After the Flood

by Bill Cooper

The test that I devised was a simple one. If the names of the individuals, families, peoples and tribes listed in the Table of Nations were genuine, then those same names should appear also in the records of other nations in the Middle East.

Today I can say that the names so far vindicated in the Table of Nations make up over 99% of the list,

For example, it is from the writings of the Taoist Lao-tzu, who flourished in the China of the 6th century BC, that the following profound statement concerning the existence and some of the attributes of God is taken: “Before time, and throughout time, there has been a self-existing being, eternal, infinite, complete, omnipresent. Outside this being, before the beginning, there was nothing.”

as the following ancient text from Heliopolis in Egypt testifies: “I am the creator of all things that exist...that came forth from my mouth. Heaven and earth did not exist, nor had been created the herbs of the ground nor the creeping things. I raised them out of the primeval abyss from a state of non-being...”3

For example, amongst the early Greeks we have in the Theogony of Hesiod (8th century BC) an account of the creation of the world that bears unmistakable and remarkably close similarities to the Genesis account: “First of all the Void came into being ...next Earth ...Out of the Void came darkness ...and out of the Night came Light and Day...”7

Xenophanes, for example, who lived some two centuries after Hesiod, held an altogether loftier view of the Creator and in a most inspiring passage sought to redress the theological balance: “Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all the things which among men are shameful and blameworthy--theft and adultery and mutual deception...[But] there is one God, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought ...he sees as a whole, he thinks as a whole, he hears as a whole ...Always he remains in the same state, changing not at all ...But far from toil he governs everything with his mind.”8

The concept of this ineffable Creator God permeated the thought of Plato, for example, who sought to replace Hesiod's perverse concepts of the Creation with a more reasonable one, based no doubt upon philosophical concepts far more ancient than Hesiod's and certainly far more profound: “Let us therefore state the reason why the framer of this universe of change framed it at all. He was good, and what is good has no particle of envy in it; being therefore without envy, he wished all things to be as like himself as possible. This is as valid a principle for the origin of the world of change as we shall discover from the wisdom of men...”9 Note the echo from Genesis: “And God saw that it was good.”

Aristotle the most notable amongst them, and he simply describes him as the “founder of natural philosophy.”10 It is upon little more than the strength of this one remark by Aristotle that the case against Thales rests. But against that must be set the aphorisms that are attributed by others to Thales, such as: “Of existing things, God is the oldest--for he is ungenerated - The world is the most beautiful, for it is God's creation - Mind is the swiftest, for it runs through everything...,”11 and so on. All of which are classic creationist sentiments.

Plato was to offer them a mightily effective challenge through his own refined creationist model of origins, for whatever the materialists proposed, Plato's model was of a higher concept altogether. For him, the Creator turned chaos into order simply because it was His good nature, and His good pleasure, so to do. He loved order rather than chaos, and to ensure the maintenance of that order everything He created was made according to an eternal and flawless pattern - Plato's justly famous Theory of Forms. But the real importance of Plato's model of origins for our enquiry is that it effectively silenced the materialist school for the next fifty years or so, that is until the time when Epicurus was to lay down his own counter-challenge to the creationist model.

Indeed, the incipient and lightly veiled atheism of Epicurus' philosophy was now answered by the Stoics in the most compelling terms, with Chrysippus giving it perhaps its most persuasive voice: “If there is anything in nature which the human mind, which human intelligence, energy and power could not create, then the creator of such things must be a being superior to man. But the heavenly bodies in their eternal orbits could not be created by man. They must therefore be created by a being greater than man ...Only an arrogant fool would imagine that there was nothing in the whole world greater than himself. Therefore there must be something greater than man. And that something must be God.”

Stoics were "star wars force"

The Greeks, it appears, first made contact with Judaism as early as the year 587 BC, when Greek mercenaries assisted the armies of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in the investing and destruction of Jerusalem.

It has to be admitted, of course, that the Jewish Torah, which naturally included the Book of Genesis, was translated into Greek in the year 250 BC, some seventeen years before Chrysippus became head of the Stoic school in 233 BC. But even the remarkable translation of Genesis into Greek did not take place until fifty-eight years after the foundation of the Stoic school by Zeno in 308 BC.

