Hamites, Semites and their neighbours in the Middle East
 

I know nothing about Babylon (except once told that Noah's Ark first appeared there), and would be interested to hear more. Judging by other posts on this thread I think quite a few of us are interested. Please tell more.

Mesopotamia
 

First off, Tradition places Noah's Ark making landfall somewhere on Mount Arafat

Not sure how interested the average member may be in Babylon, but to respond to your request :

The domination of Babylon by a succession of Anatolian and Mesopotamian neighbouring peoples infused the practice of religion with a panoply of deities : viz -

http://clt3378.wikispaces.com/Enuma+Elish

This wiki shows the entire hierarchy of Babylonian deities and maps the assumption and addition of later deities, which inevitably reflected the interactions with a number of invaders. Notable among the deities whose worship survived down to early Hebrew times is the god, Bel, a name consistently attributed to the god Marduk, and which surfaced later in Canaan as the god Baal.

A typical list showing the turnover of rulers in Babylonia, in chronological order, might be : -

Amorites ( Semites ) Hammurabi, the most famous of these, was the first to make Babylon his capital
Hittites sacked Babylon
Kassites ( non-Semite people originating from the Zagreb mountains
Elamites ( probably an Aboriginal people )
Assyrians ( a Semitic people )
Chaldeans ( Semitic peoples )
Persians ( a mixture of Aryan ' aboriginal ' peoples )
Greeks ( Macedonians - an Aryan people )

One site which details the rulers of Babylon from Hammurabi, the famous Amorite king : -

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/...historyid=aa10

Three Assyrian kings of Babylon went by the pleasing name " Tiglath-Pileser " ! ! The name brings to mind a TS eager to service a hungry anus ! But perhaps my imagination has been unfairly hi-jacked by these three ' kinky ' kings ! !

There is stacks of info. on Babylonia out there on the Web. One site which will overwhelm you with facts is -

http://history-world.org/babylonia.htm

That is, if you don't fall asleep reading through it !

:respect:

That would be Mount Ararat (in Turkey).

Palestinian faux-pas
 

I think Elonar must have become mentally locked into the Arab Spring / Palestinian debate to make such an obvious blunder. He comes across as too switched on to make such an error otherwise.

Interesting that the legend of Noah appears in the Babylonian accounts of a similar survival myth, than of Uta-Napishtim, but I guess that Elonar knows all about that too.

:respect:

PS Shouldn't this stuff be in a different thread unrelated to ' Shemales ' ?

Whoops
 

Spot on ! Very careless of me !

Just in passing -

Utanapishtim. Called Utnapishtim in the Old Babylonian version of the story of ' the Flood ', the Assyrian version contained in The Epic of Gilgamesh is the most complete. Gilgamesh, the hero, features in Akkadian and Hittite cuneiform sources which are far less complete. The Sumerian version features Utanapishtim as the devout priest-king Ziusudra caught up in a ( local ) flood in the Euphrates basin, and probably dumped by the receding waters in the Arabian Gulf. So, the Biblical Noah account ( Semitic ) apart, he features simply as a part of a very much larger saga, that of the hero, Gilgamesh.

Stacks of stuff out there on the Internet to be picked over by the curious. Oh, and the Mount Ararat of the Bible is referred to as ' Mount ' Nisir in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which, not unsurprisingly, opens a whole new can of academic worms - but I'll leave you to root around in that particular controversy !

Yes, and I agree that this stuff should really be parked in a thread called, perhaps Iraqi heritage or something like that.

ila - can you set this up, if, as Florian seems to think, there exists enough interest among the membership ?

:respect:

Jews and Arabs
 

Have any members observations and contributions to make on the early origins of Jewish and Arab peoples and their belief systems in the Mesopotamian and Mediterranean basins ?

:respect:

Why is it Jews and Arabs and not Jews and followers of Islam? You are confounding a religious identity with an ethnic identity.

Ethnic origins
 

I am confounding nothing. The peoples of ancient Mesopotamia clearly could not identify with Islam, as they did not share the same time frame.

My intention was for this thread to focus on ethnic and linguistic origins, but as I included as a secondary consideration a religious element, since other posts had shown an interest in the worship of deities in Middle Eastern antiquity.

Having said that, I realise that I have no control over the directions in which this thread may take. If it should veer towards a later discussion of Islam it would likely start to duplicate discussion material from the Arab Spring thread.

In view of your remark in your post, perhaps the title of the thread would better have been " Hamites, Semites and their neighbours in the Middle East ".
This would enable a rigorous discussion of the origins of Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians, Arameans etc., should the membership be prepared to take it up.

:respect: