In an earlier entry, I told the story of Agdistis, who gave birth to the goddess Cybele. The “Black Rock of Cybele” has become something of a grail for those of us who study the Tzombi community, since it disappeared from the palace of the Roman emperor Tiberius and has yet to reappear. This is unfortunate, as the Black Rock is thought to have cosmic origins, and may be the same which fell in the
Hé-Gál Valley around 2500 B.C., destroying all the vegetation there and poisoning the Tigris river. The valley became known as the
Hur-sag Uq, or the
Valley of the Dead.
A couple of hundred years later, a Semite known to history as
Sargon the Greatcrossed this valley with his army, bringing with him a black rock. The Kish Stele describes Sargon and his army were described as being “covered in ashes” because of their pallor. It also rechristens the
Valley of the Dead as the
Valley of the Living Ashes. Sargon established hold of the Sumerian city of Kish, destroying all of his enemies. He claimed to be directly descended from Cybele. The center of worship for Cybele became the black stone, which was enshrined at Pergamum (see entry entitled “Persecution and Fear” 11/28/06 for more on Cybele).
Eventually the Sumerians were overrun by the Amorites, and they disappeared as a recognizable race. Those that survived were taken to Babylonia, where they are referenced in the
Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, and demonized as conquered cultures typically are. Because there was no food to be found in Sumer when the Amorites conquered, and no cooking utensils, and no cooking pots, the Sumerians earned the title of “mud-eaters”, and mud came to be considered the food of the dead in Babylonian mythology. The fourth tablet of the
Enuma Elish recounts the wholesale slaughter of the Sumerians, where it says of Marduk, the Babylonian hero:
The four winds he stationed so that nothing of
the mud-eaters might escape;
The South wind and the North Wind and the East wind
and the West wind
And the fourfold wind, and the sevenfold wind, and
the whirlwind, and the wind which has no equal;
He sent forth the winds which he had created, the seven
Of them;
And scattered the mud-eaters to the lands beyond the sea;
He severed their inward parts, he pierced their hearts,
Their heads he burst like ripening fruit
He cast down their bodies and stood upon them
Their might was broken, their host scattered.
Astute readers will probably recognize that the story of the
Valley of the Dead found its way into the Old Testament, where it was converted into a prophecy of the regeneration of the house of Israel in Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones coming to life. So the story passed from historical fact into legend and then myth and then prophecy.
