies to fertilise the land and guarantee seasonal return

• Tammuz: The sacrificed consort - dies to fertilise the land and guarantee seasonal return

• Attis: The sacrificed consort - dies to fertilise the land and guarantee seasonal return

---

Dumuzi and the Dying Shepherd Kings – Grain, Blood, and the Rod of Power

In the early Sumerian tradition, the figure of Dumuzi represents a foundational archetype: the shepherd king who dies and returns. His narrative is not simply mythic allegory but a ritual memory tied to agricultural cycles, kingship legitimacy, and seasonal transformation.

Dumuzi, also known as Tammuz, is closely linked to Inanna. In some traditions he is her consort, in others a sacrificed youth offered up as part of the greater cyclical balance. His death is lamented in liturgical texts and temple rituals throughout Mesopotamia. The Sumerians enacted this drama seasonally, mourning the loss of the vital force as summer heat scorched the land and celebrating his symbolic return with the rain and renewed growth.

This was not abstract: Dumuzi was the personification of the king as steward of fertility, whose body and rule were bound to the land. The king's legitimacy was often re-affirmed through ritual marriage to the goddess, mediated through priestesses of Inanna, and his symbolic death or ritual lament.

Three elements are central to Dumuzi's role:

• Grain: As a symbol of life, death, and sustenance, the cereal grain was ritually buried, harvested, and processed in rhythms mirroring the god's own cycle.

• Blood: Sacrifice, whether animal or symbolic human, was part of the liturgical mechanism to ensure continuity and balance. In some local cults, this likely extended to ritualised kingship vulnerability.

• The Rod: Kingship was conferred by the divine rod and ring, visible in Sumerian iconography. This was not merely a badge of office but a symbol of measured rule, boundary-keeping, and divinely sanctioned authority.

The ritualised lamentations for Dumuzi shaped Near Eastern religious traditions, feeding directly into:

• The Babylonian Tammuz cult

• Syro-Phoenician rites of Adonis

• The Greek Eleusinian Mysteries

• Elements in Biblical passages referencing the women who "weep for Tammuz"

This archetype of the dying and returning king becomes essential to later mythological and theological systems. It offers insight into how early societies fused survival, sovereignty, and the sacred into one cohesive symbolic language.

(By the time of the Gospel writings, these converging archetypes had already crystallised. Jesus emerges as a fusion figure: the new Adam, the divine son who dies and returns; a Tammuz-like shepherd mourned by a holy woman; a sacrificed Atum refigured for a new age. Even the names reflect these deep etymological echoes - Atum becomes Adam, Tammuz becomes Thomas - linguistic relics of a symbolic lineage long in motion.

We see here not merely etymology, but what I call atumology: the recovery of sacred pattern through names, where myth is not forgotten but embedded - encoded in form, waiting to be remembered.

Atum, in the Egyptian tradition, is the god of completion - the setting sun, the one who returns to the underworld to become whole again. He is the primordial totality who dies each day and rises renewed - later expressed more distinctly as Osiris (the dead king) and Horus (the resurrected son). In this light, the figure of Christ descending into death and rising again mirrors not only the shepherd Tammuz but the solar Atum: crucified at dusk, entombed in the west, and resurrected as light reborn. It is this deeper continuity that atumology seeks to recover - not by asserting historical descent, but by revealing symbolic recurrence.

To reinforce the evidence for Atum as Adam, and as Jesus, we need only recall one of Atum’s epithets: Iusa, the ‘ever-coming son’ - a title that would eventually morph into Iasu or Yehoshua, before being Hellenised into Jesus. And all of this millennia before any historical ‘Jesus’ was asserted by the Church.)

As we move forward, this integration of kingship, natural cycle, and divine marriage forms the underpinning of Sumerian statecraft.

When the Storm Came – Enlil, Ninurta, and the Prototype of Yahweh

The Sumerians did not fear the heavens – they studied them. But in the evolution of their myth and ritual systems, one figure begins to loom large: Enlil, the storm god. He represents the force that tears down and re-establishes order, both feared and revered. With him arrives the idea that control over chaos does not come only through fertility or harmony, but also through severity and command.

