Between the dispersal of the tribes at Babel and the beginnings of recognisable history there lie two or three centuries of which Genesis tells us nothing, and archaeology only a score of semi-mythical legends behind which lurks some basis of fact. Genesis 10 shows the peoples, sons of Shem and Ham and Japheth, making their way from the common centre at Babel into the surrounding lands and creating their village-settlements wherever each party came to a stop and forming the nucleus of future nations. Two centuries later, these villages had grown into cities; not cities in the modern sense of the term but at least built-up towns of anything up to twenty thousand inhabitants living an orderly and civilised communal life. This is where ancient secular history begins to take definite shape and it is at this point that the first written records begin to appear and yield some definite information as to what life was like in those far-off days. Set against the Old Testament background this period is probably that of the early lifetime of the patriarch Eber, fifth in descent from Noah (Gen. 11.14 Sept.) about the time of the death of Shem, Noah's; eldest son. Shem must certainly have witnessed the developments that led to the first abortive attempt to build the Tower of Babel, and the separation of the peoples as they began to migrate in various directions to distant lands. He would perceive in this the hand of the Lord moving to the fulfilment of the injunction laid upon them when they came out of the Ark "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …and bring forth abundantly therein" (Gen. 9.1,7). Although from this point of time the affairs and histories of each emerging nation began to run in separate tracks, the background of Genesis and the story of the patriarchal line from Noah to Christ remains in the land of Babel, the Plain of Shinar, until the days of Abraham. That was a thousand years in the future. It may come as a surprise to realise that this is the period of time that separates Gen. 11.1 from Gen. 12.1. Throughout all this time the only records of events are those preserved in very imperfect form, in the inscriptions which have been recovered by painstaking investigators from the sands of Iraq. But the only lucid and reliable history of man from the very beginning up to the time of the Flood is that which was preserved through those years by the forebears of Abraham; when he left Ur of the Chaldees. The sacred records must have come with him giving the dated line of his ancestors back to the first man and this gives us the earliest chapters of the Bible we know. If the confused and mutually contradictory accounts of the period between the Flood and Abraham which are all that the Sumerian and Babylonian tablets give us can be taken by experts as a guide to the events of those days, then certainly the much more precise and definite account in the Bible should be accepted as authoritative. But before tracing out the history and developments of those days in the land of Babel with which the descendants of Noah were to be so intimately involved, a glance at the progress and welfare of at least two of the peoples who migrated over the earth is necessary. The nation that made the most rapid advance at this time was Egypt, the children of Mizraim or Misr, son of Ham. They may well have been the largest body of migrants to separate at Babel and seek for themselves a home in the far west. So they set out. Climbing steadily, from the pleasant valley in which stood the half-built Tower, ascending the three thousand feet slopes to the highlands of the present Syrian desert, they faced a long and arduous journey. Egypt is nearly a thousand miles from Babylon, and it may be conjectured that the migrants were unlikely to have got so far in so short a time. The answer probably lies in the nature of the intervening terrain. Between Babylon and Egypt lies the great Syrian desert, an elevated rocky plateau having no rivers and on which nothing grows. Braidwood and Howe, in "Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan", have stated that in ancient times this whole area was covered with luxuriant oak forests, but even so it was no place for permanent settlement. The scouts must have been out in front and eventually reported the discovery of a fertile arable land with a mighty river, (the Nile), adequate for all their needs for generations to come. Unlike the sons of Shem and of Cush, they left no settlements in their passage, but attained and colonised the land of Egypt as one body. To this day that Syrian desert contains no relics of ancient cities and habitations as do the countries round about.

Here, in this fertile territory, watered by the Nile, they found a home every bit as desirable as the one they had left. Here they rapidly built up the second great civilisation of the ancient world, that of Egypt. They entered Egypt, a neolithic (stone-using) people, having nothing in the way of metals or tools; within a few centuries they were building the Pyramids. Casson, in "Ancient Egypt" (1969) says "Within a century after the first Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom had ascended his throne, Egyptian builders had graduated from sun-dried bricks to highly sophisticated construction in stone.....within two hundred years or so Egypt's builders had so mastered the new material that they had finished the Pyramids at Gizeh". This means that technical progress was, extremely rapid, much more so than the scholars and experts of today care to admit.

