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Japheth son of the Biblical Patriarch Noah

 

Also Diphath. Literal meanings are opened, enlarged, fair or light (father of the Caucasoid/Indo-Europoid, Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, or Indo-Aryan races - Japhethites). Japheth is the progenitor of seven sons:

 

Javan "miry" (sons were Elisha, Tarshish, Kittim and Dodanim) - also Jevanim, Iewanim, Iawan, Iawon, Iamanu, Iones, Ionians, Ellas, Ellines, El-li-ness, Hellas, Hellenes, Yavan, Yavanas, Yawan, Yuban, Yauna, Uinivu, Xuthus (Grecians, Greeks, Elysians, Spartans, Dorians, Britons, Aeolians, Achaeans, Myceneans, Macedonians, Carthaginians, Cyprians, Cretans, Basques, Latins, Venetians, Sicanians, Italics, Romans, Valentians, Sicilians, Italians, Spaniards, Portugese, other related groups); 

 

What of Romans and pre-Roman peoples? Migrating nomadic peoples came from across the Alps and across the Adriatic Sea to the east of the Italian peninsula. They were primarily herdsmen, and were technologically advanced. They worked bronze, used horses, and had wheeled carts. They were a war-like people and began to settle the mountainous areas of the Italian peninsula. Historians called these people Italic, and they include several ethnic groups: the Sabines, the Umbrians and the Latins, amongst others. Rome was, in part, founded by these agrarian Italic peoples living south of the Tiber river. They were a tribal people and the social logic of tribal organization dominated Roman society in both its early and late histories.

The date of the founding of Rome is uncertain, but archaeologists estimate its founding to around 753 B.C., although it existed as a village or group of villages long before then. As the Romans steadily developed their city, government and culture, they imitated the neighboring civilization to the north, the Etruscans (former Trojans). Romans are sometimes referred to as "Etruscanized Latins". Roman legend states that Aeneas, the founder of the Roman race, was a prince of Troy who was forced to flee that city at the close of the Trojan war against Greece. Rome's founder, Romulus, had a latinized Etruscan name. The Etruscans dominated central Italy, and had already founded many cities, having arrived some 500 years earlier after leaving the city of Troy around 1260 B.C. The Etruscans were greatly influenced by the Greeks, and the Etruscans brought that influence to the city of Rome. The Romans called Etruscans the Tusci, and Tuscany still bears the name. The first two centuries of Rome's growth was dominated by the Etruscans. After many battles with the Etruscans, the city of Rome identified itself as Latin, eventually integrating the Estruscans and remaining peoples in the region. Rome became a kingdom, then an empire. 

 

Ancient Italy was separated, on the north, by the Alps, from Germany. It was bounded by the Adriatic Sea, by a part of the Mediterranean and on the south, by the strait of Messina. The south of Italy, was peopled by a colony from Greece. The middle of Italy contained several states or confederacies, under the denominations of Etrurians, Samnites, Latins, Volsci, Campanians and Sabines. The north was peopled by a race of Gauls.

 

Ancient Rome was an Italic civilization that began on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along theMediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to become one of the largest empires in the ancient world[1]with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants (roughly 20% of the world's population and covering 6.5 million square kilometers (2.5 million sq mi) during its height between the first and second centuries AD.

 

In its approximately 12 centuries of existence, Roman civilization shifted from a monarchy to a classical republic and then to an increasingly autocratic empire. Through conquest and assimilation, it came to dominate Southern and Western Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa, and parts of Northern and Eastern Europe. Rome was preponderant throughout the Mediterranean region and was one of the most powerful entities of the ancient world. It is often grouped into classical antiquity together with ancient Greece, and their similar cultures and societies are known as the Greco-Roman world.

 

Ancient Roman society has contributed to modern government, law, politics, engineering, art, literature, architecture, technology, warfare, religion, language and society. A civilization highly developed for its time, Rome professionalized and expanded its military and created a system of government called res publica, the inspiration for modern republics such as the United States and France.  It achieved impressive technological and architectural feats, such as the construction of an extensive system of aqueducts and roads, as well as large monuments, palaces, and public facilities.

 

The city of Rome originates as a village of the Latini in the 8th century BC. At first ruled by kings, the Roman Republic is established in 509 BC. During the 5th century BC, Rome gained regional dominance in Latium, and eventually the entire Italian peninsula by the 3rd century BC. The population of the city at this point is estimated at about 300,000 people.  

 

With the Punic Wars, Rome gained dominance over the Mediterranean. Soon, Ancient Rome would displace Hellenistic Greece as the dominant world power, with the city of Rome as its capital and most dominant city for the next five centuries. After Julius Caesar'sconquest of Gaul, followed by a period of civil war, the Roman Empire was established under Octavian in 27 BC. The city of Rome now surpassed a population of one million, likely the first city in history to reach this size (compared to world population of about 200–300 million at the time).

