The Babylonian Woe
 

by David Astle

A Study of the Origin of Certain Banking Practices,
and of their effect on the events of Ancient History, written in the light of the Present Day.

The intellectual faculties however are not of themselves sufficient to produce external action; they require the aid of physical force, the direction and combination of which are wholly at the disposal of money, that mighty spring by which the total force of human energies is set in motion.

Augustus Boeckh; Translated; The Public
Economy of Athens, p. 7; Book I. London, 1828.

FOREWORD

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
THE TEMPLE AND THE COUNTING HOUSE
PER ME DEI REGNANT!
THE LEFT HAND OF DAWN
BLOOD, SORROW, AND SILVER
BABYLON, BANKING, AND BULLION
PHRYGIA, FINANCE, AND FRONT MAN
TYRANT AND TRAPEZITAE
POTSHERDS AND OTHER FRAGMENTS
PERGAMUM AND PITANE
VOICES FROM THE DUST
SPARTA, THE PELANORS, WEALTH, AND WOMEN
MONEY CREATORS AND THE POLITICAL CONTROL
MAN PROPOSES BUT GOD DISPOSES

FOREWORD

“For money has been the ruin of many and has misled the minds of Kings.” –Ecclesiacticus 8, Verse 2.

When I originally approached my study as best as I might, dealing with the growth in pre-antiquity and antiquity of what is known as the International Money Power, and the particular derivative of the money creative activities of such International Money Power that might be defined as the Life Alternative Factor, I did so with some diffidence. Perhaps I was overly conscious of what seemed to be the inadequateness of my preliminary training in these matters and that in no way could I describe myself as deeply conversant with the languages of ancient times, or, in the case of Mesopotamia, their scripts.

However, in my preliminary studies involving checking through the indices of a number of those standard books of reference dealing with the ancient civilizations, I soon found that any feelings of inferiority in so far as the adequacy of my scholarship relative to my particular subject was concerned were unwarranted, and that qualms in these respects were by no means justified.

In almost all of such books of reference, except those that classified themselves as economic or monetary histories, was practically no clear approach to the subject of money and finance, or to those exchange systems that must have existed in order that the so-called civilizations might come to be. In the odd case where the translations of the texts might reveal some key clue, no more special emphasis was placed herein than might have been placed on the mention of a gold cup, a ring, a seal, or some exquisite piece of stone work.

In Jastrow’s Assyria there was no reference to money at all; in Breasted’s History of Egypt a volume of six hundred pages or so, only brief mention on pages 97-98. In A History of Egypt by Sir William M. Flinders-Petrie, in the records of Sir John Marshall and E.J.C. McKay in respect to the diggings at Mohenjo-Daro, and in the writings of Sir Charles L. Woolley and others on their findings from their studies of the exhumed archives of the city states of ancient Mesopotamia, little enough information exists on the matters referred to above. In Christopher Dawson who wrote widely on ancient times, particularly in the Age of the Gods which dealt with most cultures until the commencement of that period known as antiquity, there is only one reference to money, casual and not conveying much to the average reader; this reference to be found on page 131. In King’s History of Babylon there was practically nothing on these matters.

Thus in almost all of the works of the great archaeologists and scholars specializing in the ancient civilizations, there is a virtual silence on that all important matter, the system of distribution of food surpluses, and surpluses of all those items needed towards the maintenance of a good and continuing life so far as were required by climate and custom.

In all the writings of these great and practical scholars, the workings of that mighty engine which injects the unit of exchange amongst the peoples, and without which no civilization as we know it can come to be, is only indicated by a profound silence. Of the systems of exchanges, of the unit of exchange and its issue by private individuals, as distinct from its issue as by the authority of sovereign rule, on this all important matter governing in such totality the conditions of progression into the future of these peoples, not a word to speak of.

While it is true that the average archaeologist, in being primarily concerned with the results of the forces that gave rise to the human accretions known as civilizations, has little enough time to meditate on these forces themselves, especially since so little evidence exists of what created them, or of how they provided guidance to men in the earlier days, the widespread character of this omission borders on the mystifying. Virtual failure to speculate on those most important matters of all: the structure of the machinery of the systems of exchanges which undoubtedly had given rise to the ancient city civilizations, and the true nature of the energy source by which such machinery was driven, whether by injections of money as known this last three thousand years or so, or by injections of an exchange medium of which little significant evidence or memory remains, is cause for concern. The truth of the lines as quoted herein from Boeckh’s Public Economy of Athens (p.ii, present work) is immediately clear to all and that the physical force underlying all civilizations must have been the system whereby surpluses were allocated to the people according to their place in the pyramid of life and to their need; thus, when being controlled by the benevolent law of a dedicated ruler, maintaining at all times the true and natural order of life.

It must not be supposed, therefore, that there is lack of understanding of the importance of these matters; nor that there is any special conspiracy of silence, even though there might indeed be temptation to arrive at such a conclusion. Rather it were better to accept things as they appear, and assume that these scholars merely present the fragments of fact as they unearth them; leaving speculation of the true significance of such fragments of fact in relation to the weft and warp of life, to those considered to be particularly specialized in the various fields represented. In the case of money and finance, the scholars concerned would be classified as economic or monetary historians.

Thus little enough seems to be available on the subject of money and finance in ancient days. Nor seems to exist examination of the significance of such money and finance relative to the progress about which so much has been written in modern times. Apart from that of Alexander Del Mar who wrote in relatively recent days, and apart from that of the philosophers of antiquity such as Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Zeno, etc., almost no speculation seems to be available from scholarly sources in regards to the unprejudiced PHILOSOPHY of money, in ancient times. On the all important subject of the consequences of the creation and issuance of money by private persons as opposed to its creation and issuance according to the will of a benevolent, instructed and dedicated ruler, almost no speculation seems to exist in ancient or in modern times. Of those forces that sought throughout history to undermine any ruler who may have been firmly in the saddle because of his exercise of that prerogative which is the foundation of the State Power or God-Will of which he is the living evincement, insomuch as he maintained firm control of the original issuance of money and its injection into circulation amongst the people as against State expenditures, almost nothing seems to be known. Very little information is available of the means those forces employed towards this purpose through injection into circulation amongst the peoples of silver and gold, and of instruments indicating possession of the same.

Practically no information seems to exist of the growth of private money creation in the days of the ancient city states of Mesopotamia, of which, because of their records being preserved on fire-baked clay, more is known than of more recent civilizations; and the gap must necessarily be filled by a certain amount of speculation. Little is known of the beginnings of the fraudulent issuance by private persons of the unit of exchange, as in opposition to the law of the gods from whom kings in ancient times claimed to derive their divine origin; nor is there any information on the significance of such practice relative to the continued stability of the natural order of life in which obtained that system wherein the fount of all power was the God; such power descending to man by way of king and priesthood and directing him as he proceeded about his everyday affairs, content that God’s in His Heaven and all’s right with the world.

The use of tools of hardened iron in the mining industry about the beginning of the first millennium B.C., together with a changed attitude towards slave labour in which the slave, so far as mining was concerned, was assessed at cost per life, must have brought relatively a very flood of silver into the circulation of the cities of the Near East.

Such flood of silver injected into the circulation largely by private business houses who no doubt controlled the mines, however distant, especially after the institution of coinage in which a piece of silver of known weight and fineness passed from hand to hand, must finally and forever have broken that control of exchanges previously exercised by the god of the city through priest king, and priest.

Thus all, priest-kings and priests, came to forget that the foundations of the power given to them from on High towards the maintenance of the right living and tranquil procession through life, of their peoples, were the laws of distribution of surpluses as written on the scribes tablet; laws instituted by the god himself each ordering a specified dispensation from the surpluses in his warehouses in the Ziggurat, to the holder of the tablet. They too fell into the error of believing that silver with value created as a result of its being used as a balancing factor in international exchange could become a perpetual storehouse of value. They themselves became consumed in the scramble for this gleaming metal, so conceding it, through its controllers the power to set itself up in opposition to the law of the gods; to raise itself up in its own right, god in itself.

In its exercise, the fiat of the internationally minded group of merchants or bullion brokers that arbitrarily dictated the exchange value of such silver, being in actuality determination internationally of the value of money, placed such groups controlling silver exchanges above and beyond local law and the law of the local god, and indeed conferred on them the power to influence kingly appointment. It made of them the servants of a one god, a god above all gods; thereby somewhat relegating the god whose order on the state warehouses as inscribed on clay by scribe or priest, had been the law governing exchanges, to the place of their servant, the instrument.

“I have however, kept before me as a guiding principle, in this as other historical works I have written, the maxim that the complexity of life should never be forgotten, and that no single feature should be regarded as basic and decisive,” wrote Professor Rostovtsev, scholar and Economic Historian of renown.

It is true that while no single feature in the progression of history might be regarded as basic and decisive, it is certain that neither money nor treasure will protect the weak and disarmed in the face of a brutal and determined conqueror beyond whose successful achievements, can be no decision more final. It is also certain that the money accumulation mania injected by fame into the minds of the people as a replacement to their concern with those natural qualities endeavouring to colour the current of human life through time, amongst which are numbered virtue, honour, and godliness, destroys equally as any other debilitating disease, and will surely and speedily drag any people down to degeneracy and decay. A great army could not be more efficient in its power of destruction.

The main discussion of the Artha-Sastra of Kautilya, Hindu classic instructing kings and rulers as to their proper conduct towards good government, was as to whether financial or military organization came first of all as the root of strength and power in any organized state. Clearly in that day no less than in this day, financial organization preceded military organization; therefore there is not much point really in discussion of so obvious a fact and truth.

While an effete people, though money as it is known, is in their hands, soon give way to vigour; nevertheless vigour, without strict organization of its finances, which, while constituting strict organization of its labour, also enables it to create, or to obtain by purchase from elsewhere the finest of weapons, will not much avail. Thus, and it has been demonstrated through history over and over again, it is clear there is one feature basic and decisive in the progression of human life; certainly during the latter years of which memory exists. That feature, particularly in relatively modern societies from the bronze age onwards, and during that period of the rapid perfection of the mass production of weapons, is monetary organization, and what precious metals are available for purposes of international exchange as against the purchase of those finest of weapons and essential materials of war only obtainable abroad, and as wages for the most skilled men at arms from wherever obtainable, abroad or otherwise.

The gates of Egypt stand fast like Inmutet
They open not to the Westerners,
They open not to the Easterners,
They open not to the Northerners,
They open not to the Southerners,
They open not to the enemy who dwells within.

Much of history as we know it is the record of civilizations to counter and evade destruction of themselves from without or within, or is the record of their efforts to destroy other seemingly competing civilizations or peoples attacking them from without or within.

War is as inevitable as is peace as the result of the exhaustion of war, and there are few peoples that escape; but wars of the last three thousand years have not been relatively infrequent occurrences, and have been an incessantly recurring evil. It is no chance that; the growth of warfare into a very cancer eating into the vitals of mankind, and more particularly the white races is parallel to the growth of that other cancer which is private, and therefore irresponsible, money creation and emission.

It seems that almost none of the scholars make any serious effort to throw light on the real meaning of this matter of private monetary emission, and the disastrous effects that it has had, and in finality, will have, towards the defining of the remaining period of time of man upon this earth, as being brief and uncertain.

Those strange decisions of kings signalling the opening of wars as frightful and disastrous to the European peoples, as the last two so-called “World Wars,” decisions so abnegatory of self, but more than that, abnegatory of the best interests of the peoples they represented before God, far from being the directives of benevolent force, are the directives of a force which cannot but be described in any way but as being wholly malevolent.

The great engine which is the international control of monetary emission and regulation, driven as it was until recently by the catalytic fuel of gold alone, is now almost world embracing in the scope of its operations. It seems there is no change in the attitude of those its guides, nor any admission of the folly of their misuse of this God- Power which they direct towards the good of themselves and their friends. Their obsession, despite ruin for all looming on every horizon, seems to remain the same narrow vision of the day of their own world supremacy wherein they will rule as absolute lords over all; although by now it should be apparent to them, no less than to all thinking people, that if this madness concealed within the much talked about conception known as progress is not brought to a complete arrestment, nothing remains but an end wherein shall be silence and no song, for indeed there will be no singer, nor any to sing to.

As it looks today, it may be the end for the Indo-European peoples whose diligent labours made so much of this world of today. It may be the end, final and absolute for all men for that matter. it may be the end for this our Earth, our only place and home and hope in the awful endlessness of space and time.

It should be more than apparent that in the relatively recent day when kingship and god-ship were one, so far as the simple souls were concerned, and the god and his viceroy on earth, the priest-king, were creators and controllers of the economic good, exchanges were created in order that the people might live a fuller life, and not so much to benefit any secret society or interlocked group standing aside from the main paths of mankind, but to benefit all who kneeled humbly before the Almighty, each fully in acceptance of himself as part of the god-wish, eternal and infinite; each one in his time an integral unit carefully placed in the pyramid of life itself.

History over these last three thousand years particularly, has largely been the interweaving of both a witting, and an unwitting distortion of the truth, with all the inevitable consequences which have been expected and now are but a little way ahead. Kings largely became the mouthpiece and sword arm of those semi-secret societies that controlled the material of money as its outward and visible symbols came to be restricted to gold, silver, and copper. The fiat of the god in heaven which had been the decisive force behind that which brought about an equitable exchange, was replaced by the will of those classes controlling the undertones of civilization, leaders of the world of slave drivers, caravaneers, outcasts, and criminals generally, such as was to be discerned on the edges of the ancient city civilizations, and followed the trade routes between them. The instrument of this will was precious metal, whose supply was controlled by the leaders of these classes through their control of the slave trade, since mining was rarely profitable in the case of the precious metals, except with slave labour, even after the development of hardened iron tools and efficient methods of smelting.

The power of these men, indifferent and alien to most cities as they were, relative to that power it was replacing, which was the will of the benevolent god of the city, had been made absolute by sowing in the minds of men over the thousands of years, the idea of such metals having a specially high value relative to other goods and services being offered for exchange; indeed that they were veritable store house of value.

The law of the ruler previously exercised towards the well being of the people in that they might live a good and honourable life accordingly became corrupted. It became merely a symbol raised before their gaze, in order that they might not look down and see the evil gnawing away at the roots of the Tree of Life itself, destroying all peace and goodness. Nor could those semi-secret groups of persons be seen who so often were the sources of such evil. In their contemptuous indifference to the men of the state who found meaningfulness and tranquillity through life lived in natural order under the law of the King, they constituted hidden force deeply inimical to the best interests of mankind.

Through stealthy issue of precious metal commodity money into circulation amongst the peoples, replacing that money which represented the fiat or will of the god of the city and which was merely an order on the state warehouses through his scribes, this internationally minded group from the secrecy of their chambers were able to make a mockery of the faith and belief of simple people. The line of communication from god to man through priest-king and priest was cut, being replaced by their own twisted purposes such as they were; not however guiding mankind into the heaven that could have been and where all would be life, and light, and hope, but into such a hell as to escape from which men might gladly come to accept the idea of Mass Suicide.

My sincere acknowledgements are due to:

1. Professor Fritz Heichelheim, and Sijthoff International Publishing Company, Leyden, for their very kind permission to use the short extracts from Professor Heichelheim’s work: An Ancient Economic History.

2. Professor W.F. Albright, and Cambridge University Press for their very kind permission to use the short extracts from Professor Albright’s work The Amarna Letters from Palestine; the same being found in Volume II of the Cambridge Ancient History.

3. G.R. Driver and John C. Miles, and the Clarendon Press, Oxford, for their very kind permission to use the rendering of Hammurabai’s Law No. 7, as given by G.R. Driver and John C. Miles in their joint work: Ancient Codes and Laws of the Near East.

4. Dr. T.B.L. Webster and Messrs. Methuen Publications for their very kind permission to use the short extracts from Dr. Webster’s work: From Mycenae to Homer.

5. Sir Charles Leonard Woolley and Messrs. Faber & Faber Ltd. for their very kind permission to use the short extracts from Sir Charles Leonard Woolley’s work: Abraham.

6. Sir Charles Leonard Woolley and Messrs. Ernest Benn for their very kind permission to use the short extracts from Sir Charles Leonard Woolley’s work: Excavations at Ur.

7. Christopher Dawson & John Murray Publishing House for their kind permission to use an extract from Christopher Dawson’s work: The Age of the Gods.

8. Dr William Langer and The Houghton Mifflin Company for their very kin permission to use the short extracts from the Encyclopaedia of World History.

9. Dr. Charles Seltsman and the Associated Book Publishers for their very kind permission to use the short extracts from Greek Coins.

My sincere acknowledgements are also due to all those friends and acquaintances who in any way have assisted me in the present work.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

Every conclusion arrived at as a result of study of the fragments of information available in respect to money and its creators in the world of the Ancient Civilizations, indicates the existence of a far reaching conspiracy in respect to monetary issuance influencing the progression of man’s history in the earliest times of which written record exists. It is also outstandingly clear that it was parent to that acknowledged and most obvious conspiracy such as exists today.

The whole notion of the institution of precious metals by weight as common denominator of exchanges, internationally and nationally, cannot but have been disseminated by a conspiratorial organization fully aware of the extent of the power to which it would accede, could it but maintain control over bullion supplies and the mining which brought them into being in the first place. Clearly such notion had originally come into being during that historically distant period when first of all free silver began to be extensively used as a convenient and highly portable commodity in settlement of balances outstanding in foreign trade; certainly as far back as Neolithic times. This fact was indicated by the evidence existing that values (and by inference money) were already expressed in terms of silver by weight at the time of the Azag-Bau Dynasty at Kish in Mesopotamia (3268-2897 B.C.); although in a sense perhaps narrow and strictly national.

According to tablets unearthed recording a sale of land, the sellers were known as “The eaters of the silver of the field.” This expression clearly showed a connection between the conception of money as an abstract unit in circulation, and silver, the tangible material on which the symbols of this money were later recorded. Such silver would then be valued according to the ancient customs of the international trade routes which were manifested in the rules of the travelling merchants who controlled these routes; these rules being established towards the better regulation of exchanges between themselves.

In other words, as a result of the establishment of the custom of settlement of balances in external trade by silver bullion by weight, it seems that a system of values had grown up in the cities of Mesopotamia, over what period of time it would be impossible to say for sure, in terms of those accepted values of definite weights of silver bullion in such external trade, relative to the staples of life: barley, dates, etc.

That sales are recorded in the 4th Millennium B.C. means that even at that time there was a clear conception of the significance of the abstract monetary unit, which is in itself an integral part of the law structure of any state, for such sales were in terms of money. The true meaning of such a concept being largely incomprehensible to most even as in this day, except they were the truly initiated, those controlling the internal exchanges, namely the priesthood and scribes, might well be excused if they early fell into the error of expressing values in terms of the standard of values in international trade. This serious error brought about finally, not only the collapse of that power through whose medium the god kings were best able to serve their peoples, but also as a further consequence, the collapse and fading of the meaning and benevolent purpose of the god kings themselves.

With silver bullion controlled by an international and conspiratorial minded group, as indeed it is obvious it must have been, considering the main sources of silver supply as being far away from those centres of civilization whose money depended on it and yet with people coming to equate money, in actuality the law of the ruler, with value according to the law created in the exchanges by the custom of the use of that same privately controlled commodity, then it becomes quite clear that scarcity or plenty in money, whatever way it was evinced in the circulation, depended on the manipulations internationally of that group controlling the distribution of precious metal bullion, and the plenty or scarcity they created, as was convenient to them.

If there was no silver, why then! there was no money, and prices fell. Substitute gold for silver, and history seeming to fast repeat itself, we have the condition of the European world of the last 2000 years. If there was no gold, Why then again! There was no money!

Hence was able to develop that conspiracy against mankind most exemplified by a continuous propaganda of hate against all authority: in pre-antiquity and antiquity against the many city gods, and in relatively modern times against the kings that rose out of the ruins of that which had been Rome.

As those controlling totally the economic life of a state through monetary creation and emission, must have felt that kings and gods were more of a nuisance than anything else, the instigators of this conspiracy in whatever place and era, obviously were those who first did the business of bankers; the controllers of values, and consequently the economic life of the states wherever the precious metal standard was used.

According to Sir Charles L. Woolley, excavator of the city of Ur in Southern Mesopotamia, the unit of exchange in the days of the great city states of Mesopotamia of the third and fourth Millennium B.C., and which served, therefore, as common denominator of the value of goods and services, was the measure of barley. While however pointing out that gold and silver came to pass from hand to hand, with a value dictated by their value with reference to the constant value of a measure of barley, he asserts that the salaries of government officials at the time of Hammurabai (about the beginning of the second millennium B.C.) were assessed in barley but paid in silver, such silver having neither stamp nor government guarantee.

The notion therefore herein implied, of the numerous officials and labourers of Hammurabai of Babylon waiting in line to have silver cut off from the bullion bar, and weighed as against pay for the day, or the week, or the month, as the case might have been, although offered with sincerity, patently is as erroneous as that conception of the every day use in the exchanges of the aes rude in a similar way, in which the classical scholars and numismatists would have us believe; and which implied that the foreman and his labourers in ancient Rome of the days of the kings also waited in line after their day’s labour, say, on the Circus Maximus, to have a fragment of copper cut off and weighed in order that their wives might be able to go to the market to purchase the evening meal.

Clearly the word silver in the texts means no more than the word Plata in modern day Spanish, or Argent in modern day French. These words literally translate as silver, but as money which they are most used to indicate, they may be anything from grimy tattered paper note, to a silver peso, or to the brass coin which may function as divisible thereof. Similarly the word from the texts denoting silver may be safely said to have meant that which passed for money, perhaps exchangeable in the temple or the money shops for silver, but being in itself anything which circulated, denoting multiple or divisible of the unit o exchange; be it clay or wood or glass or leather or papyrus or stone.

Thus, as was the case in Sumeria indeed, long, long before the time of the great Hammurabai once money had come to be more of an abstract unit of account based for its value in desirable goods and services, on the barter power of a certain weight of silver bullion related to the constant value of barley, it was no major advance for those who benefited most from this conception, namely the bullion brokers and their satellites, the money changers or barkers, to find a weak king and a corruptible priesthood, who could be brought to lose sight of the total control of the city which was the right of the god they served; and who might turn a blind eye to those other more sinister activities by which the power of the Ziggurat was further undermined.

Of those time Dawson in the Age of the Gods remarks:

This information from Christopher Dawson with the translation of the tablets before him, and every assistance no doubt from those students in that particular field, is most illuminating; but of the undertones of those highly significant years in man’s period upon this earth, he seems to see little, or he just does not choose to speculate as to their nature.

Principal amongst those undertones, and quite possibly the force that brought these changes about, may safely be assumed to be the secret and private expansion of the total money supply effected primarily by the issuance into circulation of false receipts for silver and other valuables supposedly being held on deposit in thief proof vaults, or otherwise, for safe custody.

Such receipts would be accepted by merchants instead of the actual metal, and would function as money, and would be an addition to the total money supply, though not understood as such by the rulers who would thus easily be inveigled into lending their sanction to seemingly harmless practices; or at least into turning a blind eye; especially if priesthood and scribes so advised.

With that growth of the conception of private wealth which would automatically follow on the acceptance of the idea of buying and selling, or perhaps better put, preceded such idea of buying and selling as according to a silver standard internationally accepted, such involvement of priesthood and scribe would not be hard to achieve. According to Sir Charles Woolley, trade seemed to extend from the city of Ur, particularly during the so-called IIIrd. Dynasty, over the whole known world which certainly reached as far afield as Europe being carried on by means of letters of credit, bills of exchange, and “promises to pay” (cheques), made out in terms of staple necessities; of life expressed in terms of silver at valuation of barley (probably at a given season of the year).

There also is no doubt that the merchant as representative of the god of the city from which he journeyed, loaned money by which his customers were able to make their purchases, such money merely being an abstraction indicated by the figures on the clay tablet; in earlier days being backed by the will-force of the god of the city, and in latter days by the promises of silver issued by one who at that time would be the equivalent of today’s banker, and who, should such need arise, such as would be occasioned by the temple withdrawing its sanction or permissiveness towards his activities would be able to partially back his self-created abstract money which was the reality of such promises, with actual silver.

Thus the caravaneer or travelling merchant gave credit. Whether his own or that of the merchant for whom he was agent, or direct; from the Ziggurat itself, dwelling place of the god, it functioned as a form of foreign aid similar to the foreign aid of today. Considering that the merchant in earlier times operated solely with the credit of the temple that raised him up, while the temple remained supreme, such foreign aid was instrument of state policy, maintaining the servility of lesser states, while at the same time maintaining the steady working capacity of the home manufactures, and contented people in consequence. The classes of the dominant power were content that the manufacturies gave them daily labour, and the classes of the subordinate power were able to buy the luxuries they craved, and the necessities they needed as against money deducted from the credits loaned by the dominant power. Repayment of these credits, as in today, was made by way of return shipment of raw materials such as were needed for the manufacturies of the dominant state. That such raw materials were assessed in value as according to the international value of silver related to the national value of barley in the dominant state seems most likely.

However it is clear that with the growth of silver in circulation between private persons, and between private persons and states, as now would become an inevitability, that which had been total economic control from the gods through his servants in the Ziggurat, was bypassed, and merchants were now able to deal privately using their own credit, or powers of abstract money creation. They were also able, through their control of distant mining operations, to afflict a previously dedicated priesthood with thought of personal possession; and through the control of the manufacture of weapons in distant places, they were able to arm warlike peoples towards the destruction of whosoever they might choose.

Those merchants of whatever race they may have been, who voyaged to the cities of Sumeria from places as far distant as the great cities of the Indus valley civilization known today as Mohenjo-Daro and Harrapa, as is clearly demonstrated by the Sumerian seals found at Mohenjo-Daro and the seals from Mohenjo-Daro found at Ur,1
 and who were without a doubt one of the main sources of precious metal supply in Sumeria, came to realize that they could actually create that which functioned as money with but the record incised by the stylus on the clay tablet promising metal or money. Obviously, as a result of this discovery which depended on the confidence they were able to create in the minds of the peoples of their integrity, provided they banded themselves together with an absolute secrecy that excluded all other than their proven and chosen brethren, they could replace the god of the city himself as the giver of all. If so be they could institute a conception of a one god, their god, a special god of the world, a god above all gods, then not merely the city, be it Ur or Kish or Lagash or Uruk, but the world itself could be theirs, and all that in it was. A strange dream! One whose fulfilment they never really expected!

Some evidence of the knowledge and previous existence of such practice of issuance of false receipts as against supposed valuables on deposit for safe-keeping clearly exists in the Law No. 7 of the great Hammurabai, which same law was undoubtedly intended as a preventative to this sickness in society, which, even at that day, may very well have been the cancer that destroyed much that has been before.

According to Professor Bright, the Code of Hammurabai was but a revision of two legal codes promulgated in Sumerian by Lipit-Ishtar of Isin, and in Akkadian by the King of Eshnummua during the period of the breakup of that power formerly wielded by the God at Ur, that is, at about the same time that Ur was sacked by the Elamites in 1950 B.C., and Amorite and Elamite political power was established over Northern and Southern Mesopotamia. Both of these codes are well before the Code of Hammurabai, and are evidence of the latter being but a revision of law codes existing in the days of UR-NAMMU, or before, UR-NAMMU being that most outstanding ruler who reigned from 2278 B.C. to 2260 B.C. during the third dynasty at Ur.

The severity of the penalty and the placing of the law so high in the code leaves little doubt that it was directed against an evil that was by no means new, and, who knows, may have been one of the deep seated causes of the invasions that devastated Ur, both from the Gutim, the Elamites, the Amorites, and the Hittites; for no doubt of old, just as today, Money Power was as busy arming the enemies of the people amongst whom it sojourned, as that people themselves.

While the scholars do not appear to have paid any special attention to this particular law, or to have attached to it any special significance, its true intent and purpose is clear to anyone conversant with the origins of private money issuance in modern times, as indicated by the familiar story of the goldsmith’s multiple receipts.

If a man buys silver or gold or slave, or slave girl, or ox or sheep or ass or anything else whatsoever from a [free] man’s son or a free man’s slave or has received them for safe custody without witness or contract, that man is a thief: he shall be put to death.

The requisite of witnesses and contract attesting to the true facts of valuables on deposit, would to some extent obviate the danger of the goldsmiths, silversmiths or traders, involved in a transaction, creating receipts for valuables that did not exist, in safe custody or otherwise. It was equally possible in ancient times as much as in modern times to circulate such receipts as money lawfully instituted.

Provided a corrupted priesthood turned a blind eye to this practice and loaned their sanction thereto, such fraudulent money or, in the misleading euphemism of a corrupted world, “credit,” would be equally effective in foreign markets as in the home markets, if not more so because of the greater danger of exposure of the criminal nature of this activity that would undoubtedly exist in the home market.

The severity of the penalty required by this Law Number 7 of the Code of Hammurabai, exercised by a strong and dedicated ruler, would have been an absolute deterrent to such practice that since that time, and more especially in modern times since the 16th Century A.D., has become so indurated to a fixture. Its results are to be seen on every hand, not to speak of the final result which though not yet arrived, else this book would not be in existence, is clear.

The Laws of Hammurabai, King of Babylon, just the same as those more ancient codes of which they were revision, were directed towards the regulation of life of nobleman, as well as freeman, merchant, or slave, and no special concessions were given to either of these stations in life, even if such stations in life were accepted as integral part of the structure of the state life. Euphemistic and misleading words such as “businessman” or “financier” had not yet, it seems, been planted in the vocabulary. By and large, the king still ruled in absolute, and his law giving justice to all was carved in stone, and placed in the market place for the highest or the lowest to understand clearly the rules by which he must live. Merchants were unequivocally described as such, and law ruthlessly prescribed severe penalties for their corrupt conduct. They were kept in place as a caste, not of the highest order, and, it would appear, somewhat similar to the Hindu system, they served the priesthood and nobility, and were conceded a place in life as an instrument whereby the people generally might live a better life.

The Code of Hammurabai, revision of more ancient codes as it was, does not reveal any particular regard towards this caste of persons. However, as by the time of its promulgation, both privet property and privately issued money seem to have been well established, it is to be assumed that the ignorant of noble caste or otherwise, were already deferring to that magic known as money, in much the same manner as they did at all times through latter history when faced with the necessity of compromise with privet money creative power, whose activities had been permitted by foolish kings, and to whom such kings had even committed the finances of the realm. Such was most clearly illustrated during the last four hundred years in England; perhaps more so than at any other time in recorded history.

In the time of Hammurabai, King of Babylon, matters were by no means as desperate as they are today. Merchandising was by no means regarded as an end in itself, and a means whereby it was the right of ignoble men to proffer any corruption to the people so long as it made “profit” for them, and “interest” for the so-called barker who supplied the original “finances” out of his secret and costless money- creative processes. Money lending and merchandising as it is known, still had not come to be a means whereby man-hating and therefore corrupt secret societies might seek to overturn the tree of life itself by way of sowing the seeds of decay in that true and natural order of life which had been ordained from time immemorial.

Private money creators and the merchants their satellites, had at that time by no means arrived at that point when they might conspire to present complete defiance to the gods and their appointed, and as a small matter in the way of their business, install jackasses, or whatever might be, in the places of the mighty, as too often was the case in the latter days.

THE TEMPLE AND THE COUNTING HOUSE

Out of those vague shadows of war and power and peace and settlement of ancient strife that drifted out of the faded memory of man’s former abiding on the Anatolian plateaus and throughout the Near East as it is so described by us, emerged that force known as Classical Greece; a force which may be said to principally derive from the union of the essential forward thrust of the re-vitalized energies of the god-ruled city, and the political structure by which the cattle raising men of the Indo-European warrior nations had been governed.

