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GOD'S ORACLE PEOPLE

Chapter 13
THE BEHISTUN ROCK, A ROSETTA STONE OF THE LOST TRIBES

Brother John G. Gassaway

Hosea 1:9 Then said God, Call his name Lo-ammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God
2:16 And it shall be at that day, saith the LORD that thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali.
I Chronicles 5:26 And the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria, and the spirit of Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and he carried them away, even the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and brought them unto Halah, and Habor, and Hara, and to the river Gozan, unto this day.
II Kings 17:6 In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

The Assyrian Empire reached its greatest during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727). In 738 a new coalition formed against Assyria under the leadership of Sam'al (modern Zincirli) in northern Syria. It was defeated, and all the princes from Damascus to eastern Anatolia were forced to pay tribute. It was at this time in 738 BC that Tiglath-pileser took away the tribes east of the Jordan into captivity. If you look at enough historical documents, you will find that these kings went by many names at the same time. Pul was a favorite name as well as Sargon, which meant the "legitimate king." They all seemed to take on the name of Tiglath-pileser also when they ascended the throne. The kings of Assyria would usually act as co-regents, most often the general of the armies, until THE king died and then they would assume the power. It was this way when Samaria came under siege for three years. The "understudy" coregent Sharru-kin (Sargon in the Bible), meaning "Legitimate King" was the general in charge of the siege until his father Shalmaneser V (726-722) died. This "Sargon" then became king and his understudy general completed the siege of Samaria with Samaria falling to Assyria in 721 BC. Therefore you will find in one place, statements that Shalmaneser defeated Samaria [II Kings 17:6] while outside the Bible you will find the general in charge in 721, Sargon as the one who brought the final defeat of Samaria. With this information on the removal of Israel from their land, let us see if we can find them again in their new place of captivity. We will have to go outside the Bible to do that.

We have our problems in identifying people because their names keep changing. In the instance of the House of Israel, God changed their name by His edict. As result, the name Israel or El was never attached to them again (Hosea 1; "not my people"). We only found these people through archaeology. The history of archaeology is helpful here to lay important groundwork regarding the Northern Tribes. Many of the names of the Old Testament places were thought at one time to be mythological, at least by secular historians. Then there arose a group of men who dared look for the evidence of these famed places and of course the basis for events told concerning them. These included Paul Emile Botta who first discovered the ruins of Nineveh followed by Austen Henry Layard at Nineveh; Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered that the stories of Homer were factual descriptions of a real place, Troy; Arthur Evans who dug up the finds on Crete, where the digs at Knossos proved that an ancient Mycenaean culture of high sophistication emerged shortly after the flood; already mentioned Major Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and the Behistun Rock and then those men who never made the physical finds in Mesopotamia but worked for decades on deciphering the writings coming from Assyria, Babylon and Crete including George Smith, Champollion, who deciphered the Rosetta Stone, and Georg Friedrick Grotefeud who first broke the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions coming out of Mesopotamia.

Gods, Graves, and Scholars by C. W. Ceram published in 1952 is a factual narrative of the adventures of these fathers of archaeology including Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered that the stories of Homer were factual descriptions of a real place, Troy. Arthur Evans dug up the finds on Crete, where the digs at Knossos proved that an ancient Mycenaean culture of high sophistication emerged shortly after the flood. This was a naval-based civilization that sounds in every way like the place that Noah would have settled. Remember, he lived 600 or so years after the flood. You will see that he or someone like him was well known to those who don't get a lot of press in the Genesis story.

Although Napoleon was not an archaeologist, he was smart enough to know what he or his men had found when the Rosetta stone was discovered. The lifetime of work spent by one Jacques Champollion deciphering this code is an incredible story in itself.

Nineveh was thought to be a Biblical myth until 1846, when after 3 years of digging, Paul Emile Botta discovered the very place. Then Henry Layard discovered the older Palace of Nimrud in the same area. He found names recorded on the clay tablets that refer to border incidents involving the tribes and their names are typically given from the Assyrian viewpoint in the tablets of Assurbanipal’s library.

The most remarkable find to help us in this study was the Behistun rock or inscriptions in Media. The Behistun Rock is one of the keys to finding the Lost Tribes. The three languages found on the Behistun Rock reveal the three names of the Ten Tribes. God had forbidden the use of HIS name for these people [Hosea 1] The Behistun Rock is found in the Zagros Mountains, in northwestern Iran, on an old caravan road that runs from Babylon to Ecbatana, the ancient capitol of Media. The mountain is 1700 feet high and on the sheer face, 300 feet above the base is a huge bas-relief commissioned by Darius the Great (reigned 522–486 BC) in 515 BC as a grandiose Ode to his great accomplishments. Listed are the nations and peoples he conquered and ruled as the king of the Medo-Persian Empire.

