The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Parpola Sez...

Parpola Sez...

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Sunday, January 20 2008, 22:56:53 (CET)
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...I've taken this from the end of lengthy excerpt from Maggie's corral...Parpola is on a mission to prove Christianity is grounded in the orginal and only Assyrian religion. Like everyone else he assumes that love, kindness, nobility etc were invented by Christians...and he wants to show they got these things from Assyria. Well of course they did and the Assyrians got them from the Sumerians who got them from Africans who got them from apes who got them from me, or you.

..these things are NOT the center of the Christian religion...in fact they're miles from it. The kindest Christian will NOT get into heaven by being kind...he or she MUST eat human flesh and drink human blood and yearn for a Messiah to come get him off his ass. THESE things are at the core of Christianity and are to be found ONLY in Christianity...while loving-goodness is shared with almost all cultures on earth both now and then.....

"Through his attainment of spiritual perfection, Gilgamesh became the yardstick of man's spiritual value, the ideal weight, so to speak, placed on the other end of the scales to determine the weight of one's soul on the day of judgment. In this role, the perfection of Gilgamesh and the way it was attained became a model for anyone who, like Gilgamesh, dreaded the idea of death and strove for eternal life.

...except for on crucial thing...the whole point of the Epic is that there can be NO eternal life for humans...that it belongs only to the gods...and that seeking such a thing is a futile waste of time which distracts one from doing what REALLY counts, to Gilgamesh and the all the people of that region of BetNahrain which is contained in Siduhri's advice that Gilgamesh take a bath, wear clean clothes, hug his woman, love his child and be the best man and king he can be ON EARTH...without crying over or worrying about what comes after death...and it is this crying and wailing about eternity that makes a Christian...never an Assyrian or anyone from BetNahrain....Finland yes, you'd cry too if you had to live there.

... The true hero of the story, rather, is Gilgamesh's companion, Enkidu, a primitive man who overcomes his animal nature through divine guidance and becomes the partner and indispensable helper of Gilgamesh in his quest for life. The possibility of achieving human perfection is not limited to the king alone.

...there is no effort to reach "human perfection" in the Epic...there is an effort to reach GODLIKE status by attainting immortality...but man is basically flawed, as is shown by Gilgamesh failing the test Napishtim gives him of remaining awke for a week....he fails again when he loses the flower that gives youth...Gilgamesh is NOT a perfect human and only his mistaken efforts to approximate the gods in their immortality comes close to a quest for "perfection"...but a human who seeks such an unattainable thing is FLAWED...that's the whole point of the Epic...when Gilgamesh accepts the limitations AND the glory of life as a human, with all his flaws...he becomes a GOOD human...and to the Sumerians and Assyrians and the rest of those people that meant building the best damn civilization HERE on earth...and they did it.

The esoteric lore I have described did not die with the fall of the Assyrian Empire. The scholars who had previously served the Assyrian emperor later found employment at the courts of the Median and neo-Babylonian kings, the usurpers of Assyria's claim for world dominion.

..of course they did...as the Sumerians added their knowledge to the Akkadians of Sargons and as the Assyrians, babylonisn and Persiand added theirs to the Arabs...but, a quest for "human perfection" was NEVER part of the deal...at least not after Gilgamesh wised up....and realized natural, god-given limist and fability and STOPPED trying to achieve "perfection" or approximate the gods in any way...which is also when he began living as the best human he could be.

In due course, we find their descendants teaching Daniel the esoteric secrets of the Chaldeans, advising the Achaemenid kings of Persia, transmitting their wisdom to Pythagoras, waiting at the deathbed of Plato, performing the substitute king ritual for Alexander the Great, reading the physiognomy of Sulla and finally spreading their doctrines in the imperial court of Rome, as highly valued advisers of the emperors Claudius, Nero, Domitian, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. I venture to suggest that their influence was far greater than is generally believed.

...you left out the Arabs who had a more profound influence on the region and were equally affected by the people. I realize you're a white man...and a Christian...and very pleased to think Assyrians threw away their religion for your Jew carpenter...but let's try to keep a level head about all this.

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