Barone Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola

Traditional School

Barone Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (May 19, 1898 – June 11, 1974) also known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher, and esotericist. Evola regarded his perspectives and spiritual values as aristocratic, masculine, traditionalist, heroic and defiantly reactionary.

Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites, spiritual oblivion and organised deviancy. To counter this and call in a primordial rebirth, Evola presented his world of Tradition.

The core trilogy of Evola’s work is generally regarded as Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins and Ride the Tiger. According to one scholar, “Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century.”

Much of Evola’s theories and writings is centred on Evola’s own idiosyncratic spiritualism and mysticism; the inner life. The philosophy covered themes such as Hermeticism, the metaphysics of war and of sex, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism, mountaineering, the Holy Grail, the essence and history of civilisations, decadence and various philosophic and religious Traditions dealing with both the Classics and the Orient.

He was never a member of the Italian National Fascist Party (and thus rejected for not being a member), or the Italian Social Republic. Evola criticized fascism and declared himself an anti-fascist. He regarded his position as that of a sympathetic right-wing intellectual, saw potential in the movement and wished to reform its errors, to a position in line with his own views.

One of his successes was in regards to the racial laws; his advocacy of a spiritual consideration of race won out in the debate in Italy, rather than a solely materialist reductionism concept popular in Germany.

Since World War II many Radical Traditionalist, New Right, Conservative Revolutionary, Fascist and Third Positionist groups have taken inspiration from him, as well as several apolitical occultists, such as Thomas Karlsson, a Swedish occultist and an esoteric author, and Massimo Scaligero, an Italian spiritual teacher, esotericist and anthroposophist.

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“Iron Sky”

Armenian Genocide Centennial Commemoration in Istanbul

- Groups To Bring Together Turks and Armenians

Turkish and Armenian-American organizations are working together to commemorate the centennial of the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 2015 and to encourage Armenians from around the world to attend, DurDe and Project 2015 said today. The concerted campaign by Ottoman leaders a century ago resulted in the deaths and exile of the vast majority of their Armenian citizens.

 While Turkish groups have organized memorial events in Istanbul for the past several years, DurDe and Project 2015, a US-based organization, are working to ensure that a large contingent of Armenians come to Turkey for the historic centennial commemoration.

 “We encourage and welcome Armenians from around the globe to assemble with citizens of Turkey in Istanbul to participate in these memorial events,” said Levent Sensever of DurDe. “As Turks, we want to express our solidarity with Armenians as we pay our respects to the victims and survivors of this terrible crime, and press our government to recognize the genocide.”

Moneybags:

Depp commands $20m per film and is thought to have a fortune of several hundred million dollars

Johnny Depp has announced that he wants to buy Wounded Knee, a national historic landmark, and give it back to the Indian people. In an interview with the Mail On Sunday, the actor revealed that he is ready to spend millions in order to give the Native American people control of the land that was the site of a brutal 1890 massacre. ‘It’s very sacred ground and many atrocities were committed against the Sioux there,’ he said in the interview.

The $3.9 million price tag on the site of the Wounded Knee massacre is steep — but a fraction of Johnny Depp’s paycheck from The Lone Ranger.

Read the petition: Johnny Depp: Keep his word to buy Wounded Knee for the Sioux Nation

Wounded Knee Owner Threatens Tribe: ‘Buy Now or I’m Auctioning It Off’

Johnny Depp wants to buy the site of Wounded Knee massacre and give it back to the Native Americans

Indians to Johnny Depp: ‘Keep Your Word, Buy Wounded Knee’

Johnny Depp Wants To Buy Wounded Knee. But Why Was It Sold In The First Place?

Johnny Depp’s Wounded Knee offer called generous, but some think it’s misguided

The Wounded Knee medals of honor should be rescinded

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Wounded Knee Massacre

Massacre At Wounded Knee, 1890

Wounded Knee – Native American History

Wounded Knee, 1890 – 1973 in photos

Wounded Knee Museum

Wounded Knee – Pechanga.net

Investment:

Johnny Depp researched Native American history for his role as Tonto, the Indian sidekick to the Lone Ranger, but that attention to detail hasn’t helped in the box office as it is being deemed a flop

Heritage:

Depp announced that he would like to buy the site of Wounded Knee, an 1890 massacre that left hundreds of Native Americans dead, and return it to them

Just before:

This picture of the Miniconjou Sioux band was taken near the site of the Wounded Knee massacre one month before the December 1890 massacre where hundreds of Indians were killed

Tragic:

Chief Spotted Elk, (widely known by the somewhat derogatory nickname Big Foot) the leader of the Sioux, is seen here as he lay frozen in the ground after the fighting at Wounded Knee. The legendary leader died in that battle with American troops

Commemoration:

Wounded Knee is now a National Historic Landmark but Depp thinks it should belong to the Native Americans who once lived on the land

Up for sale:

The land is said to be for sale for $3.9million and Depp said he is going to do ‘everything possible’ to make it happen

Armenian Dragon Carpet, XVIIth century

Galouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal

Photo: Gulbenkian Foundation Archives

Gohar Carpet

“Gohar” with two line Armenian inscription, 1700, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) Private collection, U.S.A.

Photo: Armenian Rugs Society

Embroidered Carpet, XVIIIth century, Etchmiadzin, Treasury

Photo. Gulbenkian Foundation Archives

Armenian girls, weaving carpets in Van, 1907, Western Armenia

Hayastan – Armenia

Armenian carpet weaving centers

The complex history of Armenian weaving and needlework was acted out in the Near East, a vast, ancient, and ethnically diverse region. Few are the people who, like the Armenians, can boast of a continuous and consistent record of fine textile production from the 1st millennium BC to the present. Armenians today are blessed by the diversity and richness of a textile heritage passed on by thirty centuries of diligent practice.

Real-life ‘Eye of Sauron’ will open up over Moscow skyscraper tower

In his recent, brilliant history Debt: the First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber calls for a modern-day debt jubilee, a cancellation of all debts, just as they had in Mesopotamia. His suggestion is provocative, but it should be taken seriously. Because the longer we keep protecting the haves over the have-nots and honouring the past while destroying the future, the worse this debt crisis will get.

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David Graeber maps out the history of debt from ancient civilisations to current times, suggesting it has been one of the great catalysts for social and political strife throughout.

Debt: The First 5000 Years

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber — Reviews

Review of David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”

Anarchist Anthropology

It’s time to cancel unpayable old debts

David Rolfe Graeber (born 12 February 1961) is an American anthropologist, author, anarchist and activist who is currently Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Specialising in theories of value and social theory, he was an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him. From Yale, he went on to become a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London from Fall 2007 to Summer 2013.

Graeber has been involved in social and political activism, including the protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001 and the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002. David also played a role in the Global Justice Movement and was one of the earlier organisers of Occupy Wall Street. He is the author of numerous books including The Democracy Project, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011).

Debt: The First 5000 Years is a book by anthropologist David Graeber published in 2011. It is a wide-ranging book, exploring debt’s relationship with money, cash, barter, community, marriage, friendship, vassalage, slavery, morality, honor, law, philosophy, commerce, religion, greed, charity, violence, war and government; in short, much of the fabric of human life in society.

It draws on the history and anthropology of a number of civilizations, large and small, from the first known records of debt from Sumer in 3000 BC until the present. It explores how debt has changed and been changed by the people and societies which have used it.

A major argument of the book is that when the imprecise, informal, community-building indebtedness of “human economies” is replaced by mathematically precise, firmly enforced debts, widespread impoverishment and violence are common results which only a few societies have managed to escape.

A second major argument of the book is that, contrary to standard accounts of the history of money, debt is likely the oldest means of trade, with cash and barter transactions being later developments.

Debt, the book argues, has typically retained its primacy, with cash and barter usually limited to situations of low trust involving strangers or those not considered credit-worthy.

This book documents Graeber’s argument that as far back as we can see in the historical and archeological record, people with power have often established rules to benefit them and impoverish and enslave everyone else. This trend has been occasionally interrupted when slaves or peons rebelled, often killing the existing elites.

To reduce the risks of rebellion, a Jubilee, the year at the end of seven cycles of shmita (Sabbatical years), would be declared. This would cancel all debts but maintain most of the power and social status of existing elites.

Graeber insists that gift economies preceded barter and money, contrary to the popular claims of economists. Gifts incur debts, whose enforcement sometimes led to slavery, which occasionally led to rebellions.

He concludes that, “since Hammurabi, great imperial states have invariably resisted [Jubilees]. Athens and Rome established the paradigm: even when confronted with continual debt crises, they insisted on legislating around the edges, softening the impact, eliminating obvious abuses like debt slavery … but [never] allow a challenge to the principle of debt itself.

The governing classes of the United States seem to have taken a remarkably similar approach: eliminating the worst abuses (e.g., debtors’ prison), … but never allowing anyone to question the sacred principle that we must all pay our debts.

[But] the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. … [W]e don’t “all” have to pay our debts. … A debt is just the perversion of a promise … corrupted by both math and violence. … [N]o one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.”

Debt: The First 5000 Years

Saraswati and Ushas in the Harappan Seals

The Saraswati in the Harappan Seals

The booming city of Erbil (ancient Arbela) encircles the ancient citadel where evidence of more than six millennia of human habitation is just beginning to be uncovered.

The 100-foot-high, oval-shaped citadel of Erbil, also written Irbil, and known as Hawler (Kurdish: ھەولێر Hewlêr; Syriac: ܐܪܒܝܠ Arbel, Arabic: أربيل Arbīl ) the largest city and capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, towers high above the northern Mesopotamian plain, within sight of the Zagros Mountains that lead to the Iranian plateau.

The massive mound, with its vertiginous man-made slope, built up by its inhabitants over at least the last 6,000 years, is the heart of what may be the world’s oldest continuously occupied settlement. At various times over its long history, the city has been a pilgrimage site dedicated to a great goddess, a prosperous trading center, a town on the frontier of several empires, and a rebel stronghold.

Urban life at Erbil (Hewlêr) can be dated back to at least 6000 BC, and it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. At the heart of the city is the ancient Citadel of Arbil. In the early part of the 3rd millennium BC, the Hurrians (Armenians) from Asia Minor were the first to establish Urbilum and expand their rule to parts of northern Mesopotamia.

The city became an integral part of Assyria from the 25th century BC to the 7th century BC, but after it lost its independence at the end of the 7th century BC, both Assyria and the city of Erbil were under the rule of many regional powers in turn, including the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians and Greeks.

Following the Arab Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia, the Arabs dissolved Assyria (then known as Assuristan/Athura) as a geo-political entity in the mid-7th century AD, and during medieval times the city came to be ruled by the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks.

Erbil’s archaeological museum houses a large collection of pre-Islamic artifacts, and is a center for archaeological projects in the area. The city officially has been appointed Arab Tourism Capital 2014 by the Arab Council of Tourism. In July 2014 it was appointed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Erbil Revealed

Erbil

Archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw discovered evidence of destruction and capture of the ancient city of Metsamor, one of the most famous archaeological sites in the vicinity of Yerevan.

Krzysztof Jakubiak of the University of Warsaw and the head of the project unearthed evidence of the destruction and capture of the ancient city of Metsamor in Armenia in the eighth century BC. “In the entire area of research we found layers of burning and ash. The city was probably captured by the army of Argishti I, the ruler of Urartu,” he told Science & Scholarship in Poland.

Other findings of Polish archaeologists are evidence of the fighting and cruelty. Among them is a skeleton of about 30 years old woman, whose head was cut off, and of another person with a split skull. Their bodies had not been buried, but were found among the town’s buildings. Smashed pottery was also found on stone platforms in one of the city’s seven shrines. “We believe that both of them were killed during the attack on the city”, added Dr. Jakubiak.