Much of the revitalization of such energies derived from increasing availability of silver as a result of the expansion of the mining industry due to the increasing use of tools of hardened iron, and the consequent expansion of the volume of money in circulation amongst the peoples, abstract, or as now obtained, of actual pieces of silver of known weight and fineness carrying the identifying mark of the emitter.

This flood of the precious metals to which the new methods of mining gave rise, with the consequent strengthening of the shift of money creative, or total power center, from the god and the temple, to what some might describe as the devil and the counting house, enabled those conspiratorial groups who undoubtedly controlled precious metal bullion supplies, perhaps at this stage alliance between the priesthood of certain cities whose god was not getting fair acknowledgment, and those mysterious people, the Apiru, who, concerned with the carrying trade between the cities as is clear, seemingly belonged to no city, yet were to be found in them all, to set up a supra-national god as the fount of their secret power. He would be a god who should be contemptuous of all other gods; living in no idols, he would be in all, and over all; unseen, but all pervading.

If the god of such secret society or confederacy controlled movements of silver bullion internationally, he well might be contemptuous of all city gods other than himself, for when money values were based on the exchange value of his silver in such international exchanges, then he and his acolytes, whoever they were, knew that all prosperity in the kingdoms of those most ancient times depended on him, and whether he ordained through his servants that silver should be plentiful or otherwise; whether indeed there should be no money and hardship, or plenty of money and prosperity.

Also it may be assumed in the latter days of the declining temple power, prosperity or otherwise would also depend on whether rulers of such kingdoms and cities turned a blind eye, as it were, to that privately created ledger credit page entry money whose use the international money changers were undoubtedly promoting as a facilitation to exchanges between select and secret groups of persons. It would be completely external to the money creative power of the temple even if clandestinely linked thereto, and so would strengthen themselves and their one-God, all-powerful, all omnipotent.

The ruthless and stern edicts of such princes as Hammurabai of Babylon, previously quoted, while perhaps effective in Babylon, would not avail in all those cities or states to which the money changers undoubtedly carried their arts, especially if they were not subject to the rule of Babylon. Who knows to what extent the seizure of Ur by Hammurabai was the result of his determination to totally extirpate the source of this attack on kingly power, undoubtedly sanctioned, if not connived at by a cynical priesthood who were largely the rulers, in this most ancient city. That close to the throne and therefore the god himself, were those who secretly held in contempt the god-king, and to whom the utter devotion of the people, even unto death, was of no meaning, is clear from the following excerpt from Sir Charles L. Woolley in respect to his discovery of the tombs of the kings of the IIIrd dynasty at Ur:

“When we dug away the filling we found that in the upper part of the blocking of the door of each of the tomb chambers, there had been made a small breach just large enough for a man to get through; the dislodged bricks were lying in front of the door covered by the clean earth imported for the filling. The tomb had been robbed, and obviously just as the earth was about to be put in; nobody would have dared to rob them when the pit was still in use, nor, if such sacrilege had been done, would the bricks have been left scattered on the floor and the breach unfilled; the robbers must have chosen their moment when the inviolable earth would at once hide all traces of their crime and they could afford to be careless.”

According to the description of the burial scene by Charles L. Woolley on page 72 of Excavations at Ur, on the ramp leading down to the king’s tomb, would have lain the bodies of those who had elected to accompany their Lord into the regions beyond, in the order in which they had lain down to die; for death was obviously their wish and intention. It would have been almost impossible for such carefully timed robbery to have taken place over the bodies of those who would be amongst the first ladies of the court and certain officials, military and otherwise, without there having been a well planned conspiracy; for it was clear, dressed as they were in their finest clothing of crimson and gold, they had gladly and voluntarily offered themselves as company and comfort to their god-king at the commencement of that eternal journey which was his heavenly home. Testimony of their willingness existed in the lethal cup still clutched in their long decayed hands as they lay before his tomb in their last poisoned sleep.

As, when the robbery was effected, it is clear they were already dead, there had to be the connivance of certain persons in high places to whom this great devotion was without meaning. Additionally, such gold and silver would have been a useless and dangerous possession except to those whose lives so far as ordinary men were concerned were secret from first to last; such as to whom it meant money and power internationally, and by whom it could be melted and rapidly transferred abroad.

Speculating on the functions of the famous temple of Solomon, similar to the temples of Egypt and the Sumerian city states, although according to professor Paul Einzig little information exists as to how the evolution of the monetary system of the Jews, prior to the adoption of coinage, affected the Hebrew economic system or its price levels, it seems that this temple in the earlier days was not only used as a treasury, but, as in Babylonia, as a bank. Thus it received money on deposit (for safe keeping). Professor Einzig informs us that the gold lavishly adorning the temple for decorative purposes, existed at the same time, as a monetary reserve. When Hezekiah had paid a tribute of three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold to the king of Assyria (around 700 B.C.), he “cut the gold from the doors of the Temple of the Lord and from the Pillars;” (II Kings; 18, 16).

The arts of banking were, however, in no way as developed as they were in Babylonia and Assyria. Amongst the ‘Apiru,’ undoubtedly confederates of the Israelites in later times, were clearly many refugees from the cruel debt slavery existing in Babylonia and its outposts during the 2nd Millennium B.C., and later. Apart from the firm laws in respect to the taking of interest, the Jubilee of the 50th year (Leviticus 25.II), if fully enforced, would render any effort to create monopoly ineffective.

Thus it can be seen that the God in his holy shrine ruled in the same way in that ancient Hebrew kingdom, so much better known to most than perhaps the temple cities of ancient Sumeria; many of which, until relatively recently, were not even names, and were no more than faintly discernible mounds on the desert.

The Greek sanctuary owed existence to similar forces that had given rise to the temples of Mesopotamia and to the temple of Solomon above mentioned. Functioning in like manner, in modified form, clearly it originated from those distant days when the shrine of the mother goddess of the cities of the Anatolian plateau and the Persian highlands such as Catal Huyuk, Hacilar, Dorak, Susa, etc., was the point from which the people drew spiritual guidance, and the nucleus around which these human accretions gathered in ancient times. These shrines gave force to those mysteries whose existence and purpose towards the continuity and good in life, drew the devotion of all. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, the Temple of Athene at Athens, all obviously owed their origin to the ancient worship of the Mother Goddess who, through the wonder and urge in her body, consumed the whole life force of man. The controllers of the healthy continuance of life in these cities were a priesthood who considered themselves as the direct representatives of the goddess on earth, the shepherds appointed to the flock.

The temple states that existed to a relatively late date such as those of Cappadocia, were indeed the direct projection forward into time of this tradition of government of the city by the goddess in her holy shrine, as much as were those of the city states of early Sumeria. In Greece too, in earlier times, such rule existed beyond much doubt, and during that period when Cretan civilization extended to the mainland, and when power stemmed from the halls of Cnossus, and the mystic place of mythology where once upon a time lived the Minotaur, it would be an absolute certainty. It would not bear much difference to those systems of god control by which all those rulers of the Ancient Orient had governed, and which had guided the calm and blessed procession of the peoples through time and under the sun.

The temple of each small city state in Greece during the earlier days of Greek industry may have functioned to some extent as did the great temples or ziggurat of the powerful city states of Sumeria of much earlier days, and money, that is the law controlling exchanges as to a common denominator of values, may have come into existence as entry in the temple ledger, although how represented in the circulation does not seem to be clearly known. The notion of exchanges being conducted in terms of cattle, one animal representing the unit, even if having existed in large scale business in ancient times of the wandering Indo-European cattle raising tribes of the Scythian plains, cannot be accepted as that which created an exchange amongst the common people of the city civilizations. True, the word for cattle may have continued in some areas to have been used to indicate money, but, as previously pointed out, certainly bearing no more reference to cattle than does the French word Argent, or the Spanish word Plata bear reference to silver in a context where money is definitely referred to.

It is clear that local tribes, such as the Bushmen of South Africa, the natives of Melanesia and Micronesia, whose way of life obviously derives, with little change, from the way of life of the races that once occupied South China, Annam, India, and Ceylon, in the very ancient times of the tertiary ages previous to the ice ages, long since have been conversant, with the basic principle of money. In their case money was an abstract unit circulating amongst the people with tangibility evinced by pieces of certain shell, cut according as tradition demanded; and of value deriving from custom, which, in such societies, is law.

Therefore it may reasonably be expected that the intelligent Indo-Europeans from whom stemmed the Greeks, were equally conversant with such principles; even if later they came to forget them. According to the Cambridge Ancient History:

“Ivory beads in country now devoid of elephants suggest either wide range of movement or some form of exchange.”

When the Cambridge Ancient History speculated as above that the ivory beads of the Solutrean deposits of Northern France represented some form of exchange medium, the graves of Sungir which reveal similar mammoth ivory beads, proven to be 23,000 years old or more, had not been opened. During the Old Kingdom in Egypt and during the earliest years of the cities of Babylonia, when “numberings” of all accepted as wealth and possession, were taken every two years, and therefore books kept, a most refined system of distribution of surpluses and therefore creation of exchanges, must have existed. The connection between such system and the scarabs in the case of Egypt, and the seals in the case of Mesopotamia, seems to have been generally dismissed. The fact that the scarabs have been found in their hundreds in places far removed from Egypt, from Palestine, to Crete, to Etruria, indicates significance far removed from their use as ornaments.

The agents of the Babylonian Money Power as it existed previous to the extensive growth of coined money as a base for that circulation, seen or abstract, which drove the trade and industry of the Greek industrial revolution, would themselves have promoted and encouraged the establishment of the temple nucleus to the city state. It was the form of government they understood best and whose essential powers they knew, from experience now grown ancient, how to control and subvert if necessary. Just as the similar secret money creative force heads directly for the seat of government itself in this day and age, and once it becomes fully lodged and acknowledged, in the same way as with the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 and the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States in 1913, two instances with which we are most familiar, it penetrates right into the heart of the treasury, so it was in that day. In the little cities of early Greek industrial revolution, perhaps no less sly amongst this sturdy people, but clearly discernible it was.

