Mohammed’s talking donkey taken from story of Balaam

A funny thing happened

on the way to Mecca

 

Part Three:

Mohammed’s talking donkey taken from Balaam

 

 

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

 

 

The seer, Balaam, is famous for having a talking donkey (Numbers 22:21-30), an ancient story whose marvel has been picked up, but altered, in later mythologies.

 

The Egyptian tale of Bata, for instance, has talking oxen, and animals are made to talk even in the Book of the Dead.

 

The Prophet Mohammed is said to have ridden a donkey, Ya`fūr, and, according to an account of it this donkey spoke first to Mohammed, telling him that it had formerly been owned by a Jew.

 

At: https://www.answering-islam.org/Shamoun/yafoor.htm we read this one of the “Amazing Fables of Islam”:

Muhammad and his Donkey:

 

The Amazing Fables of Islam

 

Dimitrius & Sam Shamoun

 

 

From the book "The Beginning and the End" written by Ibn Kathir, Chapter Six, Entry title: "The Conversation of the Donkey" ….

 

More than one of the reciters have denied this hadith, however it was narrated by Abu Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Ibn Hamid, narrated by Abu Al-Hussian Ahmad Ibn Hadan Al-Sijsi, narrated by Umar Ibn Muhammad Ibn Bajir, narrated by Abu Jafaar Muhammad Ibn Mazid, narrated by Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Akba Ibn Abu Al-Sahba’, narrated by Abu Huthaifa, narrated by Abdullah Ibn Habib Al-Hathli, narrated by Abu Abd Al-Rahman Al-Silmy, narrated by Abu Manthur who said,

 

"When Allah opened Khaybar to his prophet Muhammad – may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him – he (Muhammad) received as his share of the spoils four sheep, four goats, ten pots of gold and silver and a black, haggard donkey.

 

The prophet – may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him – ADDRESSED the donkey asking, ‘What is your name?’ THE DONKEY ANSWERED, ‘Yazid Ibn Shihab. Allah had brought forth from my ancestry 60 donkeys, none of whom were ridden on except by prophets. None of the descendants of my grandfather remain but me, and none of the prophets remain but you and I expected you to ride me. Before you, I belonged to a Jewish man, whom I caused to stumble and fall frequently so he used to kick my stomach and beat my back.’

 

The prophet – may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him – said to him, ‘I will call you Ya’foor, Oh Ya’foor.’ Then Ya’foor REPLIED, ‘I obey.’ The prophet then asked, ‘Do you desire females?’ The donkey replied, ‘NO!’

 

So the prophet used to ride the donkey to complete his business and if the prophet dismounted from him he would send the donkey to the house of the person he wanted to visit and Ya’foor would knock at the door with his head. When the owner of the house would answer the door, the donkey would signal to that person to go see the prophet.

 

When the prophet died, the donkey went to a well belonging to Abu Al-Haytham Ibn Al-Tahyan and threw himself in the well out of sadness for the prophet’s death, making it his grave."

Arabic Text:

لما فتح الله على نبيه صلى الله عليه وسلم خيبر أصابه من سهمه أربعة أزواج نعال وأربعة أزواج خفاف وعشر أواق ذهب وفضة وحمار أسود، ومكتل قال: فكلم النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم الحمار، فكلمه الحمار، فقال له: "ما اسمك؟" قال: يزيد بن شهاب، أخرج الله من نسل جدي ستين حمارا، كلهم لم يركبهم إلا نبي لم يبق من نسل جدي غيري ولا من الأنبياء غيرك، وقد كنت أتوقعك أن تركبني قد كنت قبلك لرجل يهودي، وكنت أعثر به عمدا وكان يجيع بطني ويضرب ظهري، فقال له النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم: "قد سميتك يعفورا، يا يعفور" قال: لبيك. قال "أتشتهي الإناث؟" قال: لا فكان النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم يركبه لحاجته فإذا نزل عنه بعث به إلى باب الرجل، فيأتي الباب فيقرعه برأسه، فإذا خرج إليه صاحب الدار أومأ إليه أن أجب رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم، فلما قبض النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم جاء إلى بئر كان لأبي الهيثم بن التيهان فتردى فيها فصارت قبره، جزعا منه على رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم

راجع البداية و النهاية لإبن كثير .. باب حديث الحمار

 

Comments:

 

