The Secret Origin Story Of Secret Origin Stories

A high priestess sworn to celibacy bears a child.   She puts the baby in a basket of rushes sealed with tar, then puts the basket in the river, trusting the waters to deliver her child to his safety--or his fate.  But the child is beloved of the gods.  He will not be forgotten or drowned.  He is discovered in a strange land and raised by parents who are not his own, demonstrating his strength of will and arms.  Only later does he learn his birthright, which delivers him into great power.

Sargon of Akkad demonstrates the power of Mesopotamian beardage

This is the story of the first great king of Mesopotamia, Sargon the Great.  Sargon lived in the 22nd Century BC, and was the first person to unite the warring city states of the fertile crescent under one government.  But this is how it started:

My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and ... years I exercised kingship.

The story sounds familiar, right?  In Exodus, Moses is put into a basket of rushes sealed with pitch and put on the Nile, only to be rescued by the Pharaoh's family.  Only later does he realize his true identity, and the power of his birthright.

And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi.  And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.  And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.  And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.  And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.  And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' children.

Moses in the Nile

While Sargon is born to a high-status family and raised by a low-status water-drawer, Moses is born to a commoner and raised to be a king.  But besides that, the stories are incredibly similar, even down to the material of the basket, and the method in which the basket was sealed.

This is also one of the origin stories of Romulus and Remus.  According to Plutarch, a young princess is forced to become a Vestal Virgin so that her uncle can secure his grip on local power.

She was, contrary to the established laws of the Vestals, discovered to be with child, and should have suffered the most cruel punishment, had not Antho, the king's daughter, mediated with her father for her; nevertheless, she was confined, and debarred all company, that she might not be delivered without the king's knowledge. In time she brought forth two boys, of more than human size and beauty, whom Amulius, becoming yet more alarmed, commanded a servant to take and cast away; this man some call Faustulus, others say Faustulus was the man who brought them up. He put the children, however, in a small trough, and went towards the river with a design to cast them in; but, seeing the waters much swollen and coming violently down, was afraid to go nearer, and, dropping the children near the bank, went away. The river overflowing, the flood at last bore up the trough, and, gently wafting it, landed them on a smooth piece of ground, which they now call Cermanes, formerly Germanus, perhaps from Germani, which signifies brothers.

Later, after becoming super awesome and renowned, they are reunited with their grandfather, and the truth is revealed.

"Formerly, then, we (for we are twins) thought ourselves the sons of Faustulus and Larentia, the king's servants; but since we have been accused and aspersed with calumnies, and brought in peril of our lives here before you, we hear great things of ourselves, the truth of which my present danger is likely to bring to the test. Our birth is said to have been secret, our fostering and nurture in our infancy still more strange; by birds and beasts, to whom we were cast out, we were fed, by the milk of a wolf, and the morsels of a woodpecker, as we lay in a little trough by the side of the river. The trough is still in being, and is preserved, with brass plates round it, and an inscription in letters almost effaced; which may prove hereafter unavailing tokens to our parents when we are dead and gone." Numitor, upon these words, and computing the dates by the young man's looks, slighted not the hope that flattered him, but considered how to come at his daughter privately (for she was still kept under restraint), to talk with her concerning these matters.

After this, the two boys go on to found Rome.

The discovery of Romulus and Remus

This is also the story of a baby named Kal-El from the planet Krypton.  His planet doomed, Kal-El's father puts him into a space age basket of rushes--a rocket--and sends him to a strange land to face his fate.  He is found, renamed Clark Kent, and grows up to be Superman.

With only minor variations in the future occupation of the child (conqueror extraordinaire; defender of truth, justice and the American Way) this could be a modern reboot of the story of Sargon the Great.

Sargon's story was pressed into clay tablets over four thousand years ago, and ever since we have been re-telling it in countless new ways.  It is the origin-story version of  a jazz standard: a recognized heroic riff which generations of enterprising myth-makers use as a comfortable base for their individual genius.  But what about the origin story of Sargon has touched us so much that we have been repeating it to each other for four millennia or more, with variations both major and minor?  Perhaps it's that a hidden parentage explains the greatness of some men so well.  Why are these people marked out from the mass of history, while most are not?  Well they're not from around here.  They are special.

But I suspect that the popularity of this story has a deeper resonance.  When we become adults, we are all a little bit like Sargon.  We set out on the world, lost and alone, without the familiar marks of our family to distinguish us.  We face trials and challenges, all in hopes that someone will recognize our birthright, and we find some place that we truly belong.