As amongst the original aristocracy of Greece owing its origin to those heroic days of the Homeric Sagas, would be little enough sympathy for the smooth subtleties of those newcomers originating from the counting houses of the Phoenician, Aramean, or Babylonian Cities, it would not be to the natural political leaders that these newcomers would address themselves in the first place, but to the priesthood, those who controlled shrine and temple, the advisors and guides to such rulers. Just as in today such priesthood is too often composed of men of little understanding of the realities of financial life, and who will lend themselves almost eagerly to any power that may approach them with sufficient front to convince them that they are being offered more than the god they represent is already possessed of, so it was in that day. This village priesthood, conducting the simple rites such as may have been during the period known as the dark ages, and before the advent of the city states of historical record, when was breathed into their ears the possibilities of magnificent temples such as were to be found in Egypt, and the extent of the control they would exercise through the oracles, whose wisdom would be spread by fame across the whole world, would easily be gained.

Thus the cities that rose out of the industrial awakening of Greece had all the appurtenances of the sacred city state of more ancient days. However, just as sacred kingship existing as the projection of the guiding will of the Almighty on to this earth, too often during the last three hundred years has become little more than a front giving legality to such money as circulates bearing as it does, the profile of the ruler who so often has been unwitting co-conspirator, if only as essential instrument, with that money power, totally international in character, which has nowadays largely replaced kingly power as the true ruler, so it was that the temple that should owe fealty to the gods alone, became a front for the international money creative force of that day and age; connected closely with the trade in precious metals and slaves as it must have been.

The temple of the Sumerian city state had been palace, temple, warehouse, government offices and central bank in one, and its servants had administered it in these capacities certainly until the end of what is known as the Dynastic period (in the case of the city of Ur), and with declining strength for long afterwards; and the king of the city state had been sufficiently as god on earth, that, as previously has been described, there were those of his wives and concubines and officials who gladly went down to the grave with him.

Thus, as the distant heir, in some degree, to this temple of ancient days, the temple of the Greek city state in the 1st Millennium B.C. was still a place looked up to as the abode of the gods, and wherein the sacred rites were conducted; even if that economic power, by which, as the expression of the benevolent will of the god, it had controlled the total existence of men, and their comings and goings, was now exercised by an external and indifferent force, alien to Greece in thought and character, and with whom it connived against its own adherents.

In the same way the priesthood or laymen that promote, wittingly or unwittingly, the elements of decay penetrating the church of today, connive blindly or otherwise with those whose stated and clear plan has never been other than the disintegration of this selfsame church, and who have always had in mind no more than its ultimate destruction.

In a latter period it is true, but still within the first millennium B.C., the situation at the Temple of Apollo at Delos, and of which some proof exists, clearly illustrates this condition of the temple: still as controller of the mysteries, and the recipient of the bounty of devoted souls, but no longer the centre and control point of the god owned state. It had become merely a front for the economic purposes of a secret fraternity whose concern was money changing, silver bullion, the grain trade, and the slave trade. These persons had conducted their business in the shade of the temple courtyards from ancient days as, and if they could, in order that the power or mystery as locally was held in awe, might give sanctity to their activities which so often were exercised against the well being of the people who sheltered them. Such activities were frequently concerned with movements of bullion, the factor most of all giving rise to instability of prices, and movements of labour which then was slaves, hardly less a factor in such instability of prices, and therefore so necessary to the full exploitation of a given people.

The island of Delos, although virtually infertile and without special advantages such as natural harbours of any particular excellence, due to the contributions and gifts of the pilgrims visiting the Temple of Apollo, and the deposits of the cities, trapezitae and leading citizens, in precious metals and money, for such were esteemed to be safe in the Temple of the God, became very rich; a centre of trade and banking, and above all, a centre for the area slave trade from which almost none were safe.

Of the commercial activities of the great sanctuaries, Oskar Seffert, the German antiquarian of the last century had to say, (A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, p. 91.):

.” We hear in isolated cases of State Banks, but this business was carried on in the vast majority of cases, by the Great Sanctuaries, such as those of Delphi, Delos, Ephesus, and Samos, which were much used as banks for loans and deposits both by individuals and governments.”

In other words, therefore, the great sanctuary functioned very much the same way, from the economic standpoint, as the central bank in this day. The agents of International Money Power, as used by the priesthood of the Temple of Apollo to take care of the fiscal or financial dealings of the temple, and to whom undoubtedly was farmed out the credit of the temple, must have fully understood that the priesthood had betrayed their high calling, and thereby had betrayed those devoted souls who continued to believe the sole concern of the temple was, as formerly, for their spiritual guidance and that they should live good, virtuous and pious lives.

These agents would have lurked as only faintly discernible shadows behind the temple facade, although they instigated much of what came to pass in those days, if themselves so little seen. Of first concern to them would have been the reputation of their masters, the priesthood, for piety, probity, and godliness, in so far as appearance went. For by maintaining the position of the priesthood, they maintained themselves and their secret power; yet for whatever they brought about, especially if of evil, it may safely be assumed, a nevertheless inviolate priesthood would be held responsible.

Hence the people never questioned the existence of the temple but as the place where the will of the god was exercised through his servants. That it had come to function more as instrument in the capacity of sanctifying front for an international power concerned largely with money creation and the control of the slave trade, itself mainly of criminal antecedents, was something they never came to fully understand; nor that this whole thing of prayer, worship, and devotion was dangerously near to becoming a cruel hoax manipulated by a handful of aliens, who looked at them and their fervour and belief with dead eyes. No more in this day do those who toil on through the few years of their lives realize that the governments that they so naively believe are theirs, are but a wavering shadow. The absolute reality of sovereign power only obtainable through total control over monetary creation and emission and cancellation, is not theirs. They but function as standards by which international money creative forces create the worlds money in a given area; places wherein exponents of the “Law” and talkative and by no means wise or learned men foregather to discuss road minding etc. and too often little things that occupy them, but matter not too much; never looking too closely at the direction from which they came, nor toward that direction in which they go; nor, above all, towards the place of the hand that feeds them.

Therefore this economic power apparently centering in the Temple of Apollo would not only derive from those loans in precious metals that it was able to grant, but also from the fact that those very secret fraternities understanding fully the principles of Ledger Credit Page Entry Money, operated under its patronage. There can be no doubt that the principles of monetary inflation, or, better put, abstract money creation, were well understood to the trapezitae or professional bankers to whom the Temple at Delos apparently delegated these functions; and equally well known was how easily merchants could be trained to make payments by cheque drawn on account consisting of supposed deposits with a recognized banker either by signed and witnessed document, by signed document, even by no more than verbal instructions. Thus, provided the payee also had account at Delos or agency thereof, no transfer of actual silver need have been involved, and what is now euphemistically described as the fractional reserve system, (a swindle indurated in a system!) was operated. The enormous volume of exchanges a business that could be carried on without the movement of one drachma of silver, and consequently the monopolization of trade and industry and subsequent control over the whole world and its affairs that could be brought about at literally no real cost, provided those dealing in money changing and financial matters maintained close solidarity, was known to the bankers.

The tremendous entre-pôt trade of Delos, especially in slaves, could not derive from anything else other than the acceptance of the “Credit” of the Temple from the hands of these aliens. These men would be skilled money changers bred and trained in the ancient financial sophistication of the cities of Babylonia, Aram, a Phoenicia, etc. They would be fully conversant with the possibilities inherent in such ledger credit page entry money, and whose successful functioning as an abstract inflation of the number of units of silver they claimed to control, depended on secrecy, and solidarity amongst themselves, and above all, on the patronage of the corrupted temples.

Professor Rostovtsev relates at length the commercial dealings of Apollonius, manager of the economic affairs of the Ptolemic Pharaoh, Philadelphus.. If the true name of Apollonius or others of that necessarily interlocked money power was known, and substituted for that of Antigonus and Demetrius and Soter and, indeed of Philadelphus and all those rulers that succeeded Alexander, then the glass through which this tale is read, showing but dark and inscrutable figures incomprehensibly moving on the screen of time, becomes clear and meaningful. For instance it is unthinkable that those soldiers who were the successors to Alexander, probably by no means as instructed as their commander, should have understood the undercurrents that still supported enthroned kings, and upheld them before the gaze of those that yearned towards them as to the Lord’s anointed.

When Antigonus Gonatus took over the patronage formerly extended by the Ptolemies to Delos, he made it an entre-pôt centre for the Northern Aegean trade in those materials so necessary in the building of ships; and more significantly again for silver; no doubt from the mines of Thrace and beyond.

This flow of silver to Delos from the North is of equal interest to the rest of the entre-pôt trade. It would have contributed to the augmentation of the temple reserves of silver that would have enabled Delos to partially replace Athens during the 3rd Century B.C. as the new centre from which international money power came to control the finances of the Eastern Mediterranean as formerly, in the days of the Athenian Empire; and therefore above all, that grain trade so essential to Athens and mainland Greece. A document mentioned by Professor M. Rostovtsev refers to a purchase of grain in Delos by a Sitones of Histicaea, a subject city of Macedonia in which he observes that the purchase was made out of money advanced by a Rhodian banker. This particular case might suggest that the banking of Rhodes was interlocked with that of Delos and that those silver reserves of the Temple of Apollo functioned also as reserve to Rhodian banking. Delos, because of its sanctity would constitute a much safer store house for precious metal hoards than ever Rhodes might be.

Previous references to banking in the Grecian centres and sanctuaries as being conducted by aliens, are also verified by Professor M. Rostovtsev. The question therefore arises “What aliens?” Would they be members of the same fraternity as the Aramean, Apollonius above mentioned, manager for the economic affairs for Ptolemy Philadelphus; men who were standing almost above and beyond mankind in their manipulation of powers that not so long previously had been reserved solely to the gods and which had been exercised only by that dedicated priesthood surrounding the king, son of god, on earth? Such power being lost to kings forever when in the first place they permitted the institution of accounting to a silver standard in ancient times in the Lands of Sumer and Akkad.

The latter days of Delos and the Temple of Apollo when 10,000 slaves were shipped abroad in one day alone, would certainly suggest the existence at Delos as controllers of its economic affairs, a class of persons internationally minded, and utterly callous to the sufferings of the mixture of broken races that passed before it the way to the slave stockades. Although slavery previous to the 4th century B.C. had been more in the nature of a benign custom similar to the custom of the bonded servant or apprentice of the 18th and 19th Centuries in Northern Europe, after the Macedonian conquests it became a custom in no way so benign, and herding all kinds of persons formerly free, day in and day out, on to the ships of the day, could not have been accomplished but with whip and chain and families being torn apart without compunction or compassion, and little children defenseless against the abuse of monsters.

While the facts of the Temple of Apollo at Delos are relatively clear, supposition of the existence of the Temple of Athene, at Athens as being under the secret control of the bankers, while not being so clear, is logical.

The reserve of 6000 talents of coined silver supposed to have been stored in the Acropolis at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War would certainly seem to indicate that the Temple loaned itself to that major activity of so-called bankers, the creation of abstract money, and shielded them in their very carefully guarded secret that most money circulating as between Athenian merchants and those with whom they did business within, or without the Athenian Empire, was that which was created as by ledger credit page entry. The silver reserve would have been the banker’s window dressing and would have served to take care of smaller day to day expenses and payments to foreign states where no other form of payment was possible or acceptable.

