Godslayers

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The Legend of the Godslayers

Sumer's Fall and Akkad

Wikipedia: The Akkadian Empire

The Akkadian Empire was an empire centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region in ancient Mesopotamia which united all the indigenous Akkadian speaking Semites and the Sumerian speakers under one rule.
During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Semitic Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism.[5] Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate).
The Akkadian Empire reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, following the conquests of its founder Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 BC). Under Sargon and his successors, Akkadian language was briefly imposed on neighboring conquered states such as Elam. Akkad is sometimes regarded as the first empire in history, though there are earlier Sumerian claimants.

Sargon

Sargon of Akkad (Sharru-kin = "legitimate king", possibly a title he took on gaining power; 24th century BC) defeated and captured Lugal-Zage-Si in the Battle of Uruk and conquered his empire. The earliest records in the Akkadian language date to the time of Sargon. Sargon was claimed to be the son of La'ibum or Itti-Bel, a humble gardener, and possibly a hierodule, or priestess to Ishtar or Inanna. One legend related of Sargon in Assyrian times says that:

"My mother was a changeling (?), my father I knew not. The brothers of my father loved the hills. My city is Azurpiranu (the wilderness herb fields), which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates. My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose not over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was gardener Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and (fifty?) … years I exercised kingship.

Note the similarity to Moses. Fun stuff

Sargon, throughout his long life, showed special deference to the Sumerian deities, particularly Inanna (Ishtar), his patroness, and Zababa, the warrior god of Kish. He called himself "The anointed priest of Anu" and "the great ensi of Enlil" and his daughter, En-hed-uanna, was installed as priestess to Nanna at the temple in Ur.

The Curse

Later material described how the fall of Akkad was due to Naram-Sin's attack upon the city of Nippur. When prompted by a pair of inauspicious oracles, the king sacked the E-kur temple, supposedly protected by the god Enlil, head of the pantheon. As a result of this, eight chief deities of the Anunnaki pantheon were supposed to have come together and withdrawn their support from Akkad.


Edda-Earth history

In Edda-Earth, Sargon was god-born. His mother was a changeling, or a djinn, a spirit of the winds and sands of the desert, a lilitu demon who could assume the forms of what men most desired. Some of her power passed into the son she had not realized she could conceive with a mortal; she bore him in secret, and studied him. He was neither man nor god, and she could not let the other demons of the sands see him, lest they tear the infant into shreds. She placed the child into a basket that she wove of rushes, and let him pass down the stream, which was protected by gentle water spirits, and watched from a distance as the drawer of waters found the child, and took him in. And sorrow touched her heart for the first time.

Sargon grew to manhood as a gardener in the king's palace. He drew the waters, he worked with trained gangs of men, who learned to obey him, and found that his mere word could make the trees of the garden bloom, and grow ripe with fruit. This attracted the notice of Ishtar, the fertility goddess of Akkad and Sumer, and she favored him, and made him king. His children were part djinn… and god-born, as Ishtar gave him at least one daughter, En-he-duanna.

Akad rose to dominance over Sumer, and Sargon conquered many neighboring tribes, forging them into an empire. He was god-touched, and all the kings of his line were as well.

His grandson, however, Naram-Sin, though affiliated with the moon god Nanna/Sin through his auspicious naming (Sin or Suen being the Akkadians' moon god equivalent to the Sumerian Nanna), rejected the advice of the High Priestess of Ishtar, his aunt, En-he-duanna. He attacked the city of Nippur, and sacked the temple of Enlil there… having taken the advice of an outlander, who whispered strange counsels in his ear. Whispered that the gods had no right to rule over men. That the power of the gods was merely the power of men. (This was not a true Godslayer, but a human who had met one, and been inspired by them. And thus did what he thought they would want him to do… but not as they would have acted, themselves.)