Muhammad converses with a donkey who is a believer in Muhammad's prophethood and uses him as one of his means of transportation. The donkey, which Muhammad named Ya’foor, comes from a line of donkeys many of which were ridden by prophets only. Muhammad asking the donkey his name and the donkey identifying himself as Yazid Ibn Shihab assumes that animals communicate and even name their offspring much like humans. What is amazing is that they even identify themselves as the son of their fathers much like the Arabs of Muhammad’s time did! This perhaps explains the following Quranic verse:

 

There is not an animal that crawls in the earth, nor a bird that flies on its two wings, but they are communities like you. WE have left out nothing in the Book. Then to their Lord shall they all be gathered together. S. 6:38 Sher Ali

 

Furthermore, the donkey’s response to Muhammad’s question whether he preferred females implies that Ya’foor was either celibate or had homosexual inclinations.

 

The sad thing about all this is that Yafoor went to hell for committing suicide. It seems that the donkey wasn’t told that committing suicide is a sin that leads to the fire:

 

Narrated Thabit bin Ad-Dahhak:
The Prophet (p.b.u.h) said, "Whoever intentionally swears falsely by a religion other than Islam, then he is what he has said, (e.g. if he says, ‘If such thing is not true then I am a Jew,’ he is really a Jew). And whoever commits suicide with piece of iron will be punished with the same piece of iron in the Hell Fire." Narrated Jundab the Prophet said, "A man was inflicted with wounds and he committed suicide, and so Allah said: My slave has caused death on himself hurriedly, so I forbid Paradise for him." (Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 2, Book 23, Number 445)

 

Hence, the donkey believed in vain since, by committing suicide, he was forbidden Paradise. In light of all these fantastic details, it is little wonder that some reciters had difficulties with this fable.

 

Now a person may say that the Holy Bible also speaks of a talking ass. Yet the biblical account greatly differs with this Islamic story since the Holy Bible clearly shows that the donkey only spoke as a result of a miracle:

 

"Then THE LORD OPENED THE DONKEY’S MOUTH, and she said to Balaam, ‘What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?’" Numbers 22:28

"Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray. They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing, but was rebuked for his own transgression; A SPEECHLESS DONKEY spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet's madness." 2 Peter 2:15-16

 

The Islamic tradition, on other hand, presumes that donkeys do actually communicate with each other in the same way humans do and that, much like humans, they even name their offspring and keep track of their ancestors for many generations!

The miracle in the account is not that Allah caused an animal to speak, but that Muhammad was allegedly given the ability to understand the language of the animals.

 

This is confirmed in the next set of traditions.

 

Amazingly, one Sunni Muslim, Shibli Zaman, pokes fun at Shias for including a donkey as a narrator:

 

No shia`a on this planet will dispute the veracity of al Kulayni and his work. Usool al Kaafi is the primary source of narrations for their distorted sunnah. This is the same Usool al Kaafi which quotes the donkey of the Prophet (s) as a narrator in a chain of transmission (isnaad) which al Kulayni declared authentic. It literally says "`an Himaar ar rasooli-Llah" meaning "On the authority of the donkey of the Prophet (s)"! ….

 

We wonder what this same Muslim will say about Muhammad conversing with a donkey who claims to be from a line of donkeys, many of whom were only ridden by prophets. ….

 

 

 

 

 

Koran: Mecca has likely been substituted for Beersheba

 

A funny thing happened
on the way to Mecca

Part Two:

Mecca has likely been substituted for Beersheba

by

Damien F. Mackey

“Apparently drawing from early Jewish scriptural interpretations known as Targumim, Muslim interpreters linked the building of the sanctuary in Mecca with the account in

Gen 21 of digging a well in Beersheba—the place where, according to the Targumim, Abraham also built a shrine”.

Brannon Wheeler

The Qur’an (Koran) can, at times, present its reader with some appallingly bad geography; with unashamedly anachronistic history; and with endless biblical and Jewish appropriations.

For example, in my article:

Durie's Verdict: No Mohammed

https://www.academia.edu/38270742/Duries_Verdict_No_Mohammed

I quoted the Rev. Mark Durie to this effect: “Another issue is the observation in Q37:137–38 that the Qur'an’s audience can pass by the remains of Lūṭ’s [Lot's] people in the morning and by night. The Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is associated with the region around the Dead Sea...”.

Geographical swing and a miss!

A vast geographical distance separates Lot’s place of abode from that of the early Moslems.