The discovered remains were not buried in the tombs, only randomly scattered among the buildings of the so-called lower town. What drew the attention of researchers was a small amount of finds in the form of historical objects, which may illustrate the scale of predatory Urartu invasion.

The invaders did not spare the holy shrines. Archaeologists found a small, oval urban sanctuary, which had been looted during the invasion. Inside, on stone platforms, they discovered broken pottery and one vessel preserved in its entirety, made of stone.

Argishti I, the sixth known king of Urartu, reigning from 786 BC to 764 BC. was the king of Urartu, the biblical Kingdom of Ararat in the Armenian Highlands. During his reign, the boundaries of the state expanded to the Caucasus, the area of today’s Yerevan.

Argishti built the Erebuni Fortress in 782 BC, and the fortress of Argishtikhinili in 776 BC. He founded the citadel of Erebuni in 782 BC, which is the present capital of Armenia, Yerevan. He also expanded his kingdom north to the Lake Sevan conquering much of Diauehi and the Ararat Valley.

A son and the successor of Menua, he continued the series of conquests initiated by his predecessors. He was involved in a number of inconclusive conflicts with the Assyrian king Shalmaneser IV, he conquered the northern part of Syria and made Urartu the most powerful state in post-Hittite Asia Minor.

Some linguists believe that the name Argištiše has Indo-European etymology (Armenian). Compare Armenian արեգ (translit. areg) – “sun deity”, “sun”, Phrygian ΑΡΕJΑΣΤΙΝ (translit. Areyastin) – “epithet of the great mother” and Greek αργεστής (translit. argestes) – “shining”, “brilliant”, “white”, “bright”. He was succeeded by his son, Sarduri II.

In the early 6th century BC, the Urartian Kingdom was replaced by the Armenian Orontid dynasty. In the trilingual Behistun inscription, carved in 521 or 520 BC by the order of Darius the Great of Persia, the country referred to as Urartu in Assyrian is called Arminiya in Old Persian and Harminuia in Elamite.

Metsamor is a protected archaeological reserve. Excavations within the reserve have been conducted for almost 50 years. Previous studies have shown that during the heyday from the fourth to the second millennium BC, the settlement occupied more than 10 hectares and was surrounded by monumental walls.

In the early days of iron period, from the eleventh to the ninth century, Metsamor had grown to nearly 100 acres. The central part of the fortress was surrounded by temple complexes with seven shrines. At that time, it was one of the most important political and cultural centres in the Aras Valley. From the eighth century BC, Metsamor became part of the Kingdom of Urartu. The place was continuously inhabited until the seventeenth century.

Polish archaeologists began excavations in Metsamor in 2013. The project was possible thanks to an agreement signed between the Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw – in consultation with the authorities of the Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology UW – with the Institute of Archaeology of the Armenian Academy of Sciences of and the Ministry of Culture of Armenia.

Wartime Violence Uncovered at Armenia’s Metsamor

Discoveries of Polish archaeologists in Armenia

11 fun memes

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Enki

Enki (Sumerian: EN.KI(G)) is a god in Sumerian mythology, later known as Ea in Akkadian and Babylonian mythology. Enki/Ea is essentially a god of civilization, wisdom, and culture. He was also the creator and protector of man and of the world in general.

He was originally patron god of the city of Eridu, but later the influence of his cult spread throughout Mesopotamia and to the Canaanites, Hittites and Hurrians.

A large number of myths about Enki have been collected from many sites, stretching from Southern Iraq to the Levantine coast. He figures in the earliest extant cuneiform inscriptions throughout the region and was prominent from the third millennium down to Hellenistic times.

The exact meaning of his name is uncertain: the common translation is “Lord of the Earth”: the Sumerian en is translated as a title equivalent to “lord”; it was originally a title given to the High Priest; ki means “earth”; but there are theories that ki in this name has another origin, possibly kig of unknown meaning, or kur meaning “mound”.

The name Ea is allegedly Hurrian in origin while others claim that his name ‘Ea’ is possibly of Semitic origin and may be a derivation from the West-Semitic root *hyy meaning “life” in this case used for “spring”, “running water.” In Sumerian E-A means “the house of water”, and it has been suggested that this was originally the name for the shrine to the god at Eridu.

Enki were apparently depicted, sometimes, as a man covered with the skin of a fish, and this representation, as likewise the name of his temple E-apsu, “house of the watery deep”, points decidedly to his original character as a god of the waters. Around the excavation of the 18 shrines found on the spot, thousands of carp bones were found, consumed possibly in feasts to the god.

Of his cult at Eridu, which goes back to the oldest period of Mesopotamian history, nothing definite is known except that his temple was also associated with Ninhursag’s temple which was called Esaggila, “the lofty head house” (E, house, sag, head, ila, high; or Akkadian goddess = Ila), a name shared with Marduk’s temple in Babylon, pointing to a staged tower or ziggurat (as with the temple of Enlil at Nippur, which was known as E-kur (kur, hill)), and that incantations, involving ceremonial rites in which water as a sacred element played a prominent part, formed a feature of his worship.

This seems also implicated in the epic of the hieros gamos or sacred marriage of Enki and Ninhursag (above), which seems an etiological myth of the fertilisation of the dry ground by the coming of irrigation water (from Sumerian a, ab, water or semen).

The early inscriptions of Urukagina in fact go so far as to suggest that the divine pair, Enki and Ninki, were the progenitors of seven pairs of gods, including Enki as god of Eridu, Enlil of Nippur, and Su’en (or Sin) of Ur, and were themselves the children of An (sky, heaven) and Ki (earth).

The pool of the Abzu at the front of his temple was adopted also at the temple to Nanna (Akkadian Sin) the Moon, at Ur, and spread from there throughout the Middle East. It is believed to remain today as the sacred pool at Mosques, or as the holy water font in Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches.

In ancient Egyptian mythology, the fields of Aaru (Egyptian: iArw meaning “reeds”; altn. Yaaru, Iaru, Aalu), known also as Sekhet-Aaru or the Egyptian reed fields, are the heavenly paradise, where Osiris ruled after he became part of the Egyptian pantheon and displaced Anubis in the Ogdoad tradition. It has been described as the ka (a part of the soul) of the Nile Delta.

In Mesopotamian mythology, Ereshkigal (EREŠ.KI.GAL, lit. “great lady under earth”) was the goddess of Irkalla, the land of the dead or underworld. Sometimes her name is given as Irkalla, similar to the way the name Hades was used in Greek mythology for both the underworld and its ruler.

It is as the third figure in the triad (the two other members of which were Anu and Enlil) that Enki (Ea) acquires his permanent place in the pantheon. To him was assigned the control of the watery element, and in this capacity he becomes the shar apsi; i.e. king of the Apsu or “the deep”.

The Apsu was figured as the abyss of water beneath the earth, and since the gathering place of the dead, known as Aralu, was situated near the confines of the Apsu, he was also designated as En-Ki; i.e. “lord of that which is below”, in contrast to Anu, who was the lord of the “above” or the heavens.

The cult of Ea extended throughout Babylonia and Assyria. We find temples and shrines erected in his honour, e.g. at Nippur, Girsu, Ur, Babylon, Sippar, and Nineveh, and the numerous epithets given to him, as well as the various forms under which the god appears, alike bear witness to the popularity which he enjoyed from the earliest to the latest period of Babylonian-Assyrian history.

The consort of Ea, known as Ninhursag, Ki, Uriash Damkina, “lady of that which is below”, or Damgalnunna, “big lady of the waters”, originally was fully equal with Ea, but in more patriarchal Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian times plays a part merely in association with her lord.

Generally, however, Enki seems to be a reflection of pre-patriarchal times, in which relations between the sexes were characterised by a situation of greater gender equality. In his character, he prefers persuasion to conflict, which he seeks to avoid if possible.

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A council of Native American leaders has offered partial amnesty to the estimated 220 million illegal white immigrants living in the United States.

At a meeting of the Native Peoples Council (NPC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico yesterday, Native American leaders considered several proposals on the future of this continent’s large, unauthorized European population. The elders ultimately decided to extend a pathway to citizenship for those without criminal backgrounds.

“We are prepared to offer White people the option of staying on this continent legally and applying for citizenship,” explains Chief Wamsutta of the Wampanoag nation. “In return, they must pay any outstanding taxes and give back the land stolen from our ancestors.

“Any white person with a criminal record, however, will be deported in the next 90 days back to their ancestral homeland. Rush Limbaugh will be going to Germany. Justin Bieber will depart for Canada. And the entire cast of Jersey Shore will be returning to Italy.”

Sustained European colonization of North America began in the 16th and 17th centuries, when arrivals from France, Spain and England first established settlements on land that had hitherto been occupied by native peoples. Over the past 400 years immigrants from these countries and others throughout Europe have transformed the demography of the continent.

Despite their numerical superiority, many scholars question the legality of the European settlement, as it was founded on a mixture of unauthorized immigration, war and genocide.

Progressive native groups welcomed the council’s decision today as a step forward towards normalizing relations with the White community. However, many conservative Native Americans are upset about the plan, claiming that amnesty will only serve to reward lawbreakers.

“Why can’t we just deport all of the Whites back to Europe?” asks Ité Omáǧažu of the Lakota people, “They’re just a drain on our economy anyway. They came over here to steal our resources because they’re too lazy to develop their own back home.

“I can’t believe we’re just going to let them pay a fine. They should get to the back of the line like everybody else – behind the Mexicans.”

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The modern concept of United Armenia as used by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun).

The distribution of Armenians in the early 17th century, a few decades after its conquest by the Ottomans, within the current borders of Turkey:

Red: Armenian majority

Light red: Significant Armenian presence

Western Armenia

Western Armenia (Western Armenian: Արեւմտեան Հայաստան, Arevmdian Hayasdan) is a term used to refer to eastern parts of Turkey (formerly the Ottoman Empire) that were part of the historical homeland of Armenians.

Western Armenia, also referred to as Byzantine Armenia, emerged following the division of Greater Armenia between the Byzantine Empire (Western Armenia) and Sassanid Persia (Eastern Armenia) in 387 AD.

The area, formerly known as Turkish Armenia or Ottoman Armenia, was conquered by the Ottomans in the 16th century during the Ottoman-Safavid War (1532-1555) against their Iranian Safavid arch-rivals.

After the Turkish-Persian wars of 1623-1639, Western Armenia became part of the Ottoman Empire. Western (Ottoman) Armenia consisted of six vilayets (vilâyat-ı sitte) — the vilayets of Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Kharput, and Sivas.

Since the Russo-Turkish War, 1828-1829, the term “Western Armenia” has referred to the Armenian-populated historical regions of the Ottoman Empire that remained under Ottoman rule after the eastern part of Armenia was ceded to the Russian Empire by the Qajar Persians following the outcome of the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813) and Russo-Persian War (1826-1828).

During the 19th century, the Russian Empire conquered most of Eastern Armenia from Iran and also some parts of Turkish Armenia, such as Kars. The region’s Armenian population was affected during the widespread massacres of Armenians in the 1890s.

During the collapse of the Ottoman Empire Western Armenia remained under Turkish rule, and in 1894–96 and 1915 the Ottoman Empire perpetrated systematic massacres and forced deportations of Armenians resulting in the Armenian Genocide.

The massive deportation and killings of Armenians began in the spring 1915. On April 24, 1915 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were deported from Constantinople. Depending on the sources cited, from 1,500,000 to 2,500,000 Armenians were killed during this act.

During the Caucasus Campaign of World War I, the Russian Empire occupied most of the Armenian-populated regions of the Ottoman Empire. A temporary provincial government was established in occupied areas between 1915 and 1918.

The chaos caused by the Russian Revolution of 1917 put a stop to all Russian military operations and Russian forces began to conduct withdrawals. The first and second congresses of Western Armenians took place in Yerevan in 1917 and 1919.