Enlil is one of the earliest high gods of the Sumerian pantheon. His role was complex: he was the bringer of wind and storm, but also the granter of kingship, the separator of sky and earth, and the divine legislator who could sweep away civilisations with a command. His temple at Nippur became a central cultic and political centre, from which his divine authority radiated outward.

Enlil's role anticipates many features later attributed to the Hebrew deity Yahweh:

• Storm and voice: Like Yahweh at Sinai, Enlil's presence was announced in wind and thunder.

• Divine anger: Enlil initiates the flood to wipe out humanity in the Atrahasis epic, not out of malice, but to reassert divine order.

• Selection of kings: He is said to "decree the fates" and determine which city shall rise or fall.

Enlil's warrior son, Ninurta, represents the executive force of storm and war. His slaying of chaotic monsters and rebellious mountains prefigures later divine warrior motifs, including the defeat of Leviathan and other chaos-serpents.

These storm gods are not mere thunder personifications. They represent a shift in mythic consciousness:

• From cyclical regeneration to linear intervention

• From fertility-based legitimacy to command-based authority

• From harmonising with the world to subduing it

This marks a turn in divine imagery: kingship is no longer merely granted by the goddess or earned through alignment with the cycles of life. It can be claimed through force, sanctioned by the storm.

This narrative evolution will feed directly into later biblical and Near Eastern mythologies:

• Baal as the Canaanite storm god and slayer of Yam

• Yahweh as sky-lord, judge, and warrior

• The prophetic tradition of divine wrath as purifying intervention

In Enlil and Ninurta, we witness the emergence of this new model. The storm is not only feared – it is harnessed, codified, and enthroned.

The Tower and the Tongue – Writing, Administration, and Control

With the emergence of Sumerian kingship and monumental urban centres came the need to preserve memory, mark obligation, and standardise ritual and exchange. This necessity birthed one of the most transformative innovations in human history: writing. But writing did not begin with poetry or law. It began with counting.

The earliest scripts did not emerge from priests or poets, but from accountants. In 4th millennium BCE Sumer, clay tokens were used to represent commodities - cattle, grain, oil, textiles - and to track temple offerings and economic obligations. These tokens were stored in clay envelopes (bullae), and eventually pressed into their surfaces to mark contents. Over time, the tokens were replaced by incised pictograms, which evolved into stylised signs drawn with a reed stylus. This gave rise to cuneiform: a wedge-shaped script capable not only of recording goods, but names, verbs, and entire sentences.

It was in this transition that cursive forms began to straighten, and with them, so too did thought. What had once flowed now crystallised. A once-natural, adaptive rhythm began to harden into standardised lines - a reflection of the same process we see in water and stone. As in our hydronyms gar and kar, the stream that once wandered begins to wear a channel; and that channel becomes the chreode - the fixed groove, the path of least resistance. Writing, like water, began to shape the structure through which thought would henceforth be required to flow.

Parallel to the rise of writing came monumental architecture: the ziggurat, most famously associated with Uruk, Ur, and Eridu. These were not merely temples, but structures of vertical aspiration, celestial observation, and civic control. They mirrored the heavens but rose from the earth - cosmological statements rendered in baked brick.

Together, these two technologies - writing and the ziggurat - transformed Mesopotamian culture:

• Writing made memory transferrable and law enforceable
• The ziggurat encoded sacred geography into urban form

Both reflect the same directional logic: the linearisation of form - from flowing script to standardised strokes, from rounded tor to stepped pyramid. A natural curve becomes a measured rise. What once followed the landscape now begins to shape it.

And gradually, people began to ingest these new forms - no longer drawn from forest, stream, or shifting sand, nor echoed in circular tents or round houses, but built into square courtyards, rectilinear walls, and stepped ceremonial platforms. The built world became geometry, and that geometry became habitual. These new spatial logics weren’t just shelters - they became mental anchors, foci for attention, hierarchy, and ritual. The shape of one’s home began to mirror the shape of law, of power, and of the heavens themselves - only now rendered in angles, alignment, and stone.

Later tradition remembered this convergence in the myth of the Tower of Babel, where the confusion of languages was portrayed as divine punishment for human ambition. But historically, this was a moment of consolidation: where language became standardised, hierarchies entrenched, and knowledge centralised.

