PER ME DEI REGNANT!

The city states of the rulers of Troy, Orchomenos, Tyryns, Bog-Haz-Koi, Mycenae, Cnossos, and cities and states without number and of which not even the name or memory, now remains, too often, little expectant of calamity from without, from whatever cause, finally went down into smoking ruin before the deluge of wild men, who, with their reeking swords brought all those god-ordered ages of ancient time to a bloody close; men such as the wearer of the golden mask whose grave was opened by Heinrich Schlieman in his excavations at Mycenae, and who he believed to be Agamemnon sleeping his everlasting sleep.

Buried sword in one hand, with the other this giant amongst men still clutched in death as in life, those disks of gold which so obviously were storehouse of wealth and power.

Thus it is clear that by permitting gold to be equated with wealth, or that which had been money, and forgetting thus the true nature of money as a thing apart, his law alone, merely a device of transferable numbers to assist and give order to the exchanges amongst his people, this god-king from whom descended the legend of that company on Olympus, was already surrendering his might, and the freedoms of his peoples, to those inscrutable shadows that lurked in the dimness of the distant Babylonian counting houses.

To these rulers, power was already in the merchant’s and master miner’s precious metal pieces...

 

With such precious metals as they stripped from the bodies of living and dead in those cities they had so gleefully sacked and put to sword, when peace carne again, they were able to purchase those items of luxury so much desired by their women, such as were manufactured in the cities of the Mesopotamian plain and Egypt,⁽¹⁾ if not further afield.

 

More important still, they were thus able to obtain the finest of arms that skilled craftsmanship could fashion, such as the suit of bronze armor found at Medea in Greece (illustrated on Page 135 of Dawn of the Gods, by Jacquetta Hawkes); the very best of the master armourer’s trade.

Thus they readied themselves for the next slaughter. It may very well have been as in today, when the new aggressors, designated Communist as according to the meaning of that word, may very well be preparing for the destruction of those easy-going people of the Anglo-Saxon world from whose skill and technique derive those finest of arms through which their world could indeed be threatened with total obliteration.

That in their position as ruler all gold flowed through their hands, whether in those forms given to it by goldsmith’s art or in those shapes most convenient from the point of view of its use in international exchange, there is no doubt.

 

The latter case was clearly shown by the rings and disks and the tiny double headed axes, as found at Troy, all of gold, and the four hundred round pieces of gold and the one hundred and fifty golden disks that were found in the Royal tombs of Mycenae (dating from c. 1500 B.C.) by Heinrich Schlieman ⁽²⁾ all of which clearly represented some form of exchange or money.

 

Spirals of gold wire also found in the grave of one member of the Royal Family of Mycenae are suggested by Seltsman (Greek Coins, p.5) to be adjusted to the small Aegean gold talent of 8.5 grams which he classifies as the Aegean gold unit. Herein would be implication of the use of a gold unit in international exchanges even at that early time.

 

The rings of gold wire of a few grams weight which circulated in Egypt (Breasted, p. 307) in the reign of Tahutmes III (1501 B.C. - 1447 B.C.), would appear to afford some verification of this fact. Gold or silver money, whether ring money or other form of money, if of definite weight and fineness would always be desirable in international exchanges.

As an interesting and pertinent digression, it also appears that spiral or ring money may have come to occupy a place in the economic life of Egypt too, as early as the latter years of the so-called Old Kingdom. Its use and abuse, considering the Egyptian trade that existed across the known world during the reign of Pepi pharaoh who reigned 90 years during the 6th Dynasty,⁽³⁾ may have been one of the factors by which the International Money Power of the time, in whatever form it existed, brought about the total collapse of kingly rule in Egypt in the years subsequent to the death of this ruler.

The Hebrew records also appear to verify this use of metal rings or spirals being used in settlement of trade balances between foreigners; or of being storehouses of wealth... According to Madden, however,⁽⁴⁾ there is no mention of gold money in ancient Hebrew records, though gold constituted part of the wealth of Abraham, undoubtedly refugee from Ur about the time of its destruction by the Gutim...

 

The six hundred shekels of gold by weight paid by David for the threshing floor and oxen of Ornan ⁽⁵⁾ and the 6000 shekels of gold taken by Naaman on his journey to the King of Israel ⁽⁶⁾ do not imply money... Nor can the passage:

“they lavish gold out of the bag and weigh silver in the balance,” ⁽⁷⁾ or “Wisdom cannot be gotten for gold neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof,”⁽⁸⁾ be brought forward in favour of gold money.

Gold was generally employed for personal ornament ⁽⁹⁾ and for adornment of the temple.

It is probable, therefore, that a system of “jewel currency,” or “ring money”, was in use. The case of Rebekah to whom the servant of Abraham gave “a gold earring of half a shekel weight,⁽¹⁰⁾ and two bracelets for her hands of ten (shekels) weight,” proves that the ancient Hebrews made their jewels of a specific weight so as to know the value of these ornaments in employing them in lieu of money.

 

That the Egyptians kept their bullion in jewels and rings is not merely indicated by the scene on the monuments as mentioned by Lenormant and Maspero, in which they are represented as weighing rings of gold, silver and copper, but also by the findings of archaeology such as the copper rings found at Tel Amarna stamped with the cartouche of Kuen-Aten, Hyksos ruler.⁽¹¹⁾

 

These rings would appear to have been retained in the treasury at Tel Amarna, and therefore still were current two hundred years after the expulsion of the so called Hyksos. According to Breasted, gold and copper rings of a fixed weigh circulated in large scale business in the time of the “Old Kingdom”, and (significantly enough to the student of “banking”, or private money creation and regulation, as it might better be known) “stone weights were already marked with their equivalence in such rings.” ⁽¹²⁾

 

The circulation as money of these “promises to pay” recorded on stone, pointedly suggests the likelihood of the activities of a secret fraternity whose hereditary trade was private money creation. It may very well have been the debilitating force that, with the death of Pepi II in 2476 B.C., brought about ending in turmoil and anarchy to the even flow of the undeterminable age over which the God-Kings reigning in awesome splendor, so long had spread their mantle of man-consideration and true benevolence.

Further evidence that the Egyptians kept their bullion in jewels or rings is indicated by the passage from Exodus ⁽¹³⁾ in which it is related that the Israelites, previous to their departure from Egypt, borrowed “jewels of silver and jewels of gold and spoiled the Egyptians”...

In consequence it would appear that the money used by the children of Jacob when they went to purchase corn in Egypt was ring money, the use of which was permitted by the Pharaoh Egypt of the time; rightly or wrongly...

 

Their money is described “bundles of money”, as verified by the authorized translation Deuteronomy...

“Then shalt thou turn it into money and bind up the money in thine hand and shall go unto the place where the Lord thy God shall choose” ⁽¹⁴⁾

The excavations of Heinrich Schlieman indicate that such ring money was also used by the Mycenaeans at perhaps rather later date.

Thus the Greek city state, owing its existence to an uncertain long period during which there took place those events that led up to the final days of Cnossos and Mycenae, was the result of the union of the forces of order in life and death that motivated the priest-king, were he at Cnossos, or at Thebes, or Tel Amarna, or serving the Moon god at Ur, leader amongst the Sumerian cities, and those forces that drove on the builders of the battlements first of all unearthed by Heinrich Schlieman at Troy and Mycenae.

 

Whether priest-king or peasant-king, their wealth was already assessed in terms of the weight of their store of precious metals which would be so eagerly accepted in exchange for the products of the master armourers employed by the bankers who already controlled trade and money creation in those cities of the Ancient Orient; from which cities, therefore, the glory of total guidance by the god-will had already departed.

He who was literally the Son of God on Earth as he meditated in his island fastness of Crete, was beholden to none other than the people below who he served from his place as the apex of the pyramid of life itself, and to the will of the one above who appointed him to serve.

 

The peasant king at Mycenae or Troy or wherever it might be, for all his seeming rock-like strength, and a certain god-likeness in character of the kingship he bore, as was indicated by the title Wanax, necessarily existed as instrument of those who manipulated gold or silver supplies internationally, and at the same time the slave market; men of a class who, in that control of prices which they so clearly exercised, were able to control prosperity in all those seemingly powerful states that had accepted the international valuation of silver as the factor determining internal or national values; such as was the case with most of the mainland cities...

 

They may have been, as it seems they are today, a close knit conspiratorial group threaded through the priest and scholar class of these cities and lards; thought not of themselves of such origin.

The answer may be found to lie in the existence in very ancient Sumeria of a privileged class, who, having access to the “credit” of the temple, thus were able to control the masters of the great donkey caravans who carried such “credit”, or will of the god of the city, from one place of business to the other; incising record on their tablets, of loan of such credit made to enable purchase, or interest overdue, or repayment of such loan as had been made the previous trip.

 

These persons, who may be considered themselves to derive from the hereditary caravaneers and who must have functioned as bullion broker and banker, would have been fully clear on the subject of silver and its function in settlement of foreign trade balances and its use as a standard on which to base money accounting. In the latter days of the city states of Sumeria, it is reasonably clear that during certain periods of decay, a languid and corrupted priesthood might delegate ⁽¹⁵⁾ to these persons, not only matters of trade, but also those decisions relative to foreign states so essential to the continuance of the might and right of the god of the city.

The special international character of the outlook of these people, sprung as they undoubtedly were from the donkey caravaneers, born to be at home amongst all peoples, yet to always bear in mind the peculiar business of the caravan merchants, their trade and profit, may not have made for decisions as from a true and dedicated god-servant.

 

Thus it may very well be that we must look to the professional caravaneers, from whom descended the Habiru,⁽¹⁶⁾ for widespread dissemination of the knowledge of the possibilities offered to merchants by development of the practices relating to private money creation deriving from a clear understanding of the meaning of accounting to a silver standard, and later the potentialities towards development of monopoly of trade inherent in the actual use of silver as the material on which the numbers of the abstract unit were stamped.

 

The full extent of the possibilities towards the accumulation of wealth through exploitation of varying ratios between silver and gold in different parts of the world, and the possibilities of a private and secret expansion of the total monetary circulation which was open to those who were held in such esteem in the cities that persons were glad to deposit their valuables with them for safe-keeping, may also have been known to them.

As such accounting to a silver standard had long been known in the lands of Sumer and Akkad, and the mainland generally, control of values had long since been in the hands of the silver bullion brokers, whoever they were, and the money lenders, and bankers and their satellite merchants, without reference as in former days, to priesthood and temple scribe.

 

Through bullion they controlled money, and through money creation, on that bullion as base, they controlled manufactures...

 

According to T.B.L. Webster in his book From Mycenae to Homer:

“Undoubtedly Ugarit and Alalakh were more concerned with manufactures than Knossos and Pylos, and silver by weight was already for them performing the function of money, whereas as far as can be seen in the Mycenaean centers, no such standard existed” ⁽¹⁷⁾...

However the fact that the Achaeans derived their system of measurements from Mesopotamia  ⁽¹⁸⁾ would certainly suggest that the most important measurement of all, the monetary unit would equally originate from such source.

 

This opinion is further strengthened by the collaboration obviously existing in the Mycenaean settlement at Ugarit ⁽¹⁹⁾ with that money power which based itself on silver by weight, such as clearly controlled the manufacturies of Ugarit and Alalakh...

Further according to the same scholar:

“The Alalakh tablets also record copper distributed to smiths, but note in addition it is to be used for making baskets or arrowheads; and the King of Assyria sent copper to Mari to be made into nails by the local craftsmen. A report from Pylos that the woodcutters in two places are delivering 150 axles and 150 spars for the chariot factory may be compared with the Ugaritic texts on the delivery of wood for the making of arms, and a note of wood delivered to the carpenters for the construction of wagons in Alalakh.

 

We may add here also from Pylos a list of wooden objects made, a list of vessels received by men (perhaps Mayors) in various places and a note of pieces of ivory; to set beside this rather slender evidence of Mycenaean manufacture, Alalakh provides a record of sixty four business houses and their produce; they include smiths, leather workers, joiners, and cartwrights.” ⁽²⁰⁾

Thus it seems that where the conception of money as to a silver standard existed as at Ugarit and Alalakh, so also existed organized industry, including outstandingly the private manufacture of arms under methods that appear to be those of semi-mass production.

 

It is not without significance that this early era of privately issued money (such as was silver money), and consequent private industry, particularly that which was devoted to arms manufacture, was in certain areas so coincidental with the massive movements of warlike peoples, and the collapse of ancient empires that had lived long under the pattern of life known as that of the Ancient Orient. Conquering peoples needed the best of arms.

 

It seems that the best of arms were obtainable from private industry; and private industry in its turn needed silver or gold or labor which was slaves, in payment.

 

Both were obtainable as the result of war. Therefore parallel, though not entirely the same as in today, the more war, the more the industry, and the more the need for the products of the money creators' ledgers. Hence became the more absolute the control of that which most of all designs industry and its accompanying slavery in one form or another, namely, private money creative power.

Thus regardless of what strength still resided in the heart of the temple states of the Ancient Orient, if values were dictated by the international valuation of silver bullion, then, above all, the internationally dealing silver bullion brokers would be in a position to see to it that manufacture and distribution of arms was under their control, the factor most important of all in international power allocation.

They were in a position to have manufactured in some scale, controlling labor as they undoubtedly did through control of the slave trade, the finest weapons known in that day for those rulers who collaborated with them and served best their purposes... Clearly by the same token, with such total money control, they were in a position to withhold the best of weapons, or the materials for such weapons, from those who served them the least...

 

In a world that had come to believe in money as an absolute, such was the position long ago, exactly as in today. Thus the state that rejected international money power, as did Sparta and Rome in ancient times, and Russia in modern times, had to be prepared to establish total military self-sufficiency.

The Cretan civilization that communicated its ancient language through the pictograph script known as Linear “A”, which recognizably came to communicate Greek through that development of this script known as Linear “B”, about 1500 B.C.,⁽²¹⁾ would certainly seem to have been conquered by Greek speaking peoples some reasonable period previously; which would suggest about 1700-1600 B.C.

At the same time, according to Breasted,⁽²²⁾ in 1675 B.C., the so-called Hyksos, a Semitic conqueror, entered the Delta regions of Egypt, establishing total military supremacy through the use of horse and chariot, previously unknown in Egypt.

The evidences of the Ugarit and Alalakh tablets, although of a substantially later date (about three hundred and fifty years) indicating semi-mass production in these areas of chariot parts, arrow heads, and arms of various kinds,⁽²³⁾ cannot but suggest that it was from this region, so close to the copper of Cyprus, and the wood of Anatolia and Lebanon, that money power armed those restless peoples that may have inundated Crete in earlier times, and Egypt somewhat later.

The chariots by means of which Egypt had been subdued, can only have been paid for out of the booty of conquest, the plunder of tomb and temple, and the sale of the enslaved peoples.