The Armenians living in their ancestral lands were exterminated or deported during the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and the following years. The Armenian presence in the area largely ended and the cultural heritage was mainly destroyed by the then Ottoman government.

Although virtually no Armenians live in the area today, some Armenian irredentist parties, most notably the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, claim it as part of United Armenia. Since 2000, an organizing committee of the congress of heirs of Western Armenians who survived the Armenian Genocide is active in diasporan communities.

Currently, the Republic of Armenia does not have any territorial claims against the Republic of Turkey, although, some political parties such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the largest Armenian party in the diaspora, claim the area given to the Republic of Armenia (1918–1920) by US President Woodrow Wilson’s arbitral award in 1920, also known as Wilsonian Armenia.

The fate of Western Armenia — commonly referred to as “The Armenian Question” — is considered a key issue in the modern history of the Armenian people.

Eastern Armenia

The provinces of Kars, Ardahan and Iğdır

Kars Province is a province of Turkey, located in the northeastern part of the country. It shares part of its border with the Republic of Armenia. The provincial capital is the city of Kars. The provinces of Ardahan and Iğdır were until the 1990s part of Kars Province.

Ardahan Province (Turkish: Ardahan ili), is a province in the north-east of Turkey, at the very end of the country, where Turkey borders with Georgia. The provincial capital is the city of Ardahan. This is attractive open countryside which however spends many months of the year under snow. At this altitude temperatures on average reach -20°C and can drop below freezing all year round, including summer months.

Iğdır Province (Turkish: Iğdır ili) is a province in eastern Turkey, located along the border with Armenia, Azerbaijan (the area of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic), and Iran. Its adjacent provinces are Kars to the northwest and Ağrı to the west and south. It was created from southeastern part of former Kars Province in 1993. The provincial capital is the city of Iğdır.

Turkey’s highest mountain, Mount Ararat (Ağrı Dağı) is in Iğdır, but much of the land is a wide plain far below the mountain. The climate is the warmest in this part of Turkey, and cotton can be grown in Iğdır. Iğdır is where Noah is said to have thrived following the flood. The border with Armenia follows the Aras River.

Kars Province

Kars

Ardahan Province

Ardahan

Iğdır Province

Iğdır

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Kars

Kars (Armenian: Ghars, Georgian: Karsi) is a city in northeast Turkey and the capital of Kars Province. With a population of 73,826 (in 2010), it is the largest city on the Turkish side of the border with Armenia.

Little is known of the early history of Kars beyond the fact that it had its own dynasty of Armenian rulers and was the capital of a region known as Vanand. As Chorzene, the town appears in Roman historiography (Strabo) as part ofancient Armenia.

Vanand is the name used to describe the area of historic Armenia that roughly corresponds to the Kars Province of present-day Turkey. Named after the Armenian family of Vanandi, it was a principality of the Kingdom of Armenia and a later province of the Democratic Republic of Armenia. Its historic capital was the city of Kars.

For the origin of the name “Kars”, some sources claim it to be derived from the Georgian word kari, meaning “the gate”, while other sources claim it is from the Armenian word hars, which is a folk etymological word for bride, or rather from kaṛuts berd, “Kaṛuts Fortress”, meaning “uprbuild fortress”.

Medieval Armenian historians referred to the city by a variety of names, including “Karuts’ K’aghak’” (Kars city), “Karuts’ Berd”, “Amrots’n Karuts’” (both meaning Kars Fortress) and “Amurn Karuts’” (Impenetrable Kars).

At some point in the ninth century (at least by 888) it became part of the territory of the Armenian Bagratunis. Kars was the capital of Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia between 928 and 961. During this period the town’s cathedral, later known as the Church of the Holy Apostles, was built.

In 963, shortly after the Bagratuni seat was transferred to Ani, Kars became the capital of a separate independent kingdom, again called Vanand. The extent of its actual independence from the Kingdom of Ani is uncertain: it was always in the possession of the relatives of the rulers of Ani, and, after Ani’s capture by the Byzantine Empire in 1045, the Bagratuni title “King of Kings” held by the ruler of Ani was transferred to the ruler of Kars.

Its significance increased in the 19th century, when Kars was contested between the Ottoman and Russian empires, with the latter gaining control of the city as a result of the 1877-78 war. During World War I, the Ottomans took control of the city in 1918, but were forced to relinquish it to the First Republic of Armenia following the Armistice of Mudros.

During the Turkish–Armenian War in late 1920, Turkish revolutionaries captured Kars for the last time. The controversial Treaty of Kars was signed in 1921 between the Government of the Grand National Assembly and the Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which established the current north-eastern boundaries of Turkey.

Ardahan

Ardahan is a city in northeastern Turkey, near the Georgian border. The first surviving record about this region is attributed to Strabo, who calls it Gogarene (perhaps derived from Gugark’) and mentions that it was a part of the Kingdom of Armenia.

Prior to the outbreak of the 1828-1829 Russo-Turkish war, Ardahan was recorded to have had 400 households, the great majority of them Armenian. Many of them later immigrated to the Russian Empire.

The town passed into the hands of Russia following the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war and was made a part of the Kars Oblast. The majority of the town was made up of Armenians, while other ethnic groups included Georgians, Pontic Greeks, Jews, Russians, Kurds and Yazidis.

The town flourished economically under Russian rule, exporting fruits, smoked lamb meat, wheat and wood. New roads were constructed, linking Ardahan to Akhalkalak, Kars and Oltu.

On December 25, 1914, in the early months of the First World War, the Ottoman army occupied Ardahan and massacred many of its Armenian, Pontic Greek, and Georgian inhabitants. The Russians, with the help of Armenian and Pontic Greek militias, captured the town on January 3, 1915, allowing some of the original inhabitants who had fled to return.

As Russian forces withdrew from the front following the October Revolution, a small Armenian volunteer force took up positions to defend the town from the approaching Ottoman Army.

On March 6, 1918 the Ottoman army, along with the help of the town’s Muslims, overwhelmed Ardahan’s Armenian garrison and retook the town. The British occupied Ardahan after the end of the First World War and eventually handed control over it to the First Republic of Armenia.

When the Turkish Nationalists captured Ardahan in November 1920, the town’s remaining Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Georgians fled to Armenia, northern Greece, and Georgia. The Treaty of Moscow, signed the following year between the Soviets and the Turks, confirmed Ardahan as a part of Turkish territory. In 1960, Ardahan’s population stood at 7,228 and was populated by both Kurds and Turks.

Iğdır

Iğdır (Armenian: Igdir, also Tsolakert, after the ancient site nearby) was taken by the Russian Empire from Persia after the latter’s defeat in the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828. It was organized as part of the Armenian Oblast in 1828 and made a part of the Georgia-Imeretia Governorate in 1840, and then the Surmalu uyezd of the Erivan Governorate in 1850.

According to the Russian family lists accounts from 1886, of the total 71,066 inhabitants of the districts 34,351 were Azerbaijanis (48.3%, mentioned as ‘Tatars’ in the source), 22,096 Armenians (31.1%) and 14,619 Kurds (20.6%).

Under Russian rule, two primary schools, one for boys and the other for girls, and three churches were opened and 100 Armenian families were allowed to move to Igdir. The town’s population rose to 10,000 in 1914 and largely busied itself with agriculture and commerce.

Following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the area came under the control of a temporary administrative committee created by the three main ethnic groups in the Caucasus. Though it attempted to negotiate a truce with the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman forces launched an eastward offensive and took Igdir on May 20, 1918. They occupied it until the signing of the Armistice of Mudros in November 1918.

The First Republic of Armenia assumed control over Igdir thereafter. The Armenian population suffered heavily during the grueling winter of 1918-19, as famine, disease and the cold swept away the lives of many. In May 1919, its status was elevated to that of a city.

Based on the boundaries drawn by US State Department in November 1920, Igdir was envisaged to become an integral part of the Armenian republic. But in September 1920, the Government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey led by Mustafa Kemal launched a war to eliminate the republic and overran Igdir. Turkish General Kâzım Karabekir commanded the armies but his forces were initially unable to take Igdir due to strong Armenian resistance.

However, within a few days, on October 20, 1920, they managed to drive Armenian forces out of Igdir. According to official Turkish documents, after their defeat in the Shahtahti area, Armenian forces abandoned Igdir. They burned down the Markara Bridge which spanned the Araxes River and retreated to the northern bank on November 13, 1920. Turkey annexed the region of Igdir after the conclusion of several peace treaties, but its territorial gains were mainly formalized in the 1921 Treaty of Kars.

Kars

The Hyksos, c. 1600 BCE

An international team of archaeologists has uncovered the earliest known evidence of horses being domesticated by humans. The discovery suggests that horses were both ridden and milked. The findings could point to the very beginnings of horse domestication and the origins of the horse breeds we know today. Led by the Universities of Exeter and Bristol (UK), the research is published on Friday 6 March 2009 in journal Science.

Some researchers do not consider an animal to be “domesticated” until it exhibits physical changes consistent with selective breeding, or at least having been born and raised entirely in captivity. Until that point, they classify captive animals as merely “tamed”.

Those who hold to this theory of domestication point to a change in skeletal measurements was detected among horse bones recovered from middens dated about 2500 BCE in eastern Hungary in Bell-Beaker sites, and in later Bronze Age sites in the Russian steppes, Spain, and eastern Europe.

Horse bones from these contexts exhibited an increase in variability, thought to reflect the survival under human care of both larger and smaller individuals than appeared in the wild; and a decrease in average size, thought to reflect penning and restriction in diet. Horse populations that showed this combination of skeletal changes probably were domesticated.

Most evidence suggests that horses were increasingly controlled by humans after about 2500 BCE. However, more recently there have been skeletal remains found at a site in Kazakhstan which display the smaller, more slender limbs characteristic of corralled animals, dated to 3500 BCE.

The researchers have traced the origins of horse domestication back to the Botai Culture (c. 4300–3100 BC) of Kazakhstan circa 5,500 years ago. It was named after the settlement of Botai in Aqmola Province of Kazakhstan. The Botai culture has two other large sites: Krasnyi Yar, and Vasilkovka.

Evidence reported in 2009 for pottery containing mare’s milk and of horse bones with telltale signs of being bred after domestication have demonstrated a much stronger case for the Botai culture as a major user of domestic horses by about 3,500 BC, close to 1,000 years earlier than the previous scientific consensus.

This is about 1,000 years earlier than thought and about 2,000 years earlier than domestic horses are known to have been in Europe. Their findings strongly suggest that horses were originally domesticated, not just for riding, but also to provide food, including milk.

Domesticated horses could have been adopted from neighboring herding societies in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains, where the Khvalynsk culture had herds of cattle and sheep, and perhaps had domesticated horses, as early as 4800 BCE.

The oldest possible archaeological indicator of a changed relationship between horses and humans is the appearance about 4800-4400 BCE of horse bones and carved images of horses in Chalcolithic graves of the early Khvalynsk culture and the Samara culture in the middle Volga region of Russia.

At the Khvalynsk cemetery near the town of Khvalynsk, 158 graves of this period were excavated. Of these, 26 graves contained parts of sacrificed domestic animals, and additional sacrifices occurred in ritual deposits on the original ground surface above the graves. Ten graves contained parts of lower horse legs; two of these also contained the bones of domesticated cattle and sheep.

At least 52 domesticated sheep or goats, 23 domesticated cattle, and 11 horses were sacrificed at Khvalynsk. The inclusion of horses with cattle and sheep and the exclusion of obviously wild animals together suggest that horses were categorized symbolically with domesticated animals.

Together these archaeological clues suggest that horses had a symbolic importance in the Khvalynsk and Samara cultures that they had lacked earlier, and that they were associated with humans, domesticated cattle, and domesticated sheep. Thus, the earliest phase in the domestication of the horse might have begun during the period 4800-4400 BCE.

Horses were first domesticated around 4600 BCE in the Caspian Steppe, perhaps somewhere around the Don or the lower Volga, and soon became a defining element of steppe culture. Nevertheless it is unlikely that R1b was already present in the eastern steppes at the time, so the domestication of the horse should be attributed to the indigenous R1a people.

It is not yet entirely clear when R1b crossed over from eastern Anatolia to the Pontic-Caspian steppe. This might have happened with the appearance of the Dnieper-Donets culture (c. 5100-4300 BCE). This was the first truly Neolithic society in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Domesticated animals (cattle, sheep and goats) were herded throughout the steppes and funeral rituals were elaborate.

Sheep wool would play an important role in Indo-European society, notably in the Celtic and Germanic (R1b branches of the Indo-Europeans) clothing traditions up to this day.

However, many elements indicate a continuity in the Dnieper-Donets culture with the previous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and at the same time an influence from the Balkans and Carpathians, with regular imports of pottery and copper objects.

It is therefore more likely that Dnieper-Donets marked the transition mitanof indigenous R1a and/or I2a1b people to early agriculture, perhaps with an influx of Near Eastern farmers from ‘Old Europe’. Mitochondrial DNA sequences from Dnieper-Donets culture showed clear similarities with those of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in the Carpathians (haplogroups H, T and U3).

The first clearly Proto-Indo-European culture was Sredny Stog (4600-3900 BCE), when small kurgan burials begin to appear, with the distinctive posturing of the dead on the back with knees raised and oriented toward the northeast, which would be found in later steppe cultures as well.

There is evidence of population blending from the variety of skull shapes. Towards the end of the 5th millennium an elite start to develop with cattle, horses and copper used as status symbols.

Another migration across the Caucasus happened shortly before 3700 BCE, when the Maykop culture, the world’s first Bronze Age society, suddenly materialized in the north-west Caucasus, apparently out of nowhere.

The origins of Maykop are still uncertain, but archeologists have linked it to contemporary Chalcolithic cultures in the Armenian Highland. Archeology also shows a clear diffusion of bronze working and kurgan-type burials from the Maykop culture to the Pontic Steppe, where the Yamna culture developed soon afterwards (from 3500 BCE).

Kurgan (a.k.a. tumulus) burials would become a dominant feature of ancient Indo-European societies and were widely used by the Celts, Romans, Germanic tribes, and Scythians, among others.

Around 3500–3000 BCE, horse bones began to appear more frequently in archaeological sites beyond their center of distribution in the Eurasian steppes and were seen in central Europe, the middle and lower Danube valley, and the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia. Evidence of horses in these areas had been rare before, and as numbers increased, larger animals also began to appear in horse remains.

This expansion in range was contemporary with the Botai culture, where there are indications that horses were corralled and ridden. This does not necessarily mean that horses were first domesticated in the steppes, but the horse-hunters of the steppes certainly pursued wild horses more than in any other region. This geographic expansion is interpreted by many zoologists as an early phase in the spread of domesticated horses.

Later, images of horses, identified by their short ears, flowing manes, and tails that bushed out at the dock, began to appear in artistic media in Mesopotamia during the Akkadian period, 2300-2100 BCE. The word for “horse”, literally translated as ass of the mountains, first appeared in Sumerian documents during the Third Dynasty of Ur, about 2100-2000 BCE.

The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur apparently fed horses to lions for royal entertainment, perhaps indicating that horses were still regarded as more exotic than useful, but King Shulgi, about 2050 BCE, compared himself to “a horse of the highway that swishes its tail”, and one image from his reign showed a man apparently riding a horse at full gallop.

Horses were imported into Mesopotamia and the lowland Near East in larger numbers after 2000 BCE in connection with the beginning of chariot warfare.

A further expansion, into the lowland Near East and northwestern China, also happened around 2000 BCE, again apparently in conjunction with the chariot. Although Equus bones of uncertain species are found in some Late Neolithic sites in China dated before 2000 BCE, Equus caballus or Equus ferus bones first appeared in multiple sites and in significant numbers in sites of the Qijia and Siba cultures, 2000-1600 BCE, in Gansu and the northwestern provinces of China.

The Qijia culture was in contact with cultures of the Eurasian steppes, as shown through similarities between Qijia and Late Bronze Age steppe metallurgy, so it was probably through these contacts that domesticated horses first became frequent in northwestern China.

In 2008, archaeologists announced the discovery of rock art in Somalia’s northern Dhambalin region, which the researchers suggest is one of the earliest known depictions of a hunter on horseback. The rock art is in the Ethiopian-Arabian style, dated to 1000 to 3000 BCE.

While riding may have been practiced during the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, and the disappearance of “Old European” settlements may be related to attacks by horseback-mounted warriors, the clearest impact by horses on ancient warfare was by pulling chariots, introduced c. 2000 BCE.

Horses in the Bronze Age were relatively small by modern standards, which led some theorists to believe the ancient horses were too small to be ridden and so must have been driven.

The earliest wooden wheels (disks with a hole for the axle) are found in the Ceramic Neolithic Halafian culture (6500–4500 BC). The period is a continuous development out of the earlier Pottery Neolithic and is located primarily in south-eastern Turkey, Syria, and northern Iraq, although Halaf-influenced material is found throughout Greater Mesopotamia.

Early wheels were simple wooden disks with a hole for the axle. Because of the structure of wood, a horizontal slice of a tree trunk is not suitable, as it does not have the structural strength to support relevant stresses without failing; rounded pieces of longitudinal boards are required.

The spoked wheel was invented more recently, and allowed the construction of lighter and swifter vehicles. In the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley and Northwestern India, we find toy-cart wheels made of clay with lines which have been interpreted as spokes painted or in relief, and a symbol interpreted as a spoked wheel in the script of the seals, already in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC.

The earliest known examples of wooden spoked wheels are in the context of the Andronovo culture, dating to c. 2000 BC. Soon after this, horse cultures of the Caucasus region used horse-drawn spoked-wheel war chariots for the greater part of three centuries.

They moved deep into the Greek peninsula where they joined with the existing Mediterranean peoples to give rise, eventually, to classical Greece after the breaking of Minoan dominance and consolidations led by pre-classical Sparta and Athens. Celtic chariots introduced an iron rim around the wheel in the 1st millennium BC.

Halaf pottery has been found in other parts of northern Mesopotamia, such as at Nineveh and Tepe Gawra, Chagar Bazar and at many sites in Anatolia (Turkey) suggesting that it was widely used in the region.

The Halaf period was succeeded by the Halaf-Ubaid Transitional period (~5500 – 5200 cal. BCE) and then by the Ubaid period (~5200 – 4000 cal. BCE).

In South Mesopotamia the period is the earliest known period on the alluvium although it is likely earlier periods exist obscured under the alluvium. In the south it has a very long duration between about 6500 and 3800 BC when it is replaced by the Uruk period.

The Ubaid 1 period, sometimes called Eridu (5300–4700 BC), a phase limited to the extreme south of Iraq, on what was then the shores of the Persian Gulf, shows clear connection to the Samarra culture to the north.

This period saw the establishment of the first permanent settlement south of the 5 inch rainfall isohyet. These people pioneered the growing of grains in the extreme conditions of aridity, thanks to the high water tables of Southern Iraq.

The Ubaid 2 period (4800–4500 BC), after the type site of the same name, saw the development of extensive canal networks from major settlements. Irrigation agriculture, which seems to have developed first at Choga Mami (4700–4600 BC) and rapidly spread elsewhere, form the first required collective effort and centralised coordination of labour in Mesopotamia.

The Ubaid 3 and 4 period (4500–4000 BC), sometimes called Ubaid I and Ubaid II, saw a period of intense and rapid urbanisation with the Ubaid culture spread into northern Mesopotamia replacing (after a hiatus) the Halaf culture. Ubaid artifacts spread also all along the Arabian littoral, showing the growth of a trading system that stretched from the Mediterranean coast through to Oman.

The archaeological record shows that Arabian Bifacial/Ubaid period came to an abrupt end in eastern Arabia and the Oman peninsula at 3800 BC, just after the phase of lake lowering and onset of dune reactivation. At this time, increased aridity led to an end in semi-desert nomadism, and there is no evidence of human presence in the area for approximately 1000 years, the so-called “Dark Millennium”.

This might be due to the 5.9 kiloyear event, one of the most intense aridification events during the Holocene Epoch, at the end of the Older Peron. It occurred around 3900 BC (5,900 years BP), ending the Neolithic Subpluvial and probably initiated the most recent desiccation of the Sahara desert.

Thus, it also triggered worldwide migration to river valleys, such as from central North Africa to the Nile valley, which eventually led to the emergence of the first complex, highly organized, state-level societies in the 4th millennium BC. It is associated with the last round of the Sahara pump theory.

In the Middle East the 5.9 kiloyear event contributed to the abrupt end of the Ubaid period. It was associated with an abandonment of unwalled villages and the rapid growth of hierarchically structured walled cities, and in the Jemdet Nasr period, with the first book-keeping scripts.

The Ubaid period as a whole, based upon the analysis of grave goods, was one of increasingly polarised social stratification and decreasing egalitarianism. Bogucki describes this as a phase of “Trans-egalitarian” competitive households, in which some fall behind as a result of downward social mobility.

Morton Fried and Elman Service have hypothesised that Ubaid culture saw the rise of an elite class of hereditary chieftains, perhaps heads of kin groups linked in some way to the administration of the temple shrines and their granaries, responsible for mediating intra-group conflict and maintaining social order.

It would seem that various collective methods, perhaps instances of what Thorkild Jacobsen called primitive democracy, in which disputes were previously resolved through a council of one’s peers, were no longer sufficient for the needs of the local community.

Ubaid culture originated in the south, but still has clear connections to earlier cultures in the region of middle Iraq. The appearance of the Ubaid folk has sometimes been linked to the so-called Sumerian problem, related to the origins of Sumerian civilisation.

Whatever the ethnic origins of this group this culture saw for the first time a clear tripartite social division between intensive subsistence peasant farmers with crops and animals coming from the north, tent-dwelling nomadic pastoralists dependent upon their herds, and hunter-fisher folk of the Arabian littoral, living in reed huts.

Stein and Özbal describe the Near East oikumene that resulted from Ubaid expansion, contrasting it to the colonial expansionism of the later Uruk period. “A contextual analysis comparing different regions shows that the Ubaid expansion took place largely through the peaceful spread of an ideology, leading to the formation of numerous new indigenous identities that appropriated and transformed superficial elements of Ubaid material culture into locally distinct expressions”.

In North Mesopotamia the period runs only between about 5300 and 4300 BC. It is preceded by the Halaf period and the Halaf-Ubaid Transitional period and succeeded by the Late Chalcolithic period.

Shulaveri-Shomu culture is a Late Neolithic/Eneolithic culture that existed on the territory of present-day Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Armenian Highlands. The culture is dated to mid-6th or early-5th millennia BC and is thought to be one of the earliest known Neolithic cultures.

The Shulaveri-Shomu culture begins after the 8.2 kiloyear event which was a sudden decrease in global temperatures starting ca. 6200 BC and which lasted for about two to four centuries.

Shulaveri culture predates the Kura-Araxes culture and surrounding areas, which is assigned to the period of ca. 4000 – 2200 BC, and had close relation with the middle Bronze Age culture called Trialeti culture (ca. 3000 – 1500 BC). Sioni culture of Eastern Georgia possibly represents a transition from the Shulaveri to the Kura-Arax cultural complex.