The usual view of Egyptian history, shared by most scholars, considers that human settlement commenced at an extremely distant date and that men evolved only slowly from a state of primitive savagery to the highly civilised position which is revealed by the extant remains. Thus the periods of development before the first Pharaoh, which are known as the Tasian and Badarian eras, (from the names of villages where remains were first found) is pictured as being immeasurably long. If in fact, as indicated in Genesis, the first Egyptians were already civilised when they entered Egypt, this hypothesis is unnecessary. From the entry into Egypt to the first

Pharaohs need only have been a matter of two or three generations, say a century, and this would bring the early history of Egypt into line with that of Sumer. After all, if one compares the fantastic progress of human achievement during the last hundred years, in science, invention, technology and exploration, there is nothing unreasonable in thinking that the first civilisations; Egypt and Sumer, should have developed in something like two or three centuries.

One factor which led to exaggerated ideas of the antiquity of Egyptian history was the 19^th century scholars habit of taking the records of kings' reigns and dynasties as strictly consecutive, and stringing them all in succession, failing to recognise that ancient men, like modern ones, are only human and apt to exaggerate their terms of years to increase their own importance. It has been realised in this 20th century that many of these dynasties overlapped so that sometimes two or more kings reigned simultaneously in different places. Hence the scale of Egyptian history has been considerably reduced in more recent years concerning the accession of Menes, the first Egyptian Pharaoh. In 1867 Breckh gave it as 5702 BC but in 1967 a Biblical archaeologist established it at 2850 BC. The latest dates arrived at by the experts line up very well with the chronology of Genesis as given in the Septuagint. They support the view that the story of the Tower of Babel recounted in Gen. 11 should be placed at about 3000 BC and the accession of Menes about 2800 BC.

They arrived in Egypt a civilised, knowledgeable and God-fearing people but they arrived with nothing beyond a few flocks and herds and seed for their hoped-for crops. This latter is known because wheat grain found in ancient tombs of this period has been analysed and found to be of a type which is native only in Euphrates territory. But with their boundless energy it could well have been no more than a century before their first primitive culture had developed into one in which towns were being built with permanent houses and temples. Egypt's first Pharaoh, Menes, was on the throne at a little settlement that later on became the famous Memphis, capital city of Egypt in after times. Within another century they had devised a calendar and begun to devise the famous hieroglyphic writing, and had even produced a treatise on surgery. A further hundred years and they were mining copper and precious stones in Sinai, near the mountain afterwards made famous as the place of the Mosaic Law, getting gold from Sinai and East Africa, and cultivating the native river-reeds to produce papyrus for writing material - the plant name from which we have our modern word "paper". Not long after that, about 2600 BC they were building the Pyramids.

The early Egyptians were deeply religious and at this time had not developed the pantheon of gods for which Egypt afterwards became notorious. They brought with them from Babel the original worship of the God of heaven. Some of the sacred texts, recovered from tombs of a not much-later time, testify to this. They speak of the Most High as "the only true living God, self-originated, who exists from the beginning, who has made all things, but himself was not made". He is "the God who has existed from old time; there is no God without Him. He is not visible, nor carved in marble. There is no shrine with painted figures of Him; there is no building that can contain Him. He does not manifest His form". There is nothing in this from which any Christian or Jew would dissent; here, clearly, is a written expression of the faith which the sons of Noah must have brought with them from the antediluvian world and planted in this new world they were building. At this point the Egyptians pass out of Bible history, not again to be noticed until a thousand years later when Abraham, followed by Jacob and Joseph, came to sojourn in that land. After that the destinies of Israel and Egypt were intertwined but by then the Egyptians had a thousand gods to worship and temples in the land innumerable. The other party to depart from Babel whose going was to have significant consequences for Israel in later days was that of Asshur, grandson of Shem, and the ancestor of the Assyrians ("Assyria" is the Greek form of the Hebrew name "Asshur"; the nation was named after its founder). The origin of the Assyrian - is accorded a brief notice in Gen.10 when Asshur is said to have left Babel and built Nineveh and other cities. Gen.10.11-12 says "Out of that land" (i.e. Babel) "went forth Asshur, and built Nineveh and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah; the same is a great city". One immediately has visions of a mighty concourse of people armed with all the necessary implements and materials to set about the building of those magnificent cities for which Assyria afterwards became famous, but in fact there was nothing of the kind. Many generations had to pass before the sons of Asshur got around to building permanent cities: at the start they were nothing more than herdsmen living in tents. In the advance of technical progress the Assyrians lagged well behind the Sumerians and Egyptians and it was getting on for a thousand years before they had any real cities. At this time it was more like a migration of perhaps twenty or thirty thousand people under the leadership of their patriarch Asshur making their way three hundred miles northward along the course of the river Tigris, until they came upon the rolling grass lands and low foothills of Northern Mesopotamia and here they called a halt and began to erect their tents and a little later on mud-brick houses in little villages around which stretched their farmsteads and pastures. All over this land that eventually became the Assyria of the Old Testament there are the remains of literally hundreds of these settlements bearing evidences of habitation at this early date. They were much more primitive than their neighbours the Sumerians in the south and the land they occupied was not so congenial. The summer there is not so long and the winters are often bitterly cold. But there they settled and there, in the course of time, they built their cities and at last Nineveh was their capital and for a time the world's most magnificent city. They increased in military might and became the scourge of the nations.

