CHAPTER 7 THE RECORDS OF THE PRE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MAPS	PAGE

INTRODUCTION

THE RECORDS OF THE PRE-DELUGE CIVILIZATION OF THE CAUCASUS ISTHMUS	1

THE HOME OF ABRAHAM	10

HOW IT WAS DISCOVERED THAT THE SO-CALLED MYTH LANDS WERE THE CAUCASUS ISTHMUS	16

FINDING A KEY TO THE SACRED WRITINGS OF THE EGYPTIANS	25

CAUCASIA, MOTHER OF THE GREAT CIVILIZATIONS	33

THE MORNING LAND OF THE CAUCASUS	35

THE ZENITH OF THE BABYLONIAN ASTRONOMERS	38

PLATO’S ATLANTIS WORD PUZZLE	40

THE EGYPTIAN TEN PRE-DELUGE KINGS OF SOLON AND PLATO	43

AN APPARENTLY DEFINITE IDENTIFICATION OF MASONS WITH THE EGYPTIAN M-S-N	45

SYNOPSIS OF SOME UNPUBLISHED CHAPTERS OF THE DELUGED CIVILIZATION	48

In 1923 the late Professor Reginald A. Fessenden published the first six chapters of "The Deluged Civilization o f the Caucasus Isthmus" and in 1927 published one additional chapter.

The present posthumous volume contains four additional chapters and seven articles on related subjects. Since its interest will be primarily for scholars, only one hundred copies have been printed for private distribution.

In reading it, two points should be kept in mind. First, that Professor Fessenden never considered these articles as constituting a final, definitive and documented work; but intended rather to draw the attention of other scholars to certain remarkable facts and to stimulate them to further research. Second, that Professor Fessenden's theories, while revolutionary, are nevertheless worthy of serious consideration for several reasons.

Educated men unanimously hold that, no matter what field of knowledge is explored, there is just one universal scientific technique for finding the truth in any field. And Professor Fessenden was a master of that technique. His reputation as one of the outstanding physicists of his day was due entirely to his meticulous application of scientific methods to every problem he attacked. With him, nothing was left to chance. His study of apparently anomalous phenomena, classed by others as "freaks", led to his discovery of hitherto unsuspected laws, which were later fully verified by other scientists.

Obviously a mind of this type will apply the same scientific methods to any problem, whether it be of mythology, archaeology or physics. And Fessenden did just that. In preparation for a more comprehensive and fully documented work, he had assembled over 1000 pages of typewritten notes, containing over 13,000 references drawn from at least 400 unquestioned authorities. Therefore his announcement of any hypothesis indicates that he had checked and evaluated this mass of data, and that the facts supported his hypothesis.

It may perhaps be objected that Professor Fessenden was not a professional archaeologist. This is true. But Heinrich Schliemann, an army contractor, enriched our civilization by the treasures of Mycenae, despite the jeers of professional archaeologists. Friederich Grotefend, an amateur, discovered the correct method of translating cuniform inscriptions twenty‑seven years before the Academy of Gottingen could bring itself to admit that he was right. Peter Dobson, a cotton manufacturer, published the correct theory of glacial movements in 1825 and then waited seventeen years for the professionals to catch up with him.

Fortunately the trade‑guild type of mentality is rapidly disappearing among our scientists. And it is for that reason that Professor Fessenden's theories have met with approval from such eminent authorities as Sir Flinders Petrie, the late Professor A. T. Clay, Mr. W. E. D. Allen, Professor Meschaninov and many others.

Finally it should be considered that Professor Fessenden's theories furnish the one existing logical explanation of a vast number of discoveries in mythology, history, ethnology, archaeology and geology which are otherwise totally inconsistent. It is to be hoped, therefore, that this volume will be read in the same spirit in which it was written: with the humility of the true scholar, to whom all truth is welcome.

Unfortunately Professor Fessenden's long illness prevented his undertaking the definitive and fully documented work for which he had assembled the data. However, all of his typewritten notes and maps have been preserved for the use of other scholars. And, should any reader of this volume feel sufficiently interested and qualified to carry on Professor Fessenden's unfinished work, it will be a pleasure to place all the available data at his service.

CHAPTER 7

THE RECORDS OF THE PRE-DELUGE CIVILIZATION OF THE CAUCASUS ISTHMUS

IN the "Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus" the writer recently submitted evidence that the Caucasus Isthmus may have been the seat of a great civilization antedating those of Babylon and of Egypt by many thousands of years; that this civilization had recorded its history; and that the records were to be found on the eyot between the Terek and Sunsha rivers and in the upper Alizon valley.

The results of the investigation have been so favorably received by archaeologists and ethnologists that the writer is encouraged to indicate more definitely exactly where these records may be found; in the hope that one or more field expeditions may be formed to undertake their exhumation during the coming summer.

In addition to the data given in "The Deluged Civilization", we have the following traditions:

Mantho. "It remains therefore to make certain extracts concerning the dynasties of the Egyptians from the writings of Manetho the Sebennyte, the high priest of the idolatrous temples of Egypt in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. These, according to his own account, he copied from the inscriptions which were engraved in the sacred dialect and hierographic characters upon the columns set up in the Seriadic Land by Thoth, the first Hermes; and after the Flood were translated from the sacred dialect into the Greek tongue in hieroglyphic characters, and committed in writing in books and deposited by Agathodaemon the son of the second Hermes, the father of Taut, in the hidden chambers of the temples of Egypt" (from Syncellus, Chron. 40) .

Sanchuniathon. "And Usous . . . was the first man who dared to venture on the sea. And he consecrated two stelae or pillars to Fire and Wind" (Ur and Al, hence pillars of Khur-Khal, or Hercules) . . . "These things the Cabiri, the seven sons of Sydyk and their eighth brother Esmun first of all set down in memoirs as the god Taautus commanded them." (From Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 1, Chapter 6.) I do not know if it has been pointed out that Taautus of Egyptian and Phoenician mythology is the same as Taaus of the Babylonian mythology. The name means "The One Who Does Things for the Spirits". He is also the Theos of the Thracians. He was the private secretary and executive of the Gods.

Ammianus Marcellinus. "There are certain underground galleries and passages full of windings which it is said that the adepts in the ancient rites (knowing that the Flood was coming and fearing that the memory of the sacred ceremonies would be obliterated) constructed in various places and distributed beneath the temples; which were mined with great labor. And, smoothing the walls, they engraved on them numerous kinds of birds and animals and countless varieties of creatures of another world, which they called hieroglyphics."

Josephus. "The sons of Seth, being naturally of a good disposition, lived happily in the land without apostatizing and free from any evils whatsoever and they studiously turned their attention to the knowledge of the heavenly bodies and their configurations. And lest their science should at any time be lost among men, inasmuch as Adam had acquainted them that a universal aphanism or destruction of all things would take place alternately by the force of fire and the overwhelming powers of water, they erected two columns, the one of brick and the other of stone, and engraved upon each of them their discoveries; so that in case the brick pillar should be destroyed by the waters the stone one might survive to teach men the things engraved upon it, and at the same time inform them that a brick one had formerly been also erected by them. It remains even to the present day in the land of the Siriad." (Antiquities, Book 1, Chapter 2.)

The traditions handed down by the Egyptian priest Manetho, the Phoenician historian Sanchuniathon, and the Jewish historian Josephus .are in better agreement than most tradition groups and are consistent that:

These traditions will be found translated in Cory's "Ancient Fragments" or in Mead's "Thrice Greatest Hermes".

As pointed out in "The Deluged Civilization", there was ample warning of the Deluge. For example, Noah of the Pentateuch and Atra-Hasis of the Babylonian tradition had time to build the immense Ark and the Telchines had tie to colonize Cos. So there would have been time to erect the monuments. From the history of Berossus, quoted by Syncellus and Eusebius, it is clear that seals began to appear in increasing numbers as the Deluge drew near; which may be significant as indicating a breaking through of the Arctic Ocean into the Asiatic Mediterranean on the east of the Caucasus. The connection between the Arctic and the Asiatic Mediterranean is shown on Strabo's map but had probably ceased to exist by his time. The Caspian, Aral and Balkasch Seas are all that are now left of the Asiatic Mediterranean.

There is one interesting point about the Noah or Atra-Hasis traditions. In one tradition he left the Ark with his wife and the pilot and disappeared. The others thought he had been taken to heaven and make no further reference to him in their tradition. But in another tradition Gilgamesh goes to see him at his old home, to learn the story of the Deluge. It rather appears as if he and his wife and the pilot had gone back home immediately they got on dry ground. In the Pentateuch one of the versions states that Noah walked with God, an expression used also of Enoch; so there is some indication that some of the survivors of the Deluge did not know what had become of the others, because they separated as soon as dry land appeared.

The monuments were not in Egypt for two reasons; Seirios until a comparatively late date always meant the sun itself and not the star; if Josephus had meant Egypt he would have said so. I have also a Phoenician reference which shows that Siriadic land cannot mean Egypt.

These are all the same land, that is the North Caucasus Isthmus, Asiatic Sarmatia. For it was the land of Ur or Apollo where, according to a fragment of the Phaethon of Euripides, he stabled his horses. The Seira was, according to Liddell and Scott, Greek Dictionary, "a line with a noose used by the ancient Sagartians and Samartians to entangle their enemies. Herod. 7.85 and Paus. 1.21.8". And the Seres lived there, according to Strabo 11.5.8 and Muller's Ptolemy, page 905. The latter states that their kingdom was near the mouth of the Hypanis (now Kuban), but from other writers it extended across the whole isthmus and this agrees with the fact that they were the first to establish caravan routes from there to Babylon. See Strabo, ibid.

That the steles were built by the sons of Sydyk is significant because sydyk means "pointing up to the sky" and was the name given to an ithyphallic monument. The root is found in this meaning in the Greek word "sideunes".

Stieler's Hand Atlas of 1905, Plate 49, P. 19, shows right in the center of the eyot where the long mounds define the position of the city of Ur or Apollo, a village called Pssydache (Sydach). I believe this to be the position of one of the steles.

This was probably the brick stele. The city of Ur, that is Urach, was the Erech of the Gilgamesh epic of the Babylonian inscriptions. The name survives in Terek. "Sevenfold Erech of the wide plazas" was sevenfold Tartarus of the wide ring-shaped plazas with their race tracks, etc., between the encircling canals. Erech, we are told, had brick walls, which would be natural on account of the convenient clay and bitumen. So it is rather more than. probable that the stele of Pssidache was built of brick; and for other reasons (Erythria, etc.) it was probably red brick.

The stone stele would be built where stone was convenient and to the south, for the north was the plain which was to be inundated and there was no convenient stone or good foundation. Going south, about thirty miles we come to the pass of Arabus or Erebus, and the stone stele might have been placed there.

But at the further end of the pass where it debouches into the Alizon valley, which we know was the other home of the Cabiri, is a town called Achmuti or Eshmuti. As Eshmun or Achmun was the eighth Cabiri we might reasonably look for the stele in this neighborhood.

About ten miles down the Alizon valley is another place called Semochada Scheni, which means "Sun City of the Scheni." (The Phoeni or Phoenicians, the Fenku of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.)

The Egyptian Book of the Dead gives the itinerary of the dead exactly as Homer gives it (see Chapter 125 et seq.). But the transportation is in the hands of the Phoeni. A ritual (burying a lamp with a glass chimney and digging it up again) is gone through at the "city north of the olive tree", that is, Phanagoria (for olive yards of Phanagoria see Smith, Classical Dictionary) at the mouth of the Kuban. The shade sees Tartarus at a distance, goes through the pass of Erebus, and comes out into the Alizon valley at Tioneti (To-neter, the "Holy Land"). About ten miles down the shade comes to Eshmuti (Eshmun city); a little further down, to the "City of the Sun of the Phoeni" (or possibly of the Overseers, Shemochada-Scheni). Still further down the valley is "Sekhet-Eli", the fields of the sun or Osirus (Sakately) . And finally to the mountain of Bakhu, the "Mountain of Sunrise", projecting easterly into the Caspian Sea (now Baku), and the Sek-het-sasi or "flaming fields" common to the Egyptian, Greek and Parsee mythologies.