Tahutmes III

XIIth Dynasty

 

The fact of the persistence of the thrust of Tahutmes III ⁽²⁴⁾ into these regions substantially less than one hundred years after the eviction of the Hyksos by Ahmose I (1500 B.C.-1557 B.C.) from their last Egyptian stronghold at Avaris ⁽²⁵⁾ on the Eastern marches of the Delta, would indicate no idle pointless advance, but definite design towards destroying the heart of the enemy, the elimination of his financial and industrial centers. Whether they were still in the regions of Ugarit and Alalakh, or now sheltered elsewhere behind the Kingdom of Kadesh, perhaps in Mittani, would not be known.

However, that both sides had equal access to the international arms industry would certainly be indicated by the spoil in manufactures of war of the battle of Megiddo (1479 B.C.) as won by Tahutmes III against the King of Kadesh and his allies, amounting to nine hundred and twenty-four chariots and two hundred suits of armor.⁽²⁶⁾

 

By corollary, it may reasonably be assumed that opposed to these chariots as seized at Megiddo, would have been at least another thousand chariots. Alexander of Macedonia venturing far from home in later times, was a reckless adventurer, considering that at the battle of Issus (October, 333 B.C.) the whole Macedonian army amounted to little more in numbers than the Greek mercenary centre of Darius which was but a small part of the Persian’s enormous, if undisciplined host.⁽²⁷⁾

 

Tahutmes, who ruled Egypt from 1501-1447 B.C. was the god-king of a great and ancient state to which occupation by the detested Hyksos had so recently taught a severe lesson in that which was modern warfare in those times. He was descendant of a line of kings 2000 years old or more, and it is very doubtful if he would have moved abroad without careful organization and planning.

 

To build his thousand or so chariots was needed the wood of Lebanon and Syria, and those districts surrounding the Gulf of Antioch.⁽²⁸⁾

 

Also was the craftsmanship of its cities of Ugarit and Alalakh needed, or at least, of that so strategic district, whatever its name at that time; also equal financial and industrial organization to that which clearly was available to the kingdom of Kadesh, suggested by Breasted to be the last flicker of political and military power of the Hyksos.⁽²⁹⁾

Thus it would appear that money creative power had definitely reestablished some form of agency in Egypt, where, under the conditions of the empire, its best interests lay. The agreement between Tahutmes and the Phoenician cities, particularly Tyre,⁽³⁰⁾ demonstrates concessions made to traders in order to obtain the sea-power which he so much needed for the success of his campaign against Kadesh.

 

The fact of gold and silver rings of a few grains weight circulating in Egypt as against day-to-day purchases,⁽³¹⁾ indicates the nature of the concessions by Tahutmes to that money creative force which undoubtedly drove the world-wide trade of the Phoenician cities. The gifts in silver bullion from the Kheta (or Hittites),⁽³²⁾ natural enemies of the kings of Mittani, indicate that they knew that which would be most welcome to the Pharaoh, and would most of all weaken his leanings towards friendship with Mittani, or other peoples likely to have been their enemies.

The temples of Egypt clearly retained immense wealth and holdings in land,⁽³³⁾ and still conducted their own trading expeditions.⁽³⁴⁾ However, from the reckoning of Breasted that one person in fifty, and one seventh of the land was owned by them,⁽³⁵⁾ it is clear that by the times of Rameses III (1198-1167 B.C.) and to whose reign this estimate is applicable, the true force behind kingly rule which is the will of the god, so that king and temple needed to own nothing, as being all in all, they owned all and were all, had long ago been gathered up by those promoting the conception of private ownership.

 

Such conception of private ownership would naturally derive from that right these persons had already arrogated to themselves to create and manipulate the monetary unit, tangible or abstract, and thereby stimulate the growth of a private enterprise for good or ill.

 

To such an extent had this change in the substructure of life proceeded, that, by the time of Solomon, first Hebrew king in Jerusalem ⁽³⁶⁾ (955 B.C. approx.), the chronicler was able to write: “And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver”;⁽³⁷⁾ therein being indication that the international money power of the day deemed it safe to locate its most important industry, which was that of armaments, in the land of Egypt; at least after the barbaric but definitely more “pliable” Libyan dynasty had become established.

Ancient ways and ancient morale gave way to foreign influences and the period of self-criticism and therefore self-immolation that always seems to follow the advent of the penetration of international money creative force. Such money creative force and its key arms manufacturies so much needed by the war powers of that day, would always continue to maintain itself, come what may.

 

Possibly its heartland was some area such as Switzerland today, that by tacit consent of all powers, remained neutral in all this strife, and whose neutrality would always be respected by the armed force of each of the struggling states.

Kadesh, and its allies, Arvad and Symyra, were the military force towards the destruction of which Tahutmes III directed his efforts.⁽³⁸⁾ The manufacturing cities of Alalakh and Ugarit on the lower Orontes river and bordering on the Gulf of Antioch, respectively, because of the widespread extent of their trading operations during the 13th Century B.C. until the time of their destruction at the end of that century by sea rovers, either ally or enemy of the confederacy known as the “Peoples of the Sea,” might very well be suspected of being headquarters of a money market at that time, even if the deep source of their money power existed in the Babylonian cities.

In being a centre for international trade and arms manufacture during the 13th century B.C., this area may very well be considered to have been a similar centre during the 15th Century B.C.: the more especially in consideration of the agreement which seemed to have existed between the Arameo-Phoenician cities (excluding Arvad and Symyra) and Tahutmes; at least those who guided his policies.

While therefore the neutrality of such areas was respected, money power in control of the movements of bullion internationally, safe behind this shield of neutrality as designers of the international money market, would be able to continue to manipulate war industries; always remaining in a position to allocate the latest of weapons to those states which offered them the best advantage in respect to their particular affair.

 

The rulers of that great Egypt after Tahutmes III and his conquests, although probably completely unaware of the extent of the power of this same international force, deriving as it did from the bazaars of the ancient cities of lower Mesopotamia, obviously needed its good graces when it carne to obtaining those materials and weapons so necessary for what in that time was modern warfare.

As a result, although the Egyptian empire in the earliest years might very well be described as a common market existing independent of Babylonian money power, and deriving its strength from the will to be of a dedicated and instructed Ruler, the sequence of events shows that through those concessions it obtained for its best services in war, it was not long before international money power re-penetrated the substructure of Egyptian life and established its usual behind-the-scenes influence, if not control, as in the earlier time that denoted the collapse of the “Old Kingdom”.

 

It may safely be considered to have reassumed the position of hidden power it had held a thousand years before during the closing years of the 6th Dynasty, a period in which the stone weights indicating equivalence in metal money ⁽³⁹⁾ circulated in much the same way as the clay facsimiles of contemporary coinages circulated in the Eastern Mediterranean area during the days of the Athenian empire, or as circulated the paper notes of today that formerly indicated claim on precious metal.

 

Further indication of the activities of private money creative force in this same period exists in the evidence of an extensive world-wide trade on land and sea revealed by those items of Egyptian manufacture discovered at Dorak in Anatolia by James Mellaart,⁽⁴⁰⁾ and the stone vases and ivory seals that were found in Crete;⁽⁴¹⁾ all of which dated from this time, and bore little evidence to suggest that they were in the nature of gifts between rulers.

Through “liberalism,” and so-called “progressive teachings”, its most ancient instruments, wittingly or otherwise, towards the continuance of its secret hegemony, reinstituted international money creative force seems to have brought the host land of Egypt to where it was at the time of Akhenaton (1375 to 1358 B.C.), and the Tel Amarna letters which tell of self-destruction and decay, the rejection of old values and beliefs, and the indifference of the a Egyptian rulers to their trust, and to the crumbling of Empire.

 

The degeneracy and complacence of the age was revealed by the fruitless outcry out of Asia from the vassals of the Pharaoh; being particularly exemplified by the despairing pleas of king Abdikhiba of the most ancient city of Jerusalem for assistance against the pressure of the armed assaults of the Habiru.⁽⁴²⁾

In the meantime the military might of those grim warriors of the shaft graves of Mycenae continued to grow, and they clearly could be relied on to supply the master moneyers of that ancient world with gold and silver and slaves.

 

Therein these robber rulers, best known from the Homeric sagas, were but the instruments by which the mysterious worshippers of the anti-god, the controllers of the extensive money creative force deriving from the Mesopotamian cities, unseen, but all-seeing, slowly undermined the walls of the temple states of the ancient world, of Crete, of Mycenae, of Troy, of Bog-Haz Koi and of Egypt too, so finally and so completely, that little memory or record existed, except in the case of Egypt; even during that period which is known as antiquity; that is the period of the flourishing of Greece and Rome.

What, therefore, did the international money creative fraternity of that day need from those states that clearly forbad their trade or settlement as corruptors of all true order and peace in life, and that thus rejected their blandishments; or from any other state for that matter?... What other than the plunder out of sack and ruin by those wild men they brought in from distant lands to North and to South... and to whom they offered the sweet-smelling women, the sunlit gardens, the gold and the silver; which of course would soon be theirs in any case...

Of all those cities and states without number, and many without name, why they disappeared, or when, both as actual sites, or names intertwined with historical memory is not known; nor the story of the ending; for as at Pylos,⁽⁴³⁾ and Cnossos,⁽⁴⁴⁾ and Ugarit ⁽⁴⁵⁾ too, in so many cases the flames were the final gesture of fate which made durable to the end of time, the clay libraries and archives thus sharply defining the end of their compilation and leaving no record further.

The last thrust of the relatively wild men of the North and West against Egypt, and that Egypt survived to still continue to write its name upon the page of history for yet a thousand years, even if with a hand growing ever more weary, if successful, would have revealed the same picture. It is clear that the organization of all those Western and Northern peoples in confederation against Egypt during the reign of the Pharaoh Merneptah (1236 B.C.-1236 B.C.) was not of haphazard design.

 

Tehennu, Sherden (or Sardinians) Shekelesh (or Sikeli, the early natives of Sicily), Achaeans, Lycians, Teresh (or Etruscans), Danae (obviously deriving from the Goths of the Northern shores of Europe and very likely the forefathers of those in the Israelitish confederacy who described themselves as “Dan”),⁽⁴⁶⁾ all these nations known as “The Peoples of the Sea”, could not have been brought together as a fairly disciplined group without some more internationally wise advisors in the close circle surrounding King Meryey of the Libyans than his own Libyan advisors.

 

Egypt still contained in temple and burial house a great part of the gold washed from the rivers of Africa over a thousand years or more, despite the plunder in gold the so-called Hyksos had carried with them into the desert some three hundred and fifty years before.

 

Whether Egypt fell, or the confederate host fell, either way was profit to the international bullion traders whose agents would have equally followed Egyptian or confederate...

After this total victory, largely won by the skill and discipline that existed in the Egyptian archery, of copper, still a most valuable metal of war, 9000 swords alone were surrendered to Merneptah.

 

A further one hundred and twenty thousand pieces of other copper military equipment were also surrendered; of weapons and vessels in silver and gold, over three thousand pieces were taken from the camp of the rulers and chiefs; this latter spoil including many swords of gold and silver...

The Kings are overthrown, saying ‘salam !’
Not one holds up his head among the nine Nations of the Bow.

Wasted is Tehennu,
The Hittite Land is pacified,
Plundered is Canaan with every evil,
Carried off is Askalon,
Seized upon is Gezer,
Yenoam is made as a thing not existing.
Israel is desolated, her seed is not
Palestine has become a defenceless widow for Egypt.
All Lands are united, they are pacified;
Every one that is turbulent is bound by King Merneptah...⁽⁴⁷⁾

It is interesting to note that although the hosts that fell at the battle of Perire, numbering at least nine thousand, were almost all from the West, according to the poem recorded above, Merneptah almost immediately turned his attention to the peoples of the East.

 

Judging by this record of the stele, he paid some special attention to an Israel never previously referred to in Egyptian history.

 

Such Israel would undoubtedly be a confederacy established during the 13th Century B.C. by Canaanitic tribes, elements such as the fragments of the “Hyksos” or Shepherd Kings, whatever their correct designation, and that had disappeared into the desert some 350 years before pursued by the chariots of Ahmose I,⁽⁴⁸⁾ elements deriving from the “Peoples of the Sea” perhaps, and the Habiru, also known as 'Apiru or Khabiri...

...But who was who, or why, or what, little concerned that brain centre in Babylon or Ur, or wherever it was... Whoever they professed to be, or to belong to, meant nothing. Out of death and destruction was their harvest, whether those they said were their own, were theirs or not. The only reality was control of precious metal... Out of death and destruction came the releasing in that day of the all important hoards of stored bullion, and the renewal of the slave herds to be consumed in mining ventures in distant places, garnering the increase of such precious metals...⁽⁴⁹⁾

Further, as kingly rule weakened, with the increasing circulation of fraudulent receipts for precious metals and other valuables supposedly on deposit, this highly secretive inter-stratum of merchant classes controlled by these monopolists of money through monopoly of control of precious metal bullion, postulated by Professor A.L. Oppenheim to be Aramaic speaking during the first Millennium B.C.,⁽⁵⁰⁾ would be able of finance much larger manufacturing systems than had been possible from the highly discriminatory temple loans of earlier days.

 

Ugarit and Alalakh previously mentioned, were but early instances...

 

While the purpose of the temple was to cause the people to live godly lives as according to the customs of the day and to preserve them from straying out of the ways of righteousness as it were, the secret and private money creative power, being more concerned with the opposite, the needs of the anti-god, the destruction of the people’s lives, whether of king, priest, nobleman, or merchant, or he who labored in the field, loaned without such discrimination...

 

Out of the resulting confusion amongst rulers could come nothing but advantage to themselves and their purposes; out of the break up of family and home and tradition, all that the dedicated servant of the god has in life, would come an exhausted and confused people, more ready to accept slavery.⁽⁵¹⁾

 

Corruption of the priesthood, as in today, was the chief aim of money conspiracy, and by causing such priesthood to lose sight of its high purpose and itself as the voice of god on earth, success in all its other purposes, naturally followed.

“Documents of the third level originate in autonomous economic bodies ranging from collective agricultural organizations centered in families, to what often constitutes de facto private enterprise inside and outside cities. The distribution of the evidence in volume and importance varies with time and region”...⁽⁵²⁾

Private enterprise depended on privately issued money and of such was silver.

 

Thus towards the establishment of manufacturies, they, the international bullion controllers needed the connivance of those corrupted temple officials who had lost sight of the meaning of that god-given power of money creation which had been theirs, and without which the god himself, the real ruler of the city, could not be truly maintained.

 

By the time these temple officials were brought to enter into such connivance, they would be past realizing or caring, for that matter, about the destructive effects to their powers and purposes which lay in so permitting private issuance of money into circulation amongst the people by way of precious metals, or receipts for such precious metals or valuables, supposedly on deposit for safekeeping with prominent merchant houses; thus they would be easily manipulated...

With the extension of the growth of exchanges to a silver standard such as would derive from the circulation of false receipts issued against silver or valuables reputedly on deposit for safe keeping, no special outlay in precious metals was needed other than possibly bribes to court and temple officials.