As a creationist, the Stoic Cicero simply could not appreciate the Epicurean viewpoint of Lucretius: “In the heavens there is nothing accidental, nothing arbitrary, nothing out of order, nothing erratic. Everywhere is order, truth, reason, constancy ...I cannot understand this regularity in the stars, this harmony of time and motion in their various orbits through all eternity, except as the expression of reason, mind and purpose ...Their constant and eternal motion, wonderful and mysterious in its regularity, declares the indwelling power of a divine intelligence. If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling."

The Table of Nations had listed all the families and tribes of mankind in their correct groupings, whether those groupings were ethnological, linguistic or geographical. All the names, without exception, were accurate, and in more than twenty-five years of searching and analysing, I uncovered not one mistake or false statement of fact in the Table of Nations.

Japheth was regarded as the father of many peoples, particularly the Indo-European nations. The pagan Greeks perpetuated his name as Iapetos, the son of heaven and earth and again the father of many nations. We find his name in the vedas of India where it appears in Sanskrit as Pra-Japati, Father Japheth, who was deemed to be the sun and lord of creation, the source of life in other words for those descended from him.

Gomer, the first son of Japheth according to Genesis, founded a people known to the early Greeks as the Cimmerians who dwelt on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

The people of Ashchenaz are found in earliest times in Armenia, and later Jewish writers associate them with the Germanic races (Germanic Jews to this day are called Ashkenazim). They appear also in the 6th century BC records of Assyria as the Askuza who allied themselves with the Mannai in a revolt against Assyria, an event also mentioned in Jeremiah (51:27) - whose prophecy incidentally confirms the identity of the Askuza with the Ashkenazim.

It begins, in fact, with the closing years of the 6th century AD and the arrival on these shores of Augustine, the Roman Catholic bishop whose job it was to bring the British Isles under the political sway of the Roman pontif. The story is well known from Bede et al how the British Christians who were here to greet Augustine declined his demand that they place themselves under the Roman authority, and were later massacred for their refusal at Bangor, twelve hundred of the finest scholars and monks of their day being put to the sword.

From that day on there existed an animosity between the Britons (Welsh) and the papacy that was to ferment throughout the early to late Middle Ages, only to culminate in the eventual expulsion of the papal authority from the realm of England under King Henry VIII, who was significantly himself of Welsh Tudor stock.

The recorded history of the early Britons was to remain in oblivion for the five hundred years that followed the massacre at Bangor. But then an incident occurred that ensured its revival and survival to the present day, even though that revival was itself to last only a matter of a further five hundred years or so. The incident, which occurred sometime in the 1130s, was the presentation of a certain book to a British (i.e. Welsh) monk by an archdeacon of Oxford. The monk's name was Geoffrey of Monmouth, the archdeacon was Walter of Oxford, and the book was a very ancient, possibly unique, copy of the recorded history of the early Britons, written in language so archaic that it needed to be translated quickly into Latin before either the book perished or the language was forgotten.

In the Book of Genesis, we see that the dispersal of the nations from Babel took place during the fifth generation after the Flood. And here we are presented with the names of four successive generations of patriarchs who were common to the recorded ancestry of both the British and Irish Celts.6 After the fifth generation, the lines of the British and Irish Celts diversify, exactly in accordance with the historical movement of the nations as depicted in Genesis.

On Wednesday 7th November 1917, Flinders Petrie, a renowned archaeologist of the day, addressed the assembled members of the British Academy. He was to present a paper to them entitled Neglected British History, in which he drew attention to the fact that a considerable body of historical documentary source-material was being overlooked if not willfully ignored by modern historians.1 He drew fleeting attention to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth and then homed in on one particular record that shed much light upon Geoffrey's too-disparaged history. The ancient book to which he drew attention was known to him as the Tysilio Chronicle, which is listed today as Jesus College MS LXI and is lodged in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.2 It is written in medieval Welsh, and is, as its colophon reveals, a translation that was commissioned by the same Walter of Oxford who commissioned Geoffrey of Monmouth to translate a certain very ancient British book into Latin.