To-neter (the "land of the Aet-Ur) was south of the Caucasus, on the other side of Erebus from the Siriadic Land, i.e. Asiatic Sarmatia. When one remembers the great olive yards of Phanagoria and the mineral oil of the Baku district, the riddle of the 125th Chapter of the Book of the Dead ("What is thy name?" "I am he who is assembled under the flowers and who dwelleth in the olive-tree") is easily answered. It is oil, mineral and vegetable, i.e. Fire, Hermes.

The Book of the Dead, chapters 147 and 149 is a most valuable guide book to the Caucasus region, as it gives the names of the tribes, places, etc. in considerable detail. In Chapter 147 the doorkeepers of the seven Arits or earths or countries are mentioned by title and are not the names of individuals, of which a place name sometimes forms a part. But the Watchers are in all cases the different tribes or nations, beginning with the Cimmerians, the Seres, etc. And the Heralds are the marks or boundaries which indicate to the shade when he is passing from one nation's territory into that of another. The route above the head of Oceanus seems to have been more southerly than that of Homer, for we find "Teb-hra-ha-Keft" (Tiber or Keft) given as one of the Heralds.

It will be noted that the entrance was between pylons (the Bo-az pillars). In Chapter 149 the fourteen aats are different regions beyond Erebus. The first is Asmuti, then Hercules (now Melikarth), etc.

Most of the identifications are direct, the names being unchanged. For example, "the two sycamore trees of turquoise, from between which the God Ra doth emerge when he setteth out upon his journey over the Pillars of Shu towards the door of the lord of the East, wherefrom Ra cometh forth" is unmistakably the gap at Shu-mash of Mar-ash.

But one would not immediately identify Sekhet-Aaru, literally "The Field of Reeds", the name of the land of paradise or heaven, with Sakat-ali unless one knew that El was the other name of Shem, the sun-god; and that Ta Shema meant "reed land" in Egyptian; and so Sekhet-Aaru was merely the name used to the uninitiated for the hidden or secret name, Sekhet-Shem or Sekhet-Eli.

Another instance of this is the use of the name "Heru-khuti", i.e. Hercules, for the Phoenician title (Melikarth) of Hercules.

We have seen how the Greek, Phoenician and Egyptian traditions overlap, starting from the entrance to the sea of Azov and extending through the pass of Dariel, as far east as Baku and the "Flaming Fields" at the extremity of the peninsula of Apsuron.

Analogously the Babylonian traditions start at the eastern extremity of the peninsula of Apsuron at Shamasha and Marash and extend west, past Sabuje and Napare-uli or Sapare-uli, through the pass of Dariel to Terek (Tartarus) on the north, Tamischiera on the west, and Bit-Jakin on the east. Overlapping, therefore, the other three traditions, Greek, Phoenician and Egyptian.

This overlapping enables us to determine quite exactly the location of the chambers where the records were stored after transcription and translation from the steles.

For Berossus' record of the Deluge, which he took from the cuniform records in the temples at Babylon, states that Cronus bade Atra-Hasis "setting down in writing the beginning, middle and end of all things, to bury them in Sippara, the City of the Sun; to build a boat and go aboard it with his family" and that "after the Flood some of those saved went to Babylonia, dug up the writings from Sippara, founded many cities, built temples, and so repopulated Babylonia".

The original Babylonia (Bab-al-on, "Gate to the Land of the Sun", Havilah, Pshaveli) was, we know from other evidence (see "The Deluged Civilization" pp. 49, 50, 75, 76) substantially the same as the land of Dilmun, i.e. the-Alizon valley where are now the Plain of Adschinour, Chaldan, Lagodeschi, etc.

And Napare-Uli of the Stieler Atlas (Papare-Uli of the Times Atlas) is Sippara-Eli, i.e. "Sippara of the Sun". It was there that the records were stored . And we may be sure that, even if the records were removed for consultation, they were replaced because there would be no better way of keeping them.

The brick and stone steles were not, we may be fairly sure, the Pillars of Hercules. The Pillars of Hercules were erected to Ur the Fire God and to Al the Storm God. These two gods were amalgamated into one twin god, possibly from some incident as that described in the life of Elijah (1 Kings, 18), the god of fire. Fires were kept burning on top of the twin pillars. Later these fires were shielded by glass, so that one gave a green, the other a yellow, light. Herodotus describes those at Tyre as "Two pillars, one of pure gold, the other of emerald, shining with great brilliancy at night." The pillars were called Jakin and Boaz. See 1 Kings, 7;15.

The fact that Nebuchadnezzar, after reaching them in his northern expedition, next went to the north shore of the Black Sea and to Thrace; and that Hercules, coming back from the pillars with the cattle of Geryon, traversed the north shore of the Black Sea (see Megasthenes, quoted by Strabo and Herodotus, 4.8), puzzled the ancient geographers because they thought that the Pillars were at the straits of Gibraltar. And because they had overlooked the fact that the Phoenicians of Sidon had known that the Pillars had been lost and that the Phoenicians had sent out four expeditions to look for them but had reached no conclusion from these expeditions except that the straits of Gibraltar were not the true Pillars of Hercules. See Strabo, 2.5.

Of course the fact that the true Pillars of Hercules were in the north Caucasus isthmus explains why both Nebuchadnezzar and Hercules, after leaving the Pillars, came next to the shores of the Black Sea.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is that the eastern Pillars of Hercules are to be found on the map, under their right name, i.e. Stavka Terekli (Stave of Hercules) on the Times Atlas 71,L,2; or Kurtkeuli-Juk-Jewe (Jak beacon of Hercules) on the Stieler Atlas, 49, 0, 19.

This village is, as shown by the old shell deposits, on the former shore of the Caspian or Asiatic Mediterranean; and at the old mouth of the Kuma. It marked the spot where ships from the Asiatic Mediterranean must enter the Manytsch Lake system in order to go through to the Black Sea.

It is now, owing to the recedence of the Caspian, about fifty miles inland; and this, together with the fact that no one looked for the Pillars in this locality until the writer was forced to the conclusion that they must be in the vicinity, must be the reason why they were not discovered by others long ago.

Ptolemy in his Geography gives the location of certain pillars which he calls "Pillars of Alexander". As Alexander never got that far north, that excited my suspicions. Ptolemy gives the position of his pillars as (after correction) 46.00 East, 45.00 North. Looking at the Times and Stieler Atlases in 45.40 East and 44.40 North, I found this village "Stake of Hercules" or "Jak beacon of Hercules."

The extent of the movement of the shore line between the time of the AL-Ur civilization and Alexander's time is shown by the fact that Khurtkeuli Juk Jewe, on the old shell beach at the old mouth of the Kuma or Alontas is now sixty miles inland from the pillars of Alexander, i.e. Schandr Juk Owsk and Schandr Juk Owak (Alexander's Jak beacon) though still on the shore, is thirty miles away from any mouth of the Ta-lonta. The site of Alexander's pillars is not very far, it will be noted, from the position given by Ptolemy.

About sixty miles north east is an island called Birjus-Jaksh or "Fire Mound of Jak". This must have been about fifty miles from shore at the time we are considering and may have been the island Bit-Jakin referred to in one of the cuniform inscriptions. I have forgotten just how far the cuniform inscription puts Bit-Jakin from shore, and Bit-Jakin may have been Ust-Urt. In any case it cannot have been the pillars.

There was, about 200 A.D., an episcopate of Herculea Pidachthoe. The location has been lost, but I take it to be Herculea Sydach-thoe, i.e. Hercules Shore Stele. It is known to have been in this neighborhood.

The western set of pillars, Bo-az, i.e. water-gate or harbor of Az, were at the entrance to the Sea of Az-ov.

There is nothing to fix their exact position except possibly a statement of Strabo who gives the position of a very high mound which he says was a monument to some king.

When Nebuchadnezzar came back from his northern expedition (with which, incidentally, Pythagoras may have been a soldier; see Eusebius, Arm. Chron. 53) he built the walls of Babylon which were 335 feet high and 85 feet thick. This is stupendous but there is good reason for believing that the walls of Tartarus or Erech were still more monstrous. The civilization of Erech may be called a Dinosaur civilization.

It is probable that the walls of Erech have been mistaken for natural hills, because of this great size.

As these are the only monuments and records, of whose existence we know, which antedate the Deluge, it is much to be desired that these sites should be investigated by competent archaeologists, equipped with core drills. Such drills may be easily obtained from the near-by oil fields of the Baku district.

IN 1882 the writer, in the course of some work for honours in Classics, became convinced that the geography of the so called "myth lands" of the ancients was deserving of more attention than had been given it and undertook the problem of solving the apparent discrepancies. It involved the collection, tabulation, comparison, and in many cases the critical examination in the original languages, of several hundred thousand myth references and nearly resulted in loss of sight, but in 1923, after a year's delay through failure to find a publisher, the results were printed at the writer's own expense, under the title "The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus."

The solution therein given has met with the approval of the most eminent authorities in the various fields of archaeology, see for example Flinders Petrie, "Ancient Egypt", Dec. 1924; Clay, "Origin of Biblical Traditions", p. 159; and many private letters; and supplementary chapters, amplifying certain conclusions, have been published, in full or in abstract, as opportunity was afforded; e.g. on the route of the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" and on the Greek, Babylonian, Semitic and Chinese so called "myth lands" in the Christian Science Monitor for March 18th, 1924, and March 8th, 1926; on the location of the pillars of the Cabiri and their subterranean record chambers in "Nature", March 1st, 1924; and an article shewing that the names of the ten predeluge kings given by Plato in his "Critias", when translated in the method indicated there, are classical Egyptian and correspond, six at least of them, to the ten predeluge names of the lists of Berossus and of the Old Testament, has been forwarded for publication in one of the English periodicals.

The present article is a fuller treatment of the problem of the birth place of Abraham, and is a submission of the data on which the conclusions were reached for the purpose of obtaining searching criticism from those most competent to give it. In his search the writer has covered many literatures, and has some knowledge, in part minute, of a number of Semitic languages, including Hebrew and its various forms and allied tongues, as will perhaps be evident later, but as Jewish scholars will know, there is a great mass of Jewish literature supplementary and explanatory to the Pentateuch and other books of the Old Testament which very few men have been able to know completely, and very few even in part. Of these the writer knows but a very small part, but enough to know that they probably contain matter which would throw light on the problem now under discussion. It is to scholars of this great Jewish literature that this article is addressed, in the desire that they may criticise and it is hoped confirm and extend, the conclusions given below.

As will be seen more fully later, the importance of this investigation is not to Jews alone but to all humanity; and the conclusions reached and the evidence on which they are based will it is believed be accepted by competent archeological authority. Their absolute establishment must be through and after most severe criticism and support from other sources of evidence, to be derived, I feel, most surely from those very learned in the Hebrew Scriptures. who else, for one example, can tell us if there is not some where in the commentaries an explanation why the Babylonian Talmud appears to associate the name Erech with Ur-Kasdim. For this reason I address myself to and ask the critical assistance of such scholars, and give references for all statements made.

It will be best to quote direct from Dr. Albert T. Clay, Professor of Semitic Philology and Archeology at the University of Pennsylvania and later of Yale, one of the very great authorities on Semitic and Babylonian matters, and who had been in charge of the excavation work of the Bagdad School in Mesopotamia. The extracts are from works of his, published under the memorial fund of Alexander Kohut, another great oriental scholar and the author of Aruch Completum, the Talmudic Encyclopedia. As follows:

The identification has been opposed by many scholars; Dillman, Genesis, Ed. 6, p. 213; Kittel, Geschichte der Hebraer, sect. 17; Albright, Jour. Bib. Lit. XXXVII, 134.; etc. NOTE. For reasons of space, references are restricted to those most authoritative or most illustrative.