 

These men, the controllers of bullion movements internationally, and of almost equal consequence, the slave trade, now that their knowledge of the frauds relating to the use of precious metal money, and consequently their knowledge of that which is now known as “capital” was becoming perfected, were bringing into being extensive private industries, the most important of which, as pointed out previously, were the industries relating to war.

 

Towards the promotion of any particular industry as required by the bankers, no doubt ambitious slaves or freedmen as eager for money as their counterparts today, could be always found.

It was clearly understood that those receipts representing the weight of silver or the valuables assessed as according to a silver standard, that the bankers were supposed to have on deposit for safe keeping, which circulated by custom, or by law which is custom, as money as to represent a definite amount of exchange units, while accepted as money, were money....

 

The fact that the people accepted them as such, made them so. Their cost to the money manipulators, bullion brokers, or whatever their designation, being but that of the clay in the tablet and the scribe’s entry thereon...

After the final triumph of the international money creative fraternity which may be identified in Mesopotamia with that period of conquest, re-conquest, and conquest again that began with that invasion of Sumeria by the Gutim in 2270 B.C., and ended with the collapse of the Empire of Ur of Ibi-Sin before the Elamite rebels with their Amorite allies in 2030 B.C., and their taking away to Susa as captive, both the cult statue of the Lord Nannar, the Moon God together with the King Ibi-Sin himself, earthly viceroy of that God, those agents of International Money Power, quickly concluded the work of destruction ⁽⁵³⁾ through liberalism and permissiveness, no doubt, so that by 1900 B.C., the Sumerian had totally lost his national and racial identity and will to be...

 

What continued from then on was, without a doubt, a mixed breed with no special allegiance to anything other than “money”.⁽⁵⁴⁾

Such agents are shown by the general evidence of history to be a class of dubious origins and antecedents. Imbued with racial self-hatred, these rascals, who are raised up in a time of national exhaustion, against the former natural system of rule, by a triumphant money power, too often are particularly distinguished by a readiness to please those who it seems to them are the masters; even to the downgrading and debauchment of their own kind.

 

The apathy of a controlled public opinion to the deluge of perverted sex drenching the Anglo-Saxon countries today, which could not take place without the connivance of the so-called rulers, if only through their failure to take any serious steps towards controlling its source, is, herein, instance enough.

However, until the violent disruptions of caravaneering about 1800 B.C.,⁽⁵⁵⁾ the manufactures of Mesopotamia continued to flow Northwards as against precious metals, principally silver and raw materials; and no doubt that trading area or common market formerly controlled by the rulers of the III^rd Dynasty at Ur, continued to exist; though no longer with the Lord Nannar ⁽⁵⁶⁾ as signing authority.

The growing manufacturies of Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt in the time of the Empire, Ur in the reign of Ibi-Sin, and of all the well-populated world which is now known as the Near East, were instigated as a result of those secret money creative processes known only to that class of persons who have already been detailed as best as is possible out of the fragmentary evidence available, to be controlling external trade out of the Mesopotamian plain.

 

Such manufacturies, trading to the ends of the known world, would have drained south the silver of Greece, of Thrace, of Illyria, and Carpathia; indeed from wherever it could be obtained, it would have flowed as against settlement of trade balances, to Mesopotamia.

Consequently, by the time of the Assyrian assumption of control over Aram, and Arabia, and Egypt during the first half of the first Millennium B.C., money, as being a creation of the god of the city toward the well-being and good life of his people, had become a conception of which sight had been almost completely lost.

 

It had come to be the silver injected into circulation by private persons, who by then, in reality, if not so far as went general appearances, through manipulation of that inverted pyramid of ledger credit page entry money erected on the silver they claimed to hold in reserve, as apex, had now completely usurped the essential power of the temple: the creation and allocation of the unit of exchange.

 

Thus the total design of the city which derived from the power of rejection or preferment formerly exercised through the money creative powers of the god through king and priesthood, fell into their hands, and where in earlier days a devoted priesthood exercised its prerogative of preferment through money creation, towards the people living a god-ordered and pious life, each man in harmony with his neighbors,⁽⁵⁷⁾ those new international forces that now exercised the reality of such rule from the counting houses, contemptuous of all kingly and godly power as undoubtedly they were, but still needing such power as front behind which they might shelter in order to better pursue their nefarious purposes, spread hate and suspicion, each man of his brother.

Secretly promoting the concept of “Permanent Revolution” as being most suited towards the maintenance of their control, no sooner did stable and natural god-ordered government come again, then, feverishly digging at its roots, they tore it down.

 

Out of break-up of family and home, out of lust and drunkenness, out of the people living in disorder, and love giving way to hate, they throve.

 

Where they saw signs of nobility and natural aristocracy in living and thought, returning, financial preferment was automatically withdrawn... He who was consumed with animal desires and ignobility of purpose, was their man and eagerly their slave, and willing betrayer of his brethren into what was planned for them by his master.

Even though certain priesthood continued to maintain vigorous temple organizations long after the international control came about such as was exercised by the great Babylonian financial houses, it may safely be assumed that such temple organizations continued to exist only on account of their deference to these new controllers of international exchanges...

 

In a similar manner did the Egyptian priesthood defer to the power of Joseph as Vizier to the Pharaoh; as a result of which, while all other lands in Egypt were expropriated and returned to State ownership and administration, its lands, such as appertained to the temples, were not touched in any way.⁽⁵⁸⁾

 

Thus was a corrupted and short-sighted priesthood brought to acquiesce in the enthronement of its enemies, and the enemies of the god it represented.

 

For Joseph clearly was agent of an external Money Power, and while the Pharaoh leaned on him, he and that force behind him were clearly the rulers... de facto if not de jure, they were in the place of the Pharaoh...

 

 

References

1. Heinrich Schlieman: Mycenae, pp. 157; 241; 242. Blom; New York, 1967 (reprint)

2. It is also interesting to note that amongst so much precious metal was also found a large number of oyster shells and unopened oysters; also weapons of obsidian. Although Heinrich Schlieman was convinced he had found the grave of Agamemnon who had lead the heroes to before the walls of Troy, the obsidian weapons and the oyster shells indicated that this grave belonged to a much earlier age again than that of Agamemnon; an age perhaps even previous to that in Which occurred those disturbances that brought down into ruin so much of the ancient world, of which Sumeria, Crete, Mycenae, Egypt and the Empire of the Hittites were but part.

At the time of Schlieman’s diggings at Mycenae, practically nothing was known of the extensive use of shell money in ages long gone by, but as a result of the extensive studies of recent years, particularly those of Paul Einzig (Primitive Money; London 1949.), and of Mrs. Kingston-Higgins (A Survey of Primitive Money, London; 1949.), it is quite clear that the oyster shells found in the Mycenaean graves were reference days more ancient again than those of Agamemnon and the Heroes.

 

They belonged to a day already nearly forgotten, when shells were money, and money, not only amongst simple societies, but also amongst some highly organized societies was shells... In the I Chiag, one of the earliest books of the Chinese, 100,000 dead shell fish are given as the equivalent of riches. The famous dictionary of the Emperor Kang Hsi (1662 A.D. - 1723 A.D.) based on the Shuo Wen of Hsu Shin who died about A.D. 120, says pei denotes sea creatures that live in shells. The character pei was included in most characters relating to wealth. It is included in many such characters in the latest Chinese dictionaries.

3. Henry J. Breasted: P. 142.

4. F.W. Madden: Coins of the Jews, pp. 9-10.

5. Chron. I. xxxi. 25.

6. 2. Kings. V.5.

7. Isaiah. xlvi.6.

8. Job. xxviii. 15.

9. Genesis, xxiv. 22.

10. Genesis. xiv. 22.

11. Alexander del Mar: A History of Monetary Systems in Various States, P. 38.

12. James H. Breasted: A History of Egypt, pp. 97-98. Of the latter years of the Old Kingdom remarks made by the scholarly writer of the articles on Egypt in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th Edn.):

" The sixth Dynasty was probably a family of a different part of Egypt. It has left many records which indicate less centralization at Memphis than those of earlier Sovereigns; and mark the beginning of wars for predatory purposes and extension of territory. This change is accompanied by a less careful style of sculpture and less pains in the excavation of tombs as though the Egyptians were gaining a larger horizon, or, it may be, exchanging religion for ambition..."

However, speculation more to the point might very well be as to whether or not the Egyptians of this period were making an exchange of the deep harmony in living as had obtained under the true and natural order under which they had lived so long, for that disorder in life which necessarily derived from the ferment known as "Progress"; one of the essential factors by which private (and hence irresponsible) money creative power maintains its total hegemony, once its control is established amongst a people.

13. Exodus. xii, 35. Exodus iii, 22. (King James Version).

14. Deuteronomy. xiv, 24-26. (King James Version)

15. Such a period may very well have been the several centuries preceding the collapse of the caravan trade in Mesopotamia, in the 18th century B.C.

16. In the words of Professor F.W. Albright writing of the findings of his studies relative to the caravan trade and the organization of the donkey caravans of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries B.C.:

"It became particularly obvious that the previously enigmatic occupational background of Abraham becomes intelligible only when we identify the terms Ibri 'Hebrew', (previously 'Abiru) with 'Apiru, later 'Abiru, literally 'person from across or beyond'."

(The Amarna Letters from Palestine; Cambridge Ancient History; Vol. II, P. 17.)

17. T.B.L. Webster: From Mycenae to Homer, P. 22; London; 1964.

18. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 226. New York; 1969.

19. Ibid.

20. T.B.L. Webster: From Mycenae Homer, P. 22.

21. John Chadwick: The Decipherment of Linear "B"; Cambridge; 1958

22. Henry J. Breasted: A History of Egypt, P. 214.

23. T.B.L. Webster: From Mycenae to Homer, P. 18.

24. Henry J. Breasted: A History Egypt, pp. 284-321.

25. Henry J Breasted: A History of Egypt, P. 217.

26. Ibid. P. 292.

27. According to J.B. Bury (History of Greece, P. 744; Random House edn.), Alexander’s total army numbered no more than 30,000 foot and 5000 horse. The Greek hoplite centre of Darius, against which was thrown the full weight of the relatively puny Macedonian phalanx, itself numbered 30,000 men.

28. Encyclopaedia Britannica; 9th Edn.; Vol. XXII; P. 823.

29. Henry J. Breasted: A History of Egypt, pp. 293, 305.

30. Henry J. Breasted: A History of Egypt. P. 298. New York; 1956.

31. Ibid. P. 307.

32. Ibid. P. 304.

33. Ibid. P. 491.

34. Ibid. P. 485.

35. Ibid. P. 491.

36. Ibid. P. 529.

37. Kings. 10, 29.

38. Six hundred years later these cities of Arvad and Symyra seemed also to have attracted the special attention of Assyria. In this case they were friend and ally set up in opposition to the other Arameo-Phoenician cities.

39. Henry J. Breasted: A History of Egypt, pp. 97-98.

40. Stuart Piggott: Dawn of Civilization, P. 168. (New York; 1961) See also P. 28 in T.B.L. Webster (Mycenae to Homer).

41. Colin Renfrew: The Emergence of Civilization, P. 448.

42. One of the most eloquent of his letters to the Pharaoh (Winkler’s Translation of the Tel Amarna Letters. P. 181.) is as follows:

"The King’s whole land which has begun hostilities with me, will be lost. Behold the territory of Shiri (Seir) as far as Ginti-Kirmil (Carmel), its princes are wholly lost, and hostility prevails against me... as long as ships were upon the sea, the strong arm of the King occupied Narahin and Kash, but now the Khabiri (Habiru) are occupying the King’s cities. There remains not one prince to my lord the King, everyone is ruined... Let the King take care of his land, and... let him send troops... For if no troops come this year, let the King send his officer to fetch me and my brothers, that we may die with our lord the King."...

While the Pharaoh and his court, drenched with foreign influences, meditated at Tel Amarna upon the illusion of One World and its alien gods, the One World that had been the reality created by the sword of his more vigorous forebears, was crumbling to dust.

43. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 209. (New York; 1968).

44. T.B.B. Webster: From Mycenae to Homer, P. 23.

45. W.F. Albright: Syria, the Philistines and Phoenicia; P. 31; Cambridge, 1966. Of the case of the identification of the date of destruction of Ugarit through finding the last tablets placed in the oven, Professor Albright writes:

"Publication of the documents from the Tablet Oven excavated in 1954, provides a solid basis for dating the fall of Ugarit which must have occurred within a very short time after the tablets were placed in the oven. Two letters are particularly important: RS 18.38 and RS 18.40... The second letter, written by an Ugaritic official to the king of Ugarit, says that he is in Lawasanda (Lawasantiya), watching the approaches from the East together with the king of Siannu. The latter 'has fled and... was killed'."

46. Clearly the Danae were the Argives or Danaän of Homer’s Iliad. The arrows of Apollo Shootafar that appear (Book I) to have driven the Danaän back to their ships with great slaughter, could very well have been those of the dreaded archers of Egypt under Pharaoh Merneptah; thus bearing no real relation to the events at Troy except as was convenient to the poet as he endeavored to thread together fragments of a heroic tale out of the long ago...

47. Henry J. Breasted: A History of Egypt, P. 469.

48. Sir William Mathew Flinders-Petrie; A History of Egypt, P. 256. London; 1897.

49. Diodorus Siculus (A. del Mar: History of the Precious Metals, P. 40) gives striking picture of the horrors of marginal profit gold mining as carried out with slave labour in ancient times in the Bisharee district of Nubia (B.C. 50).

"There are thus infinite numbers thrown into these mines, all bound in fetters kept at work night and day, and so strictly surrounded that there is, no possibility of their effecting an escape. They are guarded by mercenary soldiers of various barbarous nations, whose language is foreign to them and to each other, so that there are no means of forming conspiracies or of corrupting those who are set to watch them.

 

They are kept to incessant work by the rod of the overseer, who often lashes them severely. Not the least care is taken of the bodies of these poor creatures; they have not a rag to cover their nakedness; and whoever sees them must compassionate their melancholy and deplorable condition, for though they may be sick, maimed or lame, no rest nor any intermission of labour is allowed them.

 

Neither the weakness of old age, nor the infirmities of females excuse any from the work, to which all are driven by blows and cudgels; until borne down by the intolerable weight of their misery, many fall dead in the midst of their insufferable labours. Deprived of all hope, these miserable creatures expect each day to be worse than the last, and long for death to end their sufferings."

50. Leo A. Oppenheim: Letters from Mesopotamia; P. 57, Chicago 1967.

51. Criticizing the prescription by Plato of community of wives, etc. for the ruling classes of his Republic, Aristotle wrote:

"It would be far more useful applied to the agricultural class. For where wives and children are held in common (and, as according to Plato, all love was to be indiscriminate as between male, female, relation, or otherwise), there is less affection, and a lack of strong affection among the ruled is conducive to obedience and not to revolution."

(The Politics. Book II. Ch. 4.).