In around ca. 6000–4200 B.C the Shulaveri-Shomu and other Neolithic/Chalcolithic cultures of the Southern Caucasus use local obsidian for tools, raise animals such as cattle and pigs, and grow crops, including grapes.

Many of the characteristic traits of the Shulaverian material culture (circular mudbrick architecture, pottery decorated by plastic design, anthropomorphic female figurines, obsidian industry with an emphasis on production of long prismatic blades) are believed to have their origin in the Near Eastern Neolithic (Hassuna, Halaf).

Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the second half of the 4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, so that the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle is still unsolved.

The Kura–Araxes culture or the early trans-Caucasian culture was a civilization that existed from 3400 BC until about 2000 BC, which has traditionally been regarded as the date of its end, but it may have disappeared as early as 2600 or 2700 BC.

The earliest evidence for this culture is found on the Ararat plain; thence it spread northward in Caucasus by 3000 BC (but never reaching Colchis), and during the next millennium it proceeded westward to the Erzurum plain, southwest to Cilicia, and to the southeast into an area below the Urmia basin and Lake Van, and finally down to the borders of present day Syria.

The economy was based on farming and livestock-raising (especially of cattle and sheep). They grew grain and various orchard crops, and are known to have used implements to make flour. They raised cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, and in its later phases, horses.

There is evidence of trade with Mesopotamia, as well as Asia Minor. It is, however, considered above all to be indigenous to the Caucasus, and its major variants characterized (according to Caucasus historian Amjad Jaimoukha) later major cultures in the region.

It may have given rise to the later Khirbet Kerak ware culture found in Syria and Canaan after the fall of the Akkadian Empire. Jaimoukha believes that its southern expanse is attributable primarily to Mitanni and the Hurrians.

They are also remarkable for the production of wheeled vehicles (wagons and carts), which were sometimes included in burial kurgans. Their metal goods were widely distributed, recorded in the Volga, Dnieper and Don-Donets systems in the north, into Syria and Palestine in the south, and west into Anatolia.

Hurrian and Urartian elements are quite probable, as are Northeast Caucasian ones. Some authors subsume Hurrians and Urartians under Northeast Caucasian as well as part of the Alarodian theory.

The presence of Kartvelian languages was also highly probable. Influences of Semitic languages and Indo-European languages are also highly possible, though the presence of the languages on the lands of the Kura–Araxes culture is more controversial.

The Maykop culture (also spelled Maikop), ca. 3700 BC-3000 BC, was a major Bronze Age archaeological culture in the Western Caucasus region of Southern Russia.

It extends along the area from the Taman Peninsula at the Kerch Strait to near the modern border of Dagestan and southwards to the Kura River. The culture takes its name from a royal burial found in Maykop kurgan in the Kuban River valley.

In the south it borders the approximately contemporaneous Kura-Araxes culture (3500-2200 BC), which extends into eastern Anatolia and apparently influenced it. To the north is the Yamna culture, including the Novotitorovka culture (3300—2700), which it overlaps in territorial extent. It is contemporaneous with the late Uruk period in Mesopotamia.

The Kuban River is navigable for much of its length and provides an easy water-passage via the Sea of Azov to the territory of the Yamna culture, along the Don and Donets River systems. The Maykop culture was thus well-situated to exploit the trading possibilities with the central Ukraine area.

New data revealed the similarity of artifacts from the Maykop culture with those found recently in the course of excavations of the ancient city of Tell Khazneh in northern Syria, the construction of which dates back to 4000 BC.

The Leyla-Tepe culture is a culture of archaeological interest from the Chalcolithic era. Its population was distributed on the southern slopes of the Central Caucasus (modern Azerbaijan, Agdam District), from 4350 until 4000 B.C. Similar amphora burials in the South Caucasus are found in the Western Georgian Jar-Burial Culture.

The culture has also been linked to the north Ubaid period monuments, in particular, with the settlements in the Eastern Anatolia Region. The settlement is of a typical Western-Asian variety, with the dwellings packed closely together and made of mud bricks with smoke outlets.

It has been suggested that the Leyla-Tepe were the founders of the Maykop culture. An expedition to Syria by the Russian Academy of Sciences revealed the similarity of the Maykop and Leyla-Tepe artifacts with those found recently while excavating the ancient city of Tel Khazneh I, from the 4th millennium BC.

In 2010, nearly 200 Bronze Age sites were reported stretching over 60 miles between the Kuban and Nalchik rivers, at an altitude of between 4,620 feet and 7,920 feet. They were all “visibly constructed according to the same architectural plan, with an oval courtyard in the center, and connected by roads.”

The Maykop people lived sedentary lives, and horses formed a very low percentage of their livestock, which mostly consisted of pigs and cattle. Archaeologists have discovered a unique form of bronze cheek-pieces, which consists of a bronze rod with a twisted loop in the middle and a thread through her nodes that connects with bridle, halter strap and headband. Notches and bumps on the edges of the cheek-pieces were, apparently, to fix nose and under-lip belts.

The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon—four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BC clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.

The oldest securely dated real wheel-axle combination that from Stare Gmajne near Ljubljana in Slovenia (Ljubljana Marshes Wooden Wheel) is now dated in 2σ-limits to 3340-3030 cal BC, the axle to 3360-3045 cal BC.

Models of two-wheeled carts from c. 3000 BCE found at Altyn-Depe are the earliest complete evidence of wheeled transport in Central Asia, though model wheels have come from contexts possibly somewhat earlier. Judging by the type of harness, carts were initially pulled by oxen, or a bull. However camels were domesticated within the BMAC. A model of a cart drawn by a camel of c. 2200 BCE was found at Altyn-Depe.

In China, the wheel was certainly present with the adoption of the chariot in c. 1200 BC, although Barbieri-Low argues for earlier Chinese wheeled vehicles, c. 2000 BC.

The ethnicity of the people of Mitanni is difficult to ascertain. A treatise on the training of chariot horses by Kikkuli contains a number of Indo-Aryan glosses. Kammenhuber (1968) suggested that this vocabulary was derived from the still undivided Indo-Iranian language, but Mayrhofer (1974) has shown that specifically Indo-Aryan features are present.

Pharaoh Thutmose III of Egypt,  the sixth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, mention in the 33rd year of his reign (1446 BC) as the people of Ermenen, and says in their land “heaven rests upon its four pillars”. The name is connected to the Indo-European root Ar- meaning “assemble/create” which is vastly used in names of or regarding the Sun, light, or fire, found in Ararat, Aryan, Arta etc.

Armani, (also given as Armanum) was an ancient kingdom mentioned by Sargon of Akkad and his grandson Naram-Sin of Akkad as stretching from Ibla to Bit-Nanib, its location is heavily debated, and it continued to be mentioned in the later Assyrian inscriptions.

Aratta is a land that appears in Sumerian myths surrounding Enmerkar and Lugalbanda, two early and possibly mythical kings of Uruk also mentioned on the Sumerian king list.

Aratta is described as follows in Sumerian literature. It is a fabulously wealthy place full of gold, silver, lapis lazuli and other precious materials, as well as the artisans to craft them. It is remote and difficult to reach, the home to the goddess Inanna, who transfers her allegiance from Aratta to Uruk, but is conquered by Enmerkar of Uruk.

Inanna (Akkadian: Ištar) is the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility, and warfare, and goddess of the E-Anna temple at the city of Uruk, her main centre. An is so prominently associated with the E-anna temple in the city of Uruk that there are good reasons for believing this place to be the original seat of the An cult. If this is correct, then the goddess Inanna (or Ishtar) of Uruk may at one time have been his consort.

Inanna’s name derives from Lady of Heaven (Sumerian: nin-an-ak). The cuneiform sign of Inanna; however, is not a ligature of the signs lady (Sumerian: nin; Cuneiform: SAL.TUG) and sky (Sumerian: an; Cuneiform: AN).

These difficulties have led some early Assyriologists to suggest that originally Inanna may have been a Proto-Euphratean goddess, possibly related to the Hurrian mother goddess Hannahannah, accepted only latterly into the Sumerian pantheon, an idea supported by her youthfulness, and that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, at first she had no sphere of responsibilities. The view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in Southern Iraq before Sumerian is not widely accepted by modern Assyriologists.

Mitanni (Hittite cuneiform Mi-ta-an-ni; also Mittani Mi-it-ta-ni) or Hanigalbat (Assyrian Hanigalbat, Khanigalbat cuneiform Ḫa-ni-gal-bat) or Naharin in ancient Egyptian texts was a Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and southeast Anatolia from ca. 1500 BC–1300 BC. Their sphere of influence is shown in Hurrian place names, personal names and the spread through Syria and the Levant of a distinct pottery type.

The Mitanni kingdom was referred to as the Maryannu, Nahrin or Mitanni by the Egyptians, the Hurri by the Hittites, and the Hanigalbat by the Assyrians. The different names seem to have referred to the same kingdom and were used interchangeably, according to Michael C. Astour.

Hittite annals mention a people called Hurri (Ḫu-ur-ri), located in northeastern Syria. A Hittite fragment, probably from the time of Mursili I, mentions a “King of the Hurri”, or “Hurrians”.

The Assyro-Akkadian version of the text renders “Hurri” as Hanigalbat. Tushratta, who styles himself “king of Mitanni” in his Akkadian Amarna letters, refers to his kingdom as Hanigalbat.

Egyptian sources call Mitanni “nhrn”, which is usually pronounced as Naharin/Naharina from the Assyro-Akkadian word for “river”, cf. Aram-Naharaim, a region that is mentioned five times in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.

In Genesis, it refers to the ‘land of Avram’s birth’ (Gen 24:4), the place where Avram’s brother Nachor lived (Gen.24:10), but it may sometimes be used somewhat interchangeably with the names Paddan Aram and Haran to denote the place where Avram stayed briefly with his father Terach’s family after leaving Ur of the Chaldees, while en route to Canaan (Gen. 11:31), and the place to which later patriarchs obtained wives, rather than marry daughters of Canaan (e.g. Gen:24:3-4).

Paddan Aram refers to the part of Aram-Naharaim along the upper Euphrates, while Haran is mainly identified with the ancient city of Harran on the Balikh River. According to one rabbinical Jewish tradition, the birthplace of Abraham (Ur) was also situated in Aram-Naharaim.

The name Mitanni is first found in the “memoirs” of the Syrian wars (ca. 1480 BC) of the official astronomer and clockmaker Amememhet, who returned from the “foreign country called Me-ta-ni” at the time of Thutmose I.

The expedition to the Naharina announced by Thutmosis I at the beginning of his reign may have actually taken place during the long previous reign of Amenhotep I Helck believes that this was the expedition mentioned by Amenhotep II.

Some theonyms, proper names and other terminology of the Mitanni exhibit close similarities to Indo-Aryan, suggesting that an Indo-Aryan elite imposed itself over the Hurrian population in the course of the Indo-Aryan expansion. In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni, the deities Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya (Ashvins) are invoked.

Kikkuli’s horse training text includes technical terms such as aika (eka, one), tera (tri, three), panza (pancha, five), satta (sapta, seven), na (nava, nine), vartana (vartana, turn, round in the horse race). The numeral aika “one” is of particular importance because it places the superstrate in the vicinity of Indo-Aryan proper as opposed to Indo-Iranian or early Iranian (which has “aiva”) in general.

About 1600 BCE, the “Chariot Age” began among the Hurrian people of the highland kingdom of Mitanni. These were people who lived in the mountainous regions of modern-day Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Iraq. They were closely associated with horses and their name for their country was Ishuwa, which means “horse land.”

The land of Isuwa was situated in the upper Euphrates river region. The river valley was here surrounded by the Anti-Taurus Mountains. To the northeast of the river lay a vast plain stretching up to the Black Sea mountain range.

