A new book by a Charles Sturt University (CSU) academic argues that Europe's first farmers were ruled by an elite aristocracy who passed themselves off as 'gods', and may have commanded secret knowledge that included ambrosia* which extended their life spans.

In Paradise Rediscovered – The Roots of Civilisation, Dr Mike Cahill, lecturer in biochemistry and cell biology at the CSU School of Biomedical Sciences in Wagga Wagga, asks and methodically answers confronting questions using a multidisciplinary approach.

 

"Paradise Rediscovered explores the hypothesis that the 'great flood' accounts of Middle Eastern pre-antiquity represent textual transmissions from a lost high-culture at the dawn of civilisation, about 3 000 years before the rise of Mesopotamia," Dr Cahill said.

 

"In the book I have assembled many pieces of myth and history, jigsaw-like, into a discernible yet incomplete image. While I can't guarantee that all its propositions or conclusions are correct, or even follow conventional wisdom, they are all based upon reasonable arguments, and I urge readers to have a look and decide for themselves."

 

Dr Cahill argues that a confrontation between an advanced farming elite and one of the Neolithic peoples they encountered near the Black Sea led to domination of the mass of Europe's early farmers by an elite of Indo-European speaking warriors and priests.

 

"They used their proprietary knowledge of sciences such as agriculture, astronomy, ceramics, the wheel, early symbolic writing, and other Neolithic technologies to pass themselves off to the subordinate masses as gods," he said.

 

"And it is as gods that they have been remembered, in the mythologies of Sumeria, the Hebrews, Egypt, and the descendants of the Indo-European speakers of the heartland of the Danube Civilisation (from 6 000 BC). Their opponents were another class of gods who occupied a religious centre at the pre-flood Bosporus sill (6 400 BC), the present site of Istanbul.

 

"That was the site of Atlantis, where, contemporary with the flood, a god-king character called 'The Ancient of Days' was involved in an ideological conflict with Indo-European 'fallen angels' who took the secret knowledge of the holy elect of Paradise and sacrilegiously shared it with the 'people of the land' to form the first farming communities in Europe. In doing so, they broke vows of chastity, having sex with the (presumably Greek) women of the land."

 

Dr Cahill postulates that these are the events surrounding the biblical flood of the Black Sea, as recounted in the Book of Enoch, which also describes a Neolithic stone circle 'observatory' that was used as a calendar to track dates associated with the agricultural cycle, thus time-stamping the passage to the Neolithic. He asserts that the circular centre was Atlantis, which was flooded and faded from prominence after the Black Sea flood, and was forgotten by all but the priests of Egypt.

 

"They kept the flame of knowledge alive for millennia and recounted it to the Greeks who passed it on until Plato finally published the account and preserved it in his Critias and Timaeus (the Atlantis texts).

 

"Methodically assigning similar historical veracity to the mythic systems inherited from that time has allowed me to conjecturally reconstruct otherwise inaccessible events. I hope that this work ultimately makes readers reconsider modern society," Dr Cahill said.

More information can be found here.