Moreover, whilst Abram (Abraham), considered to be the very father of the Islamic religion, lived in a most ancient time that has been properly (so I believe) located archaeologically to the Late Chalcolithic/Early Bronze phase (c. 3500 BC, conventional dating), the site of Mecca, to where Abraham is supposed to have gone, is, in archaeological terms, extremely young.

As I wrote in Part One:

https://www.academia.edu/38677117/A_funny_thing_happened_on_the_way_to_Mecca

…. I, whilst indeed accepting at least the religious and the evangelical aspects of things in relation to Islam, find, nevertheless, that there are immense problems with the conventional view of Islam as an historical phenomenon. There are many articles currently surfacing that support a view that the historical claims of Islam are quite false and inaccurate, with no underlying archaeology to support them.

‘A funny thing has happened on the way to Mecca’ – for it is most curious that, according to this recent scholarship:

·         “Archaeology of Mecca – the History of Mecca”. There is no archaeological evidence that suggests that Mecca is an ancient town that existed before the Christian era, or even that it existed before about the 4th century A.D. ….

(http://www.historyofmecca.com/archaeology_mecca.htm)

·         “Did Abraham Build the Kaaba?” The body of this paper will deal primarily with places and destinations, not theology or personality. I will examine the Biblical accounts of Abraham in the natural and sequential order in which they are preserved in the Bible, while I examine and compare a small sampling of the similarities and differences in the Quran and other Islamic sources. In doing so, I’ll point out the several fatal contradictions in the Islamic perspective and leave the reader to determine whether the Islamic version is truth to be believed or fable created to connect a pagan Arabian shrine to the Biblical patriarch of the Israelites. I will cover the ancient evidence and promptly dismember Islamic dogma as inauthentic and based on inadequate grounds. ….

[End of quotes]

Brannon Wheeler thinks that (and I would have to agree with him here) Moslem interpreters appropriated the biblical (the Jewish) story of Abraham at Beersheba and shifted it to Mecca: https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/people/related-articles/abraham-and-islam

Abraham and Islam by Brannon Wheeler

Muslims understand Islam to be the religion of Abraham. The biblical figure of Abraham is mentioned by name in the Qur’an 69 times—more than any other person except for Moses (137 times). Muslim interpreters of the Qur’an provide additional details linking the passages in the Qur’an to the stories of Abraham known from the Bible and from Jewish and Christian interpretation.

The Qur'an is familiar with some of the biblical stories about Abraham, including his journey to the promised land (Qur’an 21:71-73), the annunciation of Isaac (Qur’an 11:69-74, Qur’an 15:51-56, Qur’an 51:24-30), God's command for Abraham to sacrifice his son (Qur’an 37:99-113), the sacrifice of the birds (Qur’an 2:260), and Abraham's interaction with Lot and the angels (Qur’an 11:74-83, Qur’an 29:28-35, Qur’an 51:31-37).

In the Qur’an, God calls upon people to "follow the religion of Abraham" (Qur’an 3:95). Abraham is the "model" of obedience to God (Qur’an 16:120) and the "friend of God," and no one can be "better in religion" (Qur’an 4:125) than those who follow him.

The Bible begins the narrative of Abraham's life with his call by God in Gen 12, but the Qur’an begins earlier, with the story of Abraham smashing the idols of his father. A number of close parallels exist between Jewish versions of this story (found in rabbinic literature) and the details provided by Muslim interpreters, including Abraham's discovery of monotheism (Qur’an 6:74-87, Qur’an 41:37), his scheme to disprove idolatry (Qur’an 19:41-50, Qur’an 21:51-70), and his escape from the fiery furnace into which he was cast as punishment by the Babylonian king Nimrod (Qur’an 37:83-99, Qur’an 29:16-27).

Abraham is credited with establishing both the sanctuary in Mecca known as the Kaaba and the practice of Islamic pilgrimage (Haj) to that site (Qur’an 22:26-27, Qur’an 3:96-97, Qur’an 2:125-129).

Apparently drawing from early Jewish scriptural interpretations known as Targumim, Muslim interpreters linked the building of the sanctuary in Mecca with the account in Gen 21 of digging a well in Beersheba—the place where, according to the Targumim, Abraham also built a shrine.

The Qur’an does not identify the name of the son whom Abraham is commanded to sacrifice (see Gen 22), and the earliest Muslim interpreters were divided over whether it was Isaac or Ishmael. In the context of the larger narrative linking Abraham with Mecca, later Muslim traditions clearly identify the son to be sacrificed as Ishmael, the ancestor of the prophet Muhammad. Muslim interpreters also differ from the biblical account in making explicit that Abraham attempted to sacrifice his son, trying a number of times to slit his son's throat. ….