1. Mugheir was never called Ur. The mistaken idea that it had once been called Ur arose from a mis-translation. To quote Clay, Amurru, p. 167: "Sir Henry Rawlinson in 1885 found bricks at Muqayyar (Mugheir) in Southern Babylonia from which he gathered that the ancient name of the city was Hur. Subsequently it was found that the reading of the name was Urummu, and in late Babylonian, Uru, i.e. with a final vowel (long u)".

See also "Lamentation on the Destruction of Ur", Univ. of Pennsylvania "Sumerian Liturgies and Psalms" lines 10-11 and 16-17.

2. Ur was a country, not a city. See "Sacred Geography", Wells, Vol. 5, p. 216. For proof of this, see infra.

3. There' were no Chaldeans in Urummu until many centuries after Abraham's time. See Clay, "Antiquity of Amorite Civilization", p. 3 for date Abraham lived, i.e. circa 2100 B.C.; and Budge, "Babylonian Life and History", p. 44; Sayce, "Races of the Old Testament", p. 98; Olmstead, "History of Assyria", p. 123; for the date at which the Chaldeans first appear in Babylonian history, i.e. circa 950 B.C.

4. The position of Mugheir is such that if it were Ur it would be impossible to reconcile it with the statements made in regard to Abraham's actions;

The Talmud tells us that Terah, Abraham's father, worshipped 12 gods. The excavations at Mugheir do not shew that any such number of gods was worshipped there. See reports of Bagdad School. But twelve gods was the number worshipped by the fire worshipping Chaldees. See Diodorus Siculus, Book 2, chap. 21.

5. The Jews who lived in Babylonia never believed that Mugheir was Abraham's home. Such a learned archaeologist as Ezra the scribe would have been sure to have known of it if it were so. Evidently it was not in Babylonia at all or he would have known of it.

7. The Babylonians made a practice of naming cities in Babylonia after prominent cities of other lands. For example, in Babylonia we have such city names as Ashkelon, Gaza, Heshbon, in the vicinity of Nippur in the 5th century B.C. See "Business Documents of the Murashu Sons of Nippur." Nippur was a few miles from Babylon. There were at least three Urs. Clay, "Amurru", p. 174; "Biblical Trad.", p. 43.

EDITORS NOTE: The preceding article is incomplete, sections 4, 5, 6 and 7, never having been finished.

HOW IT WAS DISCOVERED THAT THE SO-CALLED MYTH LANDS WERE THE CAUCASUS ISTHMUS

[This forward was published in the CSM article but was not included in the 1933 volume: This is the third (and must for some time be the last) of the supplementary chapters of "The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus." The first, giving the location of the pillars of the Cabeiri and of their subterranean record chambers, appeared, in abstract, in Nature, March 1, 1924. The second, disclosing the secret of the "Book of the Dead," that the mysterious routes to and in the Land of Sekhet Auru were actual routes to and in the Caucasus Isthmus by which the embalmed bodies of the Egyptians were to be carried to and deposited in a certain sacred valley in that isthmus, was published in full in The Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 1924; and in abstract with valuable additions by Sir Flinders Petrie, in Ancient Egypt, December, 1924. - D. J. Holeman, January, 2002]

THE discovery that the supposed "myth lands" of the Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Semites, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Chinese were all of them an actual and an identically same locality, the Caucasus Isthmus, resulted from:

As the writer's knowledge of the various languages concerned is incomplete, except perhaps in certain limited aspects, the most desirable thing possible would be for scholars in those languages to send copies of all myth references to some central organization where they could be collected and tabulated, and be available for workers. The Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain suggests itself; if they are willing they should be endowed with funds, at least $500,000. Their name is mentioned because in my experience they are by far the most efficient and careful and thorough and helpful of all the societies with which I have had dealings; but no doubt there may be others qualified.

In the meantime, any worker may have the benefit of my own collection of data by simply inclosing a postal card addressed to himself, and numbering his questions. For example:

It will of course be understood that inquiries made merely from curiosity cannot be answered, only those from workers in the field.

To avoid possible bias, the roots were first built up from study of the place names, as was done for example by Clay with the Amuraic personal names? and were then verified and extended by comparison with known languages. It was found of course to be agglutinate, and to some extent onomatopoetic, and of comparatively few sounds, i.e.:

The place names are compounds of these. For example, Pir is "belonging to fire" or hearth or home. Perival is "home of the wind" or mountain pass. Kemmenu is "Holy Pillars" which were erected in pairs, with fires on top, one to Ur, the other to Al or El, and hence they were called the Pillars of Kur-Kal or Hercules. The Cocytus or Acheten Su (or Ope or Oche) was the river "from" Aeten or Eden. The Pyriphlegethon or Perival Achaeten was the "Pass river from Aeten (or Eden).

In the mountainous parts a guttural or dental is often prefixed apparently for use in shouting over long distances. Xenophon speaks of communicating in this way over distances of 12 miles, which seems incredible but I am told it is possible in the mountains. The effect on a near-by listener is described in "The Peaks of Shala." So while we find Eden and Acheten in the older maps for the mountain districts, we find Kacheten in the Stieler's atlas. As the prefixed guttural or dental is only found in the later place names, it may be the article "the," as the Egyptian Ta, or a shortened form of Ki, "land."

It will be noticed that in some cases the Greek names are not quite the same as the native Proto-Caucasian ones. This is explained by Strabo, 11;11;5. When they found a name they did not know they changed it slightly so as to have the same meaning if possible, or some meaning by which it could be identified. Strabo gives instances, and we may take for example the Perival Acheten R. This was the Terek or Ur oche, i.e. "Fire River" because it is in the center of the Baku oil district. So the Greeks called it the Pyri Phlegethon or Fire flaming river. Similarly they called the Kachaeten the Cocytus. The other kachaeten rivers they did not know, i.e., the Pirikets kachaeten, Kafr Aeten, Fi Acheten, but the At Aeten they changed to Eridan or Eridanus. All these rivers flow from the neighborhood of Mt. Eden or Edena Pass.

The Greek term "hekaton cheira" really is, not "hundred handed," but "acheten cheira," i.e., "of the tribe. of Mt. Eden."

One Greek term must be mentioned because it has given rise to much confusion. The word "Nesos" is still translated as meaning "island" but it does not mean this at all, except perhaps in late Greek. The Peloponnesus is a peninsula. Arabia was called a "nesos" and so was Mesopotamia. It comes from the roots "an" "aea" and "s's" and means a "sprout of the land." It must be remembered that every word was, and had to be, originally a little poem, and many of them are very interesting; for example, "wine" would seem to be "Queen of the Dark Waters." So "nesos" meant something that sprouted from the land like a twig or a fruit does, in the one case a promontory, in the other an island. It really means a district which is bounded by water, rivers or sea, to a considerable extent, but it does not mean an island, except in occasional instances. Ait does not quite fit, so I would propose the following definition for our English dictionaries: "Nesus. A district largely bounded by salt or fresh water." Circe's nesos for example was, as we shall see, a promontory with a very narrow isthmus, like the Peloponnesus.

Caucasus Range. Good photographs of this will be found in George Kennan's article in the National Geographic Magazine for Oct., 1913. He describes it as "A huge natural barrier, 700 miles in length and 10,000 feet in average height, across which in the course of unnumbered generations man has not been able to find more than two practicable passes-the Gorge of Dariel and the Iron Gate of Derbent." There is really only one pass, for the Iron Gate of Derbent is not in the range, but is a narrow space between the end of the range and the Caspian Sea. Kennan describes the different climates on the north and south of the range.

"On the northern side of the range lie the treeless wandering grounds of the Nogai Tatars-illimitable wastes where for hundreds of miles the eye sees in summer only'. a parched waste of dry steppe grass and in winter an ocean of snow dotted here and there with the herds and the black tents of the Nomadic Mongols.

"But cross the great range from north to south and the whole face of Nature is changed. From a boundless steppe you come suddenly into a series of shallow fertile valleys, blossoming with flowers, green with vine-tangled forests, sunny and warm as the south of France.

"Sheltered by a rampart of mountains from the cold northern winds, vegetation here assumes an almost tropical luxuriance. Prunes, figs, olives, oranges and pomegranates grow, almost without cultivation, in the open air; the magnificent forests of elm, oak, maple, Colchian poplar and walnut are festooned with blossoming vines, and in autumn the sunny hillsides of Georgia, Kachaetia and Mingrelia are fairly purple with the vinyards of ripening grapes.'

See also description in "The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus" and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Wheat and other grains grew wild in the southern part, Hypiberea, but since the northern steppes (the anaaruf of the Egyptians) had no grain at first, the inhabitants of the Tartar district lived on cattle and by hunting. They had no fire at first, but later got it from the tribes living in the oil districts of the northern slope, and the smuggling of this oil was a constant cause of friction until Pir Mithras showed how the cattle themselves could be used for fuel (Herodotus, 4;6^1). This is the probable cause of the punishment of Prometheus and of the description of his division of the sacrifice. The only wood was in Amalthea's Horn, where the Greek temples, built out of wood, were (Herodotus 4; 108) .

The best map of the geology of the isthmus is that by Felix Oswald, the Probate Register of Nottingham, England, who has specialized on the subject.

The Caucasus range is much older than the Himalayas and many of its peaks are more than half a mile higher than Mt. Blanc. Mt. Elbrus can be seen for more than 200 miles. The Dariel Pass, at the center of the range, is very narrow, barely space for a traveler beside the Terek River, and the cliffs run up to 5000 feet. It was closed by iron gates, and was the Erebus of the Greeks and the Erib of the Babylonians and Assyrians and Semites. It was the great highway for the traffic in foodstuffs from south to north and of oil from north to south. In one place the canyon splits, enclosing a mountain mesa, on the side of which was the cave in which Pir Mithra was believed to have been imprisoned, and on the top of which was the fort or castle of the monarch of the region; it is sometimes called Tamyra's Castle. Oil is so plentiful at the northern foot of the pass that the first concessionnaires were ruined by the damage to the farms. The great oily swamp of Acheron was here, into which the Kacheten or Cocytus and the Perivlegaten or Pyriphlegethon flowed. The fountain of the Styx or Ast-ach-su is higher up, and flows into, or is the head waters of, the Kacheteri. No silver mine is shown on the map at the spring, but some are shown a few miles to the west of it. Near here too was the nesus of Bacchus, near Tamish and Nacha on the Ardon. See Staff Map.

The most eastern part of the range where it runs into the Caspian Sea was Mt. Baku, or the "Mountain of Sunrise" of the Egyptians. Here also are Serachi and Kalachany or Telachany. The most westerly part of the range was the peninsula of Tamen, the Ta Manu, the Mountain of Sunset of the Egyptians, and it runs into Lake Maeotis, the Pool of Maatis of the -Egyptians, and the Sea of Az-ov, the "Western Water Gate" or Western Harbor of the Phoenicians. The whole range was the "White Wall" of the Egyptians. The middle and eastern part was the mountain of Maru of the Babylonians, formerly known as Mar-to until Langdon gave the correct reading; the Maru or Meru, i.e. "Thigh," of the Greeks and Egyptians, below which Nysa or Nucha was (there are two places of this name, one seeming to be connected with the vine, the other with wheat).

The eastern end, near Backu, was the Apsu of the Babylonians. This has been taken as the sea, but as Clay has shown, it means "the end." This is what is meant by saying that the dwelling of Nudimmud, i.e'. Ea or Seb, i.e. Seb-En-Gi, was opposite to the Apsu. All the old temples had a ring-like lake, from the stone border of which water spouted. The apsu was originally the stone wall but came later to be applied to the whole lake. Here also are Azarakanna, and Perek-Eshkul; and the great mountains of the range were Kingu (Mt. Elbrus), Lachamu, An, An Schar, Gaga (near Arebus and Astarti Barzun), and below, on the south, were Karassachal and Adshinar and Chaldan.