Aristotle, as tutor and advisor to Alexander " The Great ", also as husband of the niece of Hermias, banker-tyrant of Assos and Atarneus, had clearly seen efforts towards practical application of these mischievous "philosophies" of political conduct.

52. Leo A. Oppenheim: Letters from Mesopotamia, P. 30.

53. The relative poverty of the tombs of the 3rd Dynasty at Ur and the pathetic substitutes for the precious metals with which the dead had been adorned in earlier days, reveal the same withering up process that seems to attack any state exposed over any length of time to the exactions of a private money creative power maintaining itself by control of precious metals and the merry-go-round of trade for trade’s sake.

54. Thus the way was paved for the Semitic city of Babylon to institute itself as the leader of Mesopotamia. However, although politically displacing and absorbing the original race of Sumer, it functioned as but the prophet of Sumer, a mirror of the past giving renewed vigour to a culture that had been evolved long ago. (A History of Babylon, pp. 2-3, L.W. King.).

55. Albright: The Amarna Letters from Palestine. Cambridge Ancient History; Vol. II; pp. 17-18.

56. The Moon God of Ur.

57. There are evidences of a piety and reverence in those ancient days, and of longing by mankind for guidance from an unknown God, little different to that piety to which the rise of Christianity gave revival, and which still exists in homes that withstand the uproar of the age, and stand aside from the destructive forces that seek to guide it.

 

According to E.G.H. Kraeling in Aram and Israel (P. 26):

In the scriptures of Sumeria we have:

Si dilini — "Sin (or Si) hath set me free."
Si idri — "Sin is my help (in a time of need)."
Si aqabi — "Sin hath endowed (or bestowed upon me)."
Sin or Si being the name of the God

In the adoration of Nashu (or Nusku of the Assyrians) we have:

Nashu-dimri — "Nashu is my protection."
Nashu gabri — "Nashu is my hero."
Nashu sagab — "Nashu is exalted."
Nashu Qatari — "Nashu is my rock (of salvation)."
Nashu aili — "Nashu is my strength."

In the adoration of Adad we have:

Adad hutni — "Adad is my protection."

In the adoration of Ai (The Lunar Deity of the Arabians) we have:

Ia abba "Ai is my Father. "
Ia Manis "Ai is my Right Hand."
Alla sharu "God is King! (and Lord of all!)

58. Genesis. Chapter 57, Verse 22. According to Michael Grant: (Jews in the Roman World, P. 7), there are scholars who consider this Pharaoh to have been Akhenaton.

Back to Contents


 

THE LEFT HAND OF DAWN

Both according to François Lenormant ⁽¹⁾ and the Cambridge Ancient History,⁽²⁾ cheques were in use in Babylonia from the earliest times. Such use of cheques has also been verified as having existed at Ur during the 3rd and 4th Millenniums B.C. by Sir Charles L. Woolley, and no doubt, by other archaeologists at other sites.

As the only clear meaning that can be given to the law No. 7 of Hammurabi, indicates that also were known in the 3rd Millennium or earlier, the principles of private money creation through the creation of receipts as against valuables on deposit with persons of “Repute,” the existence of all the abuses against the men of the city, deriving from the exercise of the principles of inflation and deflation of the total number of such receipts indicating given numbers of the unit of exchange, may be deemed to have existed.

 

These inflations or deflations of the volume of the mass of abstract money, which indeed such false receipts may be called, and such as are particularly associated with the custom of making payments by cheque drawn on “deposits” created by such receipts as issued by such persons “of repute,” and which could be manipulated as suited themselves and their friends etc., were directed towards creation of total monopoly of wealth and industry.

Further, as according to Paul Einzig, “a credit system developed in Greece as in other parts of the ancient world long before the adoption of coinage,” ⁽³⁾ it may reasonably be supposed that well before the flood of refugees that must have poured out of Aram in the earlier days of the first millennium B.C. as a result of the Assyrian onslaught, Babylonian money power had already established branch agencies on the coast of Greece, and in the Mycenaean centers generally, from which they loaned their clay “promises to pay”, expressed in terms of silver no doubt, as against collateral.

 

Such loans could be used to purchase those luxury goods and arms which were brought from the Syrian or Mesopotamian cities; but although the original loan had been but an entry in the ledger of the agent, probably, in the final analysis costing little more than the labor of slave scribe, the repayment demanded would be silver or slaves, or other equally desirable goods.

Clear evidence of the existence of this Babylonian force in the Mycenaean cities was yielded by verification of the fact of the existence of the mythological Cadmus of Grecian Thebes, reputedly Phoenician (Phoenician being simply a word used by the Greeks to describe those people that came to trade from the ports of Syria and Canaan), having probably been reality.

 

This historical fact was revealed by the discovery in modern day Thebes in the area that in ancient times must have been the national storehouses, of cylinders containing seals of a high dignitary of the court of King Burraburias who reigned in the city of Babylon in the first half of the 14th Century B.C.; which unmistakably suggested Cadmus, and his real part in the affairs of Thebes and those cities with which it was connected.⁽⁴⁾

 

Further evidence of the activities of the Babylonians is indicated by the discovery of their seals in the Cyclades.

These trading stations established in Mycenae long before Homer, would have functioned very much as did the European trading stations on the West Coast of Africa during the eighteenth century A.D.⁽⁵⁾ They were points from which agents of international money power could instigate internal warfare amongst the tribes, so that they would always have ready market for the products of their arms and other industries; the most desirable payment for these products being precious metals and slaves; as much in ancient times as in modern times.

As previously pointed out, the warrior princes of Mycenaean Greece had undoubtedly maintained steady supplies of these commodities as the result of their depredations over many years.

 

But once they had thrown all their resources and military power into the gamble across the sea which was the campaign of the King of Lydia and the “Peoples of the Sea” against Pharaoh Merneptah of Egypt, and which ended in total disaster for them at the battle of Perire, the years of strength, and plenty, and being feared by their enemies were over...

It may reasonably be assumed that their total destruction while in confederation with the tribes and kingdoms of the Western Mediterranean at Perire on the Western marches of the Egyptian Delta in 1234 B.C., by the discipline of the massed archers of Pharaoh Merneptah, would have marked the Apogee of the parabola of their rise and fall.⁽⁶⁾

 

In that battle it was proven that they had over-reached themselves, and, as history records, their descent from that Apogee was swift. Despite the excellence of their weapons and the skill at diplomatic maneuver of those forces supporting them, such as lay hid within the Babylonian money power, although so much of that world of ancient time had fallen before their fine copper weapons and their chariots, as a result of that unhappy battle, all such equipment was gone; and more than thinking of further conquests abroad, thought had to be for defense of hearth and home.

If then the latest estimate of the date of the battle of Perire, given as 1234 B.C. by W.F. Albright,⁽⁷⁾ is correct, that the destruction of Egypt itself was planned over the period of 16 years or so following the sack of Troy (1250 B.C. according to the modern dating and that of Herodotus), is reasonable supposition. The organizing, arming, and training of such widely diverse peoples as formed the army of King Meryey of Lybia, would have taken many years of careful planning.

Considering that the plunder that acceded to Pharaoh Merneptah, after the battle, of at least ten thousand swords, mostly copper and bronze, the rest gold and silver, and the 120,000 pieces of other military equipment in copper and bronze, under the methods of production of that day represented years of work,⁽⁸⁾ perhaps Merneptah did not on this occasion melt them into bullion, or sell them to the agents of international money power who undoubtedly were amongst those camp followers appearing to support his army.

 

He may have made the obvious move, as is suggested by the fall of Pylos about 1200 B.C.⁽⁹⁾ of using this plunder in weapons to arm the tribes of Epirus, and perhaps farther North, who clearly would be the natural enemies Achaeans.

 

These tribes, although recorded by some as being shepherds, were just as likely to have been slaves revolting from the mining industries established by the Babylonian money power through the instrumentality of the Achaeans and Mycenaeans; which mining industries produced the gold that was such a commonplace in the homes of the nobility of Mycenaea and the silver that was so much needed for the maintenance of that financial system based on silver by weight which was the foundation of what may have become, by this time, a total world hegemony of private money creative power.

Following is a digression on the mining industries that existed in Greece and to the North about the time of Cadmus who, as previously pointed out, was one of the principal Babylonian agents to the Mycenaean world. His approximate date may very well be known from the dating of the seal found at Grecian Thebes;⁽¹⁰⁾ which reveals that Cadmus probably lived during the reign of King Burnaburiash (sometimes known as Burraburiash) of Babylon, who was contemporary of King Tutankhamen of Egypt (1358-1353 B.C.).

 

The same Burnaburiash is best known by his letter to King Tutankhamen as was found in the Tel Amarna archives, in which, pleading for gold in no uncertain terms, he achieves an immortal fame ⁽¹¹⁾...

Nearly one hundred years before the more extensive knowledge of these times, such as exists today, Alexander Del Mar, relying on his own observations as a mining engineer, and on the records of the ancients, wrote as follows respecting the mines from which the agents of the world-wide Babylonian financial hegemony, such as Cadmus of Thebes drew their steady flow of gold and silver...

After description of the thoroughness of Roman mining in Spain in the Asturias, and detailed mention of Laureion near Athens, he continues:

... Thassus, an island off the Thracian coast (written Thasso by the Greeks and Thassus by Livy) was originally colonized by the Phoenicians...

Thassus itself is probably a corruption of Iassus for Pausanias informs us that Thassus was the son of Agenor, the brother of Europa, and the leader of the Phoenicians (and therefore, brother of Cadmus the founder of Thebes) ⁽¹²⁾ which are details that belong to the myth of Iassus. Herodotus says that he himself visited the island of Thassus, where he saw a temple to the Thasian Hercules 'erected by the Phoenicians, who built Thassus while they were engaged in the search for Europa, an event which happened five generations before Hercules, the son of Amphytryon, was known in Greece.' The “Thasian Hercules” was Iassus.

We know but little more of the early history of Thasus beyond the fact that its mines were celebrated for their yield of gold and silver; that the most productive ones were in the S.E. district between Aenyra and Coenyra; and that the Thasians, in addition to the mines of the island, owned and worked those of Scapte Hyle (or Scaptesyla) on the Thracian main. These last in the time of Darius yielded an average annual product worth or equal to 80 talents. The mines on the island did not produce so much at this period, although at an earlier one they had annually yielded between two or three hundred talents.

About 60 miles S.S.E. of Cape Sunium is the island of Siphnos, which in the time of Polycrates B.C. 580-22 and perhaps long before, was famous for its rich mines of gold and silver.

'Their soil produced both gold and silver in such abundance that from a tenth part of their revenues they had a treasury at Delphos equal n value to (all) the riches which that temple possessed.'

In the Roman period, time of Strabo, Siphnos was noted for its poverty:

for says Pausanias, speaking of the interval, 'Afterwards their gold mines were destroyed by an inundation of the sea.'

Mount Pangaeus is in Thrace on the River Nestus, about two hundred miles W.N.W. from Constantinople. Pliny says that the gold mines in this range were opened by Cadmus: indeed it is probable that all the mines in ancient Greece were opened by the Phoenicians or the Venetians, before they were worked by the Greeks.

 

Phillip of Macedon about B.C. 358, being informed that in ancient times (that would be previous to the so-called Dark Ages of Greece) ⁽¹³⁾ these mines had been productive, caused them to be reopened, with the result that he obtained from them annually more than a thousand talents. It is from the gold of Pangaeus that he struck his “Phillips,” whose type during the following century was so extensively copied by the Gauls.

The island of Samos, once called Cypar-Issa, is on the west coast of Asia Minor near the mouth of the Caystrus and ruined Ephesus. It was colonized originally by the Bacchidae, who were presumably Phoenicians or Venetians and who, on being driven out of Samos by the Ionians, settled afterwards in Samothrace. We know little of the early history of Samos...

 

The Samian mines were of gold and silver, the ores of which were reduced on the river Imbrasus. The extant gold, silver, and electrum coins of Samos are numerous. Some of those commonly attributed to Sardis, were ascribed by Sestini to Samos. Herodotus reports that Polycrates bought off the Lacedaemonians, who tried to deprive him of the island, with a subsidy of lead coins thinly cased with gold, and thus cheaply got rid of his unwelcome visitors.

 

The mines of Samos were still worked in the time of Theophrastus, about 240 B.C., for he wrote concerning them:

'Those who work in these mines cannot stand upright, but are obliged to lie down either on their sides, or their backs: for vein they extract runs length-wise and is only two feet deep though considerably more in breadth and is enclosed on every side with hard rock. From this vein the ore is obtained.'

Mines of gold or silver or both were worked by the so-called Pelasgians in many parts of Greece, chiefly in the mountains of Albania, Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia, Servia, Thrace and Bulgaria. The remains of a smelting furnace composed of colossal hewn stones (once again the cyclopean stone works of Mycenae?),⁽¹⁴⁾ together with heaps of refuse silver ores, can still be seen in Albania, almost in sight from the houses of Corfu (Corcyra).

 

Similar structures and remains are said to exist in Dalmatia. In Bosnia at Slatnitza, on the road to Scopia, six miles from Traunick, the Romans worked gold mines on an extensive scale and they were probably worked by the Greeks before the Romans. There are reported to be gold mines in several mountains near Zvornick and Varech. The rivers Bosna, Verbatch, Drina, and Latchva are auriferous.

 

Many silver mines have been worked in the neighborhood of Rama or Prezos, Foinitca and other villages, called Sreberno, Srebernik, or Srebernitza. Cinnabar is obtained near the convent of Chressevo, and this deposit was probably worked for mercury in very ancient times. About B.C. 470, Alexander, son of Amyntas, possessed a mine near lake Prasis and Mt. Dysia in Macedonia, which yielded him a talent per diem.

In Serbia there were silver mines near Nova-Berda, and (Roman) gold mines near Saphina. Ancient mines of both gold and silver, chiefly the latter exist in other parts of Servia, but little is known of their early history. There are some twenty thousand acres of alluvions within fifty miles of Belgrade which might yet richly reward the hydraulic process. There is plenty of water with good heads and good grades for the gravel.

 

Bulgaria also abounds in mines of the precious metals, but like most of those within the territory comprised within Ancient Greece, they have fallen to ruins and their history is forgotten...

...In many parts of Greece or European Turkey, where ancient mines were worked, a superstition is said to prevent the peasantry from visiting them. Malte-Brun especially mentions this of the old Roman mines near Traunick, and we ourselves have noticed the same superstition in the vicinity of the Roman gold mines in the Carpathian foothills.

 

This superstition is probably due to the traditions of that cruel and relentless slavery to which their forefathers were subjected by the Greek and Roman Lords who once owned these mines. Valdivia, writing to the Emperor Charles V, declared that every castellano of gold from Peru cost a measure of human blood and tears. What was the cost of gold to the ancient Romans or the still more ancient Greeks, it would be hard to say: but a human life for every ounce would probably be well within the mark...⁽¹⁵⁾

For further information on mining in very ancient times in S.E. Europe, the activities of the Beaker people etc., the Cambridge Economic History should be consulted, though no special significance, such as obviously exists, will be pointed out therein relating this search for silver and gold to the private money creative system already well established in Babylonia at that time...