 

At the peak of Roman imperial power in the 2nd century, the population of the city numbered some 1.6 million, a size it would never attain again until its becoming the capital of the Republic of Italy in 1946; close to 3% of the population of the empire lived within its limits. Following the Crisis of the Third Century and the transfer of the imperial capital to Constantinople in AD 330, Rome entered a period of gradual decline.

 

By the end of the Republic, Rome had conquered the lands around the Mediterranean and beyond: its domain extended from the Atlantic to Arabia and from the mouth of the Rhine to North Africa. The Roman Empire emerged under the leadership of Augustus Caesar. 721 years of Roman-Persian Wars started in 92 BC with their first war against Parthia. It would become the longest conflict in human history, and have major lasting effects and consequences for both empires. Under Trajan, the Empire reached its territorial peak. Republican mores and traditions started to decline during the imperial period, with civil wars becoming a common ritual for a new emperor's rise. States, such as Palmyra, temporarily divided the Empire in a 3rd-century crisis.

 

Plagued by internal instability and attacked by various migrating peoples, the western part of the empire broke up into independent kingdoms in the 5th century. This splintering is a landmark historians use to divide the ancient period of universal history from the pre-medieval "Dark Ages" of Europe.

 

The Romans were divided into three tribes and the people were initially separated into two ranks or classes. The small ruling class of nobles were called the Patricians and the other class were called the Plebeians. Slaves were added by the people of Rome after by being taken in war, by way of punishment, or were simply born in a state of servitude. The number of slaves in Rome and through Italy, was immense and some rich individuals are said to have owned several thousand slaves. The power of the master over his slave was absolute.

 

A Steppe People

 

Let us assume that Homer’s “horse-taming” Trojans were a people who originated in the steppes north of the Black Sea and spoke a Ural-Altaic language like those in the modern world: Finno-Ugric languages, Turkic languages, Mongol, and Manchu—and their more distant cousins Korean and Japanese. Around the year 1200 B.C., perhaps in response to an earthquake that wrecked the walls of cities, the proto-Trojans moved south to settle on both banks of the strategic Straits leading from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, conquering and intermingling with the local peoples. The Trojans possessed an instinct for domination and great military prowess—equal to the task of destroying the Hittite cities and the Mycenaean palaces, for which they must be considered the prime suspects, as well as becoming one of the Peoples of the Sea who attacked Egypt and eventually settled as the Philistines on the coast of Palestine.

 

Some Greek writers held that the Etruscans were Trojans; and a great deal of myth, echoed by Vergil, claimed that Aeneas and other escapees from the destruction of Troy were the founders of Rome. Yet the Etruscans have come down in history as mysterious invaders from the East, or as autochthonous types (according to some scholars), whose language defies translation and seems related only to the remnants of Lemniac once spoken on the island of Lemnos.

 

Etruscan civilization is the modern name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in the area corresponding roughly to Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio. The ancient Romans called its creators the Tusci or Etrusci. Their Roman name is the origin of the terms Tuscany, which refers to their heartland, and Etruria, which can refer to their wider region.

 

In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Τυρρηνοὶ, earlier Tyrsenoi, from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēni (Etruscans), Tyrrhēnia (Etruria), and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea), prompting some to associate them with the Teresh (Sea Peoples). The word may also be related to the Hittite Taruisa. The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, which was syncopated to Rasna or Raśna.

 

The Hittites were an Ancient Anatolian people who established an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. This empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Suppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Asia Minor as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. After c. 1180 BC, the empire came to an end during the Bronze Age collapse, splintering into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some of which survived until the 8th century BC

 

The Hittites occupied the region of Anatolia (also known as Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey) prior to 1700 BCE, developed a culture apparently from the indigenous Hatti (and possibly the Hurrian) people, and expanded their territories into an empirewhich rivaled, and threatened, the established nation of Egypt. They are repeatedly mentioned throughout the Hebrew Tanakh (also known as the Christian Old Testament) as the adversaries of the Israelites and their god. According to Genesis 10, they were the descendants of Heth, son of Canaan, who was the son of Ham, born of Noah (Genesis 10: 1-6). The name they are known by today, therefore, comes from the Bible and from the Amarna Letters of Egypt which reference a "Kingdom of Kheta" identified today as the `Kingdom of Hatti' (the designation the land of the Hittites was known by) but their own documents refer to them as Nesili, as do others of the time.  Their control of the region is divided by modern-day scholars into two periods: The Old Kingdom (1700-1500 BCE), and the New Kingdom, also known as the Hittite Empire (1400-1200 BCE). 