I was inspired by this post by the Ancient World Podcast, episode 3.  Listen to it if you are curious about the whole story of Sargon the Great.

The Amazing Story Of The Six Thousand Year Old Earth

On the seventh day of the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' the examination turned to the age of the universe.  The lawyer Clarence Darrow asked the politician William Jennings Bryan if he believed that the world began in 4004 B.C.  "That has been the estimate of a man that is accepted today," Bryan answered.  Darrow pressed Bryan.  Was this number, Darrow asked, based on the calculation from the "generations of man?"

Bryan didn't know.  "I do not think about the things I don’t think about."

“Do you think about the things you do think about?” Darrow jousted.

“Well, sometimes,” Bryan answered.

William Jennings Bryan is no artifact of the past.  As of 2010 about four in ten Americans think that the earth is less than ten thousand years old.  Many would say that the definite date of creation was October 23rd 4004 B.C.  Like Bryan, most of these Americans would be have a lot of trouble saying where on earth the 4004 B.C. number came from.

The date was fixed back in the 17th Century by a man named James Ussher, primate of all Ireland, based on biblical sources.  In today's science-sobered times we may sneer at Ussher's arrogance and folly--to think that we could discover the age of the universe simply by studying the books of the Old Testament!  But Ussher was no fanatic troglodyte.  He was a scholar, and his work stands as the culmination of a long intellectual tradition, one that was interdisciplinary, brave and rigorous--even if in the long arc of time it has been proven wrong.

The task facing Ussher and the rest of his co-chronologers is sometimes characterized as easy: simply add up the lengths the reigns of kings and patriarchs in the Old Testament until they match with a particular known date in the past.  But enough problems arose doing this to give even the most diligent modern professor a long pause and a thoughtful chin scratch .  And today we have Google.

The first glaring problem was that at the time there were many different copies of the Bible floating around in a confusion of languages and from a motley of traditions--and they disagreed about the length of particular rulers' reigns.  The Septuagint--the Greek translation of the Torah--added over a thousand years to the total reign length, compared with other versions.  Ussher and his contemporaries had to sort through the conflicting data of scrambled manuscripts and figure out which version of holy scripture was the right one.  Ussher decided to go with the Hebrew version.

We would hope that once this was done, the Bible would give us a long list of kings coming one after the other, so that we could use their reign-lengths much the same way dendrochronology uses the width of tree rings to fix the ages of wood.  The Bible does provide us with such a desired unbroken list of kings--but only up until the reign of Solomon.  After that the successions become confused by war, conflicting kings, and co-regents.  This was more work for Ussher, untangling the mess of deaths and wars and exiles in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

And then there is a gap of about half a millennium between Ezra and Nehemiah--the final books in the Old Testament--and the birth of Jesus, the first biblical event on which we can confidently fix a date in the current calendar.  (Jesus' birth turns out to be in 4 B.C., by the way.)  To figure out the exact length of this gap, Ussher had to turn to outside texts and match some dateable biblical event with a datable historical event, and then work forward.

To do this, Ussher found a concordance between a the exile of Jehoiachin and the death of the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar II.  Once done, Ussher could hop over to the much more complete Chaldean and Persian records, before finally squaring these records with Roman ones.  This alone is a monumental achievement of archival genius, requiring knowledge of Hebrew, Sumerian, Persian and Latin--and who knows how many other minor languages; the assemblage and correspondance of ancient archives, histories, and lists of kings; and the resources and perseverance to do this archival work when there were no Amazon, no airmail, not internet.

Only after doing this could Ussher proudly unveil his work, and the true age of the universe.  His book, the frontispiece pictured above, ran to over two thousand pages of closely argued prose.  It settled once and for all the age of man.

Only not once and for all.  Future generations of scholars turned away from books and to the mountains, gorges, and rivers that stood outside their windows, and they saw in the landscape evidence that the world was much older than Ussher could ever have guessed.  It would take tens of thousands of years for rivers to etch fjords, for mountains to lift from the crust of the earth, for the hills to be ground down by wind.

But Ussher's scholarly work became a piece of ammo in the culture wars because in the 18th Century copies of the King James Bible started to carry handy annotations based on Ussher's chronology.  Look right there, the pages begged you, Creation--Part One--4004 B.C.  Today most Bibles no longer carry these dates.  But the 4004 B.C. date lives on.

This post is heavily indebted to Steven Jay Gould's lively essay on Ussher.  It was inspired by the In Our Time Episode on the Age Of The Universe, which is serious brain candy if you are curious about the historiography of of how old everything is--and aren't we all?