Sixth Edition

A Set of Lies Agreed Upon

That is a rather famous or infamous quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte I, emperor of the French. Unfortunately his statement is all too true.

Take for example the infamous barbarian Ghengis Khan. I read a book about him as a boy, and was shocked to learn some of the true facts. The history books and Hollywood especially tend to portray him as the consummate savage butcher, literally the "scourge of God" an appellation tacked on him by Muslim enemies which he adopted wholeheartedly. The Mongols are seen as violent rapacious beasts, a horrible sort of plague that spread across the Earth. However, the truth is Ghengis and his dynasty were horrible to have as enemies, they were quite guilty of the wholesale slaughters and destruction they have been accused of. Few bother to look into how these actions came about however. The Mongols were not simply savages invading every land
they came upon. They always sent ahead ambassadors, and almost always these ambassadors came seeking peace. No outright threats were made, in fact when Ghengis sent his envoys to the court of the ruler of Khorazahm (the largest empire he encountered) they brought along a camel train of some 100 pack animals loaded down with precious gifts of silk, gold, silver and the finest products of the east, on a mission to open trade relations with the largest Muslim empire in existence. Khorazahm killed the ambassadors and took the gifts. What ruler would stand for such treatment? Ghengis sent a second mission of envoys with even more gifts, in an attempt to make peace and avoid war, in the obvious hope that the first murders were a terrible
misunderstanding. Khorazahm killed these ambassadors as well, and the Great Khan was incensed. Among Mongols, ambassadors were inviolate! There are few reports from their empire but in all cases, foreign ambassadors are very well treated with the greatest respect. Furthermore, traders of any nationality were utterly safe within the Mongol empire, with Mongol soldiers in tiny detachments spread across the vast Silk Road and other trade routes acting as police. The Great Khan instituted the use of paper currency and a national treasury where the paper notes could be cashed in for good silver and gold. The Great Khan even proposed treaties of alliance with the western Christian monarchies of France and Britain against the Muslim nations which lay between them. It was to the court of Kubilai Khan that Marco Polo traveled to and returned with such fantastical reports that included a royal zoo, great roads and bridges. Does this sound like any kind of savage barbarian?

Napoleon himself is generally portrayed as some kind of madman by Hollywood as well as various historians and book authors, yet in fact he was very much a child of the French revolution. He instituted the Code Napoleon, a surprisingly good set of laws that is still the basis of many European laws. He was an ally of the young United States of America and sold the fledgling nation the tremendous Louisiana Purchase which doubled the size of the country. He set up a system of advancement based on merit (meritocracy) instead of the birth-based systems used before, and systematic agricultural advancement based on science. He is
usually never credited with it, but in his invasion of Egypt he brought along a crowd of the finest scientists and academics he could assemble, and it was no accident that the famous Rosetta stone was seen as an important find which led to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian heiroglyphics. Yes, indeed what a barbarian Napoleon was, fighting against the European monarchies and rule by right of birth, fighting on the same side as the United States of America against the British, the same gentle folk who in that war invaded Washington DC and burned our capital to the ground.

I could go on with this as there are so many examples, but it leads to the discovery tonight.

Hebrews in Ancient America
One of the famous inscribed stones found in America is the Bat Creek stone. It was unearthed from an Indian mound, and was a curiosity for many years - until Dr. Cyrus Gordon (an eminent diffusionist scholar) read and translated it as "for Judaea" or "unto Judaea". I had accepted his opinion, that this was indeed a Hebrew inscription; however this evening I was examining a photograph of the stone and could not fit his ascribed letters to the inscription. For one thing, there were too many letters, the last of them he read as "L YHWD" however not all of these letters appear in those forms in Israelite alphabets, they do appear in late Punic and early Neopunic. The letter forms would match very well with these alphabets, and are "L Y HSR" and combined with the first two letters not addressed by Dr. Gordon ("Q T") are easily read as "QT L YHSR" which is "Sacrifice for granting protection". HSR with the H in a different form means "potter" in Punic, so could be read in an alternate way as a sacrifice for someone with a personal name that means "the potter". This sort of inscription is well in keeping with North African practices of writing prayers and curses then burying or burning (or dropping in a well) to get the deities to grant their wishes. An inscription "for Judaea" or "unto Judaea" does not make sense nor are there any similar such inscriptions that I could find reference to in Israelite or Jewish
artifacts. The last letter could be a "D" instead of an "R" which makes the last word "pious" which also makes sense, "this sacrifice for the pious" - but pious Carthaginians, not Hebrews.

I would not go on to say there is no evidence of ancient Jews in America, in fact there is evidence but this particular inscription, found by the Smithsonian no less, is more likely from a different Semitic people.

Cold as shit here, 6 below zero. Nothing to report so this ends this edition.
Oroblanco

"Molon labe" --Leonidas, king of Sparta