What we learnt early in this exercise was that, though we in Africa south of the Sahara do not have the benefit of ancient written accounts to effectively trace our legacy from, our own vital link to those times lay encoded in language.
We quickly discovered that Sotho-Tswana could better unlock the true, original meanings of a plethora of miscued biblical names, and thus offer us better clues as to what really happened in those early and formative times. As such, we were able to correct conventional takes, and even refine, or reorient, the findings of research giants like Zecharia Sitchin. For instance, phara-disa – now ‘paradise’ in English, we saw, meant ‘guarded through’: something consistent with what Sitchin and others had discerned about E-di-ene (Eden), Place of the Gods. Even the di, a plural indicator, easily confirmed that the ‘Eden’ story was indeed lifted directly from far more ancient texts like the Akkadian (Babylonian) Atra-Hasis, but ‘gods’ later changed to ‘God’ to fit a new, rigorously-enforced outlook called ‘monotheism’. Indeed, no impartial and objective biblical historian has not determined that much of Genesis’ cosmology was lifted directly from Babylonian lore when the Old Testament was being compiled in earnest in exilic times when, fearful for their legacy, the Jews, the Children of Israel, sat by the rivers of Babylon and ‘remembered Zion’. So, whereas the Atra-Hasis is definitely older than around 2800 BC, much of the Pentateuch, we clearly showed in an article, was written not by Moses but by the Levite priests in the 500s BC. A lot of other stories, we clinically saw, were changed around. For example, in the Atra-Hasis, Ene-Ki (Enki: literally ‘Lord of Earth’, the second-in-command of Earth) who was branded a ‘snake’ by his rivals in the Enlilite clan – the clan headed by his half-brother Enlil (Ene-le-Illu: ‘Lord of the Illu (gods)’ and Earth’s number one) – is the one who not only enhanced the genetic profile of the Adamu, but rescued Noah (Utnapishtim to the Sumerians, Ziusudra to the Babylonians) after Enlil wanted the imminence of the Flood kept a secret from mankind (see literal translations of the text in last week’s article).The aim here was not to be anti-biblical: there is a lot of valid, inspiring history contained in the Old Testament. The concerted aim was to get to the unbridled truth. Like I always say in my books, truth is truth: it does not care whether you find it uncomfortable or not; it just is.