But when Asshur led his people into that grassy plain all these glories were in the distant future. It is known that Nineveh was founded at this early date. One of the greatest of 20^th century archaeologists, Sir Max Mallowan, conducted extensive researches on the site of the ancient city and probed its past right back to the time when it was no more than a village settlement of mud huts. That could well have been when Asshur entered the land. Calah, the Assyrian name of which was Kal-hu, is about twenty miles from Nineveh, and was in Ashur's time doubtless a similar village. Resen is still unknown and undiscovered; it may never have attained city status or it may have survived into history under another name. Various suggestions emanating from early medieval writers hazard the idea that it is represented today by a 'village near' Nineveh called Rash-al-am, meaning 'the fountainhead' but since this Arabic name is fairly common over all Mesoptamia there is not much reliance to be placed on that. Resen is defined in this verse "a great city"; more properly it should be rendered "a strong city", as though it was some kind of fortress offering protection. A modern suggestion is that it may have been the notable city a few miles to the south of Calah called Asshur, which itself was the capital before Nineveh. This was in later times a fortress city guarding the Assyrian dominions from the incursions of invaders from the south. No one really knows for the name Resen has not survived.

The general picture then is that `of a group of villages comprising Nineveh in the centre, Rehoboth, "the suburbs of the city", the open spaces around and Calah a little way off. Surrounding these main centres were the smaller settlements and farmlands that ultimately grew into the sovereign State of Assyria. There has been preserved lists of the kings who ruled from the first but it is known that the early so-called "kings" were in actual fact petty tribal sheikhs living in tents; the days of palaces and royal thrones came much later. The AV. margin has an alternative reading; "out of that land he went forth into Assyria" implying that it was the great hero of Gen. 10, Nimrod, who built the northern cities as well as his own, not Asshur the Semite. It is not likely that this is correct; it is based on the existence of a personal pronoun in the phrase, so that the expression runs "from this land he went Asshur" but there is no preposition of motion governing Asshur and the pronoun could equally well be masculine or neither so that the phrase could well be "Out of that land one went forth Asshur" and so refer to Asshur anyway. Nimrod as a Cushite is hardly likely to have gone north into Assyria which was a Semitic stronghold. The verse is much more likely to indicate that Nimrod went south and Asshur went north in this matter of city building and took the lead in setting up the separate Sumerian and Semitic communities.

The narrative was not written in Hebrew; it first saw the light at the very beginning of writing, in the early Sumerian pictographic script of which few examples are as yet discovered. What is known of the language, however, shows that the grammatical forms are very elementary; there were no pronouns or conjunctions and a literal representation of what is likely to have been the original account would run something like "from land went Asshur built Nineveh". All things considered, it seems that Gen. 10 is telling us that Asshur went north and Nimrod went south.

This latter name is that which has next to engage attention. Nimrod, the "mighty hunter before the Lord" who is credited in legend and folklore from that day to this in the doing of great deeds and the execution of mighty works. Who was this man, mentioned only by name in Genesis but remembered in the Arab world to this day?

(To be continued} AOH