[Why our area has its unique political and religious attitudes.]

Last article found that the pre-historic, pre-Columbian, Native American genome has significant modern Western Eurasian heritage with no ties to contemporary East Asian genome.

Who were these people?

All written historical records trace to the cradle of civilization. This becomes our heritage, whether European, Asian, or North American.

The Babylonian culture had a written record of events, which have been researched by archaeologists. They have a rich story history with Gilgamesh, Marduk, and Semiramis (Astarte). As an interesting venture, check on the history of these people. You have heard of them in Jewish and Greek narratives, but by different language names.

We should expect similar discourse in cultures with a related heritage. What today’s readers regard as myths, fantasies, and arcane seem to have a basis in fact. The tales and stories are the history as those people told it.

The stories are no more fanciful than some of the hyperbole we see in our contemporary media. Although fantastic, can we dismiss the ancient telling? Just because we do not understand the context, culture, and correlations does not prevent the validity of concept for the stories.

Ancient traditions often involved ritual sacrifices. We do not do blood-sacrifices of animals or do we? What about the backyard or tailgate parties? How different is a barbecue? It is a summer ritual and may be associated with the religious fervor of collegiate football. What is the context?

These historical narratives were the only stories that survived passing down, so the characters became heroes, a word commonly used to translate who these people were. In our history up to a generation ago, every story of George Washington made him an almost superhuman hero, from the cherry tree to the crossing of the Delaware. Unfortunately, arrogant though- influencers try to disrupt, dismiss, and destroy actual history to create a narrative of their own making.

As civilization spread, Jewish scholars built the Western perception of history on the Babylonian record and added their own cultural accounts. Historians write about their focus, generally relating a national emphasis, without much concerning the rest of the world.

The European ancient history builds on Babylonian and Jewish records including the Tanakh, because it was written, although thousands of years after some of the events. After all, the Babylonian stories are the history of all civilization. The Western European society is deeply rooted in the Jewish history of the Tanakh. That cannot legitimately be written out of our culture. It is who we are.

After the Babylonian dominion, the Egyptians had a recorded history, but it does not enter our cultural analysis. The Chinese writing was later and about the time of the Jewish, but did not relate to Western Euro- Asian culture and mores. The African did not have a written history, so it is impossible to be a later societal influencer.

Enter the Native American, and much of the rest of the world. With no known written language until Sequoyah in 1821, history was perpetuated by story-tellers. One more reason the matriarchs were so important was to keep the legacy going. If you have no written history, you are stuck with what others say about you.

The language is not uniform, but morphs over time through intermarriage, tribal conquest, isolation, and just use. How odd does ‘olde Aenglo’ sound today only 400 years ago. I recall my grandfathers, born in the 1800s, spelled the vegetable as “pease.” In my memories as a third- grader, I recall walking through the huge gardens seeing their labels and thinking, “it is too bad how uneducated these old people are.” When I shared my superior intellect, Dad explained the language transitions, but I knew more.

Putting in perspective, they were born only a couple of hundred years after the writing of the Olde English King James translation. Today we are about the same time since their nativity. They were half-way in the time morphing from what we regard as ancient language.

We often dismiss any historical event when comparing to today. How many people would it take to develop a society of mound builders? Compare to a recorded story from 1500 BCE. Approximately 2,400,000 people migrated from Egypt to Israel after their clan had been there about 400 years.

When the American experiment started after 1600, there were no European speaking people. By 1700, the population was 250,000. In 1800 it was 5.3 million, in 1900 it was 76 million, and in 2000 it was 281 million.

What does that tell us? The growth to the number of Jewish Egyptian emigrants is entirely reasonable. Furthermore, within 500 years of first arrival in the Mississippi Delta, the inhabitants could easily be in the millions.

If so, the people would start spreading because of ‘congestion’, in precisely the way population appears to have spread along the Mississippi basin from Watson Brake, to Poverty Point, to Spiro, to Cahokia.

Think about the traditional Babylonian, then Jewish, stories appear to correspond to what researchers are only recently recovering – at Tall El- Hammam (Sodom) and at the first Native American genome site. Maybe history does make sense and give us clues about, well, humans.

Excerpts from our book:

Where Indians, Outlaws & Oilmen Were Real, ISBN: 9781658834643.