[Why our area has its unique political and religious attitudes.]
We are continuing to pursue the first people in our area from pre-historic time. Pre-history simply means before a written history. Nevertheless, archaeologists have developed a significant record from artifacts.
What have we found so far about the relationship of the ancient Babylonian culture to our region?
- Babylonian culture is the foundation of European/British culture that developed into North America after 1600.
- Native American genome has a large percentage more closely related to present western Euro-Asian than to any east Asian society.
- The Babylonian history is seafarers who took ocean trips over two-months long, with multiple people, and returned home.
- The Native American mounds culture was one of the oldest, great ancient civilizations.
- The oldest documented mounds on the Mississippi River tributaries was circa 3500 BCE with people there for hundreds of years before the architecture.
- That time-frame is contemporary with the fall of the tower at Ba’Bel (Babylon).
- The grandson of Utnapishtim was premier at the time of societal disruption. It was Utnapishtim (in Babylonian, Ham in the Jewish history), who Gilgamesh sailed across the oceans to consult. So, the time-frame is consistent.
Based on these data, we can reasonably conclude that the first mound builders travelled between Babylon and the Mississippi River. That is radical, but the historical, archaeological, and analytical data strongly support the hypothesis.
Results of genome research, and the timing of the Middle Archaic and later mound builders along the Mississippi tributaries, make a trans-oceanic migration more probable. The contemporary history of Gilgamesh shows the Babylonians were long-distance seafarers.
The timing was during an interesting climatological event, the altithermal era. Following the natural cyclic decay of thermal energy, the temperature was a couple of degrees warmer, causing the lakes of the Great Basin to dry up. What other events were happening to influence the Native American migration? The ancient Jewish history affirms a disruption of society near that time.
Oh, there is more. Similar Venus-figurines were recovered from the Late Archaic Mississippi Delta site as were found with the oldest Native American genome site in the grave of the young boy half-way around the world. Similar Venus-figures found in Europe were used to correlate the genome site. Coincidence?
The settlement of mounds along the Mississippi River Basin, and where the people came from, finds its way from the cosmic stories of the Cradle of Civilization. Over 800 mound sites have been located in the lower delta of the Mississippi, on the Louisiana side.
Not all, but most of the identified lower mounds are west of the great river because of the huge Red River and Arkansas River and lesser Ouachita River tributaries. It was a few thousand years later before the large societies had moved upriver to the mouth of the Missouri and Tennessee Rivers.
What was the culture of the first mounds settlers? Expectation bias shows up among historians. Conventional wisdom is that society only develops when there is a hierarchal status with chiefs to coerce people and develop an agricultural society. How could and why would one person be more capable than the synergy of all the people independently together?
These first Mississippi Basin people demonstrated the fallacy of that argument for governmental control. They were non-hierarchal, without an apparent ruling class. They were independent, hunter-gatherers, who worked together. This characteristic carried across the region for the next 3000 years, indicating a common heritage.
Where else do we find a significant non-hierarchal system? Two-thousand years after the early Mississippi Basin mound builders, the Jewish society developed from the Babylonian area of Ur. The Jewish history shows they were an amalgamation of people from the first patriarch, Abraham, up to the first king, a period about 750 years.
It was a Jewish adviser, counselor and seer, Samuel, who before 1000 BCE warned against a strong central government society and the individual freedoms, rights, and ownership which would be lost. Strangely, it was near this same time-frame that Native Americans adopted a chiefdom.
None of the Babylonian or Native American history conflicts with the traditional Jewish Tanakh. They are different people groups, with different legacies. The Abraham family history affirms there were peoples for millennia before he came along to re-establish cultural, societal traditions and mores, which became religions rituals.
Think about: the traditional Babylonian then Jewish stories appear to correspond to what researchers are only recently recovering about the first Native American genome site, first Native American mound sites, and about the migrations of people. The records demonstrate that history does give us insight into and influences on politics and religion, if we get over expectation bias.
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Excerpts from our books:
Where Indians, Outlaws & Oilmen Were Real, ISBN: 9781658834643.