That first attack on the temple resulted in the loss of fertility in the land. Dust rose where crops should have stood, and the people began to starve. Naram-Sin was enraged that the goddess of fertility had turned her face from him, from his people, and began to attack more temples, for the grain collected inside of them. There were outlanders who had come at the call of the king. Outlanders, legend said, were revealed as demons. Demons not like the one who had given birth to Sargon in the desert, but ones who took the forms of mortal men and women. Namtar-demons.

The Namtar-demons used the idols in the temple, and called on the gods in challenge. Come and face us. Fight us, if you dare.

The gods came. And there was a pitched battle in the temple of Enlil. Enlil, and the warrior god Kish appeared, and fought the Namtar-demons for supremacy. Enlil was the lord of the air, and storms descended. One of the Namtar-demons was lifted and flung by a cloud that stretched down from the heavens like a dark finger. But the other demons closed on the gods. There were brilliant flashes of light, blinding any who looked at them… and when the storms passed… the gods were dead. Only a few remained, and fled from Akkad.

Without the gods, fields that had once been ripe with grain, and now held nothing more than dust. And the mighty empire of Akkad was no more. Rival tribes moved in, and by 2124 BC, the great city of Akkad itself… had been destroyed.

Sumer rose to power again, but their own language was now used solely in the temples in veneration of the dead gods, in the hopes that they could be brought back to life. The Semitic language of Akkad was used in daily life… . and continued to be, as Babylon rose to dominance. The remaining gods returned, such as Marduk and Ninutra.

By the time of Nabû-kudurrī-uṣur (Nebuchadnezzar), ca. 1126–1103 BC, unrest had become widespread once more, as invading Elamites attacked:

The Enmeduranki legend, or the seed of kingship,[i 5] is a Sumero-Akkadian composition relating his endowment with perfect wisdom (nam-kù-zu) by the god Marduk and his claim to belong to a “distant line of kingship from before the flood” It begins with a lament over preceding events:

At that time, in the reign of a previous king, conditions changed. Good departed and evil was regular,The lord became angry and got furious. He gave the command and the gods of the land abandoned it […] its people were incited to commit crime. The guardians of peace became furious, and went up to the dome of heaven, the spirit of justice stood aside. …who guards living beings, prostrated the people, they all became like those who have no god. Evil demons filled the land, the namtar-demon […] they penetrated the cult centers. The land diminished, its fortunes changed. The wicked Elamite, who did not hold (the land’s) treasures in esteem, […] his battle, his attack was swift. He devastated the habitations, he made them into a ruin, he carried off the gods, he ruined the shrines.

Edda-Earth history
In Edda-Earth terms, this means that the Elamites, lead by a Namtar-demon (Namtar or Namtaru, or Namtara; meaning destiny or fate), was a hellish minor deity in Mesopotamian mythology, god of death, and minister and messenger of An, Ereshkigal, and Nergal. Namtar-demon) attacked the land, and in particular entered the temples, and took the idols of the gods there. The Namtar-demon used his powers to bind the gods to their idols… and then stabbed the idols with an iron sword. Cuneiform tablets say that the idols bled out onto the temple floors.

Nabû-kudurrī-uṣur routed Elamite king Ḫulteludiš-Inšušinak on the banks of the river Ulaya, sacked Susa and retrieved the statue of Marduk (here called Bēl) and that of the goddess Il-āliya. It is written that he and his army darkened the sky with the dust of their battle … and it was then that the Namtar-demon fell.

The Assyrians conquered them. The Chaldeans conquered them. And finally, in 539 BC, Cyrus of Persia conquered them, but asserted a right to rule by virtue of giving the people of the area their gods back. He allowed them to replace their gods in their temples…

… but by this time?

Every one of them was dead, though only the priests suspected it.