The Peloponnesian War ended no more than a little over a hundred years before the time of Alexander. According to A. Andreades in his essay on the war finances of Alexander the Great, total expenditures per annum of Alexander at the time of the crossing of the Hellespont were 5000 - 7000 talents. This was the expenses of an army far from home, and to which, until the Battle of Issus and the certainty of Macedonian total victory, little enough credit would have been available, and most of the disbursements of which army would have been in solid metal. Of such metal, fortunately for the Macedonian Royal House, the mines of Phillipi had certainly made substantial contribution.

It is therefore out of the question to consider whether 6000 talents of silver were adequate for the total finances of the Peloponnesian War over ten years, so far as Athens was concerned. If all disbursements to traders etc. had been in silver, it is doubtful if such so-called reserve could have lasted six months.

This silver was merely the foundation of that illusion which was no doubt spread across the Athenian Empire, that those baked clay facsimiles of Greek coinages which circulated so well between merchants and governments, were redeemable in silver coin; just as for the last three hundred years in the British Empire all the Queen’s loyal subjects have believed that every bank note in circulation was redeemable in gold!

On the subject of such fiduciary currencies in ancient times, particularly the Athenian, François Lenormant, eminent 19th Century Numismatist wrote:

In other words the clay facsimiles functioned in much the same manner as did bank notes over the last three hundred years in the Anglo-Saxon world; they were money, privately created and emitted.

François Lenormant, however lived at a time when relatively little was realized by numismatists of the functions of “Ledger Credit Page Entry Money,” or often enough of money itself as being so many numbers injected into a circulation amongst the people, either as pure abstraction and functioning as by transfer of such ledger credit page entry, or as tangible record on clay, paper, copper, silver, or gold, and functioning as by transfer from hand to hand of those defined commodities, intrinsically valueless or otherwise, on which its numbers were so imprinted. The value of such numbers in goods and services for sale being the most amount of such numbers as the people offered in competitive buying or the least as they accepted in competitive selling.

PER ME DEI REGNANT!

The city states of the rulers of Troy, Orchomenos, Tyryns, Bog-Haz-Koi, Mycenae, Cnossos, and cities and states without number and of which not even the name or memory, now remains, too often, little expectant of calamity from without, from whatever cause, finally went down into smoking ruin before the deluge of wild men, who, with their reeking swords brought all those god-ordered ages of ancient time to a bloody close; men such as the wearer of the golden mask whose grave was opened by Heinrich Schlieman in his excavations at Mycenae, and who he believed to be Agamemnon sleeping his everlasting sleep.

Buried sword in one hand, with the other this giant amongst men still clutched in death as in life, those disks of gold which so obviously were storehouse of wealth and power.

Thus it is clear that by permitting gold to be equated with wealth, or that which had been money, and forgetting thus the true nature of money as a thing apart, his law alone, merely a device of transferable numbers to assist and give order to the exchanges amongst his people, this god-king from whom descended the legend of that company on Olympus, was already surrendering his might, and the freedoms of his peoples, to those inscrutable shadows that lurked in the dimness of the distant Babylonian counting houses.

To these rulers, power was already in the merchant’s and master miner’s precious metal pieces. With such precious metals as they stripped from the bodies of living and dead in those cities they had so gleefully sacked and put to sword, when peace carne again, they were able to purchase those items of luxury so much desired by their women, such as were manufactured in the cities of the Mesopotamian plain and Egypt, if not further afield. More important still, they were thus able to obtain the finest of arms that skilled craftsmanship could fashion, such as the suit of bronze armour found at Medea in Greece (illustrated on Page 135 of Dawn of the Gods, by Jacquetta Hawkes); the very best of the master armourer’s trade.

Thus they readied themselves for the next slaughter. It may very well have been as in today, when the new aggressors, designated Communist as according to the meaning of that word, may very well be preparing for the destruction of those easy-going people of the Anglo-Saxon world from whose skill and technique derive those finest of arms through which their world could indeed be threatened with total obliteration.

That in their position as ruler all gold flowed through their hands, whether in those forms given to it by goldsmith’s art or in those shapes most convenient from the point of view of its use in international exchange, there is no doubt. The latter case was clearly shown by the rings and disks and the tiny double headed axes, as found at Troy, all of gold, and the four hundred round pieces of gold and the one hundred and fifty golden disks that were found in the Royal tombs of Mycenae (dating from c. 1500 B.C.) by Heinrich Schlieman all of which clearly represented some form of exchange or money. Spirals of gold wire also found in the grave of one member of the Royal Family of Mycenae are suggested by Seltsman (Greek Coins, p.5) to be adjusted to the small Aegean gold talent of 8.5 grammes which he classifies as the Aegean gold unit. Herein would be implication of the use of a gold unit in international exchanges even at that early time. The rings of gold wire of a few grammes weight which circulated in Egypt (Breasted, p. 307) in the reign of Tahutmes III (1501 B.C. - 1447 B.C.), would appear to afford some verification of this fact. Gold or silver money, whether ring money or other form of money, if of definite weight and fineness would always be desirable in international exchanges.

As an interesting and pertinent digression, it also appears that spiral or ring money may have come to occupy a place in the economic life of Egypt too, as early as the latter years of the so-called Old Kingdom. Its use and abuse, considering the Egyptian trade that existed across the known world during the reign of Pepi pharaoh who reigned 90 years during the 6th Dynasty, may have been one of the factors by which the International Money Power of the time, in whatever form it existed, brought about the total collapse of kingly rule in Egypt in the years subsequent to the death of this ruler.

The Hebrew records also appear to verify this use of metal rings or spirals being used in settlement of trade balances between foreigners; or of being storehouses of wealth. According to Madden, however, there is no mention of gold money in ancient Hebrew records, though gold constituted part of the wealth of Abraham, undoubtedly refugee from Ur about the time of its destruction by the Gutim. The six hundred shekels of gold by weight paid by David for the threshing floor and oxen of Ornan and the 6000 shekels of gold taken by Naaman on his journey to the King of Israel do not imply money. Nor can the passage: “they lavish gold out of the bag and weigh silver in the balance,” or “Wisdom cannot be gotten for gold neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof,” be brought forward in favour of gold money. Gold was generally employed for personal ornament and for adornment of the temple.

It is probable, therefore, that a system of “jewel currency,” or “ring money,” was in use. The case of Rebekah to whom the servant of Abraham gave “a gold earing of half a shekel weight, and two bracelets for her hands of ten (shekels) weight,” proves that the ancient Hebrews made their jewels of a specific weight so as to know the value of these ornaments in employing them in lieu of money. That the Egyptians kept their bullion in jewels and rings is not merely indicated by the scene on the monuments as mentioned by Lenormant and Masparo, in which they are represented as weighing rings of gold, silver and copper, but also by the findings of archaeology such as the copper rings found at Tel Amarna stamped with the cartouche of Kuen-Aten, Hyksos ruler. These rings would appear to have been retained in the treasury at Tel Amarna, and therefore still were current two hundred years after the expulsion of the so called Hyksos. According to Breasted, gold and copper rings of a fixed weigh circulated in large scale business in the time of the “Old Kingdom,” and (significantly enough to the student of “banking,” or private money creation and regulation, as it might better be known) “stone weights were already marked with their equivalence in such rings.” The circulation as money of these “promises to pay” recorded on stone, pointedly suggests the likelihood of the activities of a secret fraternity whose hereditary trade was private money creation. It may very well have been the debilitating force that, with the death of Pepi II in 2476 B.C., brought about ending in turmoil and anarchy to the even flow of the undeterminable age over which the God-Kings reigning in awesome splendour, so long had spread their mantle of man-consideration and true benevolence.

Further evidence that the Egyptians kept their bullion in jewels or rings is indicated by the passage from Exodus in which it is related that the Israelites, previous to their departure from Egypt, borrowed “jewels of silver and jewels of gold and spoiled the Egyptians.”

In consequence it would appear that the money used by the children of Jacob when they went to purchase corn in Egypt was ring money, the use of which was permitted by the Pharaoh Egypt of the time; rightly or wrongly. Their money is described “bundles of money,” as verified by the authorized translation Deuteronomy. “Then shalt thou turn it into money and bind up the money in thine hand and shall go unto the place where the Lord thy God shall choose” The excavations of Heinrich Schlieman indicate that such ring money was also used by the Mycenaeans at perhaps rather later date.

Thus the Greek city state, owing its existence to an uncertain long period during which there took place those events that led up to the final days of Cnossos and Mycenae, was the result of the union of the forces of order in life and death that motivated the priest-king, were he at Cnossos, or at Thebes, or Tel Amarna, or serving the Moon god at Ur, leader amongst the Sumerian cities, and those forces that drove on the builders of the battlements first of all unearthed by Heinrich Schlieman at Troy and Mycenae. Whether priest-king or peasant-king, their wealth was already assessed in terms of the weight of their store of precious metals which would be so eagerly accepted in exchange for the products of the master armourers employed by the bankers who already controlled trade and money creation in those cities of the Ancient Orient; from which cities, therefore, the glory of total guidance by the god-will had already departed.

He who was literally the Son of God on Earth as he meditated in his island fastness of Crete, was beholden to none other than the people below who he served from his place as the apex of the pyramid of life itself, and to the will of the one above who appointed him to serve. The peasant king at Mycenae or Troy or wherever it might be, for all his seeming rock-like strength, and a certain god-likeness in character of the kingship he bore, as was indicated by the title Wanax, necessarily existed as instrument of those who manipulated gold or silver supplies internationally, and at the same time the slave market; men of a class who, in that control of prices which they so clearly exercised, were able to control prosperity in all those seemingly powerful states that had accepted the international valuation of silver as the factor determining internal or national values; such as was the case with most of the mainland cities. They may have been, as it seems they are today, a close knit conspiratorial group threaded through the priest and scholar class of these cities and lards; thought not of themselves of such origin.

The answer may be found to lie in the existence in very ancient Sumeria of a privileged class, who, having access to the “credit” of the temple, thus were able to control the masters of the great donkey caravans who carried such “credit,” or will of the god of the city, from one place of business to the other; incising record on their tablets, of loan of such credit made to enable purchase, or interest overdue, or repayment of such loan as had been made the previous trip. These persons, who may be considered themselves to derive from the hereditary caravaneers and who must have functioned as bullion broker and banker, would have been fully clear on the subject of silver and its function in settlement of foreign trade balances and its use as a standard on which to base money accounting. In the latter days of the city states of Sumeria, it is reasonably clear that during certain periods of decay, a languid and corrupted priesthood might delegate to these persons, not only matters of trade, but also those decisions relative to foreign states so essential to the continuance of the might and right of the god of the city.