The picture is accompanied by many large panels, which are inscribed with three languages. The size of the whole monument is larger 150 feet high, 150 feet wide. And it starts 300 feet above the ground. One example of the quality of workmanship that went into the monument is the preparation of the surfaces. Hot lead was added where loose rocks and cracks were found as a stabilizer or fill. This was done at over 300 feet above the ground. [Jack Edward, website; Gods, Graves and Scholars]

Henry Rawlinson in 1837 risked his life for months, hanging several hundred feet, by block and tackle, down the face of this cliff in Persia. He did so to copy off meticulously, an inscription on that mountain that had been there since the time of the Assyrians when Darius the Great had it carved into the face of the cliffs. It was written in three languages and, like the Rosetta Stone, it was a key in breaking the code of the writings of the ancients. With the three scripts like the Rosetta stone, it was now a not so "simple matter" of deciphering this cuneiform language. But here we had Persian, Susian, and Chaldean (or Babylonian) scripts. It just so happens that on that rock he had found references to these tribes. In Persian it was Sakae. In Susian (Susa the northern capitol of Persia, located in northern Iraq) it was Scythian and in Babylonian, Ghimri (another rendering of Kimrie or Cimmerian). The Babylonian dialect was very similar to the Assyrian and their name for the tribes was quite similar to the name, bet Kumrie, that the Assyrians used. They were all one and the same people in the eyes of their captors! [From One Man’s Destiny, C.R.Dickey, 1942]. The Behistun Rock inscriptions are confirmed in two other places: Darius' tomb, and a gold tablet. The gold tablet again mentions the conquering of the Saka, while the tomb inscription expands the evidence by talking about three different kinds of Sakai. In all cases, the same name in Babylonian was Ghimri. The three different kinds of "Sakai" were obviously the Cimmerians, the Scythians and the Sakai, themselves, and referred to by Darius as one and the same people, just various tribes of the same people. [Gods, Graves and Scholars]

The Persians had to deal with the tribes on their western fronts. They called them "sons of Isaac", or saki suni (Isaac’s sons). (Again Genesis 21:12 the name of Isaac) Remember old Hebrew has no vowels so the spelling of Isaac is SK. If any vowel then is added between the consonants, the first would be between the S and the K, producing Sik, Sok, Sak, etc. There is no C in Hebrew. So to Herodotus they became the Sak or Saki. He was reporting from the Persian side, although he was partial to Greece. This name Saki has pushed its way to all quarters of the world just like the prophecy in Deuteronomy 33:17 that Israel would "push the people to the ends of the earth." I previously stated that one of the most common Japanese names is Sakai and their warriors have a name, Samurai that is so close to the name of the Israelite capitol, Samaria, that the connection between Israel and Japan is virtually cemented.

Most often the Assyrians called them Beth Kimrie or House of Imrie, the sixth and most notable king of northern kingdom who moved the capital to Samaria [Gods, Graves and Scholars, C.W. Cream, 1952] They applied the name of the king that was associated with Samaria, Imrie or Omri, and had a harsh sound at the beginning called an aspirate. The Babylonian name on the Behistun rock was a cognate of Kimrie in Chaldean, Ghimri. This is just a variation in how the first sound of the name is made, soft or hard. The news people could never get the Ayatollah Khomeini’s name straight. Was it Humani or Komani? I heard both. The fact is that the name Imrie could be pronounced as I-mri or K-imri. The Assyrians used the harsh beginning, sort of a coughing sound followed by imrie. Bet was added, to denote the word house or House (dynasty) of K (Imrie, Omrie). Thus the people became known as Bet Kumrie and eventually shortened to Kimrie, or Kimmerians or Cimmerians as the beginning sound was softened somewhat. Again, the Babylonians used the Assyrian name, Kimmrie or Gimiroi. The Susian name was Scythian, descriptive of the way these tribes in that area moved about in nomadic fashion living in wagons with all their possessions. Likewise the etymological study of the word Scythian will show it is an evolution from “succuth” or sik-kooth, the houses made of branches by the Israelites at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles. That became “succuthians or sikuthians”, ones who lived in tents, as they did, moved in wagon trains, from place to place. This was eventually shortened to skithian or Scythian.

Originally the name Scythian simply meant "nomadic", the exact description that Herodotus speaks of the Scythians in this way; "The wandering Scythians once dwelt in Asia, and there warred with the Massagetai (other Saki), but with ill success; they therefore quitted their homes, crossed the Araxes [Volga], and entered the land of Cimmeria. For the land which is how inhabited by the Scyths was formerly the country of the Cimmerians." [Herodotus] All of this is supported by the archaeological finds that were made in the 1800’s. [One Man’s Destiny]

Sir Henry C. Rawlinson was mainly responsible for the decipherment of the inscriptions of the Behistun Rock. Using ladders and scaffolding, Rawlinson copied the inscriptions, and in 1840 deciphered the texts, all by the time he was thirty years old. The text contains the references that link Darius' subjects with the Israelites. The name "Kana", which is Canaan, appears 28 times. It also shows a man named "Sarocus the Sacan who wears a Hebrew hat. Included in the nations listed is the Saka. The name Saka in Persian and Elamite becomes Ghimri in Babylonian. The Assyrians and Babylonians were essentially the same people, one in the north, Assyrian and one in the south, the Chaldeans or Babylonians. A good part of Nebuchadnezzar’s early years were spent commanding the Assyrian forces in the north against the established rule in the north. The Ghimri name shows up in the same form in the Assyrian Tablets from Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh.

In Rawlinson’s book we see the picture of King Darius facing nine captives, which are secured by the neck with a rope. A tenth is under the King's foot. Each of these men is differently dressed.

Across the bottom and up one side are many panels containing the story of Darius' conquests. There is also a large section of supplementary text.

Of course Saka comes from Isaac and becomes Saxon. Ghimri comes from Kumri (from the Biblical name Omri) and goes through Gimirru and the Greek Kimmrie to Cimmerian. All of those names in European history are traceable to the Saki, Ghimri and Scythians.

Next month: The Assyrian Clay Tablets Of Assurbanipal's Library.