The principal rivers were the Oceanus or Auschet or Aeti Ope or Aradanus, now the Kuban. In former times the whole district north of it was a swamp, where the few inhabitants lived on the Urmanu or Arimu, i.e., hillocks. It originally ran through the Marsh of Trithonis, communicating by canals with the Alontas, but the marsh slipped down into the river, deluging the whole region and closing that passage but leaving the Manytch Lake passage. The end of the deep part of the river, after this landslide, was at the present Kemmenobrodsk, or Kemmenu-Aboruri as it was known to those who wished to go southwest to Dariel Pass; or Kemmenu Jakin or Eachon, as it was known to those who wished to go northwest to the Graikus and Achelous Rivers an,-.1 to Amalthea's Horn, or through by the Cerberus-Jakin delta mouths, the Sharisharadon and Shar Shuppi of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, at Olonchuduk, into the sea of Salentchuk, i.e., the old and original Atlantic Sea.

The Achelous, now Kalaus, was the original home of the Graiae-ach or Greeks, at the junction of the Graikus River with the Achelous. The adjoining river, the Aegi River, was originally a pass of the Achelous delta, but Herakles (not the Phoenician god, whose name was Hercules or Kur-Kai, but the Greek adventurer, Herakles) at the request of the Caledonians or Chaldi i.e. Chaldeans, dammed it, and so turned all the overflowed portion into fertile land. Am-Althea means "plain of Aletheia or Alytta."

East of the Achelous were the Arimi and west of it the Arim-Az-Fi or western Arimi. This is why the Graiae (which name means "old women,'' probably because the Graiae wore long black dresses, both men and women) were said to have one eye, for as Herodotus (4; 26) points out, "Arima spu" means "One eye" in the Scythian language. Incidentally this is proof that the Greeks who built the Greek temples and had the Greek customs and language would not have been late colonizers, but were the original Greeks, for they were there before Perseus, in his wars against the licentious practices of the Tammuz worshippers, (the Tammuzons who came from Mt. Thammuzeira, near Mt. Elbrus; the Amazons of the Greeks) left the Crimea to found, after conquering the Amazons, the Persi nation.

At the foot of Mt. Thammuzeira or Tammuz Schar flowed the AramUdon down which the Amazons came in their conquering passage after defeating the nations at the foot of Mt. Elbrus (the El Baris and Huburis of the Deluge traditions) and at the junction of which with the Tammuz-Alontas they founded the city of Chersonese.

Another famous river was the Kur, whose eastern valley was known (and possibly the whole eastern district) as Metsara, the Metsara of Abraham and of Cyrus. It will be noted that the old name of the Jora was Kem-bu-su (Holy Water River; the Champsis of the Scythians) in its upper part, and as Abaran in its lower part, before joining the Kur and Alizon, and that it is near the plains-.of Ad Shinour and Chaldan, and Pirata, and was the winter home of the Urie of the Koissu or "Calling" rivers, the "Kissu" district of the Babylonians, .from one of which, the Kazikimik Koissu, came the first dynasty Egyptians; and that the Avar Koissu and the Ach-Su tribes had the city of Psiddach (Sutech or Typhon), in what was probably then Sar-Veden, where one of the great Cabiri pillars was; the other and the chambers being at Achmed on the south side of the pass. The Alizon was, as I have shown elsewhere, the Elysion of the Greeks, and Makaria the Kur-Dilumn of the Babylonians. Its inhabitants were also called Alaed or Kelti, and those to the west were called Iberi.

The rest of the map needs little explanation, except perhaps the peninsula of Tamen. Tamen, or Ta manu meant "the domain of the god." Compare Greek temenos. The history of how the gods came to be in the west is a long one. It is sufficient to say that the Greek mystery traditions about Uranus, (Urie) in the East, Cronus in the west and Zeus, near Amalthea's Horn, appear to represent actual facts in history-wars and settlements of the isthmus. The small negrito race was very superstitious, troglodytic, and had many gods, but the large Scythian (Thini) race, the masters and the metal workers, worshipped the Taauti or mountain-top proclaimers or directors, the Theoi. The relation was somewhat like that formerly between the Arabs and the Negroes on the east coast of Africa. The peninsula of Anapa was the nesus of Circe, and the Circetae of that district (the Scorpion people of Gilgamesh) were the archers of Tamen. The kabardi was a long lock of hair on the left side of the head, by which the nobles used to fasten on their crests i.e. deer's heads, wolf's heads, etc., by twisting it round them. It is the symbol of the gods of the Sindi or Indi in India today and was used in Egypt. The story of Circe, the Kirke or sorcerer and her animals, came from this practice. Colchis, the Kalacha Aea, was originally in the Tamen Peninsula. The dead were tied up in red ox skins, called "meschet"; or silk bags, in the eastern or Baku Serach; or in earthern jars made to look like ox hides, in Susa. Hence the term Phoinix and the legend of the bird. Why all of the gods were driven out of the isthmus except Zeus and Athena; the history of the wars of Osiris, of the Mesen, etc.; of the use of the reflecting telescope in the Caucasus; of Ramman-Anthu, the eastern Caucasus god of justice; of Feni-Kale and Anyalius, and the white land of Achilles, the sun lions of Gilgamesk and Israel and Medea, and hundreds of other matters must be left till another time.

It will encourage archaeologists to know that, as stated in the previous articles, all public buildings, including temples, were originally underground and many can be located.

I have found that for many thousands of years all important civil and religious assemblages (even that of the Greek Areopagos), were held deep underground, and have been for years urging the use of electrically driven core drills in archaeological work. And this not only in the Caucasus, where Alexander's treasure probably lies hidden with the old records of Achmeti, but in Greece, Egypt, Palestine, Italy and Spain. The old records are not lost forever, they are merely hidden in the old underground chambers.

This new method of working, by the tabulation of myth references, and by place names, has a certain analogy to geology, the names and references being, as it were, historical fossils. And as the science of geology was built up from the study of its fossils, so we have a new science built up from these fossilized traditions and names, which may perhaps be called "mytharcheology." It has certainly been fruitful in results and we may expect that for many centuries the Caucasus isthmus will be very intensively studied by archaeologists.

An interesting point has developed in the work, i.e., that there apparently was but one original race, a small brown negritic one, which developed under troglodyte conditions, in the western isthmus, into a Negro race, and under life in the marshes in the northern isthmus into a large white race. Sufficient evidence has not yet been obtained to state this definitely, but it seems probable. Incidentally the blue mask of Osiris shows that he was originally a Negro god.

The writer is of course indebted to hundreds of other workers. More especially to Petrie, Sayce, Clay, Chiera, Budge, Breasted, Olmstead, Jansen, Peters, Rawlinson, and the other great masters of archaeology. And I am also most grateful to E. Gilchrist of Brookline, one of Sir Robert Hart's men, for his help in problems relating 'to Chinese records, and to Mr. R. E. Briggs of Boston for his assistance in connection with Negrito and other questions.

FINDING A KEY TO THE ROUTE DESCRIBED IN THE SACRED WRITINGS OF THE EGYPTIANS

IMMEDIATELY the secret of the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" is known, its phantom of a monstrous and debased theology disappears; as we read we find ourselves in the presence of a fine morality and of a strange and touching hope.

The morality was for all to see, but the hope was secret; it was that after the end of existence in Egypt one might go back to the Mother-Land, the Siris valley south of the Caucasus mountains; the land where the sun rose over Bakhu (Baku) and set over Ta Manu (Taman); the land from which Egypt had been colonized and where the Sekhet Eli (Sakataly) were.

The "Book of the Dead" gave complete and detailed instructions for reaching this Mother-Land; how one must go, what cities and tribes he would come to, by what landmarks he would recognize places, and what he would find when he got there. The instructions are so precise that they are of great value to students of ancient geography and they will bear intensive study.

As will be seen later, the instructions are quite plain. But the priests did not desire that they should be known to any except the initiates and so the sections of the "Book of the Dead" containing them, chapters 17, 18, 64, 125, 149, 150 and others, were so written that only the initiates who had the key, a very simple one, could understand them.

The early geographers knew that the Egyptians and the people of the south Caucasus Valley were the same race. Herodotus writing 450 B.C. says, 2;104; "There can be no doubt that the Colchians" (inhabitants of the west Caucasus Valley, which was all that the early geographers had knowledge of) "are an Egyptian race. Before I heard any mention of the fact from others I had remarked it myself. After the thought had struck me I made inquiries on the subject both in Colchis and in Egypt, and I found that the Colchians had a more distinct recollection of the Egyptians than the Egyptians had of them . . . . My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are blackskinned and have woolly hair . . . . I will add a further proof. These two nations weave 'heir linen in exactly the same way, and this is a way entirely unknown to the rest of the world . . . . They also in their whole mode of life and in their speech resemble one another."

Though Herodotus was a remarkably accurate observer and studied the subject on the spot and checked them by observing the comparative thickness of skull. (Herod. 3;12) ; his conclusions have been questioned. They are, however, supported by much other evidence which I have given in "The Deluged Civilization" and have been strikingly confirmed by Professor Newberry in his presidential address to the anthropological section of the British Association which will be found in Nature of Sept. 25, 1923. See also Clay's "Empire of the Amorites," p. 138.

This merely proves that the Egyptians and Colchians were the same race, it does not prove which was derived from the other. Here again there is much evidence. E.g. - Aetia was the old name for Egypt and Siris the old name for the Nile. See Rawlinson's notes to Herodotus 2 ;15. Now the west Caucasus valley was Aeria, the land of King Aeetes, of the Jason legend, see Smith Classical Dictionary; and the Cyrus runs almost the whole length of the Caucasus valley just as the Nile does in the Egyptian valley.

The Paradise of the "Book of the Dead" is thus described by Budge, "Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection," Vol. 2, p. 155.

Examination of the map will show that the valley between the Caucasus range and the mountains of Armenia exactly fits this description.

A conclusive proof is the fact that in the Paradise of the "Book of the Dead" the sun rose over a mountain called Bakhau, "The Mountain of Sunset." And it rose from and sank into the sea. Now the Caucasus range runs into the Caspian Sea on the east and into the Black Sea on the west. And the eastern peninsula is called Bakhu and the western peninsula is called Taman. No place in the world fills the conditions except the Caucasus isthmus, and it does so completely.

The Caucasus range lies inclined almost exactly 231/2 degrees to the equator and so on the shortest day of the year the sun rose at Baku, and on the longest day the sun set at Taman, directly along the line of the range.

It was this line of the Caucasus range that the Egyptians meant when they used the term "horizon." It divided their underworld into two parts, the part of the Caucasus isthmus north of the range or horizon being the infernal regions, or Hades, and that south of the range or horizon the Fields of the Blessed, or Elysium. The only way of getting from one to the other was through a gap in the "horizon," the dark and gloomy pass of Arabus or Erebus or Abydos, now called the Dariel Pass.

On the peninsula of Baku is a mountain spur running north and south, with a gap at what is now the pass of Marasy, and west of the gap is a small mountain called Shamash. On the shortest day of the year the sun on rising shone through the gap. at Marrasy or Marash upon the top of Shamash. In the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" this gap is "The Gate of the Lord of the East through which Ra cometh forth" (chap. 109), and Baku was the "Mountain of Sunrise."

In the Babylonian traditions it is referred to as "The Place of the Entering in of the Sun." The gap and mountain formed a primitive observatory and was taken as the place of zero longitude by the Babylonian observatories or ziggurats.

This eastern Caucasus Valley was the holy land of the Egyptian, Babylonian, Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and Persian religions. Sir, Ur and Napahu are equated in the Babylonian syllabaries. Nucha was the birthplace of Bacchus and of the vine; Dilmun, Hypiberea and Alysion were other names of the district, and Erech of the wide plazas was at the other end of the pass of Dariel.

At the other end, the west end, of the "horizon" or Caucasus range was Taman or Ta Manu, the "Mountain of Sunset." The peninsula of Taman projects between the Black Sea and what is now the Sea of Azov, but was then called the "Pool of Maaitis" or Lake Maeatis. The extremity of the peninsula was low, mud flats formed by the Kuban. The Cimmerians or Khemuri lived n the peninsula (Strabo 11;11;5, and the district was so notorious for its dense fogs that "Cimmerian darkness" came to be used as we use "pitch dark." And Lake Maaitis means lake "of the God of the Darkness Land."