Among the points he mentions is the account contained both in Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh chronicles of the attempted invasions of these islands by Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC. Caesar, of course, has left us his own account of this, and it is tempting to think (and is often stated) that the Welsh chronicles (and hence Geoffrey of Monmouth) contain nothing more than a rehashed version of Caesar's account. But close examination reveals a different story. The account in Geoffrey and the Welsh chronicle turns out to be nothing less than the Julian invasion as seen through the eyes of the early Britons themselves. An eyewitness account in fact, which dates this part of the material to the middle of the 1st century BC. This, of course, is far too early for most modern scholars to accept for Celtic literacy, and it also sheds a somewhat unfavourable light upon Julius Caesar, himself the hero of many a modern book on the history of early Britain.

But perhaps the gathering of the Britons at the Kentish fort is one of the more telling aspects of the affair. The Welsh chronicle names the fort Doral, which Geoffrey of Monmouth transposes into Latin as Dorobellum.5 It was known to later Latin writers as Durolevum, and was a fortress that stood roughly midway between Rochester and Canterbury.

And yet Caesar never mentions this fort, for the natural reason that he would have been entirely unaware of its existence and name. A medieval monk rehashing Caesar's work would not have mentioned it either for the same reasons. Of further significance is the fact that Nennius writes in his Historia Brittonum: “Julius Caesar ... while he was fighting with Dolabella.”6 ... Dolabella being mistaken in Nennius's source-document for the personal name of a British warrior rather than the fort where the warriors were gathered, thus revealing that by the end of the 8th century AD at the very latest, a serious corruption of the account of the British manoeuvres from which Nennius drew his own information existed.

Three further specific items in both the Welsh chronicle and Geoffrey's Latin account reveal the sometimes garbled nature of the British intelligence reports of the time that were sent over long distances, in two cases from the other side of the Channel, and the natural confusion that arose over the debriefing of warriors that returned from the front line of battle and the subsequent interviewing of eyewitnesses. The first concerns the death of a certain Roman officer. He was named as Laberius (Quintus Laberius Durus) in Caesar's account, according to which Laberius died in action during the second campaign in Britain of the year 54 BC.8 The British account, however, states that Laberius was killed during the first campaign, and, more tellingly, it identifies the soldier concerned as Labienus (Welsh Alibiens).9

Similarly, the second item concerns the garbled British report of a fortress that was erected at Caesar's command when he returned to Gaul. Caesar does not name the fort, whereas the British account reports its name as Odina.10 Flinders Petrie points out that no such place is known,

The third incident concerns an inaccurate report by British scouts which led Kasswallawn's intelligence gatherers to assume that Caesar had fled Britain at a time when the Roman army was in fact firmly encamped on these shores. Caesar, having lost valuable ships during a storm, ordered that the ships be taken out of the water and

However, of added interest is the fact that both Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh chronicle record the presence on the island of a ruined temple that was dedicated to the goddess Diana. There then follow the descriptions of a most complex ritual performed by Brutus and the nature and attributes of the goddess Diana that could only have come from a pagan source. But there is an added aspect to all this. Diana was considered to be the personification of the moon, and although there is no apparent trace remaining today of the temple of Diana on the island, there are the ruins of a temple to Diana's theological husband, the sun god Apollo. These ruins lie on a prominence some 230 feet above the sea, and: “... it was from here that the priests of Apollo would hurl themselves into space, buoyed up - so it was said - by live birds and feathered wings. The relationship between the ritual and the god seems obscure, although there was an early connection between Apollo and various birds. Ovid confirms that the virtues of the flight and the healing waters below the cliff had been known since the time of Deucalion, the Greek Noah.”

But the history of the Britons as a distinct nation had its beginnings with the fall of Troy, and it is at this point that Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh chronicles take up the story. Anchises, known to us from other histories, fled with his son, Aeneas, from the burning ruins of Troy, and they made their way to the land that is nowadays called Italy, settling with their people on the banks of the river Tiber around what was later to become Rome.

The mother of Brutus died whilst giving birth to him, and when he was a lad of fifteen years, Brutus accidentally shot his father dead with an arrow whilst out hunting. For having caused the deaths of both his parents, thus fulfilling a prophecy concerning him, Brutus was exiled out of Italy, the royal line of Aeneas passing into the hands of another. And it is at this point that the history of the Britons as a distinct nation begins.

Brutus journeyed from Italy to Greece, and there he came into contact with certain slaves. These were the descendants of the soldiers who had fought against Greece in the Trojan Wars of the 13th century BC. They had been enslaved by Priam, son of Achilles, 'in vengeance for his father's death', and were subsequently to continue their slavery under Pandrasus, king of the Dorian Greeks. Learning that he was descended from their own ancient kings, the Trojans accepted Brutus into their fellowship and elected him as their leader, and under him they successfully rose against their captors.

The Trojans again set sail, and came ashore at Totnes in Devon at some time in the 12th century BC. The land and its people were subsequently to derive their names from Brutus. Then Brutus founded the city of Trinovantum, or New Troy, which was later to become the city of London. Brutus, the first king of the Britons, reigned over his people in this island for twenty three years, i.e. from ca 1104-1081 BC.

Amongst the spoils that Brutus had taken from Greece was Ignoge, the daughter of Pandrasus, whom he wedded and who was to bear him three sons, Locrinus, Kamber and Albanactus. Upon the death of Brutus, Kamber and Albanactus inherited Wales (Cambria) and Scotland (Albany) respectively, and Locrinus became king of Loegria, the land named after him, which consisted of present-day England minus Cornwall. (The modern Welsh still know England as Loegria).

Finally the succession seems to settle down to a father-son order, at least for the next thirty-one reigns, the short length of the average reign (5-6 years) indicating political turmoil for that period of one hundred and seventy years or so, until the accession of Heli (Beli Mawr in the Welsh) in about the year 113 BC. He ruled for forty years until 73 BC when his son Lud became king. Lud rebuilt the city that Brutus had founded and had named New Troy, and renamed it Kaerlud, the city of Lud, after his own name. The name of the city was later corrupted to Kaerlundein, which the Romans took up as Londinium, hence London.

Nennius (Nynnyaw), fought hand to hand with Julius Caesar on the latter's invasion of Britain in the year 55 BC. The Romans had been trying to set up camp in the Thames estuary when the Britons fell upon them by surprise. Although Nennius was forced away from Caesar by other soldiers, he did manage to capture the emperor's sword. Escaping, Nennius died of his wounds fifteen days later and was buried beside the northern entrance to Trinovantum (modern Bishopsgate in London?).

Aurelius Ambrosius was succeeded in ca AD 501 by his brother, Uther Pendragon. Named Uther at birth, he was king of the Silures. He assumed the surname pen-Dragon (son of the dragon) after the appearance of a dragon-like comet in the sky. Like his brother Aurelius, he had been smuggled abroad on the murder of Constans. Once king, however, he consorted adulterously with Ygerna (Eigr) the wife of Gorlois, duke of Cornwall. Gorlois was killed by Uther Pendragon's soldiers at Dimilioc (Tinblot in the Welsh chronicle) as Uther Pendragon was seducing Ygerna. But of their union was born the most famous of the British kings, Arthur, who reigned over the Britons from ca AD 521-542.

The important thing for us to notice in this table of descent, though, is the unequivocal statement that the decidedly pagan Irish traced their origins back to the Biblical patriarch, Magog, the son of Japheth. This is in direct contrast to the claims of the Britons and other European nations, whose genealogies were traced back to Javan, another son of Japheth. Now, Magog, as we shall see in Appendix 3, was considered, with Ashchenaz, the father of the Scythian peoples, and the early Irish chroniclers were most emphatic in their insistence that the Irish were of Scythian stock.

The Irish were long referred to as Scots even before some of them migrated to the country that today bears their name, and as Brewer tells us: “Scot (is) the same as Scythian in etymology; the root of both is Sct. The Greeks had no c, and would change t into th making the root skth, and by adding a phonetic vowel we get Skuthai (Scythians), and Skodiai (Skoths). The Welsh disliked s at the beginning of a word, and would change it to ys; they would also change c or k to g, and th to d; whence the Welsh root would be Ysgd, and Skuth or Skoth would become ysgod. Once more, the Saxons would cut off the Welsh y, and change the g back again to c, and the d to t, converting the Ysgod to Scot.”9

the first colonisation of Ireland seems to have taken place ca 1484 BC (the 2520th year after the Creation).13 It was the colony led by one Partholan, which landed in the estuary of the river Kenmare. Partholan himself was to die thirty years later in about 1454 BC or Anno Mundi [the year of the world] 2550. Some three hundred years later, it is recorded that the colony was wiped out by a plague, 9000 men, women and children dying in one week alone. The name of the area in which they had settled was later called Tallaght, denoting a place where plague victims lie buried, and it is interesting to note that it is still littered with ancient burial mounds today.

