During the Neolithic period of agricultural settlements, there was a significant migration of enlightened tribes from Eastern Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Höyük, across the mountainous perimeter of Iraq and Iran. Knowledge of the science of religion that was enshrined within Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Höyük traveled along with them. The Aryan “gods on the mountain” would control their own urban destiny from about 5400 to 4000 BCE, at which point Semitic tribes began invading from the West. Without taking the Biblical timeline too literally, perhaps we can make use of its chronology as a guide. Enoch and Noah would have been Aryan masters, while Noah’s son Shem would have been patriarch to the Semitic tribes. After the flood, the Bible’s Diaspora to “the four corners of the Earth” was associated with Noah’s triplet sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Figure 4). Traditionally, monotheism proceeded to Abraham through the patriarchal lineage of Enoch, Noah, and Shem. The earliest Aryan polytheism, however, up to and including its oldest written text, the Rig Veda (circa 1700 - 1100 BCE), might best be described as a multi-faceted unity that is closely related to Abrahamic monotheism.
Figure 4 - The Great Diaspora in the Time of Noah
The Invention of Writing
Joseph Campbell writes that “Babylon was, according to a consistent tradition, the home of astronomy, and there the science of the stars formed the basis of intellectual culture.”41 This position is supported by Otto Neugebauer, an authority on ancient astronomy, who admits: “We know absolutely nothing about an earlier, presumably Sumerian, development.”42 Neugebauer’s focus is on the sophistication of the Old Babylonian period (circa 1800 BCE).43 In more recent challenges to Neugebauer’s ideas, scholars like Jöran Friberg discuss earlier “evidence for a possible common origin of the mathematics of various civilizations.”44 Joseph Campbell also surveys earlier mythologies, specifically those of ancient Sumer, where he concludes that “the mythological systems of the great civilizations share a significant body of motifs, many of which have been derived from a single historic source: the mathematically structured astronomical systems of the Early Bronze Age Near East.”45 The Early Bronze Age begins with the Sumerian invention of cuneiform writing, ca. 3300 BCE. So, Campbell too stresses the significance of an earlier Sumerian mathematical contribution. However, if writing did not exist when the pre-Sumerians founded Eridu (ca. 5400 BCE), we might wonder how Kramer is able to justify crediting them with the “material and spiritual heritage” of ancient Sumer. How is it possible to gauge the level of Aryan pre-Sumerian contribution between 5400 BCE and 3300 BCE without any written historical records?
Perhaps, it would be a mistake for historians to assume that people were necessarily primitive before the invention of writing. We have hypothesized that an ancient meditation practice was the main impetus behind EMH evolution, and the reason for Aryan sophistication. We should not assume that the pre-Sumerian mind, which might have been far superior to our own, had no way to comprehend or communicate complex and highly sophisticated mathematical and scientific ideas before the invention of writing. Today’s historians are aware of a rich oral tradition that existed in the ancient world for transmitting long and complex texts to posterity. It is not unlikely that this oral tradition began before writing developed.
In Chapter 5, we will be carefully examining an ancient document called the Sumerian King List, in order to understand its mathematical construction and profound significance for both religion and astronomy. The document is written in the Sumerian language, and many scholars believe it was compiled long before Babylon became the “home of astronomy.” It should also become clear, by the visual nature of these particular mathematical constructs, that a geometric template for this mathematics existed thousands of years before the invention of cuneiform phonetics and sexagesimal notation. Therefore, prior to the invention of writing, we must look to the existing archeological record for clues suggesting Aryan knowledge about the origins of the pre-Sumerian Quadrivium.
Kramer believes that the Sumerian King List was compiled sometime during the 3rd millennium BCE. It appears that Sumerian astronomer-priests wanted to understand the physical context for the soul’s migration to its Heavenly destination once meditation liberates it from the body. In Chapter 5, we will decipher this famous document’s encrypted mathematics, music, and astronomy; and, for the first time, we can explain how the science of polytheism is based on the “Clock of Heaven and Earth.” This effort will demonstrate that the most famous of sexagesimal artifacts, the clock, is tightly coupled to a natural phenomenon in astronomy known as the Precession of the Equinox. The Sumerian King List appears to be nothing less than religion’s foundation document. Understanding this document from the perspective of ancient science suggests that a knowledge of precession existed before the Babylonians — perhaps long before.
The technology of writing that accurately recorded this great legacy depended on the development of phonetic script. But, the earliest attempts to write on clay used pictographic and ideographic script, circa 4000 BCE.46 Kramer writes: “The Sumerian language was denoted by an earlier pictographic script, attested in some archaic tablets found in the remnants of ancient cities Unak/Uruk, Ur, and Jamdet Nasr...”47 Eventually, this sophisticated Aryan-Semitic civilization would collapse, precipitated by a steady stream of less desirable invaders. Kramer writes:
Turning now from the pre-Sumerian, or Irano-Semitic, period in the earlier history of Lower Mesopotamia, to the following Sumerian period, we find the latter to consist of three cultural stages: the preliterate, the proto-literate, and the early-literate. The first, or preliterate, stage of the Sumerian period began with an era of stagnation and regression following the collapse of the earlier and more advanced Irano-Semitic civilization, and the incursion of the Sumerian barbaric war bands into Lower Mesopotamia.
The centuries of barbaric Sumerian war lords created a struggle between them and more cosmopolitan Sumerians. The only cultural bright spot was the continued attempt to chisel their pre-dynastic legacy onto clay tablets. The extant Sumerian literature dates back to this period. Kramer calls it “the Heroic Age of ancient Sumer.” And, from a syncretistic perspective, he comments on the theological similarities between the earliest heroic epics of Sumer and those of ancient India and Greece:
These gods form organized communities in a chosen locality, though, in addition, each god has a special abode of his own... At death the soul travels to some distant locality that is regarded as a universal home and is not reserved for any particular community. Some of the heros are conceived as springing from the gods, but there is no trace of heroic worship or hero cults.48
A brief survey of the extant literature reveals only nine Sumerian tales. Two of these focus on the hero Enmerkar, two revolve around Lugalbanda, and five describe the star of ancient Sumer — Gilgamesh. It is important to note that all three heros were inscribed on the Sumerian King List.49 The King List begins with the statement, “When kingship was lowered from heaven the kingship was in Eridu.”50
The Aryan-Semitic Roots of Religion
Pre-Sumerian Aryans had been studying the sky ever since their ancestors left the confines of Ice Age caves. During that early period, they discovered a significant anomaly in the motion