An Extra Player on the Playing Field of History

Introduction

Cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia tell of a time when “Kingship was lowered from Heaven”. There appears to be no doubt about the translation, yet something is lacking and the full sense escapes the modern reader. Whatever the phrase signified to the Sumerians and their successors, it was apparently too well known to require an explanation, perhaps as straightforward as “In God We Trust” or Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

The key development was the emergence of legitimacy. A male endowed with now unknown qualities or characteristics had become legitimately entitled to rule over others, even those he did not know. This extraordinary development appears to have detonated the explosion of events that made history begin in Sumer.

Some of the early kings were terrestrial representatives of planetary gods, undying celestial beings whose ever-circling cyclical movements incorporated the essence of rebirth and immortality. Jupiter was King in Heaven; Saturn was Ruler over Time. Other kings ruled in the image of the never-setting pole star or as representative of the Great Bear, Ursa Major.

Kings were responsible for life on Earth Below and in time their responsibilities would include assuring the timely arrival of life-giving rains. In this, as with other tasks, they would occasionally fail, which then put their legitimacy into question, and at an early date the ancient Near East fell into incessant warring with the multiplication of claims to legitimacy, many based on the notion that “might” constituted divine evidence of “right”.

1

A Mountain of Secrets

A professor at the University of Lecce in Italy claims he has identified “a mountain sacred to our species from the very beginning”. Reviewing data from numerous expeditions, he has also come to believe that the same mountain must be the “real” Mount Sinai. The evidence suggests that Professor Anati was possibly right on both counts. Yet his identification of the site of Mount Sinai may be less important than other aspects of his research. For in the course of his work, Anati inadvertently exposed some highly curious corners of our history.

Another person who may well have been right as concerns the past was the journalist-novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), whose writings contain a reference to “two histories”, the “mendacious official History that is taught […] and the secret History that contains the true causes of events, a shameful history” (Lost Illusions, 1843).

Professor Emmanuel Anati’s “Mountain of God”

Har Karkom, which Anati calls the “Mountain of God”, is the recent Hebrew name for a little-visited but prominent mountain located in the Negev Desert of southern Israel a few miles north of the Sinai border with Egypt; Fig. 1.1. Although its description as “flat-topped” is essentially accurate, two small rounded summits mark its distinctively shaped flat surface, and “a small cave or cleft” was also found high on the mountain.

As a student in 1954, Anati had briefly visited the waterless area to check reports of ancient rock art, his specialty at that time and throughout his subsequent career. British Palestine Mandate maps then in use showed the mountain with the Bedouin name Jebel Ideid, meaning “the ←16 | 17→Mountain of Celebration” or “the Mountain of the Multitude”, and when Anati completed his studies and wished to return, he spent some years in relocating the renamed mountain on the new Israeli maps. Eventually he found the place and in the course of twenty or more archaeological expeditions commencing in the early 1980s, he and his teams registered more than 1300 ancient sites on and close by Har Karkom.

Dates associated with these sites range from the very beginning of the human adventure in the Lower Paleolithic (the Old Stone Age) up into the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods, but human habitation and activity had not been continuous. Some periods are unrepresented: in particular, a stretch dated approximately 1950 to 1000 B.C. from which there are essentially no archaeological vestiges either at Har Karkom or elsewhere in the Sinai and Negev.1

There is general agreement that this lack of regular human activity in the region during most of the second millennium B.C. was due to an extended dry period, but it is rarely recognized or admitted that this constitutes an enormous problem for professional historians and biblical scholars. For the existence of these arid conditions requires that the forty-year wanderings of the Israelite tribes recorded in Exodus had occurred at a time when the region was uninhabitable. Divine intervention in favor of the Israelites cannot be easily evoked as an explanation even for those inclined to such thinking because, as is recorded in the biblical account, the Israelites had encountered other peoples in their wanderings – peoples with names familiar from Sunday School such as the Amalekites, Amorites, Edomites, Horites, and Midianites. What did these peoples do for water? And why did they leave no vestiges datable from around the 13th century B.C., which is the time usually assigned for the Exodus? Either Anati or the climatologists or the historians have got things wrong.