The plain had favourable climatic conditions due to the abundance of water from springs and rainfall. Irrigation of fields was possible without the need to build complex canals. The river valley was well suited for intensive agriculture, while livestock could be kept at the higher altitudes. The mountains possessed rich deposits of copper which were mined in antiquity.

The area was one of the places where agriculture developed very early in the Neolithic period. Urban centres emerged in the upper Euphrates river valley around 3000 BC. The first states may have followed in the third millennium BC.

The name Isuwa is not known until the literate Hittite period of the second millennium BC. Few literate sources from within Isuwa have been discovered and the primary source material comes from Hittite texts.

The Isuwans left no written record of their own, and it is not clear which of the Anatolian peoples inhabited the land of Isuwa prior to the Luwians. They could have been Indo-Europeans like the Luwians, related to the Hittites to the west, Hattians, Hurrians from the south, or Urartians who lived east of Isuwa in the first millennium BC.

The Hurrian warriors rode in light, fast chariots; they were armed with bows and arrows as well as thrusting spears and hand weapons. These elite warriors were soon in demand as mercenaries for the emerging kingdoms and city states of Mesopotamia.

Maryannu is an ancient word for the caste of chariot-mounted hereditary warrior nobility which dominated many of the societies of the Middle East during the Bronze Age. The Mitanni warriors were called marya, the term for warrior in Sanskrit as well; note mišta-nnu (= miẓḍha,~ Sanskrit mīḍha) “payment (for catching a fugitive)”.

The term is attested in the Amarna letters written by Haapi. Robert Drews writes that the name ‘maryannu’ although plural takes the singular ‘marya’, which in Sanskrit means young warrior, and attaches a Hurrian suffix. He suggests that at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age most would have spoken either Hurrian or Aryan but by the end of the 14th century most of the Levant maryannu had Semitic names.

The common people’s language, the Hurrian language, is neither Indo-European nor Semitic. Hurrian is related to Urartian, the language of Urartu, both belonging to the Hurro-Urartian language family. It had been held that nothing more can be deduced from current evidence. A Hurrian passage in the Amarna letters – usually composed in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the day – indicates that the royal family of Mitanni was by then speaking Hurrian as well.

The military superiority of Mitanni was probably based on the use of two-wheeled war-chariots, driven by the ‘Marjannu’ people. A text on the training of war-horses, written by a certain “Kikkuli the Mitannian” has been found in the archives recovered at Hattusa. More speculative is the attribution of the introduction of the chariot in Mesopotamia to early Mitanni.

The Hyksos or Hycsos (Egyptian heqa khaseshet, “ruler(s) of the foreign countries”) were a multiracial people from Middle East who took over the eastern Nile Delta, ending the Thirteenth Dynasty of Egypt and initiating the Second Intermediate Period.

Important Canaanite populations first appeared in Egypt towards the end of the 12th Dynasty c. 1800 BC, and either around that time or c. 1720 BC, formed an independent realm in the eastern Nile Delta.

The Canaanite rulers of the Delta, regrouped in the 14th Dynasty, coexisted with the Egyptian 13th Dynasty, based in Itjtawy. The power of the 13th and 14th Dynasties progressively waned, perhaps due to famine and plague, and c. 1650 BC both were invaded by the Hyksos, who formed their own dynasty, the 15th Dynasty.

The collapse of the 13th Dynasty created a power vacuum in the south, which may have led to the rise of the 16th Dynasty, based in Thebes, and possibly of a local dynasty in Abydos. Both were eventually conquered by the Hyksos, albeit for a short time in the case of Thebes.

From then on, the 17th Dynasty took control of Thebes and reigned for some time in peaceful coexistence with the Hyksos kings, perhaps as their vassals. Eventually, Seqenenre Tao, Kamose and Ahmose waged war against the Hyksos and expelled Khamudi, their last king, from Egypt c. 1550 BC.

The Hyksos practiced horse burials, and their chief deity, their native storm god, became associated with the Egyptian storm and desert god, Seth. Although most Hyksos names seem Semitic, the Hyksos also included Hurrians, who, while speaking an isolated language, were under the rule and influence of Indo-Europeans.

The Hyksos brought several technical improvements to Egypt, as well as cultural infusions such as new musical instruments and foreign loan words. The changes introduced include new techniques of bronze working and pottery, new breeds of animals, and new crops.

In warfare, they introduced the horse and chariot, the composite bow, improved battle axes, and advanced fortification techniques. Because of these cultural advances, Hyksos rule was decisive for Egypt’s later empire in the Middle East.

Archaeologists Find Earliest Known Domestic Horses: Harnessed and Milked

The Horse, The Wheel and the Chariot

Domestication of the horse

Vegetation deity

Dying and rising god

In comparative mythology, the related motifs of a dying god and of a dying-and-rising god (also known as a death-rebirth-deity) have appeared in diverse cultures.

In the more commonly accepted motif of a dying god, the deity goes away and does not return. The less than widely accepted motif of a dying-and-rising god refers to a deity which returns, is resurrected or is reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense.

Beginning in the 19th century, a number of gods who would fit these motifs were proposed. Male examples include the ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Tammuz, Ra, Osiris, Jesus, and Dionysus. Female examples include Inanna/Ishtar, Persephone, and Bari.

The methods of death can be diverse, the Norse Baldr is killed by a holly dart from his mischievous/evil step-uncle Loki and the Aztec Quetzalcoatl (feathered serpent) sets himself on fire after over-drinking. Some gods who die are also seen as either returning or bringing about life in some other form, in many cases associated with a vegetation deity related to a staple.

The very existence of the category “dying-and-rising-god” was debated throughout the 20th century, and the soundness of the category was widely questioned, given that many of the proposed gods did not return in a permanent sense as the same deity.

By the end of the 20th century, scholarly consensus had formed against the reasoning used to suggest the category, and it was generally considered inappropriate from a historical perspective.

A vegetation deity is a nature deity whose disappearance and reappearance, or life, death and rebirth, embodies the growth cycle of plants. In nature worship, the deity can be a god or goddess with the ability to regenerate itself. A vegetation deity is often a fertility deity.

The deity typically undergoes dismemberment, scattering, and reintegration, as narrated in a myth or reenacted by a religious ritual. The cyclical pattern is given theological significance on themes such as immortality, resurrection, and reincarnation.

Vegetation myths have structural resemblances to certain creation myths in which parts of a primordial being’s body generate aspects of the cosmos, such as the Norse myth of Ymir.

In mythography of the 19th and early 20th century, as for example in The Golden Bough of J.G. Frazer, the figure is related to the “corn spirit,” “corn” in this sense meaning grain in general.

That triviality is giving the concept its tendency to turn into a meaningless generality, as Walter Friedrich Otto remarked of trying to use a “name as futile and yet pretentious as ‘Vegetation deity’.”

In the Mesopotamian tradition, during the journey of Inanna or Ishtar to the underworld, the earth becomes sterile, and neither humans nor animals are able to procreate. After confronting Ereshkigal, her sister and ruler of the underworld, Inanna is killed, but an emissary from the gods administers potions to restore her to life.

She is allowed to return to the upper world only if someone else will take her place. Her husband, the vegetation god Dumuzi, agrees to spend half the year in the underworld, during which time vegetation dies off. His return causes regrowth.

In ancient Egyptian religion the cultural achievements of Osiris among the peoples of the earth provokes the envy of his brother Set, who kills and dismembers him. Osiris’s wife Isis makes a journey to gather his fourteen scattered body parts.

In some versions, she buries each part where she finds it, causing the desert to put forth vegetation. In other versions, she reassembles his body and resurrects him, and he then becomes the ruler of the afterlife.

In European folklore, a woman’s fertility has an influence on farming. Vegetation goddess figurines from the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture have a lozenge and dot pattern that represents a sown field and female fertility.

Attis was the consort of Cybele in Phrygian and Greek mythology. His priests were eunuchs, the Galli, as explained by origin myths pertaining to Attis and castration. Attis was also a Phrygian god of vegetation, and in his self-mutilation, death, and resurrection he represents the fruits of the earth, which die in winter only to rise again in the spring.

Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya “Kubeleyan Mother”, perhaps “Mountain Mother”; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Kybele, Kybebe, Kybelis) was an originally Anatolian mother goddess.

Cybele may have evolved from an Anatolian Mother Goddess of a type found at the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük (in the Konya region), dated to the 6th millennium BCE. This corpulent, fertile and pregnant Mother Goddess appears to be giving birth on her throne, which has two feline-headed hand rests.

She is Phrygia’s only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from around the 6th century BCE.

In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the Harvest-Mother goddess Demeter.

Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following.

Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a transgender or eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.

In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater (“Great Mother”). The Roman State adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle recommended her conscription as a key religious component in Rome’s second war against Carthage. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas.

With Rome’s eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanised forms of Cybele’s cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship.

Hebat, also transcribed, Kheba or Khepat, was the mother goddess of the Hurrians, known as “the mother of all living”. She is also a Queen of the deities. The mother goddess is likely to have had a later counterpart in the Phrygian goddess Cybele.

Hannahannah (from Hittite hanna- “grandmother”) is a Hurrian Mother Goddess related to or influenced by the pre-Sumerian goddess Inanna. Hannahannah was also identified with the Hurrian goddess Hebat.

Inanna’s name derives from Lady of Heaven (Sumerian: nin-an-ak). The cuneiform sign of Inanna, however, is not a ligature of the signs lady (Sumerian: nin; Cuneiform: SAL.TUG2) and sky (Sumerian: an; Cuneiform: AN).

These difficulties have led some early Assyriologists to suggest that originally Inanna may have been a Proto-Euphratean goddess, but the view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in Southern Iraq before Sumerian is not widely accepted by modern Assyriologists.

She might be related to the Hurrian mother goddess Hannahannah, accepted only latterly into the Sumerian pantheon, an idea supported by her youthfulness, and that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, at first she had no sphere of responsibilities.

After Telepinu disappears, his father, the Storm-god Teshub, complains to Hannahannah. She then sends him out to search for his son, and when he gives up, she dispatches a bee, charging it to find Telepinu. The bee does that, and then purifies and strengthens him by stinging his hands and feet and wiping his eyes and feet with wax.

She also recommends to the Storm-god that he should pay the Sea-god the bride-price for the Sea-god’s daughter, so she can wed Telipinu.

After Inara consulted with Hannahannah, she gave her a man and land. Soon after, Inara is missing and when Hannahannah is informed thereof by the Storm-god’s bee, she apparently begins a search with the help of her female attendant.

Apparently like Demeter, Hannahanna disappears for a while in a fit of anger and while she is gone, cattle and sheep are stifled and mothers, both human and animal take no account of their children.

After her anger is banished to the Dark Earth, she returns rejoicing, and mothers care once again for their kin. Another means of banishing her anger was through burning brushwood and allowing the vapor to enter her body. Either in this or another text she appears to consult with the Sun god and the War god, but much of the text is missing.

In the Parables of Jesus and the Parable of the Sower “the sower soweth the word” were the seed is the word of God. Parable of the Mustard Seed and Parable of the Growing Seed explain the Kingdom of God where growth is due to God, not man, and follows its own timetable.

In the Gospel of John 12:24, the Death and resurrection of Jesus is compared to a kernel that falls in the ground and dies, and then produces many seeds. In many Christian traditions, Easter sunrise service or Resurrection Service is held in God’s Acre where the bodies of the dead are “sown as seed.” The sowing of seeds also refers to scattering of people away from their ancestral homeland.

Tammuz

Tammuz (Transliterated Hebrew: Tammuz, Tiberian Hebrew: Tammûz; Arabic: Tammūz; Akkadian: Duʾzu, Dūzu; Sumerian: Dumuzid (DUMU.ZI(D), Dumu, “child, son” + Zi(d), “faithful, true”, “faithful or true son”) was the name of a Sumerian god of food and vegetation, also worshiped in the later Mesopotamian states of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia.