Those Confounding Confucius Institutes

Sydney University’s descent into a very dark ignorance

Part Two:

Those Confounding Confucius Institutes

“Over 400 Chinese government-backed Confucius Institutes are making an insidious attempt to restrict academic freedom by silencing debate on human rights and other sensitive issues, and whitewash its atrocious human rights records in Tibet and China”.

The University of Sydney’s wilful abandonment of all past wisdom, love and truth, etc., in its grand project of utter folly, ‘Unlearn’, was the subject matter of Part One:

https://www.academia.edu/34776797/Sydney_University_s_descent_into_a_very_dark_ignorance That University has, as do many others, a Confucius Institute. It is not ‘Turning Japanese’, as the song goes, but Turning Chinese – and being dictated to by a crazy, authoritarian Beijing.

This is all quite fitting, of course, as part of its reckless descent into a dark, slavish ignorance.

As we read at: https://studentsforafreetibet.org/our-work/say-no-to-confucius-institutes/

Confucius Institute threatens academic freedom and free speech. It is controlled by the Chinese Government, and a central part of its soft power plan to improve the global view of China’s authoritarian system. Confucius Institutes aim to censor and silence discussions on important political and human rights issues like Tibet, East Turkestan, Taiwan, Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square.

What are Confucius Institutes?

Confucius Institutes are educational programs backed by China’s Ministry of Education partnerships in educational institutions outside China. Their stated aim is to promote Chinese language and culture in our schools and universities.

What is the threat of the Confucius Institutes?

Chinese government censorship and propaganda on topics such as Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen are reaching our students in high schools and universities all over the world.

The truth about the Confucius Institutes is that they are China’s soft power push inside our schools.

Over 400 Chinese government-backed Confucius Institutes are making an insidious attempt to restrict academic freedom by silencing debate on human rights and other sensitive issues, and whitewash its atrocious human rights records in Tibet and China.

What can I do?

Students, academics, parents, politicians and people of conscience around the around the world have already spoken up. Join them and take action: Say No to China’s Confucius Institutes! ….

And Alexander Dukalskis has written tellingly on the Confucius Institutes:

http://www.democraticaudit.com/2018/01/04/the-chinese-communist-party-has-growing-sway-in-western-universities/

The Chinese Communist Party has growing sway in Western universities

In recent years, China has fostered academic links with Western universities by funding Confucius Institutes and sending its students to study abroad.

As the recent uproar over the decision of Cambridge University Press to censor a list of journal articles for the Chinese market has highlighted, it also exerts growing influence in academic publishing. Alexander Dukalskis (University College Dublin) argues that the so-called ‘1% argument’ for censorship is disingenuous, and Confucius Institute activity should be strictly restricted to language instruction. Students and academics must be able to scrutinise China freely.

….

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) real and potential influence over higher education outside its borders came to the public’s attention last month when The Economist featured CCP “sharp power” influence – including in higher education – on its cover. Its briefing article drew its terminology from a report by the US-based National Endowment for Democracy. The Woodrow Wilson Center published a detailed report about the CCP’s effort to curry political influence abroad, including in academia. Observers are increasingly paying attention to CCP influence in areas of publishing, student exchange, classroom instruction, and research.

I have a special interest in these topics as the author of a book and academic articles about how authoritarian governments control public discourse domestically. The CCP’s export of some of these practices is concerning. I purposely use the descriptor “CCP” because in China the state is subordinate to the party. So when we talk about the Chinese state or Chinese government, what we are really talking about is the CCP.

In August, Cambridge University Press (CUP) acceded to a request by China’s import agency to censor a list of articles from its journal China Quarterly. CUP initially complied until an open letter by the editor of the journal caught the attention of academics and journalists, who then led an outcry on social media. CUP eventually agreed to not pre-emptively censor its articles, but many were startled by how quickly and easily such a prestigious press agreed to censor on behalf of an authoritarian government.

The rationale, of course, is that CUP and other presses like it wish to protect access to the Chinese market. They argue that if they censor a small portion of their offerings, then the vast majority can be accessed in China, thereby salvaging links between foreign and Chinese academics. This is the 1% argument: only 1% is censored but 99% can be accessed, so really this is not such a big problem.

