Chapter 2
The Temple And The Counting House
Astle is well read on archaeological and classical scholarship pointing to Classical Greece having emerged from a synthesis of the “political structure by which the cattle raising men of the Indo-European [0] warrior nations had been governed,” and “the thrust of the revitalized energies of the god-ruled city,” of the “Near East.” The legends of Minos, Theseus, Perseus, of Odysseus, Achilles and Agamemnon reflect the Arуan warrior culture, represented by the Eagle and the Raven. These forces were at first enraptured by, then conquered, then were beguiled and assimilated by the Near Eastern Goddess City Civilization, representative by the “snake” cults, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, snake-haired Medusa and the mystery eating serpent of the Epic of Gilgamesh. [1]
After the Great Crisis of the Bronze Age that saw the coming of the Elamites, Gutim, Hittite, Hyksos and others, by at least 1500 B.C., a new people, [2] appeared in the Near East in Palestine and Syria. These were an “increasing class of stateless and reputedly lawless,” folk of various races, to whom the term Apiru was applied, meaning “the dusty ones” who drove donkeys before them bearing the goods of the bankers.
These were survivors of the largely extinct caravaneer class who had been scattered by the barbarian invaders and now acted as a nomadic class of criminals. These Apiru were also known as Habiru, which might have no connection to the term Haburah, deriving from habor “to join” or Hebrew applied by Vespasian in the 70s A.D. to his appointment of Rabbi John Ben Zakkai as chief of Jamnia. A dusty one trudged in the dust of donkeys, mules or chariots and was something of an ancient teamster.
Astle demonstrates that whosoever employed these dusty ones to conduct silver and slaves, the money and petroleum of the day, would have little respect for the gods of the various cities, whose temples acted as state and municipal banks. However, the priesthood of cities would serve the purpose of money circulation, collection and theft through inflation from any people. Thus these shadowy actors were likely to regard local gods with contempt, as fasle front gods.
Another means of storing and collecting precious metals, was tomb robbing. Astle marshals archaeological evidence that the priests MUST have been involved in the looting of the royal tombs they were charged with securing. [As they were discovered by Alexander the Great and punished in 324 B.C.] The looting was generally done before the tomb was fully sealed, holding the supervising agents of the state religion culpable. Once the most respected locals, the priesthood of the god or goddess, were morally compromised by such crimes, they were thence reduced to disposable agents and scapegoats of the international bankers. Such looted gold and silver, in the form of holy relics of known make, were then of no value and much danger to the thief, unless the thief was employed by those who had the means to melt and export the mortuary art as ingots. [3]
The Old Testament, from Hezekiah cutting gold from the doors and pillars of “the Temple of the Lord” to pay off the Assyrian King to the plunder of Delphi by the Romans, demonstrates temples as store houses for national emergencies, such as buying off invaders. Also, the absolute debt slavery of the 2nd Millenium B.C., very similar to that in 1600s and 1700s English Plantation America, seems to have resulted in the jubilee of the 50th year in Leviticus 25.2, as a corrective. Also the Mosaic law stipulating slave holdings being marked by ear rings, and of the casting of the Golden Calf in Exodus being made of the jewelry of women and children [strictly slaves in stature] indicates a jewelry based exchange system.
In the meantime, by the 1200s B.C. [4] “Zimbredda of Lachish had been killed by slaves who had become Apiru” and that “...men of Ugarit, including slaves, who had escaped to the Apiru…”
The 1000s B.C. were a thousand years of upheaval, astronomically, ecologically, militarily and financially. As these civilizations collapsed, societies that supposedly had their own money systems, it becomes apparent that this was a sham, and that the true money supply was held by international cults. These monetary cults that trafficked in silver, slaves, gold and jewels, operated in ways that were compatible and even companionable to the nomadic banditry of the Apiru and Sea Peoples and the nomadic invaders from the hinterlands. Just as slavers, gun runners and whiskey traders made a better living among nomadic Amerindian tribes like the Lakota and Crow in the late 1800s then they did with settled tribes like the Mandan and Dine, it seems the key to financial systems [as apex parasites] surviving the death of their parasitic state hosts depended simply upon the silver and slave seller infecting the young, healthy still tribal conquerors, and even feral post-civil neo-tribes, with the mania for silver and gold through the slave trade [5]. A confirmation of this is seen in recent finds in Siberia, where the concubines of the Scythian kings are strangled and buried with their lords in great bejeweled splendor. Indication of the desire for civilized women by barbarian men comes in the Song of Solomon, in which his bride, a shepherd’s daughter, apologizes for her dark skin!
Systems of money are then traced back 23,000 years, to Solutrean deposits in Northern France of mammoth ivory beads. Sea shell money, similar to Amerindian wampum, are demonstrated circling the globe from earliest times, with such money still in use where gold and silver are strictly apparent as art and adornment.