To primitive man the sun was a fire in the sky and all the primitive races were fire worshipers. The Ur were fire worshipers from the beginning, so far as can be ascertained. The A1 race originally worshiped Al, the storm god, but later, possibly from seeing lightning set fire to trees or some such incident' as that described in I Kings, 18, came to worship A1 as a fire god and the Ur and Al united politically and religiously and worshiped a twin god Ur-At or Khur-Khal or Hercules, who on account of the similarity of names was sometimes confused with the Greek strong man, Herakles (see Herodotus 2: 44). The Aed or Aet race originally worshiped Ae or Aem or Thaem, the god of darkness, but they also later joined with the Ur and had with them a twin god. Aet-Ur or Neter or Petera.

The Phoenicians, or Kani, or Phoeni, who colonized Egypt, were originally of the Aed or Aet race, worshiped a golden-red eagle, aetos, but later became Aet-Ur. They originally came from a large river-island between the Terek and Sunsha, just north of the Caucasus range and opposite the northern end of the pass of Arabus. They went south through the pass to where it debouches into the Alizon valley and settled there and called it Ta Neter, now Tioneti, and Egypt was settled from there.

So the Egyptians had the gods Ur and Ae or Ae-m or M-Ae (m means lord or god and ae means blackness and t or d means place or land). They took the god Ur as the god of the rising sun and because he appeared to come up out of the Caspian Sea they called him O-s-ur or Osiris (o means water; s means movement of some kind, depending on the connection; and Ur means fire or fire god). The god T-ae-m or M-ae-t they took as the god of the setting sun or of darkness, and Taein-an or Taman or Ta-Manu was his mountain and peninsula just as Baku or Bakhau (the Gate of the Coming Up) (b is gate and h is up so ach or ash is coming up), was the mountain and peninsula of Osiris.

These were the "Gods of the Horizon." For the god as a whole or for the god of noon-day they had the name Ra. (Ra is a later word and its meaning is not known certainly; possibly it is "Space Fire" or "Sky Fire"). Some temples adopted Osiris and others Tem, and there was great rivalry between the temples. The Mountain of Sunrise and the Mountain of Sunset are seldom found in the same religious service, and they even had two routes to go to the heavenly fields, one through "the western lands" to be taken by the devotees of Osiris and the other through "the eastern lands" by the followers of Tem. The allotment of routes appears rather strange but is perhaps explicable.

The primitive idols were posts of wood, asher, and as Khur-Khal was a twin god there were two pillars side by side, Jakin the right hand or eastern one (see I Kings 7) . As they were fire gods, fires were kept burning on top of them. Later when glass was invented a glass protection against the wind called "the eye of Osiris" was placed round the flame and this acted as a quite efficient projection lens system. Green glass was used for one pillar light arid reddish-yellow for the other. Herodotus paid a visit about B.C. 450 to the temple of Hercules at Tyre, which had been founded about B.C. 2755 and saw "two pillars, one of pure gold and the other of emerald, shining with great brilliancy at night." (Herodotus 2;44). A good idea of the "tet" may be obtained by knocking the bottoms out of five deep glass soup plates and stacking them together so that they do not touch all around, or have a thin gap between each stand the next above it, for ventilation, and placing a lamp opposite the middle plate. It makes a better optical system than many modern ones.

The mud flats at the mouth of the Kuban were low and the land of the Cimmerians very subject to fog, so two tets of large size were placed there at Bo-Az (Water Gate of Az, or Az-ov; later this was supposed to be connected in some way with the fact that cattle were taken across there and it became Bos-porus). These were the Pillars of Shu the sun god, i.e. Khur-Khal.

The primitive dwellers on the Caucasus isthmus, not knowing that the world was round and revolved, thought that the sun after coming up from the Caspian Sea and passing through "The Gate of the Lord of the East" and over the Mountain of Sunrise, Bakhau, and over the entire length of the Caucasus range, then passed over the Mountain of Sunset, Ta-Manu, and the Pillars of Shu, and went down into the Pool of Maati, Lake Maaitis, and that during the night the sun god stabled his horses in the north Caucasus isthmus (Greek mythology) or sailed back in his boat to the east and duly appeared from the Caspian next morning.

One naturally thinks of the South Caucasus valley as the best way to get from the Black to the Caspian seas. But this meant much land travel through hostile tribes and the Phoenicians were sailors and Colchis the western valley was a trade rival.

Looking on the map a line of small lakes, the Manytsch Lakes, will be seen stretching across between the sea of Azov and the Caspian, and the map shows that the water from these lakes flows, part into the Black Sea and part into the, Caspian. The Soviet Government is now digging the passage deeper so as to re-establish navigation that way. But in the time we are now considering, i.e., 1.1,000 to 9000 B.C., before the Caspian had dried up so much (it is now 80 feet below sea level), one could sail direct from the Sea of Azov into the Caspian, and then through the Sea of Aral, all the way to Faizabad. Even as late as 200 B.C. there was water communication between the east shore of the Caucasus isthmus and Faizabad. But the level kept falling and a little after 200 B.C. (the Chinese histories put it as 125 B.C.) the Seres who lived on the Caucasus isthmus established caravan routes.

Even after the level of the Caspian had fallen it was still possible for the Phoenicians to sail from the entrance to the sea of Azov, where Phanagoria (Light-house Market) is shewn on the classical atlases, up the river kuban or Oceanus and then to pass to the river-island of Ser-Ser or Ur-Ur, between the Terek and Sunsha, and then go through the pass of Dariel or Arabus, and they would find themselves in their own home country of Ta Neter or the Alizon valley. And then they could sail in another boat down the Alizon into the Cyrus or Siris and into the Caspian.

In old times the temples were not merely places of worship; they were the banks, the universities, technical schools, consular offices, boards of trade. The first thing a trading nation did when it started trade with a new country was to put up its own temple so its merchants could get credits, trade informaion, etc.

I have told elsewhere how the Phoenicians of Sidon, about B.C. 1250, finding that a large portion of their trade had been cut off by wars with the kingdoms of the Euphrates and Tigris, examined the records of their temple Naval College and discovered that in far-back times there had been very profitable trade with countries beyond two pillars called Pillars of Hercules; and how they sent out four expeditions to find these lost Pillars of Hercules, and how they went to a number of places and returned and reported after each expedition; and how the only definite conclusion they reached was that the Straits of Gibraltar were not the Pillars of Hercules (see Strabo 2; 5).

And that the reason they could not find them was because they marked the entrance and exit of the Manytsch Lake route which had shoaled up; the Pillars of Bo-az at the sea of Az-ov end and the Pillars of Jakin (Going Out Place) at the exit into the Caspian.

The Pillars of Jakin are still marked on the latest maps; i.e., Stavka Terekli (Stave of Hercules) on the Times atlas, 71;1;2; and Kerkheuli Juk Jewe (Hercules's Jak beacon) on the Stieler's hand-atlas, 49;0;19. But now, of course, on account of the drying up of the Caspian 40 miles back from the shore, on the Caspian's old shell marked beach.

The mysterious instructions of the "Book of the Dead" are the old route directions of the Phoenician sailors for reaching the Mother-Country of the Phoenicians and Egyptians, i.e. the Alizon valley.

How this came about it is impossible to tell now. It is as if something had kept the Muhammadans from going to Mecca or the Jews from going to Jerusalem for many centuries, for so long a time that the location of Mecca or Jerusalem was finally so lost that it was not known that it was a real place; and that people finally came to believe that it was a mythical place and that the direction for getting there were religious ceremonials and not real traveling directions. Whatever the reason, it is the fact that the directions in the "Book of the Dead" are directions for getting to the Alizon valley, to Ta Neter (Tioneti); which way to go; what tribes would be met; what the landmarks and beacons were.

The "Book of the Two Ways," which is inscribed on the walls of Tutankh-Amen's tomb, gives both of the ways above referred to, i.e., the one through "the eastern lands" via Pirikan and Lake Van, and the one through "the western lands," via the River Kuban and the Sea of Azov. The latter is perhaps the more interesting; it is given in the "Book of the Dead," chapters 17; 18, 64, 125, 149, 150.

According to these directions one first sails through the Great Green Lake (Mediterranean) and the Black Sea and comes to the land of Restau, at the head of the Pool of Maati (Sea of Azov). But Restau is not the town of Rostow, but the whole land round Lake Maetis, for Res-tau, as is shown by other passages, was really Tau-res, i.e., the ancient Taurus. Such transpositions of syllables are common, e.g., Ur-ab and Ab-ur, and occur all through the "Book of the Dead" and all of the old tradition inscriptions.

As is stated in the "Book of the Dead," chapter 17, Restau or Taurus was the northern door to the underworld. Later this region was called the Chersonesus Taurica.

Next, one goes through the straits of Tches-ert (now Ker-tsch) to the mouth of the Kuban where were the Pillars of Shu. "Now the Gate of Tchesert is the gate of the Pillars of Shu." Shu was the sun god, i.e. Ur-Al, or KhurKhal. Hercules. On landing at the "city north of the olive tree," i.e., the site where Phanagoria was built later, the departed performed a religious rite, i.e. placed a glass bowl over a lamp and buried it by the side of the Kuban. He then dug it up again. This symbolized the death and resurrection of Osiris; Osiris was the flame and the glass bowl was the "eye of Osiris," i.e. the supposed transparent hemisphere of the firmament.

He was then put through a test by the Fenku or Phoenicians. He was asked the riddle, "Who is he who is gathered together under the flowers and sitteth in the olive tree," and only the initiate would know the answer, "Oil (mineral and olive), Fire or Osiris." If he could not answer the pass words and tests he would be killed.

The "Book of the Dead" then gives the various tribes and countries he had to pass through going up the Kuban. The Watchers are the landmarks, i.e., certain mountains, etc. The word generally translated "pools" or "islands" also means river expansions.

Finally he comes to the eyot of SerSer or Ur-Ur or Tur-Tur; surrounded by the Terek and Sunsha. The city was also called Erech, in the Babylonian inscriptions telling of the exploits of Gilgamesh. The city on the eyot had very high walls of burnt brick, more than 300 feet high, Nebuchadnezzar built the walls of Babylon after seeing them. The southern walls were infested with snakes. Anyone who has seen an old wall down south on a chilly morning will recognize the origin of the Egyptian and Phoenician serpent frieze. The river Sunsha had much oil floating on it, Grosnyi, the center of the Baku oil district, is on it, and it was only necessary to poke a stick in the ground and oil would collect (Ency. Brit. art. Caucasus), which sometimes caught fire; and near by were the "Ever Burning Fields" of the Persian Fire-worshippers.

The departed stayed in the city for some time, studying certain books (the Acheruntici Libri ) and after a time became quite wise. Then he obtained escort to go through the pass of Arabus or Ab-tu, which was opposed by "men of hostile face." But he was armed with a knife and finally came through into Ta .Neter (now the district of Tioneti) .ie., "The Land of Aet-Ur."

At the entrance of the valley was Ashmeti or the city of Eshmen, the eighth Cabiri, and Kapare-uli, or Sippara of the Sun, from whose great stele "cippus" was possibly derived. A little further down the valley was Schemochada-Scheni or the "Sun-City of the Shenit," where the shenit or overseers were. Still further down was Sekhet-Aaru, i.e., Sekhet-Sham, now Sakat-uli (Sham and Eli both mean "sun," the "Fields of the Sun." Then comes Melikarkh, sometimes called Harmakis; then Achssu, then Baku, the Flaming Fields, etc. Mzchet, where King Pepi wished his estate, is up near the head of the valley, near the Sun City of the Shenit. It is very interesting to go through the valley with a Stieler's atlas and the "Book of the Dead"; one feels quite like a tourist with his Baedeker.

In a short article one cannot give a very full description of the route, ceremonies, etc. It is hoped enough has been given to indicate the interesting nature of the subject, and possibly to lead to one or more archaeological expeditions to this motherland of mankind, before the rapidly growing flood of immigrants tears down the old monuments for building material (no governmental regulations can prevent this) and otherwise makes archaeological work difficult or impossible.