This is disingenuous, for two reasons. First, it ignores that censorship is even more insidious and powerful when people do not know they are subject to it. By selectively pruning offerings for the Chinese market, presses lead readers to believe that the post-censorship catalogue represents the full picture of foreign perspectives on China.  Editing out so-called “sensitive” topics like the Tiananmen Square repression of 1989, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and studies of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan gives the false impression that the CCP view on these issues is the only legitimate one and that foreign academia agrees.

Second, the 1% argument obscures the likely financial motives behind such censorship decisions.  In CUP’s case the CCP threatened to halt the press’ best-selling English language curriculum.  SpringerNature now not only censors some of its offerings in the journals International Politics and the Journal of Chinese Political Science but has also signed a letter of intent with the People’s Publishing House apparently to publish propagandistic works by CCP leader Xi Jinping.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that financial motives play a major role in these sorts of decisions.

Of course publishing is not the only higher education target of the CCP. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students study abroad each year, which is a source of funds for universities in the West. In my admittedly anecdotal and limited experience, these students are most often a joy to work with because they are smart, curious and have interesting perspectives.

However, they are also subject to surveillance and mobilisation by the officially-sponsored Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA). Western universities have been mostly silent about the CSSA, which is understandable. The CSSA presents itself as a means of helping Chinese students settle in abroad, so university leaders may feel there is little they can do.  However, some troubling examples suggest that it also plays a more assertive role in policing public discourse. This includes instances of policing what lecturers say in the classroom.

Indeed, one function of the CCP’s strategy to control public discourse about China in foreign universities is precisely to influence classroom instruction. Hundreds of Confucius Institutes teach Chinese language and culture at Western universities and schools.

Confucius Institutes present themselves as politically innocuous, but it does not take long for instruction in Chinese “culture” to morph into China “studies”, with all the off-limits topics that this implies for the CCP. It is worth remembering that the parent institution of Confucius Institutes is Hanban, which is a department of the Chinese Ministry of Education, itself ultimately under the purview of the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. Indeed, high-level CCP officials have often been quite blunt about the Confucius Institutes being a part of the party’s foreign propaganda effort.

Here again, part of the motivation for welcoming Confucius Institutes on campus in the first place is financial. Typically Confucius Institutes come with financial subsidies from Hanban (and thus ultimately the CCP). Additionally, university administrators may see the prospect of tighter links with the CCP as facilitating the recruitment of fee-paying Chinese students.  The upshot is that universities outsource their Chinese language instruction while Confucius Institute officials sometimes get a seat at the table in discussions about the curriculum in which those language or culture offerings are embedded.

The CCP also attempts to sway the tenor of research about China. Projects like the Institute for China-America Studies or the CCP-linked endowed professorship in China Studies at Johns Hopkins University are prominent examples. The overall aim is to influence the way that China is researched, discussed, and presented.

Ultimately, what is to be done? First, leaders of universities and publishing houses need to firmly and publicly stand up for academic freedom. They should say early, often and publicly that the university places free inquiry at the centre of its engagement with China. If this offends CCP partners, then so be it.

Second, universities should re-evaluate their relationships with Confucius Institutes, particularly given the CCP’s more aggressive turn under Xi Jinping. Confucius Institute contracts sometimes have clauses that call for re-evaluation every so often and universities should take advantage of these opportunities. Ideally, universities would use such clauses to terminate their relationships with CIs and CI-affiliated “research” institutes. 

Short of that, they could press for terms relating to academic freedom to be included and for the activities of CIs to be strictly restricted to language instruction.

Third, individual academics should consider boycotting peer review and submission for presses that censor their catalogues for the Chinese market. Publishing houses rely on the mostly free labour of academics to generate their products. Scholars therefore have some leverage to influence the situation. In a petition that is still open, more than 1,000 have already signed up to boycott reviewing for publications that censor their content for the CCP.

It is incumbent on university leaders, publishing houses, individual academics, and the general public to preserve free inquiry when it comes to China. This is of pressing importance because as a rising economic and military power, China will only play a more important role in the world. It is up to all of us to ensure that this role can be scrutinised freely and fairly. ….

‘Handbag’ carriers from Göbekli Tepe to Mexico

 

 by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

 

“I add “Assyrian Apkallu” to the search parameters and even more images flood my screen. Often they show bearded men holding bags or buckets which closely resemble those depicted on the Göbekli Tepe pillar and the one held by the Mexican “Man in Serpent” figure”.