 

Little was known of the Hittites other than the references from the Bible and fragmentary documentation from Egypt until the late 19th century CE when excavations began at Boghaskoy (modern-day Bogazkale, Turkey) which was once the site of Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire. Historian Christopher Scarre describes Hattusa as “a vast fortress-city sprawling over the rocky terrain, with craggy citadels and elaborate temples. It became the center of a powerful empire that covered not only most of Anatolia but also at times extended far to the south, into Syria and the Levant” (206). Hattusa was originally founded by the Hatti (an aboriginal tribe of Anatolia) in 2500 BCE, and their culture may have provided the basis for that of the Hittites.  This very important complex and those who built it along with their vast empire, however, remained almost unknown until their writings were discovered, first by the Irish missionary William Wright  in 1884 CE, and then by the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler in 1906 CE. By the year 1912 CE, Winckler “had recovered 10,000 clay tablets from the Hittite royal archives” (Scarre & Fagan, 206).  These tablets, on which they had recorded their history and transactions, were deciphered relatively quickly. The historian Erdal Yavuz describes the process of decipherment in one instance (though there were other scholars who contributed to an understanding of the Hittite script, notably Archibald Sayce, to name only one):

 

The actual day-to-day life and culture of the Hittites is equally mysterious, as the inscriptions which have been deciphered deal mainly with the kings and their campaigns. It is known that the Hittites wrote using Akkadian script but in their own Indo-European language (which is what made deciphering the tablets so difficult in that scholars of Akkadian could read the words but could not understand them) and used cylinder seals to sign documents and mark property as people did throughout Mesopotamia, suggesting to some scholars a clear link between the two cultures. At the same time, however, Akkadian was the lingua franca of the age, and Sumer (southern Mesopotamia) had long been in contact through trade with the Hatti, and so it seems more probable that the Mesopotamian culture had influenced the Hatti, not the Hittites, and the Hittites appropriated the Hattian culture through conquest. Those details of Hittite life and culture which have come to light seem to be slight variations on that of the Hatti. The precise nature of the relationship between the two peoples remains unclear, however, due to a lack of primary sources and, as mentioned, the focus of the documents on the activities of the rulers rather than the story of the people.

 

The people known as the Hurrians and the Hatti held dominance in the region of Anatolia, and Ashur, to the north in Mesopotamia, remained in the shadow of these more powerful civilizations. In addition to the Hatti, there were the people known as the Amorites who were steadily settling in the area and acquiring more land and resources. The Assyrian king Shamashi Adad I (1813-1791 BCE) drove the Amorites out and secured the borders of Assyria, claiming Ashur as the capital of his kingdom. The Hatti continued to remain dominant in the region until they were invaded and assimilated by the Hittites in c. 1700. Long before that time, however, they ceased to prove as major a concern as the city to the southwest which was slowly gaining power: Babylon. The Amorites were a growing power in Babylon for at least 100 years when the Amorite king named Sin Muballit took the throne, and, in c. 1792 BCE, his son King Hammurabi ascended to rule and subjugated the lands of the Assyrians. It is around this same time that trade between Ashur and Karum Kanesh ended, as Babylon now rose to prominence in the region and took control of trade with Assyria.

 

THE MIDDLE EMPIRE

 

 The vast Kingdom of Mitanni rose from the area of eastern Anatolia and now held power in the region of Mesopotamia; Assyria fell under their control. Invasions by the Hittites under King Suppiluliuma I broke Mitanni power and replaced the kings of Mitanni with Hittite rulers at the same time that the Assyrian king Eriba Adad I was able to gain influence at the Mitanni (now mainly Hittite) court. The Assyrians now saw an opportunity to assert their own autonomy and began to expand their kingdom outward from Ashur to the regions previously held by the Mitanni. The Hittites struck back and were able to hold the Assyrians at bay until the king Ashur-Uballit I (c.1353-1318 BCE) defeated the remaining Mitanni forces under the Hittite commanders and took significant portions of the region. He was succeeded by two kings who maintained what had been won, but no further expansion was achieved until the coming of King Adad Nirari I (c. 1307-1275 BCE) who expanded the Assyrian Empire to the north and south, driving out the Hittites and conquering their major strongholds. Adad Nirari I is the first Assyrian king about whom anything is known with certainty, because he left inscriptions of his achievements which have survived mostly intact. Further, letters between the Assyrian king and the Hittite rulers have also survived and make it clear that, initially, the Assyrian rulers were not taken seriously by those of other nations in the region until they proved themselves too powerful to resist. 