THE writer's prediction that "the eastern shore of that inland ocean known to geologists as the `Asiatic Mediterranean', and more particularly that part in the neighborhood of its eastern vestiges, the Balkhash and Dschalantschash Seas, will be found to have been the seat of a great civilization at least as old as that of Babylon" cannot of course be verified until the sites are excavated. But we have now news of two discoveries which are in agreement with it.

The first is the statement by the great Russian authority Professor Rostovtzeff (Irans and Greeks in South Russia, page 197) that "In the Altai region" (north west of the Dschalantaschash Sea) "tombs have been discovered resembling those of the Kuban."

The second is the discovery, by the eminent explorer Sir Aurel Stein in the Tarim Basin and by Russian archaeologists in the region south of Lake Baikal, of evidences of European contact.

Neither of these is proof, or even evidence, but so far as they go they are consistent.

One way is by the old beaches, shell deposits, etc., as described in the geologies, or in the Encyclopedia Britannica article "Caspian". The other is by the place names. If the Atlantic Ocean were to dry up and we wished to find its western shore we would note groups of names, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Maine, New Hampshire, Boston, Lynn, New London, New York, Maryland, Louisiana, etc.; and would say that those places were settled from England and France and not from the intervening nations which occupied the former ocean bed. And, from the type of names and knowing something of the history of England and France, we could fix, within a century or so, the date of colonization.

Now, starting from the south shore and going east, we find a long string of place names distinctive of the Caucasus Isthmus. There are three main groups of these

Many are of a type which we can date as not earlier than 6,000 B.C. But in the second and third groups we find names not later than 2,500 B.C. and in the third group names not earlier than 1,000 B.C. This we can understand if we remember that the Ocean of Selentush (the "Asiatic Mediterranean" as geologists call it) dried up gradually. First Lake Balkash was cut off from water communication with the Caucasus, isolating the Seven River district and the Dsungarei district. But boats could still go from Ferghana and from Buchara down the Sir and Amu rivers to the Sea of Aral, then called the "Lake of Kithay" (Cathay?), and thence into the Caspian. The authority for this is Strabo. But about 250 B.C. the waterway between the Aral and Caspian had apparently nearly dried up for, about that time, the Sirici, living in the north Caucasus isthmus, instituted caravan transportation between India and Babylon (Strabo, 11.5.8). It will be noted that Faizabad is only 100 miles from Chitral, from which another hundred miles down the Kunar valley brings one to the Khyber Pass and India. From Kokan it was only a very short distance to the Tarim Basin, and a clear route thence to China.

In the district south of Lake Baikhal where the Russian archaeologists have just made their discoveries the place names can hardly date earlier than 250 B.C. For example "Ekure Chalcha", about 200 miles south of the lake. This is good Babylonian or Baku Peninsular for "Principal Place of the Great (or Mountain) House (or Temple). But the form is one which can hardlyhave come in before 400 B.C. so we may perhaps say that this is a land caravan
importation.

One sufficient reason is that all explorations, so far as known, have been made in the Tarim and similar districts on the east side of the mountain ranges bordering the Selentush Ocean. Any old civilization would have been on the west sides of these ranges where we find such names as Chabar; Kent; Urdshar; Kok-su; Sarkansk; Ak-su; Tschingis; Arganatinsk; Bakanass; Chan-tau; Sarkansk; Dschangys-agatsch; Kara-bulak Ubinsk; Urunchai; Talawka; UstKammenorgorsk; etc. Many of the terminations are of course modern Russian; the last two names for example would be Talonta and Kammeno. When these sites are excavated we may reasonably expect to find something of the civilization we are seeking.

Primarily the evidence is in the form of place names. The other evidence is slight. For example, the name of the Chinese Empress who is said to have discovered silk is given as Se-lin-tschi and there is some reason for believing that this was simply the name of the sea of Selentchu or Selentash, (the Sea of Selene, possibly because it had tides and the Black Sea had not), the Gelenchuk, Selentchuk, Olontchuk, Alontas and Asslandus, of the maps of the Caucasus Isthmus.

THE first announcement, made in a paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1899, of the writer's discovery and proofs that the so-called myths and myth lands of the Greeks and Semites were quite accurate histories of events which took place in a little known distrio, the Caucasus Isthmus, was made at a time when there was not much general interest in the subject. It was thought best to complete the work before publishing further.

The material had been collected and put in shape and in part written in final form in 1922 when the announcement of the proposed re-opening of tile Manytsch Lake route and of proposed colonizations both north and south of the Caucasus mountains indicated a possible loss of valuable archeological material and it was decided to publish at once the part which had been written. It appeared in 1923, "The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus." Other notes, on the location of the pre-deluge records referred to by Eusebius, Berossus and Josephus, and on the language in which the original Book of the Dead was written were published in Nature, March 1st, and July 26th, 1924; and a description of the route of the Book of the Dead in the Christian Science Monitor, March 24th, 1924.

These later articles and the book have met with a reception for which the writer is grateful and the authorities in the fields concerned have accepted the conclusions substantially without dissent. E.g. Dr. Albert T. Clay the great Semitic and Babylonian authority in his "Origin of Biblical Traditions" and personal correspondence written shortly before his death, to which I have his permission to refer; Sir Flinders Petrie the most eminent authority on Egyptian archeology and its allied and associated problems, in "Ancient Egypt," Per: 1924; and many others.

Acceptance of a theorem is and must be conditioned upon corroboration by all possible sources of evidence and the reviewer in Nature and some of those referred to above have emphasized the importance of confirmatory archeological field work in the Caucasus districts. This is true, the spade alone lays bare those sound foundations on which history must be built. But there are other, and within their limits equally accurate and scientific instruments which may be used for locating the structure.

The triple place-name system disclosed and explained in the "Deluged Civilization" is one of these instruments and as shewn, its results are very sure. As an illustration geologists are divided in their opinions as to the extent of the vast inland ocean which they call the "Asiatic Mediterranean". It was originally held to extend eastwards from the Caspian to include Lake Balkasch and to the Altai range. Of late, and influenced by later geological evidence, it has been believed not to have stretched so far east.

But aside from geological difficulties, inspection of the map shews a string of purely old Caucasian names round the eastern and southern borders of Lake Balkash and in the Altai, e.g. Kok-su; Tau-Kum; Bakanash; Ili; Sungaris; Astchibulak; Ach-Irek; Kent; Tschimi-Kent; Olon-Bulak; Ach-su; Urta-Saryk; Sary Bulak; Alan-Kuduk; Terek; scores of others. And these are only found round the level of the "Seven Stream Land" where the old shore would have been. And Rostovtzeff has pointed out as a curious and unexplained fact, that tombs have been found in the Altai resembling those on the Kuban in the Caucasus, (the reason for this we shall see later).

We may therefore be sure that the Caucasus and the Altai and Lake Balkasch regions were in water communication. And further when we remember that the original name of the so called "Asiatic Mediterranean was (see "Deluged; Civilization") the "Ocean of Selentchuk" (the original "Atlantic Ocean"), and note that the small sea to the east of Lake Balkasch is still named the "Dschalantaschash Sea" we may be fairly sure that it was an all sea route.

And in this connection we may think of the Chinese tradition that it was "Se-ling-tsche" who brought silk into China; as we now know from Gadira in modern Daghestan, where the pre-historic silk culture, the "golden fleece" of the Argonauts was, and which was exported west to Cos by the Tel-Kaini. And how Alexander built a great fleet in the Caspian, shortly before his death and told his soldiers that he had reason to believe that the Caspian was connected by water with the ocean east of India. And how the land caravan routes from the Caucasus were initiated by the Seres about 250 B.C. as stated by Strabo and confirmed by the Chinese histories, and how up to that time the goods were brought from the east by water from Faizabad to the south Caucasus valley, Faizabad being less than 200 miles from India, via Khyber Pass and Chitral Valley. The ocean of Selentschuk dried up slowly, even as late as the 16th century the Caspian and the Aral (then called the Sea of Kithay i.e. Kathay) were believed to be parts of the same body of water. (The rate of drying of this old ocean bed is given in the Russian government reports, and various considerably as the seasons are wet or dry.)

Place names in long settled lands may, as we know from our excavations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, be more permanent that geological features. And even in comparatively modern lands; Osla, the capital of Norway was founded 1058 A.D., its name was changed to Christiana in 1624, and in 1924 the old name Osla was restored. Norway is one of the most advanced states in the world, but the Norwegian post office commission which had charge of the notification work discovered that in quite a few of the more remote districts the capital had never been known as Christiana but always and continuously as Osla.

During many thousands of years the inroads into the Caucasus isthmus were without permanent effect; the inhabitants merely retreated into the mountains and when the strength of the invaders decayed came down again. There are some slight traces of the Alexandrian rule of Hyrcania and of the Turkish conquest in the neighbourhood of Derbent, but that appears to be all. In 1829 Turkey ceded the isthmus to Russia which for some years tried to conquer the Circassians or Adighi. Military spies with a knowledge of surveying were sent throughout the isthmus and a military staff map was published in 1848, of which the writer has a copy through the kindness of the British War Office. This gives all the old place names as they were before the Russian occupation of the territory, which was not complete even in 1875. Taken in conjunction with the map of Ptolemy, the description by Strabo, and other and later important maps, of which the Royal Geographical Society of England has a most complete and extremely valuable set, and the geological map of Felix Oswald of Nottingham, Eng., we are well equipped for the application of the triple place name method.

When the writer's observation of the curious gap in myth geography between Sicily and the coast of the present Atlantic Ocean, and his realization of its importance, had led to his discovery that the far west block of myths had been misplaced and rightly belonged to the old original Atlantic Ocean or Ocean of Selentchuk, or Aet-Olontchok, to the east of the Caucasus Isthmus, it was evident that there should be references to the occurrences related in the Greek myths in the literatures of the other lands in the neighbourhood of the isthmus, and that the best, and in the end the shortest, way would be to collect and tabulate all such references.

THE Encyclopedia Britannica (article, Babylonia) says "Babylonia astronomy goes back to the time when the Accadai (Agadi) had not yet descended from their mountain fastnesses. The zenith was fixed above Elam and not above Babylon and 'The Mountain of the East', the primitive home of the race, was supposed to support the firmament.

The more exact location of this zenith is a matter of considerable importance. In an article "The Key to the Book of the Dead" it was shown that the Book of the Dead was originally written in the language which Clay calls "Amuraic . . . the early Semitic language . . . which in time developed into what has been preserved for us and which we call Phoenician, Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew, etc." and that, while the main body of the text has been correctly translated, place names have been translated which should have been left as they stood, and personal names have been mis-translated as made up of roots of a different language from that in which they were written. The situation is somewhat as if an English translation of Caesar were found in 4000 A.D. and Caesar and Rome believed to be mythical and Caesar translated as "He who takes things by violence" (Seizer) and Rome as "The Wide City" (Roomy). For example, Osiris Urt-ab, which in Amuraic means "Osiris, son of the Sun" (see chapter 43) is translated as "Osiris Still-Heart". Where the syllables are reversed, as is frequently the case in Amuraic (see Jastrow, Bab. & Assyr. p. 222 and Clay, Orig. Bib. Trad. p. 167), the appellation Ab-ur is left untranslated (see chapter 42) . Iris and Nephthys, the goddesses of morning and evening, are called the "Ur-Urti" goddesses; the term is translated but it is pure Amuraic for "Light and Darkness". Qemurte is translated as "City of the Inundation", but should not be translated, as it is Kemurtu, and so on.

When the original language is thus taken into account, it is found that the hidden land of Amen where the sun rose out of the water (the Caspian, where the god Kha-Ra, the Greek Charon, transported the dead), passed over the mountain of morning, Bakhau (now Mt. Bakhar near Baku) along the mountain range of the horizon, with its gap (the Caucasus range and pass of Dariel) and set over the mountain of Temu, Ta-Manu (now the peninsula of Tamen, the temenos of the sun-god) into the Pool of Maatis (Lake Maeotis of the Greeks, now the Sea of Azov), was the Caucasus isthmus, the land of Aia of the Greeks. And that the directions of the Book of the Dead were very precise directions for reaching the valley of the Cyrus (now the Kur). Since the old name for Egypt was Aetia and the old name for the Nile was Siris (Rawlinson, note to Herodotus 2.15) and the Egyptians and Colchians were of the same race (Herodotus 2.104 and 3.12), this was probably (there are many reasons for holding this) the old home land of the Egyptians.