The Rise of Aten

Akhenaten: "living spirit of Aten"… known before the fifth year of his reign as Amenhotep IV "Amun is Satisfied"; Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt who ruled for 17 years and died perhaps in 1336 BC or 1334 BC. He is especially noted for abandoning traditional Egyptian polytheism and introducing worship centered on the Aten. Queen: Nefertiti Son: Tutankhamun
An early inscription likens the Aten to the sun as compared to stars, and later official language avoids calling the Aten a god, giving the solar deity a status above mere gods.
Akhenaten tried to bring about a departure from traditional religion, yet in the end it would not be accepted. After his death, traditional religious practice was gradually restored, and when some dozen years later rulers without clear rights of succession from the Eighteenth Dynasty founded a new dynasty, they discredited Akhenaten and his immediate successors, referring to Akhenaten himself as "the enemy" in archival records.
In the early years of his reign, Amenhotep IV lived at Thebes with Nefertiti and his 6 daughters. Initially, he permitted worship of Egypt's traditional deities to continue but near the Temple of Karnak (Amun-Ra's great cult center), he erected several massive buildings including temples to the Aten. Aten was usually depicted as a sun disc. These buildings at Thebes were later dismantled by his successors and used as infill for new constructions in the Temple of Karnak; when they were later dismantled by archaeologists, some 36,000 decorated blocks from the original Aton building here were revealed which preserve many elements of the original relief scenes and inscriptions.
The relationship between Amenhotep IV and the priests of Amun-Re gradually deteriorated. In Year 5 of his reign, Amenhotep IV took decisive steps to establish the Aten as the exclusive, monotheistic god of Egypt: the pharaoh "disbanded the priesthoods of all the other gods…and diverted the income from these [other] cults to support the Aten". To emphasize his complete allegiance to the Aten, the king officially changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten or 'Living Spirit of Aten.'[53] Akhenaten's fifth year also marked the beginning of construction on his new capital, Akhetaten or 'Horizon of Aten',
. .. by Year 9 of his reign, Akhenaten declared that Aten was not merely the supreme god, but the only god, and that he, Akhenaten, was the only intermediary between Aten and his people. He ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt and, in a number of instances, inscriptions of the plural 'gods' were also removed.
Aten's name is also written differently after Year 9, to emphasize the radicalism of the new regime, which included a ban on images, with the exception of a rayed solar disc, in which the rays (commonly depicted ending in hands) appear to represent the unseen spirit of Aten, who by then was evidently considered not merely a sun god, but rather a universal deity.
Redford argued that while Akhenaten called himself the son of the Sun-Disc and acted as the chief mediator between god and creation, kings for thousands of years before Akhenaten's time had claimed the same relationship and priestly role. However Akhenaton's case may be different through the emphasis placed on the heavenly father and son relationship. Akhenaten described himself as "thy son who came forth from thy limbs", "thy child", "the eternal son that came forth from the Sun-Disc", and "thine only son that came forth from thy body". The close relationship between father and son is such that only the king truly knows the heart of "his father", and in return his father listens to his son's prayers. He is his father's image on earth and as Akhenaten is king on earth his father is king in heaven. As high priest, prophet, king and divine he claimed the central position in the new religious system. Since only he knew his father's mind and will, Akhenaten alone could interpret that will for all mankind with true teaching coming only from him

Edda-Earth History

Akhenaten rose to power, and by Year 5 of his reign, grew discontent with the power of the priests of Horus, and their ability to control his rule. He made a break with tradition, renaming himself, and dedicating himself to the sole worship of Aten, then depicted as both the sun disk and as the hawk-headed god of the sun. For a time, he permitted the worship of other gods to continue.

Real-Earth scholars indicate that some 'unknown event' happened that triggered the radical changes of Year 9 of his reign, in which he ordered that the other gods' worship be ended, that their names be effaced, that images of the gods be destroyed, that the very plural of the word god be removed from monuments, and that only the highly stylized sun disk could be worshiped, and that, as the Creator of all. And that he was the son of the Aten, and the only one who could speak for the god, and that he, too, should be worshiped.

Every pharaoh was considered a god by the people, and that they all insisted that they were, was a matter of politics. Certainly, the god-born traits passed through their complex family lineages, but as with every other instance of being god-born, it was not present in every child of a lineage.