As cuneiform spread, so did a new model of power:

• Kingship was now recorded and legitimised in text

• Law could be promulgated across time and territory

• Myth could be copied, edited, and canonised

In this way, writing became not only a tool of memory but also of administration and control. Those who could read and write held the keys to continuity, legacy, and order. The scribes were not simply recorders of events - they shaped what the future would remember.

Deluge and Dismemberment – The Mythic Reset of Civilisation

By the late third millennium BCE, Sumerian mythology had begun to preserve something more than seasonal rhythms or cultic precedent. It encoded a deeper memory of civilisational rupture: the loss of continuity, the fear of sky-darkening disruption, and the symbolic death of order. These fears were ritualised in the figure of the flood.

The Mesopotamian deluge narratives – Ziusudra in Sumerian tradition, Atrahasis in Akkadian, and Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh – do not describe local floods. They describe a cosmological break: the loss of known time, the unmooring of the calendar, and the severance of the old kingship line.

In each version, the cause is the anger or fatigue of the gods, but the result is the same:

• The destruction of a former world

• The preservation of a chosen one in an ark or boat

• The re-establishment of order, with altered terms

The Sumerian king list reflects this logic. Kings before the flood reign for tens of thousands of years. After the flood, reign lengths contract dramatically. This is not historiography. It is calendar cosmology. The "antediluvian" kings represent great time cycles; the flood marks a calendrical reset. Post-flood kingship is reduced, more temporal, less eternal.

Gerald Massey identified four types of flood in Egyptian tradition – flood of water, blood, darkness, and fire – each symbolic of a different kind of disruption. The Mesopotamian flood merges several of these. It is watery, but also bloody in the loss of the old generation, and dark in its breaking of the sky order.

The dismemberment theme overlays this cosmology. The bull of heaven is killed. Tiamat, in the later Babylonian myth, is cut apart to form the ordered cosmos. These are not combat myths. They are stories of disintegration and reassembly:

• Civilisation dies

• Its body is broken

• A remnant survives to carry the spark forward

In this sense, the ark is not merely a boat. It is a container of pattern - a vessel of preservation through chaos. The idea reappears in Hebrew tradition, where Noah’s ark functions both as a literal object and a symbolic anchor: a holder of lineage, memory, and law through the great dissolution. The “giants of old,” once revered as ancestral figures, are recast as threats - symbols of pre-flood corruption, rather than vestiges of an earlier age.

The deluge myths preserve a fundamental tension:

· The fear of losing the heavens and the order they bring

· The belief that knowledge and lineage can survive catastrophe

This tension is later absorbed and weaponised by Babylonian priesthoods and, much later, biblical redactors - who transform the flood into a dividing line between divine and fallen history. But in its earliest forms, the flood was not judgement - it was reset: a cosmological cycle, a celestial precession mythologised into narrative.

Crucially, this was also the period in which formalised observation - the seeds of astronomy, measurement, and law - began to emerge as early science. The flood myths, and especially the encoded memory of Ararat, were not the product of fantasy or theological metaphor alone. They were structured records.

Here, we return to two of the few researchers who fully recognised this convergence: L.A. Waddell and Donald A. Mackenzie.

Waddell, through comparative analysis of the Babylonian and Vedic king lists, showed a remarkable correspondence - especially in the first ten post-diluvian rulers. These kings, in both traditions, mark the era after the flood - but more tellingly, the antediluvian kings are the same kings, merely under different names. The “flood” becomes a boundary event not of water, but of timekeeping - a symbolic restart that allows for a new measurement system.

What is preserved in these lists is not biography, but chronometry: the ages of the pre-flood kings are celestial in scale, matching the life cycles of stars or planets. The flood, in this light, becomes the veil between two mathematical epochs - a coded map of the heavens written in generational form.

This is not mysticism, nor is it history. It is early science encoded in myth - and the memory of the Araratian sky-watchers drifting downstream into Sumer, carved into narrative, and preserved as sacred time.