So to return to the main thread of this tale... It is clear that a relatively extensive, and hardened, and brutalized population existed in the localities of the mining industries of Epirus and farther North at the time of the flourishing of Crete, and Mycenae and of Cadmus of Thebes; formerly considered mythological, but clearly powerful agent of the Babylonian money power towards its search for the precious metals.

 

This population, largely slave, given weapons and organizations, as the vanguard of the so-called militant shepherds, could be a serious threat to the civilizations of the South, so concerned with peace and the pleasures deriving from trade etc., which is born out by the records of history, scant as they are...

It is to be noted that Ugarit, wherein the Achaean had trade centre after 1300 B.C., great port, and location of manufacturies, fell well previous to 1190 B.C., when Rameses III of Egypt appears to have finally checked the Southward advance of its destroyer;⁽¹⁶⁾ which suggests likelihood of them as having been those Northern people, not connected with the “Peoples of the Sea”, with whom Egypt undoubtedly established alliance at the time of the battle of Perire.

 

Such allies may very well have been those we know of as the Dorians, who, as is revealed by the tablets of Pylos, clearly were sea raiders in their earlier days in the Mediterranean area. Further verification of these conclusions, though not of the Dorian alliance, exists in the deductions of Professor Albright (Syria, the Philistines, and Phoenicia; P.31.), deriving from the information on the documents found in the Tablet Oven at Ugarit, that the sack of Ugarit, having obviously occurred shortly after the tablets were placed in the oven, dates from about 1234 B.C., which would be about the time of the victory of Merneptah of Egypt over the “Peoples of the Sea” at Perire.

The destruction Ugarit may very well have been an act of political revenge of a reawakened Egypt, working through the allies it would be raising up. For it is clear that the raiders who struck down this important city were well advised in that they chose the time for their attack as being when the ships of Ugarit had been ordered elsewhere, perhaps to Lydia, by the Hittites who appear to have been the overlords of the kings of Ugarit.⁽¹⁷⁾

 

These raiders obviously were also well armed. In that day, much more so than today, the question was not so much as whether men were available, as whether effective arms were available for them to bear.

Ugarit was undoubtedly centre from which arms and supplies were shipped to the Libyans and the “Peoples of the Sea”. In such, therefore, it would have been agency of that greater force seeking to design the end of Egypt as it bad been known; and waiting for its plunder of sliver and gold.

The main Achaean states, suffering serious shortage of arms as a result of the battle of Perire, which appears to be verified by the dearth of military equipment recorded by the Linear “B” tablets unearthed at Pylos, obviously written shortly before the full force of the attack came from the North, were wide open to the enemy.

 

On the reasonable assumption that Pharaoh Merneptah would have arranged for armed uprising of the numerous mine slaves to the North of Mycenaean Greece, together with organized attack from those nations of mid Europe, perhaps from as far afield as Denmark, trading partner of Mycenae,⁽¹⁸⁾ it would have been reasonable for him to have supplied them with officers particularly instructed in siege work, and the arms with which, as a result of Perire, his arsenals would have been so well equipped.

One thing is clear, the Dorians known to be destroyers of Pylos, an action which paved the way for their conquest of the Peloponnese, were well organized, with a strong esprit de corps which remained with them until the last days of Sparta, and were well armed as armaments went in those days. Having ships, as the tablets of Pylos reveal,⁽¹⁹⁾ they thus could maintain adequate supplies down the coast of the Adriatic.

 

Above all they must have had previous experience in siege work such as could have been gained in the wars against the Canaanitic cities, for the tremendous walls of both Mycenae and Tyryns could not have been taken but by well organized armies with a strong and experienced engineering corps... It may safely be considered that a considerable part of the excellent arms with which the Dorians must have been supplied, was the plunder of Perire.

 

The only uncertainty is whether these arms were obtained, as seems to be the usual thing in such circumstances, from the international money power direct, or from a scheming and resurgent Egypt where the god-king shone once again on the throne of the two lands, giving universal illumination as guide of his people's destiny...

 

After Perire, terrible battle that it must have been for the times, he certainly would have been in a position to “Divide and Rule”...

After all these events, largely indicating frustration of the schemes of international money creative power, particularly in its failure to bring about total collapse of that most ancient world which was Egypt, so far as Greece was concerned, there came a period known today as the “Dark Ages”; dark, because too little is known thereof.

 

Such was the magnitude of the disaster that swept over the Achaeans, weaponless as they very well may have been, that for a time those trading stations established by the Babylonians, and that had flourished for so long, through the crumbling of so much of what had been in ancient days, may have been reduced or even closed.⁽²⁰⁾

As however the turbulence died away, money power as centered in Mesopotamia. now with the plunder of half a dozen civilizations in its strong rooms, and a steady inflow of the precious metals deriving from the rapid expansion of the mining industry at that time, due to the improvement of the methods of exploration and smelting brought about by the use of tools of hardened iron, together with the availability of ample slave supplies as derived from all these wars, began to look around for new fields in which its power to create “Capital” could be used to best advantage.

 

Thus once again the money creators of Mesopotamia turned their eyes towards the idyllic shores of Greece, and its forested mountains and hills; Greece which was clearly the gateway to Europe, and, through its command of the routes to the Hellespont and the Black Sea, to further Asia...

Analyzing the sources, either Dorian or Ionian from which derived the impulses which gave driving force to the growth of the Greek industrial revolution, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1898) says:

...“The Ionian was that which most actively influenced the early development of Greece. But the Ionians themselves derived the most impulses of their progress from a foreign source. Those Canaanites or 'lowlanders' of Syria, whom we call by the Greek name of Phoenicians, inhabited the long narrow strip of territory between Lebanon and the sea.

 

Phoenicia, called 'Keft' by the Egyptians, had at a remote period contributed Semitic settlers to the Delta or 'Isle of Caphtor'; and it would appear from the evidence of the Egyptian monuments that the Kefa, or Phoenicians, were a great commercial people as early as the 16th Century B.C. Cyprus, visible from the heights of Lebanon, was the first stage of the Phoenician advance into the Western waters; and to the last there was a Semitic element side by side with the Indo-Europeans. From Cyprus the Phoenician navigators proceeded to the Southern coasts of Asia Minor, where the Phoenician colonists gradually blended with the natives, until the entire seaboard had become in a great measure subject to Phoenician influences.

 

Thus the Solymni, settled in Lycia, were akin to the Canaanites and the Carians, originally kinsmen of the Greeks, were strongly affected by Phoenician contact. It was at Miletus especially that the Ionian Greeks came into commercial intercourse with the Phoenicians. Unlike the dwellers on the southern seaboard of Asia Minor, they showed no tendency to merge their nationality in that of Syrian strangers.

 

But they learned from them much that concerned the art of navigation, as for instance, the use of the round built merchant vessels called , and also a system of weights and measures, as well as the rudiments of some useful arts.

 

The Phoenicians had first of all been drawn to the coasts of Greece in quest of the purple fish which was found in abundance off the coasts of the Peloponnesus and of Boeotia; other attractions were furnished by the plentiful timber for shipbuilding which the Greek forests supplied, and by veins of silver, iron, and copper ore.

Two periods of Phoenician influence on early Greece may be distinguished: first, a period during which they were brought into intercourse with the Greeks merely by traffic in occasional voyages; secondly a period of Phoenician trading settlements in the islands or on the coasts of the Greek seas, when their influence became more penetrating and thorough.

 

It was probably early in this second period, perhaps about the 9th century B.C. (probably the time of the first major Assyrian attack on the Arameans in 933 B.C.), that the Phoenician alphabet became diffused through Greece. This alphabet was itself derived from the alphabet of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics, which was brought into Phoenicia by the Phoenician settlers in the Delta.

 

It was imported into Greece, probably by the Arameo-Phoenicians of the Gulf of Antioch, not by the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, and seems to have superseded, in Asia Minor and the islands, a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be used in Cyprus down to a late time.

 

The direct Phoenician (I.E. Babylonian), influence on Greece lasted to about 600 B.C. (significantly about the time of the Seisachtheia at Athens, and the Laws of Lycurgus in Laconia). Commerce and navigation were the provinces that concerned the higher culture, the Phoenicians seem to have been little more than carriers from East to West of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian ideas...” ⁽²¹⁾

Although the existence of the cities of Ugarit and Alalakh in the region of the Gulf of Antioch was unknown when the above was written, neither therefore had knowledge of those days received the impetus of the information recorded in their tablet hoards, nor were Linear “A” and “B” known, much less deciphered, revealing so much of Mycenae and its time, and that which had been before, the opinions expressed by this 19th Century writer more or less agree with those recently expressed by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley,⁽²²⁾ despite the belief of Sir Leonard some 26 years previously, that the script of the (Aramaic) tablets of Ras Shamra, site of ancient Ugarit, derived from the cuneiform of Sumeria and Akkadia...⁽²³⁾

...And so to continue with the main thread of our narrative, it being thus quite clear that by 933 B.C., agencies for Babylonian imperialism were once again well established, in Greece, certainly in Ionia, and almost certainly farther afield on the Greek mainland, considering those favorable conditions existing in Greece at that time, the international money power of that day, in reality as blind a force to its own needs and purposes as it is today, on the advice of such Aramaean refugees no doubt, decided to reduce exports to Greece, and to finance the growth of native Greek manufactures. Such financing, whether through forgery of the existing currency of Greece, the iron or copper spits, out of the bloody scrap garnered from the fields of battle in Aram, or Arabia, or Israel, or Egypt; or by other methods known to them, as previously described, would present no problem.

Thus renewing more permanently the base from which their trade into Northern Europe might be conducted, winter or summer, they were guaranteed a more steady flow of Carpathian, Illyrian, Thracian, or Attican silver.

 

A base was also established from which the similar trade into the Pontic regions and South Russia could be better maintained; in addition could be reckoned on a growing industrial population to assist in the absorption of both Egyptian and South Russian surpluses of grain.

The petty but vigorous city states of Greece as existed and would come to exist, would form a good ground for experiment with money systems, and with new systems of government and, what is now-a-days called social systems.

 

In the fevered imagination of the money changers scheming in their shaded courtyards of Babylonia, such experiments might even show the way towards that for which their souls yearned above all, and which still they had not been able to bring about: the total disintegration of the last great kingdoms of earth, which, it seems, no sooner had they been brought to the point of collapse, than somehow they came to rise again...

“Kingship again being sent down from on High”.⁽²⁴⁾

The way might be shown to them by which they too, their God, themselves and theirs, might become Lords of the Earth; and indeed, whereby out of their midst might be set up that God-King who would preside over the governance of the Universe; its total and absolute ruler...

...And much of these strange yearnings came to be realized. The possibilities inherent in circulating pieces of precious metal of equal weight and fineness, and with the seal of state stamped thereon, as money, after the first major experiment therein in the Lydia of Croesus, were fully exploited in Greece...

 

No doubt these ancient Greeks, the same as our people in this day, fondly imagined that the state imprinted marks on their so-called coinage, denoted the absolute integrity of their money; and while they continued in this belief, they were the more easily manipulated.

Thus the power of rejection or appointment fell out of the withering hand of a decadent, if not dying priesthood, into that hand that moved over the disks of precious metal in the shadows of the counting house; and rather than noble and selfless men in positions of power, came low and venal men wielding but the appearance of power.

 

Such men being raised up from the blind mob, exercised no more control or rule than that which the forces behind money creation and issuance permitted to them; nor did they exercise guidance further than that limit dictated by the inferiority of their quality.

The Greek of those days, as the Englishman during the 17th Century A.D., was highly intelligent, industrious, and frugal, and he clearly served under his ancient and natural aristocracy proudly and gladly in war or in peace... His land was then covered with forests from which was available an ample supply of charcoal such as would last kilns and furnaces for a long time to come; from Thrace, not so far distant, came suitable timbers for shipbuilding...

 

Hence the spark that gave light to the life of the Greek city state must have been smoldering well before the introduction of coined money from Lydia and its attendant possibilities of controlled credit manipulations much greater than had ever been before.

Consequently, at the time of its emergence into the light of history as we know it, Greece was to the known world in the same way as was England during the 16th and 17th Centuries, when, due to the stealthy stimulation of a “Credit,” or abstract money economy, money greed injected into the nobility caused them to forget their trust.

 

The major manifestation of the forgetfulness of such trust was their seizure of the common lands for the purposes of sheep pasture, the growing wool trade now yielding good return in the expanding money economy; thus depriving the villagers of their rightful livelihood on the land, and leaving them with no option but emigration into the cities. In the cities these villagers served as labor in mine or factory, there being totally at the mercy of rascals from foreign parts, or those who bad been raised up from their own ranks as most eager for food, and who were least critical of the hand that offered it to them.

So far as Greece was concerned, on to a scene idyllic in the loveliness of its tree clad hills and mountains and shores, came men from that Aramaic speaking money power out of Syria and Aram, plausible men who wept and moaned to the pitying Greek the slaughter of their people by the Assyrian. Refugees from the Hittite city of Carchemish, from Aramean Damascus, Kummuh, and Sama’l, and other cities.

 

Cities which had crumbled to dust before the ferocity of the Assyrians under Shalmanezer and Ashurnazirpal; but whether Syrian or Babylonian, these men spoke and wrote Aramaic in one form or another, as the evidence of the Greek alphabet reveals,⁽²⁵⁾ and which would be further suggested by the nature of the tablets that were found (about 1935) on the site of Ugarit (now known as Ras Shamra), on the North Syrian Coast.⁽²⁶⁾

These men brought with them the knowledge of precious metal commodity exchange, and amongst other deceptions easily perpetrated on a simple and trusting people, knowledge of the possibilities of creation of money and wealth through the rackets of storage of valuables as for safe custody; or the creation of credit as it is now euphemistically known, and its power as a driving force towards the establishment of industry amongst a healthy, trusting, and warlike people; and its power towards the creation of monopoly of ownership and control of such industry.

What must have been cottage industry in Greece, soon became industry under organization and under methods of semi-mass production, long since known in Sumeria, and Akkadia, and Assyria etc. Such industry could only be organized on the basis of money wages in the case of freemen, and therefore only with labor, slave or free, trained to the concept of money, and the making of money, as the be-all and end-all in life.

Athens made pottery and ships; Corinth made pottery and ships; Megara made textiles.

 

Athens, with ample surpluses of olive oil sufficient to maintain a substantial export trade in that commodity, and with the production of silver from the Laureion mines but a few miles from the city, became centre of an entre-pôt trade with those other Greek city states that relied on copper or iron fiduciary money systems to drive their industry and exchanges; money systems if of state design and control, that international banking had little use for...