Egyptian scarabs were so wide spread outside of their cultural zones that they seem to have served as money. During the darkest ages, the money power stays in the background and increases in range until society becomes more productive according to the lineal death hockey stick graph idea of progress. Now it is in place, as chaos recedes, such as in the formation of the private Bank of England in 1694, and the Private Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, just in time to perpetuate another cycle of war and crisis to fuel economic activity. Just as such banks are private international concerns, which pretend to be public national treasuries, the ancient temples were subverted as extraction sites.
The story of Euthymus, Olympic Victor, is instructive. A temple to a demon in Temesa was receiving the most beautiful virgin of the year as sacrifice. This did not produce a body, but vanished the girl as she was taken off into Hades in marriage—more like to Antioch for sale. Euthymus stayed in the temple, and chased off the demon—a slaver who knew his limits—and married the maiden. Girls and boys, olive oil, silver and gold, donated to the temple would be secretly taken off, despoiling the folk of a thousand towns and a hundred cities through the expedient of faith.
The banker of old controlled labor movement and scarcity [slaves], money circulation and plenty [inflation and deflation], able to make or break kings, owning already the priesthood and scholarly class kings depended upon, and setting their sights on the actual throne. As in the 1600s and 1700s, when nobility of account routinely fell into slavery, none were safe from the auction block in Early Antiquity. [6]
“These agents would have lurked as faintly discernible shadows behind the temple facade, although they instigated so much of what came to pass… this whole thing of prayer, worship, and devotion was dangerously close to a cruel hoax manipulated by a handful of aliens, who looked at and their fervor and belief with dead eyes.”
“Sovereign power” is not “obtainable” but “through total control of money creation, emission and cancellation.”
Thus by the most ancient of standards, Astle reminds us that our very nations are great slave gangs chained to ideals which have no application in reality, feeding the financial beast that dine on our decency.
Having moved to Greece, Astle fast forwards to the 200s B.C. and cites names of bankers from Delos and Rhodes concerning fractional reserve banking practice such as plague our own day. One Apollonius, signing for a purchase for Pharaoh Philadelphus. Delos, under Alexander’s successors, as they battled for his empire, was respected as a religious bank, which had partially replaced Athens as a banking center. Interestingly, an overture to the ruinous Peloponnesian War was the desecration of Delos by Athenians, who even floated the mummies of its priests out to sea.
Antigonas Gonatus took over Delos from the rival Ptolemies based in Egypt:
“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.”
Strabo XIV, mentions 10,000 slaves sold and physically shipped abroad in one day at Delos in the later 200s B.C. as Greece was depopulated during the later phases of its 200 year long civil war. As in more ancient times, internationally minded agents facilitated this mass deportation of “broken races.”
Astle returns to the beginning of this period, financed largely by Babylonian banks, the Peloponnesian War, in which the Athenian treasury held 6,000 talents of silver and that the siege of Podidea, a small town, cost 2,000 talents, indicating that a fractional reserve system was in place in which clay token, or promises to pay, were in use, many of which were found in Athens by Sicilian Numismatist M. Antonio Salinas. This reminds one of the claims of Cedrenus that the early Romans had wooden money.
“In other words the clay facsimiles functioned in much the same way as did notes over the past three hundred years in the Anglo-Saxon world; they were money, privately created and emitted.” [7]
The author notes that these agents are mere shadows to us marooned so far downstream in this river of grift: “...the glass through which this tale is read, showing but dark and inscrutable figures incomprehensibly moving on the screen of time…”
…
Notes
-0. More accurately Arуan after Ares or War
-1. 1500 was the approximate date of the composition of the first book of the Bible, Job, which does place Satan as an agent of a cruel God upon the earth, free to roam on his wicked errands.
-2. Astle indicates that these apiru would become confederates of the Isrаelites in later times.
-3. One is reminded of the fence Fagan in Oliver Twist, who kept a small melting pot for rendering watches and jewelry down to untraceable ingots.
-4. Amarna Letters from Palestine, Professor W.F. Albright
-5. Whereby most of the most beautiful women of the world were up for auction when delicate societies collapsed. Imagine being a chief of a criminal gang near Vegas, Denver or Los Angeles, where the greatest stock of America’s beauties are gathered, when the grid goes down and their sissy husbands’ money no longer has value?
-6. According to Diodorus 15:7 and Plutarch: Dion. 5 Plato was sold into slavery by Dyonysus, tyrant of Syracuse.
-7. According to A. Andreades, 1929, Paris, Alexander’s expenses in the early Greek phase of his campaigns were 5000 to 7000 talents per year.
