The Origins of Religion In the Near and Far East

I am a student of history. I love history and spend many hours researching it, but have focused mainly on how history relates to the Bible and other ancient religions. You learn a lot about civilizations when you study this. But I was given a challenge and took it up, to discover the origin of Eden.

Someone said to me that just because we only know two of the rivers mentioned in Genesis, the Tigris and Euphrates, but the other two are not known today, the Pison and the Gihon, then it does not really matter about those two. To be historically honest, every place and name is important, otherwise ancient historians would have never mentioned them. But I am not going to relate this to Atlantis, that's a still open speculation, but what I am going to do is point to the rivers mentioned, because we know they do exist.

I read from the Bible the descriptions of the lands where the rivers were at. Let's examine the first river mentioned, the Pison. The Bible tells us...

Genesis 2:10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. 11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

Obviously, the descriptor markers is that the land has gold, bdellium and onyx. So I looked up where all these three things can be found together. Now as we aren't sure what Havilah was, we can then assume that Havilah is the Hebraic word for the land. But these three metals are indeed found together in one land, that the ancient writers were well aware that they existed in a certain location, and that location is in modern day Pakistan. But Pakistan is not even 100 years old as a geopolitical entity, it was known in ancient times as the Indus River Valley, and the might Indus River flowed through there and it is where we find the ancient civilization of Harappa.

But since the other two know rivers also flow into the Gulf of Arabia, as the Indus does, I decided to look on Google Earth and found something interesting that I have not heard anyone mention before. I found underwater lines of an ancient structure that is man made. The lines are perfectly formed, something that could not have been naturally occurring. I am giving the coordinates here, and you may need to scroll in and out to get a full picture because it does seem quite large. This is in the Gulf of Arabia and the corner points to the Indus River Valley.

Latitude 20° 8'2.22"N
Longitude 64°54'51.42"E

Why is this area so important? The Indus River Valley is known for several things, it was the birthplace of the worship of Brahma, it also had two rivers, the Saraswati and Ghaggara. Some people believe Abraham was Brahma, and make the connection that Saraswati is the wife.

The Rig Vedas have the creation story much like the Genesis story,

Rig Veda

HYMN CXXIX. Creation 1. THEN was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? 2 Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever. 3 Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was void and form less: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.

Compare that to Genesis

Genesis 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

In the beginning, as both say, the world was void, then One who was self-existent caused the world to come into being. Darkness was on the face of the deep, both say the same thing. Until the moment that God spoke the division of dark and light, both say the same thing.

You must understand that the Rig Vedas were before Hinduism, it came along later after people tried to explain the mysteries of God. In the Vedic Age, the people of the Indus River Valley held this belief. And it is from here that religion spread in all directions. Let's look a minute to see what the Harappans believed...

Mohenjo Daro

While some have proposed an Aryan Invasion, no evidence has come to support it within Harappan or Indus River Valley sources. We will leave that one up in the air for now...

But taking a look at the Harappans and Mohenjo Daro, several things appear that cause one to think there was no religion, that is in fact false. There simply was no priestly class, and the same was for Abraham's time. The area he lived in was simply based on loose animistic and shamanistic religions, his father was a builder of idols. Many idols have been found in the Indus River, including the proto Shiva.

An inference to a centralized administration for each city, if not the entire civilization revealed the cultural uniformity. However, it is quite uncertain whether authority lay with a commercial oligarchy. There appears to be a complete lack of priestly "pomp or lavish display" which was common in all the other civilizations.

As there were no lavish examples of priests, there still was a religious motif carried out of Harappa to Sumer.

Several Harappan seals along with pictures of animals like tigers have been found in excavations of Sumerian cities. This aspect could have in no way existed in Mesopotamia. There is no evidence as to the religion of the Harappans. There is no such building which can be construed as temple or involve any kind of public worship. This is contrary to Mesopotamia or Egyptian civilization.

There are Harappan motifs found in Sumer, which is where Abraham is reputed to have been from. So therefore, it is my belief that what we know about religion in the ancient past, began in Harappa and followed Abraham into Sumer.

But if you look at the historical references, they place the most ancient Jews as being from India. Hindu Focus

Flavius Josephus (37 – 100 A.D.), wrote that the Greek philosopher Aristotle had said: “…These Jews are derived from the Indian philosophers; they are named by the Indians Calani.” (Book I:22.)

but that in no wise makes them Hindu as Hinduism was a later construct.