The special international character of the outlook of these people, sprung as they undoubtedly were from the donkey caravaneers, born to be at home amongst all peoples, yet to always bear in mind the peculiar business of the caravan merchants, their trade and profit, may not have made for decisions as from a true and dedicated god-servant. Thus it may very well be that we must look to the professional caravaneers, from whom descended the Habiru, for widespread dissemination of the knowledge of the possibilities offered to merchants by development of the practices relating to private money creation deriving from a clear understanding of the meaning of accounting to a silver standard, and later the potentialities towards development of monopoly of trade inherent in the actual use of silver as the material on which the numbers of the abstract unit were stamped. The full extent of the possibilities towards the accumulation of wealth through exploitation of varying ratios between silver and gold in different parts of the world, and the possibilities of a private and secret expansion of the total monetary circulation which was open to those who were held in such esteem in the cities that persons were glad to deposit their valuables with them for safe-keeping, may also have been known to them.

As such accounting to a silver standard had long been known in the lands of Sumer and Akkad, and the mainland generally, control of values had long since been in the hands of the silver bullion brokers, whoever they were, and the money lenders, and bankers and their satellite merchants, without reference as in former days, to priesthood and temple scribe. Through bullion they controlled money, and through money creation, on that bullion as base, they controlled manufactures. According to T.B.L. Webster in his book From Mycenae to Homer: “Undoubtedly Ugarit and Alalakh were more concerned with manufactures than Knossos and Pylos, and silver by weight was already for them performing the function of money, whereas as far as can be seen in the Mycenaean centres, no such standard existed”. However the fact that the Achaeans derived their system of measurements from Mesopotamia would certainly suggest that the most important measurement of all, the monetary unit would equally originate from such source. This opinion is further strengthened by the collaboration obviously existing in the Mycenaean settlement at Ugarit with that money power which based itself on silver by weight, such as clearly controlled the manufacturies of Ugarit and Alalakh.

Further according to the same scholar:

“The Alalakh tablets also record copper distributed to smiths, but note in addition it is to be used for making baskets or arrowheads; and the King of Assyria sent copper to Mari to be made into nails by the local craftsmen. A report from Pylos that the woodcutters in two places are delivering 150 axles and 150 spars for the chariot factory may be compared with the Ugaritic texts on the delivery of wood for the making of arms, and a note of wood delivered to the carpenters for the construction of wagons in Alalakh. We may add here also from Pylos a list of wooden objects made, a list of vessels received by men (perhaps Mayors) in various places and a note of pieces of ivory; to set beside this rather slender evidence of Mycenaean manufacture, Alalakh provides a record of sixty four business houses and their produce; they include smiths, leather workers, joiners, and cartwrights.”

Thus it seems that where the conception of money as to a silver standard existed as at Ugarit and Alalakh, so also existed organized industry, including outstandingly the private manufacture of arms under methods that appear to be those of semi-mass production. It is not without significance that this early era of privately issued money (such as was silver money), and consequent private industry, particularly that which was devoted to arms manufacture, was in certain areas so coincidental with the massive movements of warlike peoples, and the collapse of ancient empires that had lived long under the pattern of life known as that of the Ancient Orient. Conquering peoples needed the best of arms. It seems that the best of arms were obtainable from private industry; and private industry in its turn needed silver or gold or labour which was slaves, in payment. Both were obtainable as the result of war. Therefore parallel, though not entirely the same as in today, the more war, the more the industry, and the more the need for the products of the money creators’ ledgers. Hence became the more absolute the control of that which most of all designs industry and its accompanying slavery in one form or another, namely, private money creative power.

Thus regardless of what strength still resided in the heart of the temple states of the Ancient Orient, if values were dictated by the international valuation of silver bullion, then, above all, the internationally dealing silver bullion brokers would be in a position to see to it that manufacture and distribution of arms was under their control, the factor most important of all in international power allocation.

They were in a position to have manufactured in some scale, controlling labour as they undoubtedly did through control of the slave trade, the finest weapons known in that day for those rulers who collaborated with them and served best their purposes. Clearly by the same token, with such total money control, they were in a position to withhold the best of weapons, or the materials for such weapons, from those who served them the least. In a world that had come to believe in money as an absolute, such was the position long ago, exactly as in today. Thus the state that rejected international money power, as did Sparta and Rome in ancient times, and Russia in modern times, had to be prepared to establish total military self-sufficiency.

The Cretan civilization that communicated its ancient language through the pictograph script known as Linear “A,” which recognizably came to communicate Greek through that development of this script known as Linear “B,” about 1500 B.C., would certainly seem to have been conquered by Greek speaking peoples some reasonable period previously; which would suggest about 1700-1600 B.C.

At the same time, according to Breasted, in 1675 B.C., the so-called Hyksos, a Semitic conqueror, entered the Delta regions of Egypt, establishing total military supremacy through the use of horse and chariot, previously unknown in Egypt.

The evidences of the Ugarit and Alalakh tablets, although of a substantially later date (about three hundred and fifty years) indicating semi-mass production in these areas of chariot parts, arrow heads, and arms of various kinds, cannot but suggest that it was from this region, so close to the copper of Cyprus, and the wood of Anatolia and Lebanon, that money power armed those restless peoples that may have inundated Crete in earlier times, and Egypt somewhat later.

The chariots by means of which Egypt had been subdued, can only have been paid for out of the booty of conquest, the plunder of tomb and temple, and the sale of the enslaved peoples. The fact of the persistence of the thrust of Tahutmes III into these regions substantially less than one hundred years after the eviction of the Hyksos by Ahmose I (1500 B.C.-1557 B.C.) from their last Egyptian stronghold at Avaris on the Eastern marches of the Delta, would indicate no idle pointless advance, but definite design towards destroying the heart of the enemy, the elimination of his financial and industrial centres. Whether they were still in the regions of Ugarit and Alalakh, or now sheltered elsewhere behind the Kingdom of Kadesh, perhaps in Mittani, would not be known.

However, that both sides had equal access to the international arms industry would certainly be indicated by the spoil in manufactures of war of the battle of Megiddo (1479 B.C.) as won by Tahutmes III against the King of Kadesh and his allies, amounting to nine hundred and twenty-four chariots and two hundred suits of armour. By corollary, it may reasonably be assumed that opposed to these chariots as seized at Megiddo, would have been at least another thousand chariots. Alexander of Macedonia venturing far from home in later times, was a reckless adventurer, considering that at the battle of Issus (October, 333 B.C.) the whole Macedonian army amounted to little more in numbers than the Greek mercenary centre of Darius which was but a small part of the Persian’s enormous, if undisciplined host. Tahutmes, who ruled Egypt from 1501-1447 B.C. was the god-king of a great and ancient state to which occupation by the detested Hyksos had so recently taught a severe lesson in that which was modern warfare in those times. He was descendant of a line of kings 2000 years old or more, and it is very doubtful if he would have moved abroad without careful organization and planning. To build his thousand or so chariots was needed the wood of Lebanon and Syria, and those districts surrounding the Gulf of Antioch. Also was the craftsmanship of its cities of Ugarit and Alalakh needed, or at least, of that so strategic district, whatever its name at that time; also equal financial and industrial organization to that which clearly was available to the kingdom of Kadesh, suggested by Breasted to be the last flicker of political and military power of the Hyksos.

Thus it would appear that money creative power had definitely reestablished some form of agency in Egypt, where, under the conditions of the empire, its best interests lay. The agreement between Tahutmes and the Phoenician cities, particularly Tyre, demonstrates concessions made to traders in order to obtain the sea-power which he so much needed for the success of his campaign against Kadesh. The fact of gold and silver rings of a few grains weight circulating in Egypt as against day-to-day purchases, indicates the nature of the concessions by Tahutmes to that money creative force which undoubtedly drove the world-wide trade of the Phoenician cities. The gifts in silver bullion from the Kheta (or Hittites), natural enemies of the kings of Mittani, indicate that they knew that which would be most welcome to the Pharaoh, and would most of all weaken his leanings towards friendship with Mittani, or other peoples likely to have been their enemies.

The temples of Egypt clearly retained immense wealth and holdings in land, and still conducted their own trading expeditions. However, from the reckoning of Breasted that one person in fifty, and one seventh of the land was owned by them, it is clear that by the times of Rameses III (1198-1167 B.C.) and to whose reign this estimate is applicable, the true force behind kingly rule which is the will of the god, so that king and temple needed to own nothing, as being all in all, they owned all and were all, had long ago been gathered up by those promoting the conception of private ownership. Such conception of private ownership would naturally derive from that right these persons had already arrogated to themselves to create and manipulate the monetary unit, tangible or abstract, and thereby stimulate the growth of a private enterprise for good or ill. To such an extent had this change in the substructure of life proceeded, that, by the time of Solomon, first Hebrew king in Jerusalem (955 B.C. approx.), the chronicler was able to write: “And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver”; therein being indication that the international money power of the day deemed it safe to locate its most important industry, which was that of armaments, in the land of Egypt; at least after the barbaric but definitely more “pliable” Libyan dynasty had become established.

Ancient ways and ancient morale gave way to foreign influences and the period of self-criticism and therefore self-immolation that always seems to follow the advent of the penetration of international money creative force. Such money creative force and its key arms manufacturies so much needed by the war powers of that day, would always continue to maintain itself, come what may. Possibly its heartland was some area such as Switzerland today, that by tacit consent of all powers, remained neutral in all this strife, and whose neutrality would always be respected by the armed force of each of the struggling states.

Kadesh, and its allies, Arvad and Symyra, were the military force towards the destruction of which Tahutmes III directed his efforts. The manufacturing cities of Alalakh and Ugarit on the lower Orontes river and bordering on the Gulf of Antioch, respectively, because of the widespread extent of their trading operations during the 13th Century B.C. until the time of their destruction at the end of that century by sea rovers, either ally or enemy of the confederacy known as the “Peoples of the Sea,” might very well be suspected of being headquarters of a money market at that time, even if the deep source of their money power existed in the Babylonian cities.

In being a centre for international trade and arms manufacture during the 13th century B.C., this area may very well be considered to have been a similar centre during the 15th Century B.C.: the more especially in consideration of the agreement which seemed to have existed between the Arameo-Phoenician cities (excluding Arvad and Symyra) and Tahutmes; at least those who guided his policies.