This logic of cosmic recurrence - flood as celestial reset, antediluvian kings as star-clocks - was not confined to Mesopotamia. It echoes with precision in India’s Yuga system, in Egyptian and Irish seasonal divisions, and in the codified colours, durations, and numerals of sacred time across cultures. What appears mythic is, in truth, mathematical. As Donald A. Mackenzie shows, these systems were not primitive guesses but sophisticated frameworks of temporal structure, rooted in observation and preserved through symbol. The following passage from Myths of Babylonia and Assyria illustrates how the familiar concept of 360 degrees, the saros cycle, and the 432,000-year flood chronology are all expressions of this same astro-mathematical worldview:

Of special interest among the many problems presented by Babylonian astronomical lore is the theory of Cosmic periods or Ages of the Universe. In the Indian, Greek, and Irish mythologies there are four Ages – the Silvern (white), Golden (yellow), the Bronze (red), and the Iron (black). As has been already indicated, Mr. R. Brown, jun., shows that “the Indian system of Yugas, or ages of the world, presents many features which forcibly remind us of the Euphratean scheme". The Babylonians had ten antediluvian kings, who were reputed to have reigned for vast periods, the total of which amounted to 120 saroi, or 432,000 years. These figures at once recall the Indian Maha-yuga of 4,320,000 years = 432,000 x 10. Apparently the Babylonian and Indian systems of calculation were of common origin. In both countries the measurements of time and space were arrived at by utilizing the numerals 10 and 6.

When primitive man began to count he adopted a method which comes naturally to every schoolboy; he utilized his fingers. Twice five gave him ten, and from ten he progressed to twenty, and then on to a hundred and beyond. In making measurements his hands, arms, and feet were at his service. We are still measuring by feet and yards (standardized strides) in this country, while those who engage in the immemorial art of knitting, and, in doing so, repeat designs found on neolithic pottery, continue to measure in finger breadths, finger lengths, and hand breadths as did the ancient folks who called an arm length a cubit. Nor has the span been forgotten, especially by boys in their games with marbles; the space from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger when the hand is extended must have been an important measurement from the earliest times.

(In India "finger counting" [Kaur guna] is associated with prayer or the repeating of mantras. The counting is performed by the thumb, which, when the hand is drawn up, touches the upper part of the third finger. The two upper "chambers" of the third finger are counted, then the two upper "chambers" of the little finger; the thumb then touches the tip of each finger from the little finger to the first; when it comes down into the upper chamber of the first finger 9 is counted. By a similar process each round of 9 on the right hand is recorded by the left up to 12; 12 X 9 = 108 repetitions of a mantra. The upper "chambers" of the fingers are the "best" or "highest" [uttama], the lower [adhama] chambers are not utilized in the prayer-counting process. When Hindus sit cross-legged at prayers, with closed eyes, the right hand is raised from the elbow in front of the body, and the thumb moves each time a mantra is repeated; the left hand lies palm upward on the left knee, and the thumb moves each time nine mantra have been counted.)

As he made progress in calculations, the primitive Babylonian appears to have been struck by other details in his anatomy besides his sets of five fingers and five toes. He observed, for instance, that his fingers were divided into three parts and his thumb into two parts only; four fingers multiplied by three gave him twelve, and multiplying 12 by 3 he reached 36. Apparently the figure 6 attracted him. His body was divided into 6 parts – 2 arms, 2 legs, the head, and the trunk; his 2 ears, 2 eyes, and mouth, and nose also gave him 6. The basal 6, multiplied by his 10 fingers, gave him 60, and 60 x 2 (for his 2 hands) gave him 120. In Babylonian arithmetic 6 and 60 are important numbers, and it is not surprising to find that in the system of numerals the signs for I and 10 combined represent 60.

In fixing the length of a mythical period his first great calculation of 120 came naturally to the Babylonian, and when he undertook to measure the Zodiac he equated time and space by fixing on 120 degrees. His first zodiac was the Sumerian lunar zodiac, which contained thirty moon chambers associated with the “Thirty Stars" of the tablets, and referred to by Diodorus as “Divinities of the Council". The chiefs of the Thirty numbered twelve. In this system the year began in the winter solstice. Mr. Hewitt has shown that the chief annual festival of the Indian Dravidians begins with the first full moon after the winter festival, and Mr. Brown emphasizes the fact that the list of Tamil (Dravidian) lunar and solar months are named like the Babylonian constellations. "Lunar chronology", wrote Professor Max Muller, "seems everywhere to have preceded solar chronology." The later Semitic Babylonian system had twelve solar chambers and the thirty-six constellations.