But without the economic organization deriving from participation in the orbit of the international money market controlled by the international silver bullion brokers and their agents, the bankers of the Piraeus who controlled above all the flow of silver from Laureion and Thrace, and Samos, and mines further afield, it is doubtful if that dynamic force engendered from the union of Dorian and pre-Dorian Greece could ever have become that which it did become: the point to which a great part of the power and learning gravitated from those fast dying worlds of the most Ancient Orient; thence being thrust forth again amongst men to constitute that which may prove to have been one of the last stages of man's endeavor upon this earth.

It was the beginning of an apparent re-assemblance, a false renewal of learning and life which was to reveal momentarily, in fading glory, the fusion of that world of the companions of Zeus, golden-headed giants descended to earth from their home amongst the gods, and the world of Crete where dark children of the sun basked in the light and comfort of him who to them was god on earth as he walked in his gardens at Cnossos.

...Both god, priesthood and people lived in this distant sunlit world in the mystic harmony of ancient systems of life... They lived with little knowledge of warfare or weapons of war... Their cities were without wall or visible defense so long had they been without fear...

 

In a mild warm climate, they needed little clothing, and their women who wore no more than a heavy flounced skirt, proudly and fearlessly displayed the loveliness of their breasts...



References

1. François Lenormant: La Monnaie dans l'Antiquité; Book l; pp. 113-122.

2. Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. I; P. 392.

3. Paul Einzig: Primitive Money, P. 225.

4. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 205, (New York, 1968). Also Britannica 1898, Vol. XI. P. 92. Also the deductions of Professor Sayce in Mycenae, P. 265. P. 365.

5. Captain Theodore Canot: The Adventures of an African Slaver; (New York; 1928). Also Cambridge Economic History, Vol II; P. 16.

6. W.F. Albright; P. 32.

7. The estimate given by Breasted in his edition of 1956 is 1220 B.C. However the deductions by which Professor Albright arrives at his conclusion that the battle of Perire was fought in 1234 B.C. are most convincing, and do not leave much doubt.

8. The details of the mining, treatment and smelting of unoxidized ores as took place about this time in the Austrian Alps, are evidence of a long and tedious process (Cambridge Economic History, Vol II, pp. 19-20.).

According to Professor W.F. Albright in The Amarna Letters from Palestine, (P. 12.):

"when we glance through the Amarna letters, we cannot but be impressed with the smallness of the garrisons which were considered adequate by the local princes when clamoring for aid; the prince of Megiddo wants a hundred men, but three other chieftains including the princes of Gezer and Jerusalem, are satisfied with fifty each.

 

Even the prince of wealthy Byblos who constantly asks for assistance, is generally satisfied with two hundred to six hundred infantry and twenty to thirty chariots. Brigawaza of the Damascus region also wants two hundred men..."

Correlating these informations, it is clear, that although populations were much less in that day (the latter half of the second millennium B.C.), the limiting factor to military force was the availability of arms, not as is today with its unlimited supplies of metal, the availability of men (hence "conscription").

9. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 24.

10 Ibid. P. 205.

11. Letter 9 of the Tel Amarna Tablets; Vol I; P. 29. (Samuel A.B. Mercer; Toronto, 1939.). The translation reads as follows:

To Niphururia, king of Eg[ypt], say. Thus saith Burraburias, king of Karadunias, thy brother. I am well. With thee, thy house, thy wives, thy land, thy chief men, thy horses, thy chariots, may it be very well. Since my father and thy fathers with one another established friendly relations, they sent to one another rich presents, and they refused not one another any good request. Now my brother has sent [only] two minas of gold as a present. But now, if gold is plentiful, send me as much as thy fathers. But if it is scarce, send half what thy father did. Why didst thou send only two minas of gold? Now, since my work on the House of God is great, and vigorously have I undertaken its accomplishment, send much gold.

There is little doubt that it was about this time that gold was beginning to augment silver in Babylonia as reserve in the ratio of 13:1 approximately... Hence it might reasonably be assumed that the worthy Burnaburiash could very well have been egged on by force other than that of sheer godliness.

12. Bracketed comment by present author. Britannica, 9th edition, Vol. VIII.

13. Bracketed comment by present author.

14. Ibid.

15. Alexander del Mar: History of the Precious Metals, pp. 47-50.

16. Breasted, pp. 480-481.

17. Cyrus H Gordon: Ugaritic Literature, p. ix, p. 120. (Text 118) Rome, 1949.

18. Cambridge Economic History, Vol. II, P. 16.

19. Jacquetta Hawkes: Dawn of the Gods, P. 209.

20. Cambridge Economic History; Vol. II: P. 19.

21. Britannica. 1898: P. 90: Vol. XI.

22. Sir Charles Leonard Woolley: Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, pp. 651-658, London, 1937.

23. Sir Charles Leonard Woolley: Abraham, P. 23, 24. Also see P. 80 present work.

24. This quotation which comes from Sir Charles L. Woolley's translation of the Sumerian King Lists, (Excavations at Ur, P. 249.), reads in full: “ The Flood came. After the Flood came, Kingship again was sent down from on High “...

25. Frederick William Madden, M.R.A.S.: Coins of the Jews, P. 29; London; 1881.

26. According to Sir Charles L. Woolley in his book Abraham (pp. 23-24.):

"At Ras Shamra on the North Syrian coast, there have recently been unearthed documents of a very surprising kind; there are clay tablets bearing inscriptions in cuneiform, but the signs represent not syllables as in Babylonian, but letters of the alphabet, and the language is a form of Aramaic closely related to Hebrew: they date from the 14th Century before Christ. Consequently we see that by the time of the Exodus people living in Syria and speaking a tongue akin to the Israelite were so accustomed to the idea of writing that they had modified the old established script of Sumer and Babylon to suit the peculiarities of their own language."

However, in his latest book: Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, (Pp. 651-658), Sir Leonard Woolley states that the various scripts of Ancient Syria deciphered or otherwise, and including Phoenician which he definitely claims to be parent script of ancient Greek, all derived from the Egyptian picture writing or Hieroglyphics (via the Hieratic of 2000 B.C.) in agreement with Madden who wrote one hundred years ago. (See chart on P. 75 of the present work.)

Back to Contents





BLOOD, SORROW, AND SILVER

The growth during the early years of the first Millennium B.C. of the use of hardened iron tools in the mining industry ⁽¹⁾ and the development of a highly efficient system by the Phoenicians, for smelting calamine and other silver bearing ores, as shown by the almost complete absence of silver in the slags or scoria left by their mining operations at Laureion,⁽²⁾ released a heavy flow of silver on to the bullion markets of the Near East; with the consequence that silver, further than being a standard for money accounting between merchants and also the temples,

"in relation to staples, other metals, and customary services..." ⁽³⁾ became an actual means of payment "...and as currency of all levels of transaction." ⁽⁴⁾

This practice, with all the possibilities inherent therein towards the virtually unlimited private creation of money in opposition to that money which had originated as entry in the temple ledger, spread westward with all its attendant evils during the first half of the first millennium B.C., as already pointed out in respect to Greece.

While certain temple organizations still survived as previously mentioned and were strongly maintained, the instances quoted being those of the temples of Sippur and Uruk (Oppenheim; P.46), the flood of privately issued and controlled money which in reality was this new silver in circulation, together with the pyramid of ledger credit page entry money raised thereon, had almost completely effaced even the memory of that law in relation to exchanges, that was the word and order of the god of the city himself, and that had been the issue of kings and priesthood of former times...

 

These kings may have been aware that the source of all their powers was the power inherent m the creation and emission of the units of exchange, which was the power to discriminate, the power to reject or prefer from amongst their subjects; and of course they may not have been so aware.

Of the evidence revealing the steps by which this god-power was undermined, the first and most important was the establishment of internal values in the exchanges within any state to the same standard as the value of silver in the international exchanges, which did not happen overnight as it were, and may have slowly taken place over several thousand years; for at least 1500 years before what was supposed to be the invention of coined money in Lydia, silver ingots already circulated in Babylonia bearing the stamp of the issuing and guaranteeing authority, whether temple, state, or merchant...

 

Before this time,

"Silver was used in many instances as a standard of value even though it was not actually employed in payments." ⁽⁵⁾

It is not until the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian eras that clear evidence can be traced of the total degeneration of kingly power and of kings and so-called emperors as quite often being little more than gloriously be-medaled front men for private money creative power striving to create world-wide hegemony...

 

They still continued to be needed principally as a point towards which the eyes of the people might be diverted in order that the people might not realize that all was not well in that direction towards which their loyalties naturally leaned, nor glimpse the destructive forces that were gnawing at the roots of the Tree of Life itself. Even as far back as 2500 B.C. Sargon of Akkad proceeded into Anatolia to chastise the city of Ganes on account of the commercial community of Mesopotamia;⁽⁶⁾ probably to enforce payment of interest on loans, or repayment of principal...

 

One of the reasons of the success of Cyrus, though but a petty Persian prince formerly to 550 B.C. when he deposed his sovereign, Astyages the Mede, is clear from the circumstances of his victory over Croesus of Lydia in 546 B.C.

Croesus had offended international money powers by seizure of their treasure held by their agent Sadyattes ⁽⁷⁾ and by the total assumption of monetary issue by the state. Example had to be made of him to deter other princes from similar action, and the eager and ambitious Cyrus was obviously the one chosen for this purpose. According to the article in Babylonia in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th Edition, by Professor Sayce, Croesus had rashly joined battle with Cyrus without waiting for the arrival of his Babylonian allies under Nabu-Nahud ⁽⁸⁾ the father of Belshazzar of the Book of Daniel.

 

It is more than likely, however, that a truer reading of these events would be that international money power, patron of the rise of Cyrus both through organization of his supplies of mercenary soldiers, and of the best of weapons, had been the principal influence in these events as in other enterprises of Cyrus, such as the siege of Babylon 14 years later.

 

Thanks to its influence, while the progress of Nabu-Nahud towards junction with the forces of Croesus would have been sabotaged, Croesus himself would have been misinformed of the intentions and strength of both Cyrus and Nabu-Nahud.⁽⁹⁾

Cyrus won the day, and Croesus was totally humbled. Having thus proven his "suitability", and his readiness to promote the policies of his financial backers, the relatively easy conquest of Babylon was arranged for Cyrus some fourteen years later.⁽¹⁰⁾ Cyrus from then on was designated "The Great", and assumed the title of "Great King" of the vast Persian domains over which he now ruled...

As the most valuable by-product of their being and existence, kings and "conquerors" were also needed towards the maintenance of the steady inflow of slaves, sufficient to take care of the fearful death rate in the mines, and no doubt, to permit of the opening of new mines due to the rapid expansion of the mining industry on account of the growth of the use of hardened iron tools and improved methods of exploration.

This growth of bullion supplies, also meaning growth of the money economy, meant growth of industry. Such growth of industry meant further demand for labor, which labor then was principally slave, as money economy had not arrived at the totality of its modern development. Therefore not only was an increasing and continuous flow of slaves needed for the mines, but also for the industry to which the products of the mines gave rise.

There were two ways alone by which new supplies of precious metals became available to rejuvenate a monetary circulation withering, and even disappearing from wear and tear, exportation or hoarding, with the economic collapse that such condition could bring about: one was through mining using slave labor as mining with free labor was rarely profitable,⁽¹¹⁾ and the other was through sack and plunder.

 

For the first method "Conquerors" were needed for free men did not willingly become mine slaves; for the second method "Conquerors" were obviously needed again, for to cause a people to reveal and surrender their hidden hoards of precious metals, would only be possible as a result of the nights of terror immediately following on the "Conquest," and the abuse and rapine infected by a lust crazed soldiery such as followed such conquerors and achieved such "Conquests"...

 

For instance, according to the Iliad, (Book IX), promise of the gold and bronze plunder (of Troy) was the principal lure used by Agamemnon (besides the return of Briseis), to bring Achilles back into the fight.

For further instance, may be accepted the main information in respect to Shalmanezer the Assyrian and his campaigns in 858 B.C., leaving no doubt of the purposes of the hidden forces who guided him, and wherein lay their chief interest...

 

The conquest of Damascus, in 803 B.C., yielded 20 talents of gold and 2300 talents of silver, not to speak of 300 talents copper and 5000 talents of iron. The sack of Carchemish by Sargon, 717 B.C., yielded 11 talents of gold and 2100 talents of silver.

The following table reveals what was extracted from several lesser cities and their rulers.

 

Ruler & City	Gold Indemnity	Silver Indemnity	Annual Tribute
Hattinean	3 Talents	100 Talents	10 Talents of Silver
Sangar of Carchemish	3 Talents	70 Talents 1 m. gold, 1 t. silver
Harii of Sam'al	10 Talents	16 minas of gold
Arame son of Bitaqusi	6 Talents
Katazil of Kummuh	20 minas of silver

 

Tyre, Sidon, and Jehu of Israel, though clearly sitting on the fence as it were to secure the best advantage as might be offered out of these events, without openly committing themselves as ally of Assyria, hastened to pay tribute when after the battle near Wadi Zerzer in 842 B.C. in which Hazael, usurper King of Damascus was finally put to flight with the slaughter of some 6000 Arameans,⁽¹²⁾ and likely the enslavement of many more, Shalmanezer, victorious but totally exhausted, came down to the coast unable to continue with the investment of Damascus ⁽¹³⁾...

 

It would be an interesting speculation as to what was really in the mind of Shalmanezer in turning towards the coast. What money power had armed Hazael to the point that he could be such a real threat to the Assyrian? Had Shalmanezer planned bloody revenge?...

 

Then realizing that in the destruction he planned, he might further destroy his own source of arms, and those slave traders who organized the sale of his captives, had he hesitated, finally deciding to settle for tribute?

The States of Arvad, Symyra, and Ushana in the fact that they paid no tribute to Nineveh,⁽¹⁴⁾ while being much closer than the Aramean States, revealed themselves as ally; the absence of any savage thrust by Assyria at that time against Israel, or Tyre, or Sidon, in the first phase of Assyrian conquest, would suggest such states, if not actually as ally, as harboring forces in one form or another which would be controlled by agents of that highly secret international bullion broking fraternity, which indubitably existed, and which was connected to the extensive organization of camp followers and slave traders that must have been yet another host behind the Assyrian host, and therefore, profitably, enemy of the Aramean...

Money power, international in scope, being that it sought at this time, to institute precious metals as the governing factor of exchanges over the rest of the known world, was deeply lodged in the heart of the Assyrian, a people to whom it had early imparted the secret Hittite skills and processes in iron working, and who, in their home land, had the necessary materials for such industry. Assyria for the time was their sword arm.

 

Whether the Assyrians were aware of its significance or not, they must have been closely connected with that fraternity whose business was mining of the precious metals, trade in certain staple commodities and manufactures, and slaves, and who must have conducted their operations in all the cities of Babylonia, Aram, whether enemy or not, and especially, Phoenicia. Considering that Phoenician mining operations extended as far North as Britain where was mined the tin so necessary in bronze manufacture, it may be assumed that Phoenicia, above all, dealt in Assyrian war captives.