 

Graham Hancock

 

  

 

Knowing that Graham Hancock is never dull reading, and also that his recent (2015) book, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilisation, has quite a lot to say about Göbekli Tepe, a site whose findings I think are devastating for the evolutionary explanation of origins:

 

Göbekli Tepe dating plain wrong

 

https://www.academia.edu/39378001/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe_dating_plain_wrong

 

then it was inevitable that I should, when I saw the book in a library, take it home to read.

A few things struck me early. Most especially, those ubiquitous ‘handbags’ of the gods.

What did they mean?

That question has been posed, too, by dmatherly at the colourful Graham Hancock site

http://grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?1,1084130,1084130

 

What function do ancient depictions of so-called hand bags have?...From the Olmec to Sumerian/Assyrian and even on a stela at Gobekli Tepe are these found..

 

 

Graham Hancock himself, when in situ at Göbekli Tepe, had speculated about these objects.

He writes about it in his book:

http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Graham%20Hancock%20-%20Magicians%20of%20the%20Gods%20-%20The%20Forgotten%20Wisdom%20of%20Earth%27s%20Lost%20Civilization.pdf

 

While I’m online I run some searches for images of the Seven Sages. I don’t get many hits at first, but the moment I change the search terms to “Apkallu” and “Seven Apkallu” I open a colossal archive of images from all over the internet, many of them reliefs from Assyria, a culture that thrived in Mesopotamia from approximately 2500 BC to about 600 BC. I add “Assyrian Apkallu” to the search parameters and even more images flood my screen. Often they show bearded men holding bags or buckets which closely resemble those depicted on the Göbekli Tepe pillar and the one held by the Mexican “Man in Serpent” figure. It’s not just the curved handles of these containers, or their shape—where the resemblance is much closer than on the original Oannes relief I reproduced in Fingerprints of the Gods. Even more striking is the peculiar and distinctive way that the figures from both Mesopotamia and Mexico hold these containers with the fingers of the hands turned inward and the thumb crooked forward over the handle.

There’s something else as well. A good number of the images show not a man but a therianthrope —a birdman with a hooked beak exactly like the hooked beak of the therianthrope on the Göbekli Tepe pillar. What makes the resemblance even closer is that in the Mesopotamian reliefs the birdman is holding the container in one hand and a cone-shaped object in the other. The shape is a little different but a comparison with the disc cradled above the wing of the Göbekli Tepe birdman is hard to resist.

I can’t prove anything yet. It could, of course, all be coincidence, or I could be imagining links that aren’t there. But my curiosity is aroused by the similar containers on different continents and in different epochs and so I jot down a series of questions that can form the frame of a loose hypothesis for future testing. For instance, could these containers (whether they are bags or buckets) be the symbols of office of an initiatic brotherhood—far traveled and deeply ancient, with roots reaching back into the remotest prehistory? I feel that this possibility, extraordinary though it may seem on the face of things, is worth looking into and is strengthened by the distinctive hand postures. Might these not have served the same sort of function as Masonic handshakes today—providing an instant means of identifying who is an “insider” and who is not?

 

[End of quote]

 

Striking cultural, architectural, and many other similarities amongst cultures spread as far and wide as Mesopotamia, Armenia (modern Turkey), Africa and the New World (e.g. Mexico), and significantly differing as to their eras, do not favour the evolutionary view of origins in isolation. How to explain this Göbekli Tepe–Australian Aboriginal connection, for instance?:

 

Also grabbing my attention in Hancock’s book were the ancient references to the Flood by Nebuchednezzar I and Ashurbanipal, especially given my identification of both of these names with Nebuchednezzar ‘the Great’ (so-called II) - three name for the one king. See e.g. my article:

 

Nebuchednezzar - mad, bad, then great

 

https://www.academia.edu/39013559/Nebuchednezzar_-_mad_bad_then_great

 

From these ancient quotes we learn that (also not favouring the evolutionary view) there was “the flood”, despite Mesopotamia often experiencing floods; that a “seed [was] preserved” from this flood, and that “writings” existed before the flood. Hancock writes:

 

In due course, later kings would speak of their link to the antediluvian world. In the late first millenium BC, Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylon described himself as a “seed preserved from before the flood”88 while Ashurbanipal, who ruled the central Mesopotamian empire of Assyria in the seventh century BC, boasted: “I learned the craft of Adapa, the sage, which is the secret knowledge … I am well acquainted with the signs of heaven and earth … I am enjoying the writings on stones from before the flood.”89