In Babylonia, the month Tammuz was established in honor of the eponymous god Tammuz, who originated as a Sumerian shepherd-god, Dumuzid or Dumuzi, the consort of Inanna and, in his Akkadian form, the parallel consort of Ishtar. The Levantine Adonis (“lord”), who was drawn into the Greek pantheon, was considered by Joseph Campbell among others to be another counterpart of Tammuz, son and consort.

The Aramaic name “Tammuz” seems to have been derived from the Akkadian form Tammuzi, based on early Sumerian Damu-zid. The later standard Sumerian form, Dumu-zid, in turn became Dumuzi in Akkadian. Tamuzi also is Dumuzid or Dumuzi.

Beginning with the summer solstice came a time of mourning in the Ancient Near East, as in the Aegean: the Babylonians marked the decline in daylight hours and the onset of killing summer heat and drought with a six-day “funeral” for the god.

Recent discoveries reconfirm him as an annual life-death-rebirth deity: tablets discovered in 1963 show that Dumuzi was in fact consigned to the Underworld himself, in order to secure Inanna’s release, though the recovered final line reveals that he is to revive for six months of each year.

In cult practice, the dead Tammuz was widely mourned in the Ancient Near East. Locations associated in antiquity with the site of his death include both Harran and Byblos, among others.

Today several versions of the Sumerian death of Dumuzi have been recovered, “Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld”, “Dumuzi’s dream” and “Dumuzi and the galla”, as well as a tablet separately recounting Dumuzi’s death, mourned by holy Inanna, and his noble sister Geštinanna, and even his dog and the lambs and kids in his fold; Dumuzi himself is weeping at the hard fate in store for him, after he had walked among men, and the cruel galla of the Underworld seize him.

A number of pastoral poems and songs relate the love affair of Inanna and Dumuzid the shepherd. A text recovered in 1963 recounts “The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi” in terms that are tender and frankly erotic.

The month of Tammuz

Tammuz was a month in the Babylonian calendar, named for one of the main Babylonian gods, Tammuz (Sumerian: Dumuzid, “son of life”). Many different calendar systems have since adopted Tammuz to refer to a month in the summer season.

The festival for the deity Tammuz was held throughout the month of Tammuz in midsummer, and celebrated his death and resurrection. The first day of the month of Tammuz was the day of the new moon of the summer solstice. On the second day of the month, there was lamentation over the death of Tammuz, on the 9th, 16th and 17th days torchlit processions, and on the last three days, an image of Tammuz was buried.

Tammuz is also the name for the month of July in the Gregorian calendar, also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar, the internationally most widely used civil calendar in Arabic, Syriac and Turkish (“Temmuz”).

Tammuz (Standard Hebraic: Tammuz; Tiberian: Tammûz) is the tenth month of the civil year and the fourth month of the ecclesiastical year on the Hebrew calendar. It is a boreal summer month of 29 days, which occurs on the Gregorian calendar around June-July.

The name of the month was adopted from the Assyrian-Babylonian calendar, in which the month was named after one of the main Mesopotamian gods, Tammuz. This is referred to in Ezekiel 8:14. Tammuz is also a month in the modern Assyrian calendar of the ethnic Assyrian Christians.

Tammuz is the month of July in Iraqi Arabic and Levantine Arabic, and references to Tammuz appear in Arabic literature from the 9th to 11th centuries AD.

Dumuzid “the Shepherd”

Dumuzid or Dumuzi, called “the Shepherd”, from Bad-tibira in Sumer, was, according to the Sumerian King List, the fifth predynastic king in the legendary period before the Deluge. The list further states that Dumuzid ruled for 36,000 years.

“Dumuzid the Shepherd” is also the subject of a series of epic poems in Sumerian literature. However, in these tablets he is associated not with Bad-tibira but with Uruk, where a namesake, Dumuzid the Fisherman, was king sometime after the Flood, in between Lugalbanda “the Shepherd” and Gilgamesh.

Later poems and hymns of praise to Dumuzid indicate that he was later considered a deity, a precursor of the Babylonian god Tammuz. In Tablet 6 of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh rebuffs Ishtar (Inanna), reminding her that she had struck Tammuz (Dumuzid), “the lover of [her] youth”, decreeing that he should “keep weeping year after year”.

In a chart of antediluvian generations in Babylonian and Biblical traditions, William Wolfgang Hallo associates Dumuzid with the composite half-man, half-fish counselor or culture hero (Apkallu) An-Enlilda, and suggests an equivalence between Dumuzid and Enoch in the Sethite Genealogy given in Genesis chapter 5.

Dumuzid “the Fisherman”

Dumuzid “the Fisherman”, originally from Kuara in Sumer, was the 3rd king in the 1st Dynasty of Uruk, and Gilgamesh’s predecessor, according to the Sumerian king list.

The king list also states that he singlehandedly captured Enmebaragesi, ruler of Kish, and it claims he ruled in Uruk for 100 years — far fewer than the 1200 years it ascribes his predecessor, Lugalbanda “the Shepherd”.

There may have been some confusion in the early Sumerian compositions between this figure and that of “Dumuzid the Shepherd”, whom they call the king of Uruk, and who appears as a deity (Tammuz) in later works. However, the Sumerian king list says that Dumuzid the Shepherd ruled before the flood, and in Bad-tibira, not Uruk.

Among the compositions involving Dumuzid the Shepherd are:

Inanna’s descent to the netherworld: Inanna, after descending to the underworld, is allowed to return, but only with an unwanted entourage of demons, who insist on taking away a notable person in her place.

She dissuades the demons from taking the rulers of Umma and Bad-tibira, who are sitting in dirt and rags. However, when they come to Uruk, they find Dumuzid the Shepherd sitting in palatial opulence, and seize him immediately, taking him into the underworld as Inanna’s substitute.

Dumuzid and Ngeshtin-ana: Inanna gives Dumuzid over to the demons as her substitute; they proceed to violate him, but he escapes to the home of his sister, Ngeshtin-ana (Geshtinanna). The demons pursue Dumuzid there, and eventually find him hiding in the pasture.

Dumuzid and his sister: Fragmentary. Dumuzid’s sister seems to be mourning his death in this tablet.

Dumuzid’s dream: In this account, Dumuzid dreams of his own death and tells Ngeshtin-ana, who tells him it is a sign that he is about to be toppled in an uprising by evil and hungry men (also described as galla, ‘demons’) who are coming to Uruk for the king.

No sooner does she speak this, than men of Adab, Akshak, Uruk, Ur, and Nippur are indeed sighted coming for him with clubs. Dumuzid resolves to hide in the district of Alali, but they finally catch him. He escapes from them and reaches to the district of Kubiresh, but they catch him again.

Escaping again to the house of Old Woman Bilulu, he is again caught, but then escapes once more to his sister’s home. There he is caught a last time, hiding in the pasture, and killed.

Inanna and Bilulu: This describes how Inanna avenges her lover Dumuzid’s death, by killing Old Woman Bilulu.

Semiramis

For ancient Greeks Semiramis (Armenian: Shamiram) was the legendary queen of King Ninus, succeeding him to the throne of Assyria. The legends narrated by Diodorus Siculus, Justin and others from Ctesias of Cnidus describe her and her relationship to King Ninus, himself a mythical king of Assyria, not attested in the Assyrian King List.

The name of Semiramis came to be applied to various monuments in Western Asia and Asia Minor, the origin of which was forgotten or unknown. Nearly every stupendous work of antiquity by the Euphrates or in Iran seems to have ultimately been ascribed to her, even the Behistun Inscription of Darius.

Herodotus ascribes to her the artificial banks that confined the Euphrates and knows her name as borne by a gate of Babylon. However, Diodorus stresses that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built long after Semiramis had reigned and not in her time.

Various places in Assyria and throughout Mesopotamia as a whole, Media, Persia, the Levant, Asia Minor, Arabia, and the Caucasus bore the name of Semiramis, but slightly changed, even in the Middle Ages, and an old name of the city of Van was Shamiramagerd (in Armenian it means created by Semiramis).

A real and historical Shammuramat (the Akkadian and Aramaic form of the name) was the Assyrian queen of Shamshi-Adad V (ruled 824 BC–811 BC), king of Assyria and ruler of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and its regent for five years until her son Adad-nirari III came of age.

The indigenous Assyrians of Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and northwest Iran still use Semiramis as a name for female children.

According to the legend as related by Diodorus, Semiramis was of noble parents, the daughter of the fish-goddess Derketo of Ascalon in Syria and a mortal. Derketo abandoned her at birth and drowned herself. Doves fed the child until Simmas, the royal shepherd, found and raised her.

She then married Onnes or Menones, one of the generals of Ninus. Ninus was so struck by her bravery at the capture of Bactra that he married her, forcing Onnes to commit suicide.

She and Ninus had a son named Ninyas. After King Ninus conquered Asia, including the Bactrians, he was fatally wounded by an arrow. Semiramis then masqueraded as her son and tricked her late husband’s army into following her instructions because they thought these came from their new ruler. After Ninus’s death she reigned as queen regnant for 42 years, conquering much of Asia.

She restored ancient Babylon and protected it with a high brick wall that completely surrounded the city. Then she built several palaces in Persia, including Ecbatana. Diodorus also attributes the Behistun inscription to her, now known to have been done under Darius I of Persia.

She didn’t only reigned Asia effectively but also added Libya and Aethiopia to the empire. She then went to war with king Stabrobates of India, having her artisans create an army of false elephants to deceive the Indians into thinking she had acquired real elephants. This succeeded at first, but then she was wounded in the counterattack and her army again retreated west of the Indus.

Armenian tradition portrays her as a homewrecker and a harlot. These facts are partly to be explained by observing that, according to the legends, in her birth as well as in her disappearance from earth, Semiramis appears as a goddess, the daughter of the fish-goddess Atargatis, and herself connected with the doves of Ishtar or Astartë.

One of the most popular legends in Armenian tradition involves Semiramis and an Armenian king, Ara the Beautiful. In the 20th century, the poet Nairi Zarian retold the story of Ara the Beautiful and Shamiram, in a work considered to be a masterpiece of Armenian literary drama.

According to the legend, Semiramis had heard about the fame of the handsome Armenian king Ara, and she lusted after his image. Semiramis was enamored with Ara’s vigorous physical power and so sought to consummate with him. She asked Ara to marry her, but he refused; upon hearing this, she gathered the armies of Assyria and marched against Armenia.

During the battle, which may have taken place in the Ararat valley, Ara was slain by Semiramis. To avoid continuous warfare with the Armenians, Semiramis, reputed to be a sorceress, took his body and prayed to the gods to raise Ara from the dead. When the Armenians advanced to avenge their leader, she disguised one of her lovers as Ara and spread the rumor that the gods had brought Ara back to life, ending the war. Although many different versions of the legend exist, they agree that Ara never came back to life.

While the achievements of Semiramis are clearly in the realm of mythical Greek historiography, the historical Assyrian queen Shammuramat (Semiramis), wife of Shamshi-Adad V of Assyria, certainly existed. After her husband’s death, she served as regent from 811–806 BC for her son, Adad-nirari III.

Shammuramat would have thus been briefly in control of the vast Neo Assyrian Empire, which 150 years later stretched from the Caucasus Mountains in the north to the Arabian Peninsula in the south, and western Iran in the east to Cyprus in the west.

In Shammuramat’s time, however, Assyria only ruled over parts of neighboring areas in Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor, and Iran.

Georges Roux speculated that the later Greek and Indo-Iranian (Persian and Median) flavoured myths surrounding Semiramis stem from successful campaigns she waged against these peoples, and the novelty of a woman ruling such an empire. Some authors allow for the possibility of more than one figure named Semiramis.