In which context, it is interesting to note what Professor Mackie has written concerning the language of the early Picts who had more than a passing influence on both the early and later history of the Irish: “The Picts certainly used a form of P-Celtic (the mother of Welsh, Cornish and Breton), with traces of Gaulish forms. However, it is clear, from the few scraps of evidence which survive, that the Picts also used another language, probably unrelated to any ‘Indo-European’ tongue and therefore so different from modern European languages as to be incomprehensible to us.”

A second group settled, intriguingly, in the northernmost parts of Britain, apparently the first Pictish settlement of what is now Scotland. This settlement of Picts from 'Scythia' (so states the British record - note etymological derivation given above of Scot from Scythian) into Albany, is recalled in the early British chronicles as having taken place under the Pictish king Soderic. The British chronology seems to have slipped somewhat at this point, but the event is real enough and accurately portrayed.

The last colonisation of Ireland is then recorded under Anno Mundi 3500 (i.e. ca 504 BC): “The fleet of the sons of Milidh came to Ireland at the end of this year, to take it from the Tuatha de Danann, and they fought the battle of Sliabh Mis with them on the third day after landing.”23 The children of Milidh, known to us as the Milesians, had landed unobserved in the mouth of the river Slaney in what is today the county of Wexford, from where they marched to Tara, the central seat of government.

The word Milesian is still used (though with increasing rarity) to denote the Irish people themselves, or things pertaining to Ireland. And of further interest to our enquiry is the fact that the Milesians were newly arrived (via the Spanish peninsula) from the city of Miletus, whose ruins still stand on the Turkish mainland, and which was finally destroyed by the Persian army in the year 494 BC. Given that the Irish records state ca 504 BC for the landing of the Milesian colony in Ireland, this is a spontaneous and unexpected chronological correlation that is close enough to give us serious pause for thought.

And that the city of Miletus should also be known to us as an Ionian outpost whose population consisted of, amongst other races, Scythians and Phoenicians, tells us that we should take the claims of the early Irish chroniclers very seriously indeed. Moreover, with regard to the equally often stated Phoenician element of Irish descent, we should also note that the ancient Greeks once held that Phoenicia was founded by one Phoenix, whose brother Cadmus had invented the alphabet. Likewise, the early Irish recalled the time when they lived under a king named...Phenius, “who devoted himself especially to the study of languages, and composed an alphabet and the elements of grammar.”

For example, the version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, known as the Parker Chronicle,2 states that from the beginning of the world until the year AD 6 were 5200 years. The Laud Chronicle,3 differs slightly from this, stating that the same period elapsed from the Creation to the year AD 11, indicating either a simple scribal error or a derivation from two distinct sources. However, both chronicles agree that from the Creation to the year AD 33, the year of the Crucifixion, was a period of 5226 years. In other words, as far as the Saxons were concerned, the world was created about 5200 BC.

However, the Creation date of ca 4000 BC favoured by the early Irish chroniclers brings to mind the most famous of all proposed for the Creation, that of Ussher, who, in his 17th century work, Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, calculated a date of 4004 BC.

Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) was a scholar of immense ability who broke much new ground in the study of classical literature. Yet his chief claim to fame (if the comparative obscurity so far afforded him can be described as fame), lies in his work, De Emendatione Temporum, which he published in 1583 and which paved the way for the modern science of chronology.

In his De Emendatione Temporum, Scaliger rightly recognised that the calendar as it now stands, i.e. the Gregorian Calendar which was introduced in Europe in 1582, and which he heavily criticised, was a somewhat cumbersome apparatus with which to reconstruct the chronology of past events.

Well, Scaliger (partially) solved the problem by turning his attention to the three basic units upon which virtually all workable calendars are based, namely, the Solar Cycle, the Metonic Cycle and the Roman Indiction. In simple terms, the Solar Cycle is completed every 28 years, the Metonic Cycle every 19 years, and the Roman Indiction every 15 years. Scaliger realised that there must obviously be points in time when all three cycles begin and end together, so, noting carefully the age of each cycle at the moment when he began his calculations, he counted the years backwards until he came to that year when all three cycles began together. And that was the year 4713 BC.