 

In places as distant as Cornwall where they would have been in a relatively weak position so far from home, they would have relied on imported slaves, rather than on local conquest. There is no missing the connection between the floods of slaves as released on to world markets by the Assyrian conquests, and the rapid expansions of that which is now known as "Credit", the same silver and gold mining that was taking place all over the known world at that time.

Of some interest is the story of the easing of the pressure on Damascus by the departure of Shalmanezer in 839 B.C. during the first phase of Assyrian conquest, to more pressing business in the North...

"Hazael, King of Damascus was able to turn again to Israel..."

Once Assyria, abandoning the Israelites whose alliance they must have been accepting at that time, either to assure themselves of a source of supply of mercenary soldiers or of slave-master camp followers, turned a deaf ear to the pleas of Jehu, the Israelite king, the Philistines, the Idumeans, the Amorites, and even their ancient ally, the Tyrians, viciously turned on them ⁽¹⁵⁾...

 

Could it be to seize a share of the plunder gathered off the battlefields of Shalmanezer?

The renewed stream of precious metal money that must have followed the sack of all those cities of Aram at this time, flowing through the coffers of the international money power located in the cities of Nineveh or Babylon or Ur, would have been accompanied by vast expansions of that which is now known as "Credit", the same being emitted in all the major cities of the Near East.

 

Also ⁽¹⁶⁾ Bills of Exchange, Letters of Credit, but above all the ubiquitous receipts for valuables reputedly on deposit for safe custody, came into being: clay "Promises to Pay": all forming expansion in one form or another of the working money supply.

 

By manipulation of such abstract monetary units in relation to what might have been described as the visible symbols of the monetary unit such as was gold or silver money, powerful business houses combining the operations of banker, goldsmith, silversmith etc., with branches in all major cities, were certainly able to manipulate the destinies of so-called empires, just as they have so done in this day.

 

That Babylon itself should have been able to rise again, and lead a frightened world against Assyria to form the so-called Neo-Babylonian empire, is proof, however, that international money power at that time was not monopoly of the Hebrew who now whatever his origins, as ally of the Israelite who had come out of Egypt, appears clearly in history, a distinct entity; even if the part he plays as native of Palestine was relatively insignificant.

It seems the fall of the Assyrian in finality in the defeat of Ashur-Uballit by Nabopolassar in 605 B.C, was also the fall of the Hebrew.

 

No sooner had Nabopolassar destroyed the last remnant of Assyrian military power, than, at Carchemish, his son Nebuchadnezzar destroyed that of a resurgent Egypt under Pharaoh Necho, recently victor over Josiah of Judah on that ominous place of battle Meggiddo,⁽¹⁷⁾ better known as Armageddon, (II Chronicles; 25, 20-27.), and where eight hundred years previously Tahutmes III had put the confederate armies of Syria to flight.

In this battle of Carchemish in which Pharaoh Necho had suffered complete defeat, was destroyed the last protector of Israel, and as a consequence, in 586 B.C. Israel itself was totally destroyed.

 

Its leaders, overtaken by the same fate as its Aramean blood relatives, if not co-religionists, were carried off to servitude at Babylon; where in the case of some, they were used to keep the wheels of industry and finance turning in that great city, while in the case of others, they seem to have been permitted settlement in the region of the river Chebar, a large irrigation canal near Babylon, where they were allowed to establish homes, to farm, and to maintain themselves as a racial and religious group, clearly living a national and exclusive life, as was shown by the very fact that an intensely nationalistic prophet such as Ezekiel could exist in the settlement at Chebar, preaching amongst his own people without restriction.⁽¹⁸⁾

During this time the city was yet again sold to the new imperial power risen out of old Elam and the Persian Highlands, and in 536 B.C., the Persian forces under Cyrus, "The Great", quietly entered the city by night march down the drying river bed after they had completed diversion of the river.

 

According to the book of Daniel, the proud Belshazzar, King in Babylon, was slain that night.⁽¹⁹⁾

It is interesting to note that shortly after the entry of the Persian forces into the city, the "Children of Israel" were permitted to return to that which they considered their homeland, and every assistance was given them towards renewal of their national life and the rebuilding of their temple, which, of course, was its heart.

 

In the very first year of his reign at Babylon 536 B.C., Cyrus issued a decree permitting the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem, and the gold and silver vessels carried away by Nebuchadnezzar supposed to be 5400 in number, were returned to Sheshbazaar, the Prince of Judah who was leader of the migration.⁽²⁰⁾

 

Although the proclamation of Cyrus had been addressed to all servants of God throughout the Empire, the 42,000 or so who responded to the call and went with Sheshbazaar, were but a small part of the Hebrew population of the total dominions of Cyrus...

 

The special concessions made by Cyrus to the Hebrew almost on entry into the city of Babylon, would certainly suggest that he had received their substantial assistance, perhaps through financing towards the purchase of the finest of military accoutrements such as would only be obtainable through the good graces of the Babylonian commercial and banking houses, or through that information with which the Hebrew may have kept him constantly supplied such as the state of military preparedness within the city, etc.

It may reasonably be assumed that the Babylonian money power was completely international in outlook, whatever its outward profession, and totally unsympathetic towards the ancient faith of the Ziggurat and the worship of Marduk,⁽²¹⁾ and towards the intended effects of the restoration of the Ziggurat of Ur, at that time, by Nebuchadnezzar. If in earlier Assyrian times such money power certainly was not the Hebrew, though possibly linked thereto through members of the latter Israelitish Confederacy such as the Habiru or even those who derived from the Hyksos, the fact of the existence of powerful Hebrew influence in international finance in Neo-Babylonian times, seems a reasonable supposition...

The Hebrew, being aggressive and intelligent, may have risen to especially privileged position in the Babylonian money industry, if that is what it can be called, and may have come to learn at that time those secret practices of the money changers craft, which he was certainly forbidden in his native land, according to the Laws Moses.

 

In Babylonia the law No. 7 of Hammurabai has long since become a dead letter...

That ungodly and cruel order of Ezra compelling the Israelites divorce their foreign wives after their return to what was considered their ancestral homeland,⁽²²⁾ might very well have been related to the needs of total religious, racial, and commercial security, as indeed might the ordinance existing today amongst English Quakers forbidding them to marry outside their own sect,⁽²³⁾ whose leaders, any brief study will show, were deeply involved in the growth and control of modern banking,⁽²⁴⁾ which had lead, and still leads mankind along a road that offers little peace or rest, and finally, exhaustion and calamity; a road of non-return...

One thing becomes clear out of this turmoil of rising and falling "Empires" of the first millennium B.C., particularly that calamitous succession of Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian "Empires", from 933-605 B.C., 625-538 B.C., and 538-332 B.C., respectively, and that is: in a world where treasure had become totally equated in the peoples minds with "Wealth," as expressing relatively large sums of the monetary unit, no sooner had one power gathered all such treasure in a given area into its store houses and safe deposits, by conquest, plunder, and sack, than such treasure, temporarily creating boom, moved on again, as likely as not to form the base of those "credits" granted by international money power towards the purchase of arms and the best of mercenary soldiers by that next power destined to arise and be the new "conqueror".

Dealing in money, and bullion which was the foundation of the money system, had become a highly specialized and closed trade now able to operate quite apart from the temples; even if in many cases the temples still continued to permit themselves, and that which they stood for, to be used as front, and so had offered sanctity to those most sinister and destructive operations of the money, bullion, and slave brokers; in themselves and their attitude towards mankind, the antithesis of God, the Anti-God.

The money masters had only one purpose besides maintenance of secrecy: which was growth of themselves and those through whom they worked.

 

Those through whom they worked were too often the criminal castes of the civilizations; criminal because the nature of so much of their activities, such as fencing, counterfeiting of coinages, clipping and sweating of coins, was criminal; as it had to be. Towards this purpose, consciously or not, they sought the total destruction of that natural order of life of god, king, priesthood, and temple and the devoted, and its eradication from the Book of Life itself.

 

For piety and love and man living with hope and will for the future, guided by his trained shepherds had to be substituted an order of the exploitation of mankind.

 

The rulers in such an order would be its previous rejects, its outcasts. God, king, temple and the devoted were to become a thing forgotten, and man, into whom was to be injected raging animal passions, was to be left wandering without guide, except such thrusting hither and thither by such as could only be called living sores of man-hatred and which were embedded in mankind itself, could be called guidance.

The unfortunate masses of the Ancient Orient, who had so trusted their rulers, had no idea or understanding of the new reality, and that the ruler they saw, far from being the Son of God on Earth, was in reality a puppet manipulated by that conspiratorial force exerted by those controllers of precious metal bullion particularly, that lurked in the Aramaic speaking middle class mentioned by Professor Oppenheim.⁽²⁵⁾

 

These powerful classes could have had no more than a secret contempt for the gods, kings, priesthood, of the peoples amongst whom they lived, able as they were by this manipulation, to bring about the decay or growth of power, without reference to such "State" power structure, of those whose undoing or otherwise, they planned...

They themselves, through triumph of their system of private money issuance, had now in reality come to sit in the place of the gods. From this time on it seems, there was not even that periodic interference of the king against the money-lender, which gave the people respite from time to time, as in the old Babylonian period,⁽²⁶⁾ and the Kingdom of Israel of record.⁽²⁷⁾

Cruel private monopolization of wealth and capital grew, and where the people had been sheep in the flock, and the king their loving and devoted guide, now that kings concerned themselves with those false policies prepared for them in the interest of the private money creators, the people became lost and disheartened, driven hither and thither as they were by the crazed wolf masquerading in the place of the shepherd's diligent sheep dog.

In this time, as today, the people were almost entirely at the mercy of the private persons controlling their money, who then controlled the inflow of precious metals, silver and gold, the foundation of the people's money. The policies of these controllers from their standpoint as internationalists, were necessarily directed towards the stimulation of war against the well-being of mankind.

 

Frequently wars were above all the prime essential,

• firstly towards the destruction of the natural system of rule ⁽²⁸⁾ previously defined, which had been the protection of the people

• secondly towards the reinjection into the system of hoarded coin and bullion, and consequent reinflation of the money supply

• thirdly, but not the least important, the gathering of a new crop of slaves to replace those stocks of silver and gold, so necessary to the foundation of their money power, and the maintenance of their international hegemony in consequence...

 

References

1. Alexander del Mar: History of the Precious Metals, P. 45.

2. Miner's and Smelter's Magazine, Vol. VI, pp 286-322. (A. del Mar: History of the Precious Metals, P. 46.)

3. Leo A. Oppenheim: Letters from Mesopotamia, P. 46: Chicago: 1967.

4. Ibid.

5. Paul Einzig: Primitive Money, P. 206. Also as according to the records of the city of Kish as pertain to the Azag-Bau Dynasty (3268-2897 B.C.). See page 1 of this work.

6. Sir Charles Woolley: Abraham, P. 122.

7. Ernest Babelon: Les Origines de la Monnaie, P. 106; Paris; 1897.

8. Herodotus: The Histories, Book I.

9. The Nabonidus of modern books of reference who reigned in conjunction with Belshazzar.

10. Actually through his general, Gobryas, 558 B.C.

11. Alexander del Mar: History of Monetary Systems, pp. 413, 425, 410, 441, 442.

12. Emil G.H. Kraeling: Aram and Israel, P. 80; Columbia. 1918.

13. Ibid.

14. Emil G.H. Krealing: Aram and Israel, P. 80, Columbia, 1918.

15. Emil G.H. Kraeling, Ph.D.: Aram and Israel, pp. 83-84 Columbia: 1918.

16. Paul Einzig: Primitive Money, P. 225; Oxford, 1949.

17. According to II Kings, 17, 6,

"In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes," and according to the records of Sargon of Assyria: "Samaria I looked at, I captured; 27,280 men (or families) who dwelt in it I carried away."

As a completely new population was brought to the now empty land (II Kings, 17, 24), it is curious that 120 years later a so-called Jewish prince should go out of his way to seek battle with Pharaoh Necho, vigorous king of a resurgent Egypt, who according to the Biblical record (II Chronicles, 36, 21),

"sent ambassadors to him, saying, what have I to do with thee, thou king of Judah? I come not against thee this day, but against the house wherewith I have war: for God commanded me to make haste (to Carchemish): forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not."

18. Ezekiel, Chapter I, V.1,3. Chapter 3, V.15, 23. Chapter 10, V.15, 22. Chapter 11, V.4, (Prophesy) 25, (Expounding Prophesy to Chebarites).

19. Daniel, Chapter 5, V. 30.

20. William Smith: History of the Bible, P. 476 London, Ont. 1885.

21. Marduk was the national God of Babylon, just as Nannar was National God of Ur, and second only to Énlil.

22. Ezra, King James Version; Ch. 10.

23...."Membership in the Society is now either by 'convincement' of the Spiritual Truths to which Friends witness, or, in England, by birth if both parents are Friends"...

James Hastings in Vol. 12 of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, (New York 1914.).

24. Sir Ernest Cassel: Lloyd's Bank in the History of Banking, P. 20 et seq. Oxford, 1933.

25. Leo A. Oppenheim: Letters from Mesopotamia, P. 51; Chicago; 1967.

26. Ibid., P. 46

27. Leviticus, Chapter 5, King James version.

28. The nobility have always been the first to disappear in major warfare. As leaders of their men in battle, their young men are the first to die. During the recent first "Great" war, it may safely be said that the best part of the young men of the natural aristocracy of Europe had perished by 1917.

Back to Contents


 

BABYLON, BANKING, AND BULLION

Without a doubt, the ramifications of Babylonian banking as operated from Nineveh during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., extended in more or less degree over that total area from Tartessus to India,⁽¹⁾ and from the gold washings of that great bend in the Nile in Nubia known as the Bisharee, to the mines of Cornwall; and of all such area it was the focus of land and sea routes.

 

In absolute degree during the first millennium, it extended as far afield as there is evidence of Aramaic as language of official and merchant classes; that is to say from Peshawar to Greece.⁽²⁾ In Greece the evidence however is not so much from Aramaic as language, as from the fact that the Greek alphabet derives from Aramaic,⁽³⁾ and therefore may be assumed to be the design of refugee Arameans of the period after 933 B.C., when Assyrian policy after forty years of unremitting pressure from the Arameans, became the extirpation of the Aramean, achievable from much strengthened military resources.

Accolytes of the bankers of Babylonia, whether from Nineveh, Carchemish, or the Babylonian cities themselves, who sought their own fields abroad, or prominent but unsuspecting natives of the area chosen for penetration, were selected as "suitable" to open the trade in a given area; "suitability", as in today, being advanced training in money worship, basic lack of integrity, and preferably some black mark in their secret past making them amenable to pressure and willing to grind down their own kind, or sell them to the slave trader without the gate, and without mercy and without compunction.

Those refugees skilled in money, from the cities of Aram in particular, though perhaps not qualifying in every specific trait detailed above, being dispossessed, and with therefore bitterness in their hearts, would have served best.

 

They would have considered that alignment with the Babylonian banking houses would be alignment with enemy and destroyer of that which had destroyed them. Such silver money as they later minted and circulated from Aegina and Argos, appears, as is explained below, to have been of the same weight and fineness as the Babylonian shekel, being that it was eighty-five grains to the drachma.

