Chapter 1

In The Beginning Was The Word

Astle’s exhumation of Early Antiquity follows the keen scholarship of men like Sir Charles L. Woolley 1960s and Christopher Dawson working in the 1920s. Also cited is the Conspiracy Scholar W. Cleon Skousen, who in 2024 is still active and running for president.

Initially, in the cradle of Western Civilization, Mesopotamia [Land-between-the-rivers], money was a measure of barley. This measure seems to have been represented, for practical purposes, by currency made of leather, clay, wood, papyrus, stone or glass. Originally, in a purely agrarian setting, the laborer might be paid from temple grain houses with barley or dates, which were the staples of life. As economy diversified and raw materials were drawn from further afield, the priests of the City god, with slave scribes writing promises to pay, these certificates issued to merchants, or agents of the priesthood, facilitated far flung trade. This practice would have two far ranging effects:

-1. Kings would lose power, through corrupted priesthoods, to these mere agents.

-2. The continued social disasters financed by these agents or merchants, arming and financing barbarian outliers and corrupt insiders and disposing of these in their turn through palace intrigues, resulted in a progressive drift of power to the west, as lands were denuded and raped, cities were corrupted and then ruined, and fresh interlopers of warlike aspect were financed. This polarity, the scheming middle man within a society financing its disruption and fall through beckoning invaders, would work its way around the globe and was used to remove my entire family of 60 souls from the city of our birth over as many years.

The primary mechanism was the use of silver as a money representing a measure of grain. This item, less portable than leather or paper notes, yet more portable than barley, salt or dates, possessed an artistic quality as well as an antibacterial property which made it valuable of its own nature. The crux was that silver and other precious metals were to be had from remote mountain locations dominated by warlike folks who, being tribal, would never consent to murdering their own folk through these horrendous labors. The merchant must then use slaves, imported to these distant regions, as miners who mostly perished in their labors and as bearers, who a carried precious goods and were sold along with these luxuries as their attendants, like selling a car along with its driver and a mechanic.

By the Azag-Bau Dynasty at Kish (3268-2897 B.C.) sellers of land were known as “The eaters of the silver of the field,” in that the silver bought the sustaining articles of life, such as bread and beer, salt and dates. Astle triangulates with a 20th Century missionary who notes that pre-European Africans of Zaire used to announce their copper mining season with the phrase, “Let us go eat copper” in effect “Let us go enrich ourselves to provide for our life.”

So the agents who found themselves involved in abbreviating the increasingly complex societies enriched and made complex by their trade interactions, need only find a means of procuring slaves that could be worked to death. This was easily done by using mining profits to buy slaves from the tribes of the mining or adjacent region, who could then be paid in metal they were two sensible to mine themselves. As society scaled up, war need only be fomented between neighboring cities and tribes through payment and also through armament using the same iron foundries used to make mining tools. It is well known that the primary weapons of the “barbarian” steppes peoples, chariots and then composite bows, required settled “civilized” conditions to produce, and thus kept these reliable conquerors in useful orbit.

After a few generations these conquerors were easily corrupted by their literate banking “servants” their assimilated dynasties hollowed out and displaced. The adoration of barbarian conquerors for gold and silver and their use primarily as adornment speaks to this seduction.

The dominant power would be able to maintain the subjugation of subordinate powers partly by the toleration of a private international money system that permitted their slaves to purchase the luxuries they craved.

“They [the money/slave merchants] were also able, through their control of distant mining operations, to afflict the previously dedicated priesthood [of the city god] 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.”

Note that the Egyptian sword, the kopish, was exported to Greece, Italy and India as the kopis, ensis, falcata and kukri. The strategy described was used by the British in North America to pay tribesmen for the scalps [a form of currency] or persons [the actual resource] of rebel frontiersmen and return of runaway slaves with money that could then be redeemed for guns, powder, shot and steel.

The priests of corrupt temples were able to falsify stocks of value in foods and metals via the written word. This was then imitated by their agents who became a power unto themselves. For such agents to usurp the city priesthoods, “… as a result of this discovery which depended on the confidence they were able to create in the minds of the peoples [0] of their integrity, provided they banded together with an absolute secrecy that excluded all other than their proven and chosen brethren, [1] they could replace the god of the city himself as the giver of all. If so be they could institute a conception of one god, their god, a special god of the world, a god above all gods…”

These law codes of Summer were revised in 2278 to 2260 B.C. under Ur-Nammu. Despite financial reforms the barbarian Elamites and Akkadians were somehow financed in their takeover of Mesopotamia. We lack the letters of invitation, of course not written, but imparted by agents. This, in about 1750 B.C., would be addressed in a reformation of this legal code by King Hammurabai of Babylon, with Law #7:

“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 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.”

Despite such reforms, the criminal, slave-driving bankers would eventually take over the entire region from India to Rome, from their base at Babylon, disposing of the world’s greatest men from the shadows, to facilitate the ruin of a world that was and is to them merely a living host caught within their silken web to be sucked hollow of life. [2]

Notes

-0. We are now in an age when false integrity through information control, creation and manipulation is now the currency of society, with legacy forms of money now increasingly converted to digital information.

-1. There would be little value in a merchant with silver or gold sources in one region proclaiming his own patron deity against another merchant’s product, compared to them both cooperating in subverting the many city banks [temples, store houses and counting houses] as mere points of exchange and ultimately extraction of value.

-2. Astle repeatedly affirms what is apparent to any student of British history, that from 1600 onward, when International money power in the form of monopoly owning corporations and international banks took over state operations, to include foreign wars and the settlement of new worlds.

-3. Credit, agent, merchant and progressive are all singled as “euphemisms of a corrupt world,” in which people are no longer spoken of for what they are, but back away from blame through such labels as financier, and businessman. Indeed, the corporation, which is the centerpiece of post 1600s human society is a legal fiction structured to absolve evil actors for their evil actions, assigning blame instead to the fictitious “Company.”