I mentioned that I am working on a longer post in which I try to connect all this with the religion of Osiris. There are so many threads to weave together and my knowledge of classical historical texts is not sufficient for me to make really educated arguments. So as always, take everything I write with a grain of salt. I will keep hammering away in any case.
The "Persians" are a big theme in both Herodotus and the Bible. This empire has always seemed fishy to me, but of course that might simply be due to the fact that I am not well-read enough. Philippe Wajdenbaum argues, in "Argonauts of the Desert", that the Old Testament was based on Greek mythology, and that the Bible was written as a kind of backdated "prequel" to the Histories of Herodotus, which is why the Bible ends more or less where Herodotus begins, with the Persian Empire. Wajdenbaum is not a chronological revisionist, but again, I am working from the paradigm that all these texts were written no more than five hundred years ago and maybe much more recently.
I mentioned Roger Sabbah, who argues that the Pentateuch was composed by the Greek Ptolemies after conquering Egypt in order to write the original Jewish/Egyptian religion out of existence and replace it with a corrupted version which they controlled (the Septuagint) via their fictional character, Moses, and their new God, Kyrios. These two theories fit together.
Here is where I am going. Were the "Persians" and the "Pharisees" (Pharisians) one and the same? Was the Persian empire not a land empire based in today's Iran, but one of the names of the original merchant network that controlled the ancient world? Was this the "medieval empire of the Israelites" that Grishin and Melamed describe, the one that practiced castration, the one that was defeated and replaced by the Greek, Roman, and Ottoman empires?
I can't develop this idea (which I encountered on the website of Didier Lacapelle) completely here without going too far afield. But I would like to tarry with it a bit. It simplifies (perhaps oversimplifies) a lot of things. The principal language of the Persian Empire in its trade dealings was Imperial Aramaic, which is basically proto-Hebrew.
The word "Pharisee" in English comes from the Hebrew root PRS(h) which means "set apart" in the sense of a priestly class set apart from ordinary people. "Persian" and "Pharisian" are more or less the same word. Was the Persian Empire simply the empire of eunuch priests? While considering this idea, it struck me that the distinction between the set-apart PRSns and the masses still exists in the English language. I am talking about the words PERSON and PEOPLE. They come from two unrelated Latin words, persona and populus, the first referring to a kind of mask (which is itself curious) and the second referring to humans considered as an animal mass. No one knows how these roots entered Latin, however. The French peuple and the German Pöbel still both suggest the helot classes. Is this a linguistic relic of a time when the Persians, i.e. Templars/Jews/eunuchs, still ran the global trade empire?
In Jewish tradition, a boy receives a name when he is circumcised. Historically, one's name day was considered more important than one's birthday, because this was the moment a baby passed from the "animal" realm to the properly "human" one. Was the name "bought" at the expense of the genitals? Was castration what transformed someone from a nameless "people" into a "person" with the right to a name?
Cyrus the Great, a Persian, is the only non-Jewish Messiah in the Bible. Roger Sabbah argues pretty convincingly that the Bible was written by the Greek Ptolemies with the goal of substituting their fabricated God, Kyrios, for the original Egyptian/Jewish God, Osiris. Well, "Kyrios" looks an awful lot like "Kyros", which is how Cyrus is written in Greek. Hypothesis: the fake character Cyrus was a first attempt on the part of the Greek Empire to "hack" the Jewish/Egyptian/Persian Empire by inventing a universalist God/Messiah and inserting him into their rewrite of the Jewish holy books. Is "Kyrios" a mix of "Kyros" and "Darios"? Was he written into the Septuagint after the (real) destruction of the first Temple in order to Hellenize the Jews/Persians? Was Cyrus a first Jesus?
Claude:
Ezra the scribe, the founding figure of the Torah-centered Judaism from which Pharisaism descends, operates under explicit Persian royal authorization. The Persians funded the rebuilding of the Temple, authorized Jewish legal autonomy, and actively promoted Torah observance among the returning exiles.
In this oversimplified version of things, there were only two real rival empires at the "beginning" of history, the Jewish/Persian/Templar and the Greek. The Elephantine Papyri are intact papyrus documents found in Egypt and written in Demotic, Greek, and Aramaic that are supposedly 2500 years old. I originally assumed they were forgeries, but once we take into account that "Ancient Egyptian" history is no more than a few hundred years old, the idea of papyrus letters surviving in the desert is no longer so unrealistic. They show that "Jews" did not have the Torah yet, worshiped multiple gods, and had multiple temples. In one of the letters, the invading "Persians" are accused of destroying their temples.
Going back to the theme of this thread, it occurs to me that every representation of Egyptian workers we have shows beardless men. Supposedly these slaves were shaving their beards every day with bronze razors before heading off to work themselves to death in the fields...no way. The entire Egyptian religion, in which the rulers and the people were supposedly united happily and harmoniously through the worship of Osiris and the institution of Maat, or divinely ordained justice, sounds like an early version of Stalinist propaganda to me. My guess is that "Maat" was more like the equivalent of North Korean "Juche". Egypt was the first industrial farm and perhaps the place where castration- and religion-based brainwash techniques were perfected in order to maximize output. Forget about the pyramids and temples for a moment. The Nile Delta is a perfect natural farm, and this is why it was so important in the past. Mainstream history considers Egypt to be the place where commodity farming, in which surplus is produced and sold at profit, was invented. No wonder every empire (Persian, Greek, Roman) not only wanted to conquer it, but wanted to export its culture. Were "Maat" and "Osiris" and castration the key to transforming primitive communities around the world into slave colonies? I like this theory because it offers us a hard, material explanation for why Egypt was so important: the geography of the Nile Delta, which made it a perfect natural commodity farm and established the template for imperial extractive sharecropping operations around the world.
I will go into more detail in my next post.
