CHAPTER 13

KING LISTS AND GOD LISTS

he ancient Egyptians had a Pharonic King List, now called the Turin Canon, written on the reverse side of a tax list. It is possibly dated in the 1200s BCE. It has nothing to do with Turin except that it now resides in that city in Italy, and the word 'canon' generally refers to a papal decree or ecclesiastical law, so the name is somewhat misleading. Apparently it survived over 3,000 years intact, but was shipped unwrapped in a box to Italy by 'archaeologists' and arrived in a thousand pieces. As a result, much of it is missing but here are a few pieces that can be read:

First Column

Geb his life time(?) time of his reign being 733 (years)

Osiris (gap)

Seth (lost)

Horus of the Gods 300 years

Thoth 7,726

Maat 200

Horus (?)

A total of kings - (gap)

All these (except the last Horus - a semi- or half god) are gods.

Second Column

(?) 1,110 years

(?)

? (a thousand something)

(?)

(?)

The glorified spirits the followers of Horus 13,420

(?) ...down to the followers of Horus 23,200 +

After this comes a King List of Egyptian Pharaohs recognized by scholars. The total of this "God List" such as it is, with much missing, is 58,089 years.

Herodotus was a Greek historian who travelled to Egypt and talked with priests there in about 455 BCE. (Heracles is the Greek God the Romans called Hercules.) Here's part of what Herodotus said:

"Heracles is a very ancient god of the Egyptians. As they themselves say, it was 17,000 years to the time when Amosis began to reign since the twelve gods, whereof they hold Heracles to be one, were born from the eight.... The Egyptians and their priests showed that there had been 341 generations of men from the first king unto this last. Now three generations of men are an hundred years, thus in 11,340 years, they said that no god in the form of a man had been king."

Manetho was apparently an Egyptian priest in the 200s BCE. His three-volume work is lost but parts of it have come down to us as he is quoted by others.

Here's what we get from Manetho:

With the exception of Osiris and Isis, Horus, Anubis, Ammon and Sosos, the names given for all the gods are Greek. The order of this appearance seems very confused when considered in relation to the Greeks own ideas of the lives of descent of their gods and goddesses.

We have no time-line for the Greek Immortals but the lines of descent are: from Gaea and Uranus these six brothers and their six sisters:

MALE	FEMALE
Oceanus	Theia
Coeus	Rhea
Hyperion	Themis
Iapetus	Mnemosyne
Kronos	Phoebe
Crius	Tethys

The above twelve Titans mated among themselves and had offspring, among them:

Kronos, who had a son named Zeus.

Zeus, some sons of his were :

Aries..Hyphaestos..Heracles..Apollo

And

Hyperion, had a son named Helios

We can see the order of kingship according to the Egyptians bears little relationship to the order of birth according to ancient Greek tradition. Each of these civilizations recognized and built temples to some of the gods recognized by the other.

Let's look at another civilization in the Near East -- the Sumerian-Babylonian, apparently the oldest of the Asian civilizations. Here we have another "king list":

After the so-called "mythical" figures, the list goes on:

Then we have reached the age of Sargon, a known historical king. We can also see how the very long pre-flood reigns shrank to less than 10% after the flood and these gradually contracted down to normal spans for a reign in historical times. This phenomenon also occurs in Genesis in the Bible.

What do we think of a list of rulers before the Flood totalling 241,200 years (not 241,000) per the numbers given. Numbers of this size take us back close to the times of the earliest "big brained" fossil individual, the "Swanscombe" man's skull, unearthed in the 20^th century, dated by archaeologists to about 250,000 years ago.

We might consider something else. The length of time from the Flood in the Sumerian God list to our present day is 31,359 years. This does not agree with our present estimates of when the last ice age ended, variously given as about 10 - 12,000 years ago. Apparently at the poles the last ice age ended about 1,000 years later than in the temperate zones.

On the oxygen/isotope ice core table we find that from the datal point of 0.7 million years ago there are 68 x 1/16" to the present day on the scale. Therefore 1/16 inch represents approximately 10,000 years. If we measure the Sumerian 31,359 years as 3/16+ of an inch back from the present day on the table we find it gives us the lowest point in the entire table, which is just over 31,000 years ago.

If these measurements given in the table are accurate, there is here supporting evidence from a surprising source that something extraordinary indeed took place in the earth's history about 31,000+ years ago, which the Sumerians date as a Flood.

There may be another aspect to this picture of how our genealogy began -- provided by modern science and mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA. These are thought to be handed down by the mother alone. It should be possible to devise a 'clock' and track mt.genes back through the generations, provided the genetic material mutates at a constant rate, and that the mutations are not favoured or eliminated by natural selection. These are some very big "ifs" but a west coast U.S. group of scientists has calculated by such means that "Eve", or ''the first modern man's mother,' probably lived between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. These are fairly wide limits but another DNA 'clock' would suggest that Eve existed only 75,000 years ago.

What I find surprising from all this is that the ancient civilizations are giving us time scales not very different from these tentative datings by genetic and scientific dating methods. Until now prehistorians have dismissed these ancient "god lists" as pure myth -- many writers don't even trouble to mention them. I suggest this should change, and that the ancient writers' "god lists" should be taken more seriously.

It seems to me that the three civilizations we have mentioned, living so far apart and with very different languages: the Olmec, the Egyptian, and the Sumerian, are either copying one another, or more probably are each in their own way expressing their experience of the same type of event. That is, over long periods of time, first came the creation of domesticated plants and animals, then the creation of civilized man. And then much further back in time we have the phenomenon which the Sumerians called "kingship was lowered from heaven". This 272,500 year old event seems somehow to be connected in time with what we have found to be the appearance of a modern type of big-brained mankind, as distinct from ape-like creatures or hominids.

The Sumerians appear to have had no doubt as to what they meant by "kingship was lowered from heaven". They meant that their gods and goddesses, the Immortals, appeared and set up kingships on earth.

According to the ancient writers, it was these Immortals who domesticated plants and animals. The Immortals were aeons ahead of humans of their time in knowledge and brain power.

This takes us back to Alfred Wallace who you remember said that modern humans had something not derived from our animal progenitors - a spiritual essence or nature. Next we need to find out what ancient writers tell us about the so-called Immortals, in our effort to determine whether they really existed, if so, what part they played in the civilization process, and whether that infusion into humans is what caused the rapid creation of cities, civilizations and cultures at the end of the last ice age.