While therefore the neutrality of such areas was respected, money power in control of the movements of bullion internationally, safe behind this shield of neutrality as designers of the international money market, would be able to continue to manipulate war industries; always remaining in a position to allocate the latest of weapons to those states which offered them the best advantage in respect to their particular affair. The rulers of that great Egypt after Tahutmes III and his conquests, although probably completely unaware of the extent of the power of this same international force, deriving as it did from the bazaars of the ancient cities of lower Mesopotamia, obviously needed its good graces when it carne to obtaining those materials and weapons so necessary for what in that time was modern warfare.

As a result, although the Egyptian empire in the earliest years might very well be described as a common market existing independent of Babylonian money power, and deriving its strength from the will to be of a dedicated and instructed Ruler, the sequence of events shows that through those concessions it obtained for its best services in war, it was not long before international money power re-penetrated the substructure of Egyptian life and established its usual behind-the-scenes influence, if not control, as in the earlier time that denoted the collapse of the “Old Kingdom.” It may safely be considered to have reassumed the position of hidden power it had held a thousand years before during the closing years of the 6th Dynasty, a period in which the stone weights indicating equivalence in metal money circulated in much the same way as the clay facsimiles of contemporary coinages circulated in the Eastern Mediterranean area during the days of the Athenian empire, or as circulated the paper notes of today that formerly indicated claim on precious metal. Further indication of the activities of private money creative force in this same period exists in the evidence of an extensive world-wide trade on land and sea revealed by those items of Egyptian manufacture discovered at Dorak in Anatolia by James Mellaart, and the stone vases and ivory seals that were found in Crete; all of which dated from this time, and bore little evidence to suggest that they were in the nature of gifts between rulers.

Through “liberalism,” and so-called “progressive teachings,” its most ancient instruments, wittingly or otherwise, towards the continuance of its secret hegemony, reinstituted international money creative force seems to have brought the host land of Egypt to where it was at the time of Akhenaton (1375 to 1358 B.C.), and the Tel Amarna letters which tell of self-destruction and decay, the rejection of old values and beliefs, and the indifference of the a Egyptian rulers to their trust, and to the crumbling of Empire. The degeneracy and complacence of the age was revealed by the fruitless outcry out of Asia from the vassals of the Pharaoh; being particularly exemplified by the despairing pleas of king Abdikhiba of the most ancient city of Jerusalem for assistance against the pressure of the armed assaults of the Habiru.

In the meantime the military might of those grim warriors of the shaft graves of Mycenae continued to grow, and they clearly could be relied on to supply the master moneyers of that ancient world with gold and silver and slaves. Therein these robber rulers, best known from the Homeric sagas, were but the instruments by which the mysterious worshippers of the anti-god, the controllers of the extensive money creative force deriving from the Mesopotamian cities, unseen, but all-seeing, slowly undermined the walls of the temple states of the ancient world, of Crete, of Mycenae, of Troy, of Bog-Haz Koi and of Egypt too, so finally and so completely, that little memory or record existed, except in the case of Egypt; even during that period which is known as antiquity; that is the period of the flourishing of Greece and Rome.

What, therefore, did the international money creative fraternity of that day need from those states that clearly forbad their trade or settlement as corruptors of all true order and peace in life, and that thus rejected their blandishments; or from any other state for that matter? What other than the plunder out of sack and ruin by those wild men they brought in from distant lands to North and to South. and to whom they offered the sweet-smelling women, the sunlit gardens, the gold and the silver; which of course would soon be theirs in any case.

Of all those cities and states without number, and many without name, why they disappeared, or when, both as actual sites, or names intertwined with historical memory is not known; nor the story of the ending; for as at Pylos, and Cnossos, and Ugarit too, in so many cases the flames were the final gesture of fate which made durable to the end of time, the clay libraries and archives thus sharply defining the end of their compilation and leaving no record further.

The last thrust of the relatively wild men of the North and West against Egypt, and that Egypt survived to still continue to write its name upon the page of history for yet a thousand years, even if with a hand growing ever more weary, if successful, would have revealed the same picture. It is clear that the organization of all those Western and Northern peoples in confederation against Egypt during the reign of the Pharaoh Merneptah (1236 B.C.-1236 B.C.) was not of haphazard design. Tehennu, Sherden (or Sardinians) Shekelesh (or Sikeli, the early natives of Sicily), Achaeans, Lycians, Teresh (or Etruscans), Danae (obviously deriving from the Goths of the Northern shores of Europe and very likely the forefathers of those in the Israelitish confederacy who described themselves as “Dan”), all these nations known as “The Peoples of the Sea,” could not have been brought together as a fairly disciplined group without some more internationally wise advisors in the close circle surrounding King Meryey of the Libyans than his own Libyan advisors. Egypt still contained in temple and burial house a great part of the gold washed from the rivers of Africa over a thousand years or more, despite the plunder in gold the so-called Hyksos had carried with them into the desert some three hundred and fifty years before. Whether Egypt fell, or the confederate host fell, either way was profit to the international bullion traders whose agents would have equally followed Egyptian or confederate.

After this total victory, largely won by the skill and discipline that existed in the Egyptian archery, of copper, still a most valuable metal of war, 9000 swords alone were surrendered to Merneptah. A further one hundred and twenty thousand pieces of other copper military equipment were also surrendered; of weapons and vessels in silver and gold, over three thousand pieces were taken from the camp of the rulers and chiefs; this latter spoil including many swords of gold and silver.

The Kings are overthrown, saying ‘salam!’
Not one holds up his head among the nine Nations of the Bow.
Wasted is Tehennu,
The Hittite Land is pacified,
Plundered is Canaan with every evil,
Carried off is Askalon,
Seized upon is Gezer,
Yenoam is made as a thing not existing.
Israel is desolated, her seed is not
Palestine has become a defenceless widow for Egypt.
All Lands are united, they are pacified;
Every one that is turbulent is bound by King Merneptah.

It is interesting to note that although the hosts that fell at the battle of Perire, numbering at least nine thousand, were almost all from the West, according to the poem recorded above, Merneptah almost immediately turned his attention to the peoples of the East. Judging by this record of the stele, he paid some special attention to an Israel never previously referred to in Egyptian history. Such Israel would undoubtedly be a confederacy established during the 13th Century B.C. by Canaanitic tribes, elements such as the fragments of the “Hyksos” or Shepherd Kings, whatever their correct designation, and that had disappeared into the desert some 350 years before pursued by the chariots of Ahmose I, elements deriving from the “Peoples of the Sea” perhaps, and the Habiru, also known as ‘Apiru or Khabiri.

But who was who, or why, or what, little concerned that brain centre in Babylon or Ur, or wherever it was. Whoever they professed to be, or to belong to, meant nothing. Out of death and destruction was their harvest, whether those they said were their own, were theirs or not. The only reality was control of precious metal. Out of death and destruction came the releasing in that day of the all important hoards of stored bullion, and the renewal of the slave herds to be consumed in mining ventures in distant places, garnering the increase of such precious metals.

Further, as kingly rule weakened, with the increasing circulation of fraudulent receipts for precious metals and other valuables supposedly on deposit, this highly secretive interstratum of merchant classes controlled by these monopolists of money through monopoly of control of precious metal bullion, postulated by Professor A.L. Oppenheim to be Aramaic speaking during the first Millennium B.C., would be able of finance much larger manufacturing systems than had been possible from the highly discriminatory temple loans of earlier days. Ugarit and Alalakh previously mentioned, were but early instances. While the purpose of the temple was to cause the people to live godly lives as according to the customs of the day and to preserve them from straying out of the ways of righteousness as it were, the secret and private money creative power, being more concerned with the opposite, the needs of the anti-god, the destruction of the people’s lives, whether of king, priest, nobleman, or merchant, or he who laboured in the field, loaned without such discrimination. Out of the resulting confusion amongst rulers could come nothing but advantage to themselves and their purposes; out of the break up of family and home and tradition, all that the dedicated servant of the god has in life, would come an exhausted and confused people, more ready to accept slavery. Corruption of the priesthood, as in today, was the chief aim of money conspiracy, and by causing such priesthood to lose sight of its high purpose and itself as the voice of god on earth, success in all its other purposes, naturally followed.

“Documents of the third level originate in autonomous economic bodies ranging from collective agricultural organizations centred in families, to what often constitutes de facto private enterprise inside and outside cities. The distribution of the evidence in volume and importance varies with time and region.”

Private enterprise depended on privately issued money and of such was silver. Thus towards the establishment of manufacturies, they, the international bullion controllers needed the connivance of those corrupted temple officials who had lost sight of the meaning of that god-given power of money creation which had been theirs, and without which the god himself, the real ruler of the city, could not be truly maintained. By the time these temple officials were brought to enter into such connivance, they would be past realizing or caring, for that matter, about the destructive effects to their powers and purposes which lay in so permitting private issuance of money into circulation amongst the people by way of precious metals, or receipts for such precious metals or valuables, supposedly on deposit for safekeeping with prominent merchant houses; thus they would be easily manipulated.

With the extension of the growth of exchanges to a silver standard such as would derive from the circulation of false receipts issued against silver or valuables reputedly on deposit for safe keeping, no special outlay in precious metals was needed other than possibly bribes to court and temple officials. These men, the controllers of bullion movements internationally, and of almost equal consequence, the slave trade, now that their knowledge of the frauds relating to the use of precious metal money, and consequently their knowledge of that which is now known as “capital” was becoming perfected, were bringing into being extensive private industries, the most important of which, as pointed out previously, were the industries relating to war. Towards the promotion of any particular industry as required by the bankers, no doubt ambitious slaves or freedmen as eager for money as their counterparts today, could be always found.

It was clearly understood that those receipts representing the weight of silver or the valuables assessed as according to a silver standard, that the bankers were supposed to have on deposit for safe keeping, which circulated by custom, or by law which is custom, as money as to represent a definite amount of exchange units, while accepted as money, were money. The fact that the people accepted them as such, made them so. Their cost to the money manipulators, bullion brokers, or whatever their designation, being but that of the clay in the tablet and the scribe’s entry thereon.

After the final triumph of the international money creative fraternity which may be identified in Mesopotamia with that period of conquest, reconquest, and conquest again that began with that invasion of Sumeria by the Gutim in 2270 B.C., and ended with the collapse of the Empire of Ur of Ibi-Sin before the Elamite rebels with their Amorite allies in 2030 B.C., and their taking away to Susa as captive, both the cult statue of the Lord Nannar, the Moon God together with the King Ibi-Sin himself, earthly viceroy of that God, those agents of International Money Power, quickly concluded the work of destruction through liberalism and permissiveness, no doubt, so that by 1900 B.C., the Sumerian had totally lost his national and racial identity and will to be. What continued from then on was, without a doubt, a mixed breed with no special allegiance to anything other than “m