Each degree was divided into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds. The hours of the day and night each numbered twelve.

Multiplying 6 by 10 (pur), the Babylonian arrived at 60 (soss); 60 x 10 gave him 600 (ner), and 600 X 6, 3600 (sar), while 3600 x 10 gave him 36,000, and 36,000 X 12, 432,000 years, or 120 saroi, which is equal to the "sar" multiplied by the "soss" X 2. "Pur" signifies "heap" – the ten fingers closed after being counted; and "ner" signifies "foot ". Mr. George Bertin suggests that when 6 X 10 fingers gave 60 this number was multiplied by the ten toes, with the result that 600 was afterwards associated with the feet (ner). The Babylonian sign for 10 resembles the impression of two feet with heels closed and toes apart. This suggests a primitive record of the first round of finger counting.

In India this Babylonian system of calculation was developed during the Brahmanical period. The four Yugas or Ages, representing the four fingers used by the primitive mathematicians, totalled 12,000 divine years, a period which was called a Maha-yuga; it equalled the Babylonian 120 saroi, multiplied by 100. Ten times a hundred of these periods gave a "Day of Brahma ".

Each day of the gods, it was explained by the Brahmans, was a year to mortals. Multiplied by 360 days, I2,000 divine years equalled 4320000 human years. This Maha-yuga, multiplied by 1000, gave the "Day of Brahma" as 4,320,000,000 human years.

The shortest Indian Yuga is the Babylonian 120 saroi multiplied by 10 = 1200 divine years for the Kali Yuga; twice that number gives the Dvapara Yuga of 2400 divine years; then the Treta Yuga is 2400 + 1200 = 3600 divine years, and Krita Yuga 3600 + 1200 = 4800 divine years.

The influence of Babylonia is apparent in these calculations. During the Vedic period "Yuga" usually signified a "generation", and there are no certain references to the four Ages as such. The names "Kali", “Dvapara”, “Treta”, and “Krita” "occur as the designations of throws of dice". It was after the arrival of the "late comers", the post-Vedic Aryans, that the Yuga system was developed in India.

In Indian Myth and Legend it is shown that the Indian and Irish Ages have the same colour sequence: (1) White or Silvern, (2) Red or Bronze, (3) Yellow or Golden, and (4) Black or Iron. The Greek order is: (1) Golden, (2) Silvern, (3) Bronze, and (4) Iron.

The Babylonians coloured the seven planets as follows: the moon, silvern; the sun, golden; Mars, red; Saturn, black; Jupiter, orange; Venus, yellow; and Mercury, blue.

As the ten antediluvian kings who reigned for 120 saroi had an astral significance, their long reigns corresponding “with the distances separating certain of the principal stars in or near the ecliptic" it seems highly probable that the planets were similarly connected with mythical ages which were equated with the “four quarters” of the celestial regions and the four regions of the earth, which in the Gaelic story are called “the four red divisions of the world”.

(Donald A Mackenzie – Myths of Babylonia & Assyria)

The biblical patriarchs of Genesis - from Adam to Noah - are not the founders of a literal bloodline. They are a late reformation of far older mathematical and cosmological constructs. Their vast lifespans mirror the exaggerated reigns of the Sumerian antediluvian kings and the Yuga-calibrated figures of Vedic chronology. The number ten, preserved in both the Genesis genealogy and the Sumerian king list, is not coincidental - it is a mnemonic code. Each “patriarch” is a placeholder in a symbolic sequence, encoding not biology but cosmology: solar cycles, precessional shifts, sidereal reckoning. The flood myth, inserted between the antediluvian and postdiluvian sets, functions as a symbolic delimiter - a cosmic reset between epochs of timekeeping. To read these patriarchs as historical figures or supernatural ancestors is to mistake mathematical allegory for biological lineage. Their true origin lies not in divine genetics, but in the early science of the stars.

LA Waddell placed the transit of the first Brahman priests from Babylonia to India via the Indus Valley during the Isin period around 2000BC.