The route given is very precise (there are two, but I refer to the main one) and leads through the Mediterranean, up the west shore of the Black Sea, across the isthmus of the Crimea and the district of Rostow, through the lake and river system and then down the west shore of the Caspian and up the river Pir-ata or Ata-ar to Sebakhu and Kemartu and Lake Kau and the Mountain Bakhar. Thence south into the Kur-Alizon valley and Sakataly. In following the route only the old place names must be used. These are best found on the British Staff Map of 1885, for a copy of which I am much indebted to the War Office, as this was made before the country had been settled from Russia. Also the Stieler's Hand Atlas of 1902, sheets 48 and 49 and the Times Atlas of 1897 will be found very useful. The best map of all would probably be the Russian Staff Map of 1847, made long before the country was invaded by Russia, but so far no copy has been available. Strabo and Ptolemy will also be found of much use; Strabo, for example, gives the city Beta; and Ptolemy the location of Alexander's pillars, now Scandrjukjowsk on the Caspian. Kerkulijukjowsk is now about forty miles inland, west of the mouth of the Alontas of the classical atlas, now Ta-lowka. Shari-Shariket and Shari-Sapu (now ShariSharidon and Shari-Suppu) are shown on the International map, North, L. 38.

The reason why the knowledge of the zenith is important is this. In the neighborhood of Mt. Bakhar (see Staff Map, sheet I, 8) we find well-known Babylonian place names, i.e. Shemacha and Marazi, the mountain and gap of the sun; Eshagil, Erech, Shirappik, Azar-Akanna, Kassim-kend, Agadi-kend, Kissu, Kurkur and Konack-kent, which, since it is on the Apsu or end of the Caucasus range, I take to be possibly Apsu-anaki (and possibly Enoch or Kanach). This gives us a meeting point of the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. The Gilgamesh story relates to the same district and I have shown elsewhere that the rivers Kacheten (Cocytus), and Uroch (Pyriphlegethon), which flow into the Ast-ach-su (Styx) are near by and that the route of Ulysses was up the Kuban. The writer's work along this line has met with 'much earlier recognition and acceptance than might have been anticipated, and it is now proposed to send out a preliminary expedition. Obviously it is advisable to fix definitely; if possible, the places to excavate.

Now, east of Mt. Bakhar are two peculiar islands, now known as the "Two Brothers", between which, one one day of the year, the sun may be seen to rise from Mt. Bakhar. West of Mt. Bakhar are some curious rocks which possibly may be a primitive Stonehenge. There are reasons for believing that Bakhar may have been the site of the primitive observatory of the Babylonians, which fixed their zenith.

No edition of Plato, with which I am acquainted, calls attention to the fact that his story of Atlantis contains a very simple but interesting and important cipher.

It is difficult to see how it has escaped notice, for Plato specifically states that the names are given in cipher and specifically states the nature of the, cipher, one well-known to adepts of his time, and specifically gives, and states that he gives, along with one of the names, its cipher solution, so affording a means of checking the method.

"Yet before we narrate this, we must briefly warn you not to be surprised at hearing Hellenic names given to barbarians; and the cause of this you shall now hear. Solon, intending to make use of this story in his poetry, made an investigation into the power of names, and found that the early Egyptians who committed these facts to writing transferred these names into their own language, and he again receiving the meaning of each name, introduced it into our language . . . and to the twin born after him who had received for his share the extreme parts of the nesos (land) towards the Pillars of Hercules, as far as the region which now in that country is called Gadeirica, he gave the titular name which we Greeks call Eumelus, but which the people of that country call Gadeirus."

The "power of names" cipher was a standard international cipher used by scholars of that and earlier and later ages. By it a name, to be correctly translated, must not only mean the same thing as the original, but the letters of each, read as numbers, must, when added, give the same sum. To take an example from Berossus (Eusebi Chronicorum, Liber 'Prior, Schoene, pp. 14-18). "The ruler of them all was a woman whose name was Omorka, which in Chaldean is interpreted Thalatth, and in Greek Thalassa; but by numerical equivalence it is Selene."

The international number-letter system, omitting now discussion of modified values given to some of the "hundreds" letters, was:

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Units	a	b	g	d	e	F	z	e	th
Tens	i	k	1	m	n	ks	o	p	kh
Hundreds	r	s	t	u	ph	ch	ps	o	sh

Taking next the example given by Plato, of one of the Atlantis -names, i.e. that Eumeles is the Greek translation of the Egyptian Gadeirus, we must remember that Solon, who tells the story, lived several hundred years before Plato and spoke an older form of Greek, and that even if Plato did give the spelling as handed down to him, it was probably corrected as old-fashioned by his editors. So we must be prepared to change the scientific spelling of the Greek grammarians back to the old spelling of Solon's time. According to the rule of the cipher, Gadeirus and Eumeles must mean the same thing. Since Gadeirus is Egyptian, it can only be connected with the root Gad, meaning "happy". So Eumeles must mean "happy" and, on looking in Liddell and Scott's Greek Dictionary, we find the word eumeles and that it was used by the poet Plato, who lived in the time of the philosopher Plato, in the sense of "agreeable". So the first condition is fulfilled.

For the second, we have Plato's statement that the name was a titular one of the land of Gadeirica and, on looking in Liddell and Scott again, we find that the proper Greek for an inhabitant of Gadeirica is Gadeireus.

They do not agree. But, looking in our Greek dictionary, we find other words, such as eummelies, from eu and melia, also emmeles, etc., showing that the M was commonly doubled, and other facts indicating that Eumeles was originally spelled with two Ms and that, for scansion and to avoid confusion, one M was dropped later by the grammarians. So we have:

Eummeles which is 5,400,40,40,5,30,8,200 and totals 728, the same as Gadeireus, and the second condition is fulfilled; as of course it must be, since Plato gave it as an example.

We can now proceed somewhat confidently to solve the rest of the cipher. Take the name of the mother of Gadeireus, i.e. Klito. Its meaning is "the end", (Greek Klitos). What name of an Egyptian woman means "end"? Plutarch, in his "Iris and Osiris", section 38, says: "for which reason they call Nephthys the `end' and say that she is the consort of Typhon."

We know that the true spelling is Naphthys (see Herodotus, 7.193) and that it is the word from which naphtha is derived. So we have:

So this is the correct translation of the cipher.

Klito married Poseidon, or in old Greek, Poteidaon, whose Egyptian equivalent is Typhon.

And now go on with the story. Solve the other names and you will be interested. Atlantis city was at the hot springs near Pjatigorsk, north of the Dariel Pass. The mud flats Plato speaks of have now been solidified. You will find Gadira on the old maps to the southeast of Atlantis.

THE first draft of "The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus' contained no reference to Atlantis. The discovery that, after repeated expeditions, the Phoenicians had pronounced the straits of Gibraltar not to be the true Pillars of Hercules; that the real pillars, the Kemmenu or Chamminim of Boaz, were at the entrance to the Sea of Azov, the Az-ubbu or Western Water Gate or Harbour; that the old Mid-Asiatic Mediterranean of. the geologist; was formerly known as the At-Alan-Tschack or Sea of the Land .of the Alans that there was water communication between the Black (Ach-Sini) Sea and the At-Alan-Tschack via what are now shown on the maps as the Manytsch Lakes, Olont-Chuduck and the Cerber-Jakin (Cerber means mouths) ; and by a more southern route, near Pyatogorsk, later blocked by land-slides; the identity of the customs, rites, ceremonies, size and configuration of the land with that of the North Caucasus isthmus; its position given in Diodorus Siculus as next the Amazons, whose position is known from Strabo, and others; the fact of land invasions to and from Scythia and Thrace, etc., were all of interest But it was felt that their inclusion might prejudice the reception of the other results given in that book.

When it was realized however that Plato was the first to disclose the existence of the ten pre-Deluge kings or tribes, for he wrote 100 years before the time of Berossus, and aside from the fact that Solon lived 150 years before the time that Ezra compiled the Jah and Priestly lists and the Babylonian cuni form inscriptions were not revealed until recent years, it seemed advisable to translate the list he gives, by the method he indicates in Critias, VII. Trivial as the system may now seem, it must be remembered that for many centuries it was used by historians. An example is given in Berossus, i.e. the equivalence of Omorka and Thalatta and Selene.

One or two examples from Plato will be sufficient. He states specifically (Critias VIII) that Gadaireus has the same meaning and summation a; Eumeles. Gadeireus is spelled in only one way (see Liddell and Scott), so we have 3,1,4,5,10,100,5,400,200 summed or 728. There might be some doubt about the length of the second E in Eumeles, but the Semitic root G'd has two meanings, "fortunate" and "strong" and Eumeles with the short E has exactly those same two meanings. So we have 5,400,40,5,30,8,200 summed, or 688 This is 40 short. But we would expect a double M with the short vowel and in fact Liddell and Scott gives eummelies for "well-ashed", taken from Homer From this and other authority, and the statement that the names are equivalent, we are justified in using the double M, which. adds 40 and makes the two equivalent in value i.e. 728. Incidentally this and other words indicate that the original spelling was that of the time of Solon and not of Plato and so make it probable that the story did come from Solon.

Taking next Klito. This means "the End" and so does Nephthys, (Budge, "Legend of Horus", p. 243) . Klito is 20,30,10,300,800 summed or 1160. Nephthys is 50,1,500,9,400,200 summed or 1164. But there is evidence that the correct spelling of the name of the sister of "Osiris who sitteth in his olive tree" was "Naphthys" and this makes the names equivalent i.e. 1160. The root is also found in Herodotus 7.183, Aphetai; in Japhetus, Neptune, Aptu, Apaturia etc. The root is F-aet. This and many others, perhaps all, of the early constructions may be understood from examination of the languages round Lake Urmia. For example the use of "son of" for the possessive case; "lord of" for "very", etc.

Poseidon, the "Earth Shaker", the husband of Klito, is of course Sutekh, husband of Nephthys. Poseidon does not sum with any Egyptian deity but if we go to what Liddell and Scott give as the old spelling, i.e. Poteidaon, we find that this gives 1320 and sums with Sutukh, for which we have the well known authority of "Sydyk". Atlas equates with Harmakis, 532, taking the initial H as guttural H, that is KH, for which there is ample authority. And so with the other names, noting that Leucippe does not necessarily mean "white horse", but that "Leuke" may mean "wolf" and that the compound "hippo" is very frequently, in fact almost always except in late names, to be taken as the Greek rendering of the Phoenician "ubbu", water-gate or harbour.

Translating these names, Plato's ten pre-Deluge kings appear to correspond in the main with the lists of Berossus and Langdon's - fragment more closely than the latter lists do with the Jah and Priestly ones. The spelling certainly confirms Plato's statement that the list was made long before his time and was Egyptian, But it is advisable that the correspondence be checked by other workers, especially by men who have a much greater knowledge of the temporal . variants of Egyptian names than the writer has; and this note is published in the hope that some such scholars, especially those having also an acquaintance with Babylonian languages, may give the matter consideration.

The connection between the Aral (Kithay) and the Balkash Seas has lately been questioned by geologists, but evidence will later be submitted to show that they resembled the North and Baltic seas, a long peninsula, the Kara-tau, nearly, but not quite, separating them. Note the .place names east of Balkash, thousands of years older than the "Ekure Chalcha", (E-kur Chalacha, Great House of the Tribal Hole, or Fortress, or Tribal Capital, and the other names of the districts inland from Balkash.

(Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Merseyside Association for Masonic Research.)