Akhenaten was not god-born, himself. He had no actual powers.

The 'unknown event' was that the priests of Horus, who included several god-born, and who resented this pharaoh's changes, plotted against his life. Not unknown in ancient Egypt, but not tolerated by the pharaoh, who had them seized and killed, and began working to consolidate his power. Many more god-born were put to death. The pharaoh began binding weaker gods to their idols, and had the idols destroyed. Reports from the period are scanty, for obvious reasons, but the followers of a handful of gods secreted their idols in tombs, trying to protect them.

Akhenaten then began to consolidate all power in Egypt to himself, wanting to be the ultimate authority in all matters, spiritual and temporal. Technically, pharaohs already were, but he was power-hungry and narcissistic, for all that he allowed himself to be depicted with cruel accuracy in his portraiture. He didn't see his deformities as ugly, but evidence of his actual god-touched status. By year 15 of his reign, he had secluded himself and his family, and was wrapped in delusions of grandeur. He demanded the direct homage and worship of everyone in Egypt, and, as all pharaohs did, made his sisters his wives. Scholars debate whether or not he made his own daughters his wives, and whether or not he had a sexual relationship with his son, Smenkhkare.

He died under mysterious circumstances, in year 17 of his reign. Not of ill-health, as it was on Real-Earth, but at the hands of an outsider, who entered the palace at Akhetaten. There are no eye-witness reports. Even the reports of the intruder are only attested in hieroglyphics on the tomb wall of Neferneferuaten, the name his wife, Nefertiti, ("she who exercises power for her husband") had taken when appointed his co-ruler in Year 15 of his reign, and who held power temporarily after his death.

The hieroglyphic panels are much debated, and are in a remarkable state of preservation. Most of the artwork is in the unusually naturalistic style of the period.

The first panel shows the executions of the priests of Horus, who were disemboweled ritually and fed to the crocodiles of the Nile. It shows the anger of foreign kings, to whom Akhenaten had sent poor gifts, statues of gold plated over wood, but who demanded richer gifts in return. It shows the kings preparing for war, and shows the workers in the fields, holding out sheaves of grain that have only a few stalks in them. Signs of famine, most scholars agree.

The central panel is the one in most dispute. It shows the palace and Akhenaten, seated there in power, his family around him. It then shows a huge figure—larger even than the pharaoh, whose divinity was customarily shown by giving him larger size than all other figures in a composition. This figure is the center of the debate. It is armored, but the armor covers the entirety of the body, concealing the face entirely, other than a yellow glow that seems to emanate from the eyes; the armor is not recognizable as Assyrian, Hittite, or Egyptian. It is colored black in the original pigments, not a normal color in which the bronze, and limited armor of the period would have been depicted. The armor is also covered in hooks and barbs, which would have required a vast understanding of metallurgy for the time period… or might be the fancy of the artist's imagination.

This is in defiance of the naturalistic style of the period. Most scholars agree that the figure is meant to be depiction not of an individual, but of divine retribution. Unfortunately, the iconography does not match that of any known god, Egyptian, Summerian, or other. This has led scholars to refer to the figure as, alternately, "the Creature," (by scholars who don't believe that the figure is wearing armor, but that it is merely a god-beast of some sort) "the Assassin," and, in some circles, "the Godslayer."

The final panel shows Neferneferuaten/Nefertiti reigning as a regent for Smenkhkare, followed by Tutankhamen. The restoration of the other gods.

Of course, many of those gods were now dead. The pantheon now consisted of Aten, Amun-Ra, Isis, Horus, Sekhmet, Thoth, and Set. Equally naturally, people didn't stop worshiping the gods, just because they were dead.

The cult of Aten died down, but was never wholly effaced. In the eighteenth century AC, archaeologists recovered the tombs of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamen, which led to a revival of the beliefs, and wide-spread rebellion against the Ptolemies, who maintained control through their descent from Greek gods as well as their descent from Isis, Ra, and Horus.


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