The Tablets of Destiny – Nippur and the Forging of Cosmic Law

In Sumerian and Akkadian thought, law was not merely a civic invention, but a cosmic inheritance. Its authority did not originate with kings, but with the heavens. This belief was crystallised in the myth of the Tablets of Destiny: divine records that conferred supreme authority over the cosmos and its order.

The city of Nippur held a central place in this cosmology. It was the seat of Enlil, the high god and granter of kingship. From his temple, the Ekur, divine decree emanated-not only for Sumer, but for the ordered world. Here, the concept of "me" (divine ordinances or attributes) was collected and distributed: principles governing everything from justice and wisdom to weaving and kingship.

The original name of Nippur in Sumerian was Nippuru (𒀩𒉌), which is often transliterated as Nippur in modern sources. The Ekur was not only a religious centre but also an important site for astronomical observation and the recording of celestial events. The temple’s high tower, often described as a ziggurat, was a key feature of the site. Ziggurats were multi-story structures built as a platform for the temple, and they were used for religious ceremonies and astronomical observation.

The etymological similarities between Nibiru (crossing planet) and Nippuru imply a recognition of the observatory on earth as an axis or stable point with which to watch the heavens. As above, so below. It could also mean a ‘gateway’ as implied by the ru participle that also implies ‘motion towards’ or road to. A road will usually lead to a destination, and a gateway. Babylon means ‘The Gate of God’, or perhaps more accurately The Gate of ‘On’, the ‘sun’ or ‘light’. The original word is Bab-ili and this implies light, not ‘God’ in particular, unless god is specifically a light being, or star. Which is appropriate for our early astronomers. (ili is also ilu, see Chapter 6 for the word lugal and the translation of lu as light and not ‘man’).

The Babylonians became known as the Chaldeans, famed as the first true scientists. But as we have shown, through our examination of the data, the ‘Chaldeans’ of Babylonia were most likely part of the same cultural drift from the East, where the Chaldean culture originated, and is most likely why their language and flood myth from the plains of Ararat came to Mesopotamia.

The Tablets of Destiny appear across multiple Mesopotamian myths:

• In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat grants them to Kingu, her general.

• Marduk, rising to power, defeats Kingu and claims the tablets.

• In earlier myth, Enlil or Anu hold them, bestowing them as tokens of rule.

These tablets are not merely written objects. They represent the structure of creation:

• The rhythms of time and calendar

• The laws governing human behaviour

• The patterns of trade, temple, and state

The capture, loss, or transfer of the tablets in myth reflects political and theological shifts:

• When Marduk seizes them, he becomes chief of the pantheon, symbolising Babylon’s theological supremacy.

• When Kingu holds them, he represents the threat of chaos wielding authority.

Later, this narrative will influence how sacred law is framed in other traditions:

• The Torah as divine instruction

• The tablets of Moses as physical covenant

• Inscribed law as both cosmic and national mandate

The Tablets of Destiny also signify the growing power of written text as a foundation of authority. Oral legitimacy gives way to inscribed permanence. This was not accidental - it was political:

• Temples became scriptoria

• Scribes became gatekeepers of divine knowledge

• Law became the expression of cosmic hierarchy

In this framework, kingship becomes inseparable from literacy and liturgy. To rule was to write. To transgress was to defy the stars and their inscription.

The legacy of the Tablets of Destiny is not limited to Mesopotamian theology. Their logic underlies later empires, scriptural canons, and bureaucratic states. From Nippur's high temple, a vision of law as cosmic truth was broadcast - and it has echoed ever since.

While priest-kings upheld order through the alignment of calendar and cosmos, there was another, less linear tradition alive in ancient religion: the ecstatic, boundary-breaking ritual of the Galli.

The Galli were sacred attendants of Cybele, not Inanna. Originating in Phrygia and later absorbed into Roman religion, they were male devotees who underwent ritual castration and assumed gender-fluid roles. They were performers, ecstatic dancers, and agents of transgression. Their ceremonies were loud, frenzied, and emotionally charged, contrasting with the formality of temple procession and state cult.