One major clustering of archaeological dates from Har Karkom occurs some 35,000 to 10,000 years ago within the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. (For comparison, the cave art at Chauvet and Lascaux dates, respectively, from approximately 30,000 and 17,000 years before the present.) At Har Karkom, this long Paleolithic interval is marked by artifacts made of flint excavated from the “Mountain of God” itself, and commencing roughly 30,000 years ago, flints from Har Karkom were retouched to produce human and animal-like faces and animal-like shapes, which to Anati and others has suggested a ritual or religious purpose.

By 2001 Anati and his teams had recorded 43 sites with still older Lower Paleolithic vestiges, and in an overview Anati would write that it had become clear “that Har Karkom had been a holy site ever since the arrival of the first Homo sapiens”. “If we can refer to this Paleolithic site as a ‘sanctuary’ ”, he wrote, “it may well be the oldest sanctuary known, in which case Har Karkom may be considered […] a sacred mountain to our species from the very beginning”.2

Outsiders may find it difficult to pass judgment on Anati’s sensible-sounding but extraordinary contention. Further, any attempt to check Anati’s reasoning brings forth a troublesome question: “Why Har Karkom?” Why not somewhere else, the next flint-bearing hill or mountain to the north, south, east, or west, for instance?

A second major clustering of dates at Har Karkom marks the much later “Bronze Age Complex” around 3200 B.C. to 1950 B.C., approximately 26,000 years after the great flourishing in the Middle Paleolithic. During the Bronze Age, there were “cult sites on the plateau and dwelling structures at the foot of the mountain”, a distribution sufficiently distinctive to cause Anati to suggest that only the elite had been allowed up the mountain, much as is recorded in the biblical account where only Moses had been allowed up Mount Sinai.

Anati’s depictions of diversely dated rock art, pillars, stone circles, tumuli, altar-like structures, round platforms, and face-like features at Har Karkom nicely support his identification of the mountain as a “persisting” religious center of some sort. It is not clear, however, what religions or sets of beliefs might be associated with the site. The “Where?” and the “When?” emerge from Anati’s presentation, but not the “Who?”, the “What?”, or the “Why?”.

To his great surprise, Anati noted early in his research that no specific biblical place-name has been identified as referring to Har Karkom. He even wondered if there had been a purposeful omission, even a cover-up. But a cover-up of what? In what period? And by whom?

In 1983 Anati reached the conclusion that Har Karkom must be the biblical Mount Sinai.³ Non-specialists, including tourists who have visited the Byzantine monastery of Saint Catherine in the southern Sinai Peninsula, may find this puzzling for they will have been told by their guides that the nearby Jebel Musa (“Mountain of Moses” in Arabic) is the biblical Mount Sinai. Yet standard reference books such as Cornfeld’s Archaeology of the Bible have Jebel Musa as only one of a dozen ←18 | 19→or more mountains that have been claimed to be the Mount Sinai. For Cornfeld,4 the identity of Mount Sinai remains “problematic” and the “lack of a clear, continuous tradition about the location or even name of the mountain” led him to propose that several traditions may have been blended imperfectly. Cornfeld may or may not be correct, but within the enormous span of time claimed by Anati to stretch back to the Lower Paleolithic, we are primarily concerned with the historically first, the original, Mount Sinai.

Taking the account of the Exodus as his authority, Anati put together what he called “a 24-point Identikit” for the biblical Mount Sinai. His “kit” included some trivial features (“the desert of Sinai at its feet” and “rock engravings”) but others (“a small cave or cleft on the peak of the mountain”; “an altar with twelve standing stones… beside it”) seem quite specific, even diagnostic. Of the twenty-four features, Anati identified twenty-three at Har Karkom, the only missing feature being “a forging oven for metal, with a water hole beside it”.

Anati’s contentions have been very poorly received; in fact, they have been ferociously criticized, because

–the usual identification of Mount Sinai is with Jebel Musa (around which, however inconveniently, few vestiges are older than Byzantine);

–some of Anati’s correlations of modern place-names and places with sites described in Exodus seem far-fetched; and

–some of his datings employ a contested technology, “patina analysis”, (a bad-faith criticism because Anati did not use the technique to establish absolute dates but only for comparative dating, a task for which it is suited); but mostly because