 

Thus it is evident that the financial organization these Arameans created in Greece previous to Solon was outright extension of the Babylonian; in a way it might have been the instrument of Babylonian imperialism, just as was the entry on the tablet of the traveling agent of the Temple of Ur, recording loans made to enable purchase, instrument, two thousand years before, of that imperialism of Ur ⁽⁴⁾...

 

Thus the coinage as used at Athens at this time, wherever minted, could be exported and circulated in Babylonia or other cities of this common money market; and while it could be profitably used in settlement of unfavorable Indian trade balances, it could also be returned to Athens without loss or remitting.

In the so-called Solonian monetary reforms, according to Groseclose,⁽⁵⁾ the Mina consisting of 73 drachmas was made legal tender to the value of 100 drachmas, though according to some scholars, there is no evidence of Athenian mintage at this time.⁽⁶⁾

 

Assuming Groseclose and his authorities to be correct, it follows that the real meaning of these currency reforms was the establishment of Athenian home mintage inaugurating a new coinage of a less weight, made legal tender for debts incurred in terms of the previous heavy weight coinage minted at Aegina or Argos.

 

However of this matter Seltsman in his Greek Coins writes,

"...That was the change brought about by the Solonian currency reform, the purpose of which was not to relieve debtors by lowering the value of the standard coin, but rather to free Athenian trade from a weight system such as bound the merchants to a local Peloponnesian standard which did not extend beyond the Aegean sea.

Instead the Athenians now had a currency based on the old and famous bronze Age "Euboic talent and mina, and his standard coin was of the same weight of those of the Corinthians, Samians, and later of Cyrenaeans. But he retained the Pheidonian system of dividing his stater into two drachmas and his drachma into six obols... At Athens, too, the rival systems of currency met and merged for she began to coin on the Dorian system, whence she derived her obols, drachmas, and didrachmas, but under Solon's reforms she went over to the Ionian system and adjusted her money to the Ionic Euboic talent." ⁽⁷⁾

The very fact of the stress on weight shows that such reforms were designed for, and perhaps only really understood by, a group that was only concerned with silver by weight; in other words, large scale movements of bullion; and who would be none other than our old friends the international bankers or bullion brokers; possibly even in some opposition to a situation in the Peloponnese and Aegina, such as may have been occasioned by the institution of the Laws of Lycurgus at Sparta,⁽⁸⁾ when consequently, they and their agents had virtually been ejected from those areas controlled by Sparta or influenced by her policies.

Solon was more likely the front man they put up to put into effect a program they had designed as a result of the conclusion reached amongst themselves that the notion of Greece as source of the slaves so desperately needed in a world which consumed so much labor, would have to be forgotten if their agents were to be able to continue operating in Greece, and if they themselves were to be able to maintain that confidence and respect of the Greek people so essential to their particular affair...

From henceforward it is clear, the issue was to be loans to industrial workers on the security of their wages. No longer would the banks or money lenders lend to the peasantry being that now they were forbidden to bind their persons as collateral security, and sell them into slavery across the seas, in the event of non-payment; or to alienate their lands.

 

To get such loans, which the poor and trusting of the countryside were always craving for one special occasion or another it was necessary to go to Athens and work for a wage in some industry. It may safely be said that the main industry was mining at Laureion, and possibly in Thrace, where "Free Men" for a trifling wage could join the gangs of slaves clawing their way into the hard rock, until further sources of cheap slave supply were found.

Although some modern numismatic scholars ⁽⁹⁾ disagree with the findings of the scholars of even thirty years ago, and with some reason, and certainly may be more accurate in their dates, in the case of Alexander Del Mar, who had both practical experience of mining and practical experience in the field of government finance, and who had made considerable study of the workings of money and finance in antiquity, his opinion is not to be so lightly brushed aside.

 

In his History of Monetary Systems in Various States on this subject he writes:⁽¹⁰⁾

"According to Boeckh, p. 28, one hundred of the new drachmas of Solon who was Archon of Athens B.C. 594, were equivalent to 72 or 73 more ancient drachmas. If this were quite reliable, then to Solon belongs the merit or demerit of altering the ratio from 13:1 to 10:1; because, as we have some of the drachmas of Solon and know their contents, the proportion given would make the more ancient drachmas contain about 85 grains fine silver, the weight of the shekel.

 

As twenty of these were commonly exchanged for a gold coin, which, whether a dharana of India, a medimni of Media, a daric of Persia, or a stater of the Levant, contained about 130 grains of fine metal, the Athenian ratio, previous to the lowering of the drachma, must have obeyed the ratio of Assyria, Media, and Persia, which was 13:1. But according to Quiepo, who is a more reliable authority on the weights of coins than Boeckh, although we have drachmas older than Solon, they do not contain more than 65 grains of fine silver; so that the change of ratio from 13:1 to 10:1, assumed to have occurred at Athens, must have taken place before Solon was Archon.

 

However, it is certain from the coins that the ratio under the administration of Solon was 10:1 and that it continued for nearly three centuries; for it is impliedly mentioned by Menander about B.C. 322, as being still in vogue at a recent period. During this interval, the ratio in the Orient was 6¼ or 6½, and in Persia 13:1 or double the Indian ratio."

In other words, if these weights of drachma and of shekel as at that time are correct, just as the Roman denarius was later issued to practically the same weight as the post Solonian drachma which was in use in Sicily and Magna Graecia,⁽¹¹⁾ so was the early Greek drachma, whether Aeginetic or of Argos, I.E. Pheidonian, minted to the same standard as the shekel, the unit of exchange in Babylonia, Assyria, and Phoenicia, clearly creating extension of the Common Money Market of that area and its financial dependencies.

 

Thus the Greek coin could be exported, circulated at par with the shekel, and even returned to Greece without loss through remitting or smelting to bullion; and also more important still, could realize that sure profit that the international bullion traders had guaranteed themselves in the Indian trade, by prevailing on rulers to maintain the ratio of silver as to gold at 13:1 as opposed to 6½:1 in India.⁽¹²⁾

 

In other words the real significance of the monetary reforms of Solon was the separation of Athens from the financial hegemony of Babylonia and its nearer agencies in Lydia, Aegina, Argos etc.; which, as previously pointed out, may very well have been rendered ineffective by the Laws of Lycurgus,⁽¹³⁾ considered now, a point of great significance, to have been enacted in the early sixth century.⁽¹⁴⁾

 

From now on it was going to be forbidden to Athenian merchants to settle unfavorable trade balances with slaves, and almost profitless to settle such balances with silver, either as coin or bullion. Henceforth the bankers would have to serve Athenian interests and would have to derive their profits from local business, I.E., there would be much more money circulating in Athens, and therefore a healthier industry; which history records as being exactly what transpired.

According to Grote, the banking system assumed after Solon a more beneficial character.

 

The old noxious contracts,

"mere snare for the liberty of a poor free man and his children," disappeared and loans of money "took their place founded on property and prospective earnings of the debtor which were in the main useful to both parties, and therefore maintained their place in the moral sentiment of the people..." ⁽¹⁵⁾

Thus to such an extent did Athens abjure the international bankers who must be loosely described as centering in Babylonia, that, insignificant as she relatively was, through the seisachtheia ('shaking-off-of-burdens'), she in reality severed from Babylonian Imperialism and its financial hegemony world wide, and established herself as minor competitive force, as was shown by the Persian efforts at encirclement; towards which their seizure of control of the Thracian mines in the year 512 B.C. constituted the first clear step.

 

Even if the reforms of Solon were not so absolute as those of Lycurgus in Sparta, and still left silver as the material of the basic monetary unit, and therefore still left Athens at the mercy of those forces whose secret activities contributed towards the functioning of what is known as Gresham's Law, "Bad money drives out the good," the Persian move of 512 B.C., by no means took the strength out of Athens and her allies.

 

While securing ship timbers for the fleets they were planning, and also further silver supplies, Persia, wherein nested international money power at that time, thought that she would be cutting off from Athens these commodities so essential to the promotion of war industry....

 

Somehow Athens still continued to maintain itself free of this Babylonian Imperialism which now sheltered behind Persia, and despite the enormous resources of Persia, was able to defeat the "Great King", both on land at Marathon, 490 B.C.; Platea and Mycale, 479 B.C.; and at sea at Salamis in the famous naval battle of 480 B.C.... It may safely be assumed that the huge issues of the owl drachmas during the decade that followed the discovery of the 3rd level or contact at Laureion ⁽¹⁶⁾ and its fantastically rich ore, substantially contributed to this success.

 

Those designing international money power were just that: international ! If the other fellow too, looked to be on to a good thing, and could offer what its controllers needed most of all, which was precious metals, then a way could always be found to do business! Out of war could only come good to them and theirs. Whether the "Great King" remained great, or Athens took his place, was not of that much importance. They would see to it that none who might be a real threat to them, would achieve a similar power to theirs; that is, from an international standpoint...

So to sum up the situation so far as pre-Solonian Athens was concerned, a simple unlettered people offered all the luxuries of another world as against the new money whose function is so little understood by lettered people even in this day, without going back 2500 years, had become swamped in debt. The law in respect to this debt had been upheld by a corrupted nobility in favor of the bankers.

 

No doubt it had been represented to them by these same bankers that this pressure of debt on the growing population would keep the masses docile and tied to the land as was indicated by the prevalence of the mortgage tablets on the farms of Attica.⁽¹⁷⁾ This condition, favoring the corrupted nobility of Greece and the international money power, ignored the needs of the new-rich manufacturers of Athens, who were neither able to obtain sufficient supply of local free labor, nor to obtain slaves.

Where credit institutions had long since existed as in the Grecian ports,⁽¹⁸⁾ in a land of relatively simple folk, where the ways of money were no more understood than they are today, by loans of ledger credit page entry money against collateral, demanding in repayment silver coinage, Money Power obviously had made a very good thing of it in Greece.

 

By the bankers of a given area using the same standard of weight in its precious metal coinage, calling loans in unison, the money supply could be shrunk to almost nothing; on which, their agents abroad could send ships, and buy crops and men and women and children for a song.

The Laws of the Archon Solon, by making no provision for employment for the freed debt slaves, nor providing for redistribution of the land, gave the Athenian manufacturer that labor, which he most of all needed. The Solonian ordinance offering Athenian citizenship to any free man from the countryside who came to Athens and took up a trade, further improved the labor market....

 

The monetary reforms of Solon reducing the export of coin or bullion, gave the Athenian manufacturers the money they also needed, for they remained the only market for the "funds" of the bankers, native or Peloponnesian; the latter having had no option but to find new lands to "conquer", as it were, after their virtual ejection by the laws enacted under the patronage of Lycurgus of Sparta.⁽¹⁹⁾

Finally, it might be said that the laws of the Archon Solon were the manifestation of the growth of the Athenian principle and the rejection, compulsory or otherwise, by all classes, of the Babylonian Money Power; including that growing class, who for the time being, seeing which way the wind lay, might now be called National Money Power...



References

1. F.W. Madden: Coins of the Jews, pp. 4-5; London; 1881.

2. Charles Seltsman: Greek Coins; London; 1933.

3. F.W. Madden: Coins of the Jews, page 29... According to Herodotus "the Phoenician letters were adopted but with some variation in the shape of a few," but according to Professor Sayce of much more convincing opinion,

"since the names of the letters of the Greek alphabet nearly all end in 'a', it would appear that it must have been brought into Greece, not by the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, but by the Arameans of the gulf of Antioch since the emphatic Aleph is a characteristic of Aramaic, not Phoenician. Even the names of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet disclose their Aramaic origin"...

Which conclusions were further verified by the Ras Shamra tablets discovered some fifty years later, mentioned on page 80 of this work. (See chart on pp. 75-76.)

4. Sir Charles L. Woolley: Abraham, pp. 124-125, p. 16.

5. Elgin Groseclose: Money, the Human Conflict; P. 16. University of Oklahoma; 1934.

6. W.P. Wallace: The Early Coinages of Athens and Euboia, P. 23, Numismatic Chronicle, 1962, and reply by Colin M. Kraay on P. 417.

7. Charles Seltsman: Greek Coins, London, 1933.

8. Plutarch: The Lives, "Lucurgus".

9. W.P. Wallace: The Early Coinages of Athens and Euboia, P. 23, Numismatic Chronicle; and the reply by Colin M. Kraay, P. 417.

10. A. Del Mar: History of Monetary Systems in Various States; P. 47; reprint, New York; 1969.

11. " "Mais lorsque, par la guerre de Tarente, l'Italie eut été soumise...., alors se fit sentir, en premier lieu, la nécessité de plus en plus vive d'un système général de bonnes monnaies;.... On fit choix, dans ce but, d'un pied monétaire, qui déjà avait été généralement accepté, et on frappa le Denier, de valeur de la Drachme Attique, qui était en usage non seulement dans les monarchies de l'Orient mais encore en Sicile. Assurément le Drachme de l'Attique pesait 4 gr. 37, tandis que le plus ancien Denier, quelque peu plus lourd, était taillé sur un poids moyen de 4 gr. 55 puisqu'il valait quatre Scrupules, c'est-a-dire 1/72 de livre ou 1/6 d'once. Mais cette différence fut supprimée, a la suite d'une réduction qui eut lieu vraisemblablement pendant la première guerre punique, et porta le denier à 1/84 de livre ou 1/7 de l'once c'est-à-dire 3 gr. 90; de sorte que les derniers de ce poids devaient en général être accepté sur le même pied que les Drachmes qui étaient en circulation et n'avaient pas tout à fait le poids légal...": Théodore Mommsen & Joachim Marquardt: Manuel des Antiquités Romaines, P. 14, Tome X, "De l'Organisation Financière Chez les Romaines.""

12. Alexander del Mar: History of Monetary Systems in Various States, P. 29, pp. 35-53.

13. Formerly, as according to Mythology, considered to have been enacted in the 9th Century B.C.

14. Humphrey Michell: Sparta, P. 27.

15. G. Grote: History of Greece, Ch. 9; (Elgin Groseclose: Money, the Human Conflict, P. 18.):

16. W.P Wallace: The Early Coinages of Athens and Euboia, P. 35, The Numismatic Chronicle, 1962.

17. Elgin Groseclose: Money, the Human Conflict, P. 16; University of Oklahoma, 1934.

18. Paul Einzig: Primitive Money, P. 225; London, 1949.

19. According to Gertrude Coogan, the first act of Solon after having had the Dictatorship urged on him by a powerful sector of the Athenian population, was abrogation of the privilege of silver mining, and, as a consequence, the privilege of money issuance by the nobility. I am, however, of the opinion that Miss Coogan missed the point here.

 

What actually happened, it is true, would have been abrogation of the privilege of money issue by the nobility, but not as directly exercised by such nobility, but as through it being farmed out by them to the Arameo-Phoenician traders, i.e., the Babylonian Money Power.

Back to Contents