Mar Paulus VII – Blog –

Mesopotamia is the land between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, Bet Nahrein in the Ashurai language. This is the land where writing and numbers were invented six thousand years ago. It’s where the Bible tells us God created the first man and the first woman and placed them in the Garden of Eden, or Paradise. Mesopotamia is the Greek name for this land. Alexander the Great died in Babylon three centuries before the time of Jesus. Alexander’s empire crumbled after his death. The land of Mesopotamia became the battleground for many nations. The Arabs conquered Mesopotamia in the 7th Century AD, and they’ve occupied this Biblical land ever since. Although most of the original inhabitants of Mesopotamia have long migrated to other countries, there is a remnant of Ashurai and Chaldeans left in Mesopotamia, which has been renamed Iraq since the 1930s. Three thousand years ago, the Ashurai lands were in North Mesopotamia and the Chaldean lands were in South Mesopotamia. Nineveh in the North battled Babylon in the South for four thousand years, until there were no more men left to fight. Today, that seems mind boggling, but the sculptures depicting those battles and the records of those kings that ruled in the early millennia are still in the world museums. The war between the North and South has been going on for ten thousand years.

Every empire or super power experiences some sort of civil war that goes on forever. The US Civil War was the same eternal war, the North against the South, and we fight that war in every country where there is contention; it’s always the North versus the South, ironically not so much the East versus the West. Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and everywhere that people fight against themselves, it’s always the North versus the South. Maybe it has to do with the polarities of the North Pole and the South Pole, their destiny may be to attract and repel one another, the positive charge and the negative charge, the plus and the minus, the haves and the have-nots.

These three thousand year old sculptures that appeared in John’s vision of Revelation, were excavated from ancient Ashur when the country was called Mesopotamia. They were brought to the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, in the late 19th Century. My interest in the Bible was sparked when I visited the Louvre to shoot a documentary film on the history and the artifacts of Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh. The history of the Bible came alive before my eyes that day. I will never forget it. These three cities in Mesopotamia, or Bet-Nahrein, were the capitals of the land that is known as the Cradle of Civilization. Together with Babylon and Sumer in the South of Mesopotamia, they are the lands where the history of the Old Testament began. It’s where the Epics of Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood were recorded. These cities were the starting point in Abraham’s journey to the land of Canaan and Egypt. It’s were his children and grandchildren returned to write the history of their ancestors and the Scriptures as we know it today. This knowledge was lost for centuries, buried under the sand and rubble of conquering armies of the Greeks, Romans, Mongols and Arabs. The Crossroads of Civilization ran across the land of Mesopotamia, but the great cities of Ashur remained buried until the late part of the 19th Century. Now that the US has emerged as the sole super power in the world, and especially after the events of September 11th, there’s an interest in civilization again, and a concern for its enemy, terrorism. The Ashurai had to deal with terrorism from the very start of their first settlements ten thousand years ago.

Now that’s finally becoming known that the language of the Scriptures is the Ancient Aramaic, which evolved from Ashurit, it’s finally possible to interpret the Scriptures correctly and reconcile the tenets of the five major religions: Western Christianity, Modern Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It’s now possible to return to one conception of what the Scriptures are all about.