 

 

In 1237 BCE, Hatusilli III died and rule passed to his son Tudhaliya IV. At this time the Assyrians were growing in power and, in 1230 BCE, challenged the sovereignty of the Hittites for control of the region formerly belonging to the Mitanni. At the Battle of Nihriya, in c. 1245 BCE, the forces of Tudhaliya IV were defeated by the Assyrian army and this begins the decline of the Hittite Empire. Yavuz writes, “A mass of attacks from [a people of unknown origin] known as `the Sea Peoples’ destroyed much of Asia Minor, including the Hittite State, about 1200 BCE and, after that, the Hittites were never able to restore their state again”. The last king of the Hittite Empire was Suppiluliuma II, famous for his part in the first naval battle in recorded history in 1210 BCE, in which the Hittite fleet was victorious over the Cypriots. Still, the victory was the exception, rather than the rule, of Suppiluliuma II’s reign, and the growing might of the Assyrians, combined with repeated raids by the Sea Peoples and the Kaska tribe, who had risen again, chipped away at the stability of the empire until it broke apart. Hattusa was sacked by the Kaskas in 1190 BCE and burned. Suppiluliuma II is thought to have died in this engagement. Christopher Scarre writes, “The apogee of Hittite power came under king Suppiluliuma I when his armies competed with Egypt and Mitanni for control of the Levant [and] the Hittite empire collapsed around 1200 BC, dissolving south of the Taurus Mountains into powerful Neo-Hittite city-states which were absorbed into the Assyrian empire in the ninth century BC” (215). The Assyrians destroyed whatever they could not use from the Hittite empire and stamped the region with their own culture and values. The area was still known as “the land of the Hatti” down to the year 630 BCE, even though the people, by that time, no longer remembered the Hatti or the Hittite kings and their achievements.

 

The Assyrians were a Semitic people who originally spoke and wrote Akkadian before the easier to use Aramaic language became more popular. Historians have divided the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire into three periods: The Old Kingdom, The Middle Empire, and The Late Empire (also known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire), although it should be noted that Assyrian history continued on past that point, and there are still Assyrians living in the regions of Iran and Iraq, and elsewhere, in the present day. The Assyrian Empire is considered the greatest of the Mesopotamian empires due to its expanse and the development of the bureaucracy and military strategies which allowed it to grow and flourish.  Assyrian people, also known as Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans are a Christian, Semitic, ethnoreligious group indigenous to the Middle East. Most Assyrians speak a Neo-Aramaic language, whose subdivisions include Assyrian, Chaldean, Turoyo, and Western, as well as another language, dependent on the country of residence.  The Assyrians are considered to be one of the indigenous people in the Middle East. Their homeland was thought to be located in the area around the Tigris and Euphrates. The historical Assyrian homelands spanned across northern Iraq, north eastern Syria, south eastern Turkey, and north western Iran.  The Assyrians initially experienced some periods of religious and cultural freedom interspersed with periods of severe religious and ethnic persecution after the Arab Islamic invasion and conquest of the 7th century AD. As heirs to ancient Mesopotamian civilization and culture, they also contributed hugely to the Arab Islamic Civilization during the Umayyads and the Abbasids by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic.

 

Ashurism was, of course, the first religion of the Assyrians. The very word Assyrian, in its Latin form, derives from the name of Ashur, the Assyrian god. Assyrians continued to practice Ashurism until 256 A.D, although by that time, most Assyrians had accepted Christianity. Indeed, Assyrians were the first nation to accept Christianity, and the Assyrian Church was founded in 33 A.D. by Thomas, Bortholemew and Thaddeus.

 

In Ashurism it was the God Ashur that was the ultimate worship. All the other Gods were seen as aspects of the Chief God Ashur whom was the totality of the Gods. The God Ashur derived from the Sumerian God AN.SHAR, AN meaning Heaven and SHAR literally meaning whole. Ashur is symbolized as a deity in a winged and emanating sun disk.Ashur thus represents, from the derivative AN.SHAR, whole heaven or spirit. Many of the earlier depictions didn't include the deity, but only the winged and emanating sun disk, although to the Ashurites it was the archer that symbolized protection that was equated with the deity of the whole of the heavens. The consort of Ashur was Ishtar or Inanna, which since Ashur derived from AN.SHAR, thus Ishtar would be derived from KI.SHAR which means "Whole Earth" or matter. To the Ashurites Ishtar/Inanna represented the Goddess of Love, the divine feminine, as the consort of Ashur the two represented the union of Heaven and Earth.

 

Ashurism was apart of the Ancient Semitic religions and also closely paralleled the Proto-Indo European religion.

In the ancient Levantine/Cannanite religion Ashur is equated with Yahweh whom was depicted as a man sitting in a winged chariot. Yahweh's consort Asherah or Astartu also equates the two as Astartu is commonly equated with Ishtar and both are known as the Queen of Heaven.