From Ararat to Nineveh (Iraq Kurdistan)
 
The most ancient texts ever discovered that can still be read were written in the language of the Sumerians, a people long believed to have been the world's oldest civilization. It is widely supposed that the Sumerians were the original people in the land between the two rivers that the Greeks called Mesopotamia which we know as present-day Iraq. But the Sumerians might not have been the first to live in their land.

The great Sumerian scholars Arno Poebel and Samuel Noah Kramer believed that the Sumerian name derived from the same root as Shem, one of Noah's sons as given in the Bible. Perhaps, as in the case of the table of nations in Genesis chapter 10, the term referred to peoples living in this area assumed by the ancients as descended as Shem. For sure, the Sumerians own history discovered in Ancient Near Eastern texts tell of people who lived there before the Flood.

Even more interesting, these texts tell us that the Sumerians themselves came from the land where the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers begin. The Sumerians called this land Arrata, To get to Arrata one had to cross seven mountains. To guess where ancient Arrarta may have been, take a look at the map above that shows the place where the Tigris River flows from the mountains. The Sumerians ancient homeland of Arrata would have been ancient Urartu (see article below right), what is now called Ararat.

Indeed, there are many parallels between the historiography found in the Bible and that of the peoples of the Ancient Near East. We learn from both sources about (1) an ancient world-destroying Flood; (2) new origins of mankind from the mountains of Ararat; (3) an ancestor (like Enoch of the Bible) who ascended to Heaven without actually dying; (4) texts that speak of all mankind once having the same language (as in the biblical account of Babel).

Indeed scholars have long been long aware of the connection between the creation account in the Bible and those of other peoples in the Ancient Near East. The common assumption today is that the creation and origin accounts in the biblical text are borrowed from Ancient Near Eastern "myths." But what on earth could have inspired such a widespread sharing of myth! The gospel of Jesus Christ is just now reaching all the peoples of the earth. What great event could have inspired so many ancient nations to retain a common memory of the past?

A simpler assumption is that all the peoples of the Ancient Near East as well as the many peoples from every continent and land who share elements of a similar historiography (i.e. Creation, world-destroying Flood, re-population of the world through the salvation of a saved remnant) might be sharing core elements from their actual history, the ancient history of all mankind.

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The land translated in most of our English Bibles as Ararat is the land of Urartu (the name as appears in the Hebrew text), a country well known to the people of the Ancient Near East. This land appears not only in the Bible as being the landing place of Noah's Ark (Genesis 8:4), but also as the place where the sons of the Assyrian king fled just after they murdered their father. (Isaiah 37:38) This was the same Assyrian king who had placed a siege on Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah. Lying just north of the country of Assyria, Urartu appears frequently in Assyrian texts dating from the most ancient biblical times.

I refer to Urartu as a land or country instead of as a nation or people because modern scholars inspired by German nationalism* have come to identify nations and peoples by the native language of the people. Hence, whenever these scholars  discovered some new languages written in ancient texts of clay or stone, they invented a new Ancient Near Eastern nation. In truth, in ancient times as today, many nations may speak the same language. Nations or peoples also change their language or speak or write more than one language. Their new language may be from an altogether different language family. This may be the chief reason why the nations of the Ancient Near East that have been identified by scholars do not completely match the peoples and nations as recorded in the Bible.

Another language found written on texts in the land of Urartu and in diplomatic texts found in other lands was probably  spoken by the people who live in Urartu. Scholars call this language and the people who spoke it Hurrian. Hurrian is unlike what are now called the Semitic family of languages that include Akkadian, Canaanite, biblical Hebrew, and Arabic.

The great William F. Albright who pioneered studies into the historiography and archaeological cultures of the Ancient Near East noticed similarities in customs between the Hurrians and the Hebrew patriarchs. In fact names found among the early Israelites have Hurrian roots. The Hyskos who ruled in ancient Egypt, whom the Jewish historian Josephus identifies as Israel from the time of Joseph, also spoke what is called the Hurrian language. Thus, the Hebrew spoken by Abraham and named for his ancestor Eber may not have been the Western Canaanite language that the Israelites later spoke and that would be used for writing the Bible. Ancient Hebrew may in fact have been very similar to the Hurrian language spoken in the land of ancient Urartu.




*The nineteenth century German scholars who are responsible for the modern historiography of the ancient world may have identified ancient nations as different languages discovered in ancient inscriptions and texts due to the fact that Germany was perhaps the first and only state in human history formed (from numerous small central European states) on the basis of a particular language.

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