Bel (Akkadian)

Bel (from Akkadian bēlu), signifying “lord” or “master”, is a title rather than a genuine name, applied to various gods in the Mesopotamian religion of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. The feminine form is Belit ‘Lady, Mistress’. Bel is named in the Bible at Isaiah 46:1 and Jeremiah 50:2 and 51:44.

Bêlit is a form of the Akkadian language word beltu or beltum (meaning “lady, mistress”) as used in noun compounds; it appears in titles of goddesses, such as bêlit-ili “lady of the gods”, an Akkadian title of Ninhursag.

The word bêlit appears in Greek form as Beltis (Βελτις), considered to be the name of the wife of the god Bêl, represented in Greek as Belos and in Latin as Belus. Linguistically Bel is an East Semitic form cognate with Northwest Semitic Ba‘al with the same meaning.

Belet-Seri (also spelled Beletseri, Belit-Sheri, Belit-Tseri) in Babylonian and Akkadian mythology is an underworld goddess. The recorder of the dead entering the underworld, she is known as the “Scribe of the Earth”.

It is Belet-seri who keeps the records of human activities so she can advise the queen of the dead, Erishkigal, on their final judgement. Married to Amurru, the God of Nomads, she’s known as ‘Queen of the Desert.’ Beginning in the Old Babylonian Period, Belet-Seri was identified with the goddess Gestinanna.

In Babylonian religion, Belit Ilani was a title described as meaning “mistress of the gods” and the name of the “evening star of desire”. It has been associated with Ninlil and Astarte and has been found inscribed on portraits of a woman blessing a suckling child with her right hand.

Theophilus G. Pinches noted that Belit Ilani or Nnlil or had seven different names (such as Nintud, Ninhursag, Ninmah, etc.) for seven different localities in ancient Sumer.

Early translators of Akkadian believed that the ideogram for the god called in Sumerian Enlil was to be read as Bel in Akkadian. This is now known to be incorrect; but one finds Bel used in referring to Enlil in older translations and discussions.

Bel became especially used of the Babylonian god Marduk and when found in Assyrian and neo-Babylonian personal names or mentioned in inscriptions in a Mesopotamian context it can usually be taken as referring to Marduk and no other god.

Similarly Belit without some disambiguation mostly refers to Bel Marduk’s spouse Sarpanit. However Marduk’s mother, the Sumerian goddess called Ninhursag, Damkina, Ninmah and other names in Sumerian, was often known as Belit-ili ‘Lady of the Gods’ in Akkadian.

Of course other gods called “Lord” could be and sometimes were identified totally or in part with Bel Marduk. The god Malak-bel of Palmyra is an example, though in the later period from which most of our information comes he seems to have become very much a sun god. Similarly Zeus Belus mentioned by Sanchuniathon as born to Cronus/El in Peraea is certainly most unlikely to be Marduk.

I. H. D. Rouse in 1940 wrote an ironic end note to Book 40 of his edition of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca about a very syncretistic hymn sung by Dionysus to Tyrian Heracles, that is, to Ba‘al Melqart whom Dionysus identifies with Belus on the Euphrates (who should be Marduk!) and as a sun god:

… the Greeks were as firmly convinced as many modern Bible-readers that the Semites, or the Orientals generally, worshipped a god called Baal or Bel, the truth of course being that ba’al is a Semitic word for lord or master, and so applies to a multitude of gods. This “Bel,” then, being an important deity, must be the sun, the more so as some of the gods bearing that title may have been really solar.

Baal (NW Semitic)

Baal, also rendered Baʿal, is a North-West Semitic title and honorific meaning “master” or “lord” that is used for various gods who were patrons of cities in the Levant and Asia Minor, cognate to Akkadian Bēlu. A Baalist or Baalite means a worshipper of Baal.

Baal, god worshiped in many ancient Middle Eastern communities, especially among the Canaanites, who apparently considered him a fertility deity and one of the most important gods in the pantheon.

As a Semitic common noun baal (Hebrew baʿal) meant “owner” or “lord,” although it could be used more generally; for example, a baal of wings was a winged creature, and, in the plural, baalim of arrows indicated archers. Yet such fluidity in the use of the term baal did not prevent it from being attached to a god of distinct character.As such, Baal designated the universal god of fertility, and in that capacity his title was Prince, Lord of the Earth. He was also called the Lord of Rain and Dew, the two forms of moisture that were indispensable for fertile soil in Canaan. In Ugaritic and Old Testament Hebrew, Baal’s epithet as the storm god was He Who Rides on the Clouds. In Phoenician he was called Baal Shamen, Lord of the Heavens.

“Baal” may refer to any god and even to human officials. In some texts it is used for Hadad, a god of thunderstorms, fertility and agriculture, and the lord of Heaven. Since only priests were allowed to utter his divine name, Hadad, Ba‛al was commonly used.

Nevertheless, few if any biblical uses of “Baal” refer to Hadad, the lord over the assembly of gods on the holy mount of Heaven; most refer to a variety of local spirit-deities worshiped as cult images, each called baal and regarded in the Hebrew Bible in that context as a false god.

Baʿal (bet-ayin-lamedh) is a Semitic word signifying “The Lord, master, owner (male), keeper, husband”, which became the usual designation of the great weather-god of the Western Semites. Cognates include Standard Hebrew Báʿal, Akkadian Bēl.

In Hebrew, the word ba’al means “husband” or “owner”, and is related to a verb meaning to take possession of, for a man, to consummate a marriage. The word “ba’al” is also used in many Hebrew phrases, denoting both concrete ownership as well as possession of different qualities in one’s personality. The feminine form is Baʿalah‎, signifying “a mistress: -that has, a mistress”; Arabic baʿalah, a rare word for “wife”.

The words themselves had no exclusively religious connotation; they are honorific titles for heads of households or master craftsmen, but not for royalty. The meaning of “lord” as a member of royalty or nobility is more accurately translated as Adon in biblical Hebrew.

In modern Levantine Arabic, the word báʿal serves as an adjective describing farming that relies only on rainwater as a source of irrigation. Probably it is the last remnant of the sense of Baal the god in the minds of the people of the region. In the Amharic language, the Semitic word for “owner” or “husband, spouse” survives with the spelling bal.

Because more than one god bore the title “Baal” and more than one goddess bore the title “Baalat” or “Baalah,” only the context of a text, the definitive article, or a genetive following the word in construct can denote which particular god, a text is speaking of.

Baldr

Baldr (also Balder, Baldur) is the second son of the god Odin and the goddess Frigg. He is the god of summer sun, light, and radiance. His twin brother is the blind god of darkness, Hodr. He has numerous brothers, such as Thor and Váli.

His wife is called Nanna. They have a son called Forseti, god of justice. In Gylfaginning, Snorri relates that Baldr had the greatest ship ever built, named Hringhorni, and that there is no place more beautiful than his hall, Breidablik.

In the 12th century, Danish accounts by Saxo Grammaticus and other Danish Latin chroniclers recorded a euhemerized account of his story. Compiled in Iceland in the 13th century, but based on much older Old Norse poetry, the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda contain numerous references to the death of Baldr as both a great tragedy to the Æsir and a harbinger of Ragnarök.

Baldur once had a nightmare that he would be killed. His mother, Frigg, made all the things on Earth vow not to hurt him. The mistletoe did not vow, however, and Frigg considered it to be so unimportant that she thought nothing of it. Loki found out that the mistletoe had not vowed, and thus made a spear out of mistletoe, and tricked Hohr into killing Baldur with it.

The death of Baldur is believed to be the beginning of Ragnarok. Many gods and goddesses will come to his funeral. His wife Nana also died of sadness. His father, Odin, placed the golden ring Draupnir on Baldur, but he later sent the ring back from Hell. This ring somehow came to Freyr’s hand. After Ragnarok and the death of Odin, Baldur and Hodr came back to Asgard, and they rule in place of their father.

Balts

Balts

Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology (ch. 11) identifies Old Norse Baldr with the Old High German Baldere (2nd Merseburg Charm, Thuringia), Palter (theonym, Bavaria), Paltar (personal name) and with Old English bealdor, baldor “lord, prince, king” (used always with a genitive plural, as in gumena baldor “lord of men”, wigena baldor “lord of warriors”, et cetera).

Old Norse shows this usage of the word as an honorific in a few cases, as in baldur î brynju (Sæm. 272b) and herbaldr (Sæm. 218b), both epithets of heroes in general.

Grimm traces the etymology of the name to *balþaz, whence Gothic balþs, Old English bald, Old High German pald, all meaning “bold, brave”. But the interpretation of Baldr as “the brave god” may be secondary.

Baltic (cf. Lithuanian baltas, Latvian balts), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰel-, has a word meaning “the white, the good”, and Grimm speculates that the name may originate as a Baltic loan into Proto-Germanic.

In continental Saxon and Anglo-Saxon tradition, the son of Woden is called not Bealdor but Baldag (Sax.) and Bældæg, Beldeg (AS.), which shows association with “day”, possibly with Day personified as a deity which, Grimm points out, would agree with the meaning “shining one, white one, a god” derived from the meaning of Baltic baltas, further adducing Slavic Belobog and German Berhta.

Balts comes from an unattested verb *balt (“to become white”) (of which balts originally was the past participle form; compare. Lithuanian verb bálti, and compare. Latvian 17th-century derived verb baltīt (“to make, paint something white”), later replaced by other verbs, derived from balts: from Proto-Baltic *bal-, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰel-, *bʰol- (“shiny, white”). Cognates include Lithuanian báltas, Sudovian baltas.

In several Indo-European languages, reflexes of the stem *bʰel-, *bʰol- are often found in words relating to water or humid places, probably due to their shiny, reflective surfaces: Illyrian *balta (“marsh, swamp”), Albanian baltë (“mud, sludge, swamp”), Proto-Slavic *bolto (“swamp, lake”) (Old Church Slavonic блато (blato, “lake”), Russian болото (bolóto, “marsh, swamp”) (dialectal “puddle, lake”), Czech bláto (“mud; pl. swamp”), Polish błoto (“mud, swamp”)).

This usage is also attested in Baltic languages, as in, e.g., Old Prussian placename Namuynbalt (swamp). It left also traces in Latvian, in the names of lakes or swamps (Baltenis, Baltiņa purvs), and is a possible source of the word balti (“Balts, Baltic”).

10 World’s Oldest Things From Armenia

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Minister of Culture and Tourism of Turkey, Omer Celik, has become the first senior Turkish official to pronounce the word “Armenian” in connection with the historical Armenian City of Ani.

Celik informed that they are making efforts to include Ani, the “City of 1001 Churches,” in the UNESCO World Heritage List by the year 2016, reported Haberler website of Turkey.

Historically known as the city with “one thousand and one churches” or “forty doors,” Ani was registered in the candidate list in 2012. The minister is reported as saying that he is committed to the preservation and protection of cultural and human heritage monuments.

Turkish authorities are now reportedly seeking to declare it as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Active excavations, redevelopment, and renovation activities in the historical city continue under the Ministry’s oversight.

“We have always felt proud with the amazing, big and historical heritage of Ani. We want to do what is appropriate to us: to endow that heritage to mankind and preserve it for future generations. Turkey is now making steps towards becoming a leading country. So we do not want to have gaps in that race,” Celik said.

He noted that the Armenian people are among the several nations that have left a world heritage in these lands, and has described the measure as an attempt to take the ancient site under protection.

“The historical City of Ani is an important heritage that conveys the Armenian traces to us. The continuation of the traces of the Armenian culture in these lands is a proof of our cultural wealth.

“Professionals from Armenia will participate in the renovation of the Church of the Savior and the Cathedral of Mren [in Ani],” the Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism stated.