To be continued..

reply to post by WarminIndy


As Hinduism arose out of many different tantric groups trying to explain God, to say the ancient Jews were Hindus would be wrong. What we can say is that they had an origin, and that origin is the Indus River Valley, and in the Vedic Age, their creation was given as the same in Genesis. And if we go across Sumer and Mespotamia, we see also the same concepts, one such was Tiamat.

Tiamat was the monster known as chaos, of which we see repeated from the Rig Vedas. Tiamat was the Akkadian goddess. We find her in the Enuma Elis, the Babylonian creation story.

When the sky above was not named, And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name, And the primeval Apsû, who begat them, And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both, Their waters were mingled together, And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen; When of the gods none had been called into being.

Refer back to the Rig Vedas and see the parallel. But who is Apsu? Apsu, or Abzu, was the god of fresh water, or to know, spread semen and deep. Genesis says that the Spirit of God moved upon the waters.

The Enuma Elis also contains the concept of Sabbath, from the word Shabbat or full moon, and designated as a day of rest.

So the point I am trying to make here is that all religions had the same god and the same creation story, they simply transmitted it across the lands they went in to. I believe it all began in Harappa.

So the point I am trying to make here is that all religions had the same god and the same creation story, they simply transmitted it across the lands they went in to. I believe it all began in Harappa.

Just to clarify, are you saying there is a common monotheistic God nucleus at the root of all religions?

According to what I've read, the first documented evidence of monotheism is in Egyptian hieroglyphs dating to 5000 B.C.

What say you about the first documented evidence of monotheism? Where do you put that on the calendar?

InverseLookingGlass

So the point I am trying to make here is that all religions had the same god and the same creation story, they simply transmitted it across the lands they went in to. I believe it all began in Harappa.

Just to clarify, are you saying there is a common monotheistic God nucleus at the root of all religions?

According to what I've read, the first documented evidence of monotheism is in Egyptian hieroglyphs dating to 5000 B.C.

What say you about the first documented evidence of monotheism? Where do you put that on the calendar?

Yes, that it what I am saying. And simply because something was not documented does not mean it did not exist. We only know about religious systems that we have written or archeological evidence of. There are archeological sites of people buried with certain items that are assumed as for religious reasons, but just because 5,000 years ago is the first documentation does not mean there was no a monotheistic belief before.

Catal Huyuk might be the oldest structure for worship, it doesn't say what the worship consisted of. If we want to go by their original belief of Tengrism, they did worship Tengri as the Sky Father, and not the sky itself. Over time it became nature based.

But we can see the spread of religion westward and northward from Harappa. But the Popol Vuh has the same creation story as well as the ancient Chinese Oracle Bones. The Mandate of Heaven is a monotheistic concept in itself, and it was older than Buddhism and later Confucius. This came from somewhere.

What there is not yet, is what was documented pre-Egyptian, but it would be wrong to assume they just suddenly at one time developed a religion that is familiar with all the others, and yet none of the civilizations seemingly had much contact at that time. However, if we choose to believe human migration over time, then over time wherever they migrated to, took their beliefs with them.

Even if we did find archeological evidence, chances are we would not be able to decipher it anyway, such as the link shows about Harappa. To this day, the Harappan writing is not deciphered. Other than hieroglyphics from Egypt, does any of that say what the origins of their faith system is? It does not say where the origin is, therefore it would be wrong to assume that it simply began then. We can't speculate when something is documented. What I have provided is what is documented from other areas. Egypt's history itself is debated. If we want to believe they came from the Pan-African migration, then why didn't the Egyptians express the same shamanism that is still in Subsaharan Africa? But what we do see is a back migration of religion.

There are petroglyphs in Africa, North America and Australia that have the same imagery. And if we look at the cave paintings in France, Spain and Portugal, they tell a story of animals that do not exist in Europe, but either they brought that knowledge with them, or they experienced it in Europe.

The ability to document their world was at least 14,000 years. But the current thought in academia is that Europe could not have been populated before the last ice age, 17,000 years ago, but why would there be Europeans painting rock art 9,000 years before Egyptian hieroglyphics? So we just don't know what was before that, but we do know about the ability long before that.

The cave painting in France have more geometric shapes than animals. As this has not been deciphered yet either, it does not prove or disprove anything. What the speculation has been is to name different figurines as religious in nature, without evidence that they were. That's the assumption made by recent anthropologists. And since the belief is that God's form is not seen or known, then how do we know that is not how they perceived the world?

But the only thing you could say about Egypt was that it was the first codified and organized religion in that area, it may have not been organized prior to that.