ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO
MODERN JUDIASM, CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM,
AND THE POSSIBLE ORIGINAL HOMELAND OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE

By Vickie L. Holt

In the course of researching a question my mind asked me one day, I found more information than I had bargained for. What I found may have a significant impact on those who hold fast to the doctrines of their religion, but it’s not my intention to shake any pillars. This essay is only for the purpose of recording what I found.

The question my mind asked was: In ancient times, race was very much a regional phenomenon. The common man often stayed where he was born, creating pockets of pure race that were, to modern standards, not very far away from one another. So, asked my mind, what were the Hebrews doing in Egypt in the first place? It’s widely accepted that the Hebrews were a different race than the Egyptians, and therefore had to have come from somewhere else. Who were they? Where did they come from, and why were they there?

I first turned, of course, to the Bible and began tracing back from Moses. Together with online Biblical family trees, I learned that, after all the begats, Moses was a direct descendant of Abraham. In the chapter of the Exodus, God says to Moses “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham…” So my next move was to learn who Abraham was and find out where he’d come from.

I learned, through more begats, that Abraham was a direct descendant of Noah, and that he’d lived in ancient Mesopotamia – as did all his ancestors back to the arrival of Noah. I also learned that Abraham was the one who first took the Hebrew people out of Mesopotamia to start looking for their own land, as God had promised them after displacing them by the fabled biblical flood. As this large group of people wandered and traveled, many settled in the lands they passed through. This is how the Hebrew people became seeded throughout the region…including Egypt, where they eventually became enslaved. This answered part of my question. I understand now how the Hebrew people came to be in Egypt, but I still didn’t know where their race originated.
Since most people know the story of Noah and the ark, I certainly knew that my search didn’t end with Mesopotamia. Farther back in the ancestral line from Abraham, this group of people came from still another place. A place where Noah had lived. A place that was flooded, forcing Noah and some of his people to flee by boat to Mesopotamia where they lived for generations, until Abraham took them all on his quest for a new homeland. And since even modern scholars are unsure of where Noah’s homeland had been, my search was seemingly at a dead end.
But while still looking at Mesopotamia, I discovered many web pages dealing with that area’s mythology. The contemporary Middle East was once home to such mythical and occult-favorite places as Babylon and Sumeria. The pantheon of gods being worshipped there in the time of Abraham included such figures as Tiamat, Anshar, Ishtar, Marduk and Anu…among many others. While reading the stories and mythological “histories” of this pantheon, I came across some very interesting legends surrounding the god Ea – third generation in the family tree of the gods of Mesopotamia.

To provide a brief background, the god consorts, Apsu and Tiamat, were the father and mother to the rest of the pantheon, and consequently, the creators of existence. Three generations later, a great grandson of the creators (Ea) decided to make man. By this time, Tiamat had a lover – Quingu. Ea had advised a goddess of the pantheon (Aruru) to take the blood of Quingu (Quingu had just been killed by Ea’s son, Marduk), mix it with some clay, and create man. He suggested that his brother, Ellil, be the one to carry out this creation. It was as if Ea had all the knowledge and ideas, yet got other figures in the pantheon to actually do the work. This is very significant as it makes Ea himself responsible for the creation of mankind. In modern Jewish, Christian and Muslim beliefs, the creation of man is credited to God.

In the mythologies of the region, Ea is specifically described as the patron god of mankind, and “advises them when other gods would do them harm”. There was even a story of advice given to the first man, Adapa – similar to the name Adam. He advised Adapa not to eat the bread of eternal life. Advice very similar to that which God gave to Adam about not eating from the tree of knowledge.

Even more significant is one particular story I discovered about Ea. The story he is most noted for. Ellil didn’t like man very much. As the story goes, Ellil “grew tired of the noise made by man”. Ellil demanded that Ea flood the world of man, thus destroying the nuisance. Ea refused, but Ellil finally won the argument. Ea gave in and agreed to flood the world of man, but not before he’d given warning to a man called Atrahasis. As the Mesopotamian legend goes, Ea advised Atrahasis to build a boat in which to weather the flood.

All of these stories would strongly suggest that many of the legends surrounding the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God have their roots in ancient Mesopotamian mythology, and are related predominantly to the god Ea. And though no one in modern times has ever heard the language of ancient Mesopotamia spoken, it would not be beyond possibility that Ea could have been pronounced e (ah) a. Yahway. Also, when viewing the documentary “The Exodus Decoded”, Archeologist and film maker, Simcha Jacobovici, was exploring an ancient mining site and discovered the inscriptions of slaves on the mine walls. These would have been the Israelites, who didn’t worship the Egyptian gods. During this portion of the documentary, Jacobovici mentioned that the biblical Hebrews referred to their god as “El”, a name strikingly similar to Ea, and suggesting significantly that the Hebrew god was indeed Ea, changed to El after many generations.

Ea, however, isn’t the only figure from Mesopotamian mythology that has a counterpart in modern belief. The god Anu and goddess Antu were the mother and father of Tammuz and Ishtar, but they were also the parents of four groups of individuals that could have been the forerunners to the angels of God. They were the Anunnaki – gods of the earth, the Uttukki – eleven demons mentioned by name in the mythologies, the Sebitti – the seven warrior gods from the sky (represented by the Pleadies), and the Igigi – mostly of the heavens. The Igigi were given the task of digging riverbeds. They complained so much that Ea created man for the task instead.

In the past decade or so, Hollywood has made such movies as “The Prophecy” and “Dogma”. Both films strongly reference the biblical legends of the wars in Heaven.
Revelation 12:7-11:

7 And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
8 And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

In Mesopotamian mythology, the war started when Apsu’s advisor, Mummu, suggested that the younger gods be killed because they “had become noisesome and Tiamat was getting no rest”. Tiamat herself rejected the idea, but by then, the word had spread. Ea (key figure) learned of the plan and killed Apsu and Mummu. Yet, after Apsu was killed, Tiamat started a second war of vengeance against the gods that had sided with Ea, and Ea sent his son Marduk (as God sent Michael) to kill Tiamat in the end. Ea has already been compared to the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God within this report. Which makes his predominant role is this war even more significant as this war is compared to the war described in Revelations. Also important to know is that Tiamat’s physical appearance is recorded in Mesopotamian and Babylonian mythology as that of a dragon. This is an image of Marduk slaying Tiamat.

It is very difficult to dismiss so many similarities between Mesopotamian mythology and the oldest stories from the Jewish/Christian/Muslim religions…especially since the racial group and the direct ancestral line that fathered the modern religions were from there. Based solely on geographic location, it’s a significance that no other ancient mythology or belief structure can claim. But did Abraham and his ancestors share the beliefs of the ancient Mesopotamians? Of all the pantheon, did they – out of gratitude for saving them from the flood – choose Ea as the one and only god to whom they owed any allegiance, forsaking the others? Did Noah already know of Ea? Was Noah’s birthplace and homeland so close to Mesopotamia that it, too, existed under the same belief structure? Or, did Ea reach far beyond the region of his pantheon’s influence to whisper in Noah’s (Atrahasis’) ear?

The former would make more sense. Just like race, belief structures were a regional phenomenon. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and dozens of other cultures had their own pantheons, no matter how closely they bordered. In order for Noah/Atrahasis to be associated with God/Ea, the land of Noah/Atrahasis would have had to have been geographically close to ancient Mesopotamia.
Enter Dr. Robert D. Ballard. Best known for leading the expedition which raised the Titanic, this intrepid scientist/explorer set his sites in 1999 on the Black Sea. His goal was to find ancient ships, sunken and perfectly preserved in the sterile waters. With the help of cutting edge technology and sensitive sonar, his team quickly began identifying structures and formations on the sea floor. But they weren’t ships.

From the exploration’s recorded dispatches as found at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/

The second day out, says Ballard, “We hit a home run.” Pointing at a sonar display on the ship’s computer monitor, Ballard painted a picture of the Black Sea floor. As the sonar image of the sea floor scrolled by, he described the flat plain in view, extending outward from the present coastline to a distance of about 20 nautical miles (37 kilometers). As the image continued to scroll, the curve of a coastline became apparent. Ballard also theorizes that a river fed the lake. If so, the place would have been an ideal location for human settlement.

The archaeological evidence of Neolithic settlement on land, combined with underwater evidence of an ancient river and lake system, suggests that this area in Sinop could have been inhabited by people who were forced to move out by a great flood.

Over the next two years, Ballard’s team discovered more and more evidence that supported the theory that, before it flooded, the Black Sea area was a fertile land with a large body of water that was fed by many rivers. A land that supported a thriving human population. But how could this land have flooded? What happened to create the disaster? Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman theorize that, as the glaciers from the most recent ice age melted and ocean sea levels increased, the small wall of land that now separates the Mediterranean and Black seas was breached, thus spilling waters from the Mediterranean into the valley to the east in a cataclysmic deluge.

What makes the flood east of the Mediterranean a more likely candidate for the Biblical Flood – and consequently, those lands the original homeland of Noah/Atrahasis and the Hebrew people – is the surrounding geography and its position relative to Mesopotamia.

In this map, the southeastern-most part of the black sea is directly north-northwest of where ancient Mesopotamia was located. If waters from the Mediterranean flooded the area, they would have pushed anything in the valley eastward. That is, until it reached the eastern rim of what was then the Caucasus Mountains (see map below). Once the water reached this barrier, it would have begun flowing north and south, spreading outward rather than forward. Certainly, as shown on the map below, a great deal of water did fill the lower-altitude regions to the north. But as the story goes, Noah’s ark came to rest on a mountaintop. And there are no mountain tops depicted in the regions north of the Black Sea. However, the map indicates that the mountain range is most narrow at the southeastern-most shore of the sea. Here, not only would there have been a mountain to land upon, but also a mountain passage narrow enough that the possibilities of Noah and his people crossing over it would have been better than had they tried to cross anywhere else. And directly southeast on the other side of this portion of that mountain range, as depicted in the map above…is Mesopotamia.

Through the research and findings of Robert Ballard, we know that this valley was once occupied by human settlements. Researchers associated with William Ryan and Walter Pitman, through studying the geology of the region, have verified that rising sea levels at the end of the ice age did cause a breach that flooded this valley. When that happened, the surviving inhabitants would have been displaced. The northern inhabitants would have naturally been washed north, but the inhabitants in the southern part of the valley would have not been able to cross the vast deluge to join them. Their only choice would have been to travel south, to settle in the only nation there…Mesopotamia.

If this is where Abraham was (which is verified in the Bible) and his ancestor was Noah (also verified in the Bible) – who was not a native of Mesopotamia, but who came there after being displaced by God’s flood – then the valley civilization that once existed beneath the waters of the Black Sea was very likely where Noah had originally lived, and thus, the original homeland of the Hebrew people. There are undoubtedly hundreds of Theologists, Archeologists and Historians who would choose to differ, and who might also choose to site countless volumes of extra information, but I often find that the simplest explanation makes most sense. Through the evidence found, recorded mythologies and modern geography, I would have to maintain that the information I have presented does make sense, and my mind is satisfied with the answer I finally gave to the question it asked me.