IN the semitic languages the consonants are the important letters, and those of the old semitic languages are, it is believed, quite accurately known. But it is only of recent years, thanks mainly to a study of Coptic, that the value of the vowels has been determined. Therefore, if in reading a book twenty years old, on Egypt, one comes to the name Ari, and finds, in a book two years old, the same name, i.e., the same hieroglyphs, transliterated It, one will understand that in the elapsed eighteen years it has been found that the latter is the more probable rendering.

In the present note, to avoid any possibility of personal bias, I have followed throughout Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, which is admittedly the latest and most authoritative treatise on the Egyptian language, and have identified the hieroglyphs treated of by the numbers given to them by him in that book and their translation by the page on which he gives it.

It has often been suggested that the Egyptian M-s-n, the followers of Heru-Behuti, were the original society from which our Masonic order is descended. But, up to the present time, there has been no definite proof of this.

The word M-s-n is translated by Budge (Gods of the Egyptians, vol. I, p. 485), as "blacksmiths," and Gardiner, p. 544, translates it as "hippopotamus hunters," and on p. 510 as "weavers."

There is, so far, nothing to connect the M-s-n with Masons, except the similarity of name, and this means nothing by itself, since the Egyptian root m-s also means "to bring," so that the King's messengers might also claim them as their prototypes, so far as the evidence can be taken to indicate anything.

But in the Book of the Dead (papyrus Nebseni) occurs the name of an Egyptian God, written with the hieroglyphs, in Gardiners' numbered list, -

or Ìr-em-ab-f, "He who makes according to his desire": an artificer god.

From the Book of the Dead we learn three things more about him.

From Chapter 125 we learn that he was one, the 36th, of the 42 Assessors or judges who received the so-called "Negative Confession." He was apparently a god, and possibly a great deified man, as for example the deified I-emhotep (Budge, Gods of the Egyptians, Vol. I, p. 522), the celebrated architect and healer.

From Chapter 125 we learn that he "comes forth from the city of Tebti," and From Chapter 110 we learn that he has blue eyes.

As is well known, the Egyptian gods had many names. See for example the list of names of Osiris given in the Book o f the Dead, Chapter 142. One of the names of Osiris there given, in section 5, is An-mut-f-ab-ur, a name of the same type as the one we are now considering.

Can we find another of the names of this god or deified being? What artificer god, with blue eyes, has his temple in the city of Tebti?

Tebti, the Tanis of Herodotus, the Zoan of the Hebrews, was a great manufacturing place of glass, pottery, etc., and had a great dockyard. In Numbers xiii. 22, it is stated to be older than the time of Abraham (Smith, Dict. Class. Geog., art. Tanis). An artificer god would therefore be natural.

Turning up Budge's invaluable index to his Gods of the Egyptians, we find that the only god he gives, as having a temple there, is Horus Behutet.

In Smith's Dict. Class. Geog., it is stated that the temple there was that of Ptah. Ptah also was an artificer god, and may have been confused with Heru, or, as it is usually spelled, Horus Behutet. Or his worship may have superseded that of Horus. In any case, at the time the chapters of the Book of the Dead were written, it was Horus the artificer who had the temple at Tanis, and the Book of the Dead states that Ptah was the god at Memphis.

When we find that Horus is the only god mentioned in the Book of the Dead as having blue eyes, "Horus of the blue eyes cometh unto you," chapter 177, line 7, the identification is apparently complete, especially when we note that the name of Horus does not appear along with that of Ìremabf in the list of the 42 judges of the dead, in chapter 125, and this would support the conclusion that Ìremabf was another name for Horus, just as An-mut-fab-ur is another name for Osiris, chapter 142.

Having thus identified Ìremabf with Horus Behutet, it is a matter of very considerable interest to note that Hem-Behutet, or Ìremabf, was the head of the Mesen.

I need not give a description of these, as it will be found given very fully in Budge, Gods of Egypt, vol. I., pp. 476, seq., and this paper is sufficiently long.
As regards the meaning of the word M-s-n, or to supply the missing vowels in accordance with accepted practice Mesen. after very thorough investigation of the Egyptian, Phoenician and other Semitic language roots, and of the places where the words are used, it is evident that the word does not apply to any particular kind of work, but to the position of the men occupied in it.

The root M-s means "to produce, or to bring forth" (Gardiner, p. 544, and others). The word "Factors" would be a good translation, had the factors of the old companies been actually workmen or overseers themselves. Possibly they were. In any case, Mesen means a master craftsman, irrespective of the nature of his work. At Edfu they were undoubtedly blacksmiths, but at other cities they may have been masons, or other craftsmen. In hieroglyphic writing the hieroglyph originally represented the thing itself. It is therefore of interest to note that Ir, "He who does," is written with a hieroglyph which is the Masonic Eye (Gardiner D 4) . Also the word M-s, in M-s-n, is an apron constructed out of three foxes' skins (Gardiner, F, 31). These may be merely coincidences, but there is more likely a connection which is real. It would seem as if in the name Ìremabf we had good evidence of a real connection of our order with the Old Egyptian order of the master craftsmen of the Egyptian order of Mesen.

It would be natural to reject the connection with the King of Tyre, as being a story made up to explain certain things. I felt so till it developed that the Mesen were originally, in pre-dynastic times, foreign invaders from the Red Sea (Budge, Gods of Egypt, vol. I., p. 485) who crossed the desert to the Nile near Thebes.

Nine years ago I shewed (Deluged. Civilization; now out of print, but in the British Museum, Atheneum and other libraries) that the Phoenicians came this way. As there was a city of Tyre at their original home at the Stagnurn Assyrium, Ìremabf may have been a king of that original Tyre, but there is no proof of this.

The name Huram-abi, or as it is usually spelled, Hiram-abi, of 2nd Chronicles ii. 13, is a well known type of Phoenician name. Compare Abi-Baal, and name of Huram's father; Abi is (Rosenberg, Phoenician Dict. p. 70 and the Century Bible, Chronicles, p. 184), "Hurom is my father," i.e. my benefactor or protector. But the word "abi" may have been used as a mnemonic for the widowed mother of Horus Behutet, for such mnemonics are found in many ancient rituals.

SYNOPSIS OF SOME UNPUBLISHED CHAPTERS OF THE DELUGED CIVILIZATION OF THE CAUCASUS ISTHMUS

BABYLON. The names of the gods of the Babylonian Creation legend, i.e. Lakamu, Lakmu, Kingu, Anshar, An, Marduk, Gaga, are the names of the most prominent mountains of the Caucasus range. The names are all unchanged except Kingu, now Elbruz, and Anshar, now Kasbek; whose old names are given in the Encyclopedia Britannica, article "Caucasus".

Almost all of these names are very distinctive and are found nowhere else, e.g. Lakamu, Gaga, etc., though Kingu is found as Kongur on the shore of Lake Sevanga. In addition their characteristics correspond with those of the gods. For example, Kingu is the greatest, Anshar next, then An; and Marduk is near Anshar; and Gaga is a smaller mountain between Marduk and Terek. The Apsu was the crest of the range.

BABYLONIA AND FINLAND. The Encyclopedia Britannica, article "Babylonia", says:

The Apshuron peninsula was the home land of both races. It is a net work of rivers, locally called "-su". See Ach-su; Ach-Koissan-su; Sumgait; Sangat; Samur, etc. The people north of the mountains, on the peninsula, were called Su or Suoni in ancient times, see Strabo and Muller's Ptolemy. The people south of the mountains were called Shemi, Shumi or Shomi, (see maps). Suoni means "People of the River Lands". The people on the heights were. called Achd and the name still persists; see town of Achty. It was also where the Al or Alon race was. There is a mountain called Gil-gum-kock in the Suoni district, near a town called Dilum. The town of Sabuje is on the south side of the mountains, to the west. Ur-al-a was the name of the city of the Terek to the west, the old Erech. Wide-plaza-ed Erech was wide-plaza-ed Tartarus, with 'its great circular spaces and race-tracks. The old observatory at Shemash and Marash is just south of the mountains, and there was another Marash just north, see below. Lam is found as an additive term meaning "mountain" only in this peninsula. Compare Sukur-Lam. The eagle and the snake were the emblems of the Aet-Ur who lived south of the mountains to the west, and of the Seres who lived north and to the west. The Chalybs were the Chaldeans (see Strabo and Xenophon who state specifically that this was their original name). The plain of Shinar and town of Chaldan are on the south side of the peninsula.

EGYPTIAN. There are only two lands where the sun rises over a mountain called Bakau (the mountain of sunrise) out of the sea, and' sets over a mountain Ta Manu (peninsula and mountain of Tamen) into a sea called Maaitis (Sea of Maaitis or Maetis), and these are the Caucasus Isthmus and the land of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The route of the Book of the Dead was along the Mediterranean coast (the Great Green Sea); then along the west shore of the Black Sea (the original Lake Maaitis or Black Sea) to the Siwash, past Ak Metschet, Tatisch and Tschetyr Lak; then past Arabat, through the strait of Kertsch in the land of Res-tau or Tau-rus to Anapa. Then up the river Kuban to Ser-Ser or Tar-tar; through Erebus to Tioneti (Ta Neter) and Achmeti and Shemochada Sheni (the Sun City of the Shenit or Overseers) ; Thence to Harmakis and Baku and the Fields of the Sun, Sakataly, and to Baku and the Flaming Fields. The Pillars of Shu were the Two Brothers.

This route is the same as that of Homer. Why the Egyptians should have supposed that they went back to the home land when dead is not known. Bait there are many analogies; for example Curtis ("Children of the Sun") says that the Zuni expected to go back to the land their fathers came from when they died.

Seback near Baku of the Egyptians was Bacchus, who was said to be born near there at Nucha. Sabazios, the chief Thracian divinity, was another form of Sebak; and possibly the Sabathai who, though mostly Jews, were not of the Jewish religion.

CHINA AND INDIA. Siwash is Siv-ash, and Seb is Siv. Sevanga is the feminine goddess. The Hindi were originally the Sindi, at the mouth of the Kuban. The Seres later became the Chinese. Another branch were the Khani or Kaini. The Telchines were the Talachani; and the Surachani were the tribe from whom the "Siricon" of the ancients took its name. See Talachany and Surachany on opposite sides of the isthmus of Baku.

PILLARS OF HERCULES. The eastern or Jakin pillars of Hercules are shown on the maps on the old shore line of the Caspian, where the Udon used to fall into it. See Stieler's Atlas, sheet 49, 0,19: the village Kurkeuli Juk Jewe. On the Times Atlas it is Stavka Terekli, (Stake of Hercules). The pillars of Alexander are forty miles to the east, on the Caspian shore.

VOCABULARY. A list of about forty primitive word roots has been prepared. Almost all of these are found to be common to all languages.

Note 1 - The maps which are linked to this document are actually earlier (1929) versions of the maps than those which were published in the 1933 volume of Chapters 7-10 of the Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus. The 1933 versions were smaller and spread across two pages making copying difficult. The 1929 editions which appear here were published as separate large sheets. There are no substantive differences between the content of the versions of the maps, the 1933 maps simply having been 'cleaned up' for publication somewhat. The 1929 version of Map 8 was additionally hand-colored whereas the 1933 version had the color printed on them.

Note 2 - The map labeled "CSM" linked ahead of the title of this document was not published in the 1933 volume of The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus but instead was published in the Christian Science Monitor of March 8, 1926 as an illustration for the article that now comprises Chapter 9, HOW IT WAS DISCOVERED THAT THE SO-CALLED MYTH LANDS WERE THE CAUCASUS ISTHMUS. It was copied from the original article which had been attached, in an envelope, to the 1923 volume located at the Smith College Library.

Note 3 - The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus was published in three parts as separate volumes, with the latter two volume out of sequence:

Chapters 7-10 were published in 1933, posthumously, by Fessenden's son Reginald Kennelly Fessenden.

Every effort has been made to ensure accurate transcription of the original documents.

Hieroglyph	Read	Translation	Gardiner, page
D 4, An eye	Ìr	He who makes	443
G 17, An owl,	em	according to	542
F 34, A heart,	ab	desire	534
I 9, A viper,	f	his.	542