But the Galli were not marginal. Their rites played a key role in maintaining social and cosmic balance. Their symbolic inversion of norms served to purify and protect the order they appeared to violate. The Galli stood at thresholds:

Between male and female
Between priest and supplicant
Between civilisation and chaos

Their castration was more than an act of devotion. It represented the permanent cutting away of reproductive identity in exchange for a new form of sacred embodiment. It could also be viewed as the male giving way to the recognition of the feminine as necessary to complete the masculine – a ritual sacrifice of the male member to become more aligned with the goddess. This mirrored, in part, the myth of Inanna and her descent into the underworld, where power is physically stripped from her at each gate. Though the Galli were not her priests, the thematic connection between ritual dismemberment and sacred transformation is structurally consistent. Later inversion of the goddess into the figure of the whore – such as the Marian archetype or the Whore of Babylon – may reflect a deep discomfort with these threshold roles.

The figure of the Galli spread across the ancient world:

In Phrygia, they served Cybele and Attis through self-castration and ecstatic performance.

In Syria and Phoenicia, gender-nonconforming priesthoods maintained lunar and fertility cults aligned with goddess systems.

In Gaul, accounts survive of ecstatic warrior-priests engaging in ritual frenzy.
In Ireland, vestiges appear in the Ceile Dé, who preserved liminal symbolic roles linked to pre-Christian ritual inversion.

The knife in these traditions is not merely a symbol of sacrifice. It is the tool of transformation. It demarcates the body as site of ritualised offering and initiates access to altered sacred status.

The state cults eventually moved toward codified ritual and linear hierarchy, but the older layers persisted. The presence of the Galli reminds us that sacred systems once included rupture, transgression, and ecstatic inversion as valid paths of renewal. Their rites testify to the role of gender, embodiment, and pain in the maintenance and regeneration of cultural order.

Some have traced ritual castration to later cultural acts of circumcision in Bible-based societies. Though this is not unique to the Western traditions – many cultures have engaged in circumcision or ritual genital modification with symbolic deference to the feminine principle.

Sargon, Sharru-kin, and the Forged Beginning of History

Around 2334 BCE, a new figure emerged in Mesopotamia who would become central to the historical narrative of kingship: Sargon of Akkad, known in Semitic tradition as Sharru-kin, or "true king." His rise marks a turning point: the movement from the sacred kingship of city-states to the imperial consolidation of myth, memory, and geography under a centralised authority.

Sargon’s origins were shrouded in symbolic motifs:

• He is said to have been set adrift in a basket on the river, echoing a widespread folkloric theme that later appears in the story of Moses.

• He rose from humble roots, serving in the court of Kish before seizing power and founding the Akkadian Empire.

But more than his military or administrative reforms, it was Sargon’s manipulation of history that defined his legacy. In his inscriptions, he positioned himself as the inaugurator of legitimate kingship, rewriting what came before into a prelude.

In reality, Sumerian kingship had a long and complex lineage stretching back centuries. The cities of Ur, Uruk, Nippur, and Lagash had developed distinct priest-king traditions, ritual calendars, and cosmological orders. Sargon’s claim to universal rule was a political act - and a historiographical one.

Later traditions, especially those shaped in Babylon and inherited by exilic Judean scribes, would amplify this model:

• Constructing beginning-of-history narratives

• Using the motif of chosen rulers arising from obscurity

• Aligning political consolidation with divine selection

L. A. Waddell controversially argued that Sargon was identical to Menes of Egypt, an interpretation now discredited in mainstream chronology but worth revisiting carefully for its recognition of early diffusion and overlapping motifs in rulership myths.

Sargon’s dynasty also pioneered the use of imperial propaganda through inscriptions, seals, and the establishment of a standardised Semitic dialect - Akkadian - which gradually eclipsed Sumerian as a spoken language.

This shift from Sumerian to Akkadian mirrored a deeper transformation:

• From polycentric cultic city-states to a unified imperial ideology

• From mythic time cycles to linear conquest narratives

• From sacred stewardship to personal dominion

The figure of Sargon stands at the threshold of this change. He did not only conquer cities. He conquered memory. And in doing so, he redefined the beginning. His rule extended beyond territory into historiography, redefining how the past itself was to be remembered.