Selerael explored the vessel to learn the secrets that were still intact after the crash, to decipher the records of Enor she knew had been preserved within the alien vessel. Then on her way to the alcove, she saw that one of the coffins had not been opened.
Selerael approached slowly and stared at the face of the dead man preserved within. The sight of him struck a chord deep in her; she felt as though she were looking at herself.
He had been a tall man, a human, not unlike the Seynorynaelians in height, but his skin was not cloud-grey like the other true Enorians—he looked more like a colonizer, one of those who had brought life to the universe, but somewhat different from those she had known, for in the thin ray of her beacon, his silver hair reflected colors that varied as she turned her head to look at him in a different angle.
Was he dead? She wondered.
Her mind said yes; her bio-scanner read “no life signs”. Yet her senses objected.
This was Zariqua Enassa himself—the last and greatest colonizer created by Enor—he could not be dead! The colonizers had escaped the death of Enor and come into this universe more than 17 billion years before. Long-lived yet mortal, all but a few remained on Seynorynael and throughout the galaxies.
She stepped back, feeling her skin crawl in unexplainable fear. The further she stepped away, the safer she felt.
Selerael took one last long look at him and turned back the way she had come. She decided to leave the Havens undisturbed. As Falia’s father, a colonizer, had once said, the Enorian way of life and all traces of Enor must be left to fade into oblivion. And she would do all she could to ensure that that happened.
Before she left, she blasted the upper hillside with a concentrated beam of telekinetic power, letting the stones tumble down until nothing could be seen of the Enorian Havens. Before she left, she ran a battery of scanning tests and continued to blast the upper cliffs until she was positive there was no way of detecting that the ship existed.
Satisfied, she descended the hill and headed for the capital city of Ariyal-synai.
Appendix: on histories in the novel
On Troia, or Troy, Greece, and the Hittites:
Taroisa, Taruisa, Troisa, Taruiya, Homer’s Troia—such were the names of Troy. Troy was an ancient city in the region called Wilusa, Ilios, or Ilion in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) long before it was sacked by the Achaians (Greeks) and made the subject of Homer’s great epic, the Iliad. Troy was sacked many times (even once reputably by Herakles!) along with other coastal cities in Asia Minor; Troy was also frequently destroyed by earthquakes, later to be rebuilt.
Alaksandus of Wilusa/Alexandros of WiIios or Ilios may be the historical Paris of Troy, prince of Wilusa/Wilios. The land of Wilusa, called Wilios by Homer, was perhaps once a remote state of the Hittite Empire to which it was loyal (loyal to the Hittites rather than the Greeks probably because the Greeks had sacked Troy before), though Troy could have been an ancient, lost Greek colony rebuilt on an old site in Asia Minor which fell under Hittite influence. Or, most likely, Troy was a separate smaller kingdom loyal to the Hittites but caught between the two powers. (This latter hypothesis is the most likely to have been relevant, considering that there were many other smaller kingdoms of western Anatolia sandwiched between the two major political powers.)
After the fall of the Hittite Empire, the Hittites vanished almost entirely from history until the discovery of their ancient capital at Bogazkoy in Turkey in the nineteenth century. Until that time, only a few references of the Hittites in history bore testament to their existence, but even less was known about them or their culture. The mysterious Hittites were known mainly through references mentioned in the Bible (such as the wife of Esau and Bathsheba’s husband) and Egyptian texts were found to mention them. But the Hittites ruled a vast Empire a thousand years before Alexander the Great swept through Turkey, before Moses led the Jews from Israel. The Hittite Empire called itself “Khatti”, ruled from the capital Khattu-sas, rivaling even Egypt in greatness in its day; the two kingdoms were also united by royal marriages. The Hittite King Hattusilis III even called the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II “brother”, according to the ancient tradition of High Kings to call each other “brother” and their subordinate kings “son”.
Who were the Hittites? Some scholars claim they were a combined race of indigenous Semitic tribes who had been conquered and assimilated with groups of nomadic Indo-European tribes from the shores of the Caspian and Black Seas. The Hittites were certainly an Indo-European speaking group of people, as their Greek neighbors (Germanic, Greek, and Celtic grew from the Hittite branch of the Indo-European languages), and their empire stretched over much of modern-day Turkey and Lebanon; their civilization was possibly closely related to the ancient Minoan civilization of Crete (which gave us Minos and the legend of the Minotaur, similar to the Hittite bull cult).
Taruisa, or Taruiya, likely the Troy VI known to modern scholars, was a royal chief’s citadel (perhaps of Paraimu and Aleksandus) and also likely Homer’s Troia, which was probably destroyed around 1260 BC (some scholars place this later). The historian Georgiev even suggested that Aineias (Aeneas) and the surviving Trojans who fled Trusia, or Troy, made a brief stop in Northern Africa (Carthage) before journeying to Italy. He suggests that their descendants came to be known as E-trus-ci, the Etruscans who founded Rome. Herodotus claimed that Tyrrhenians (Tyrsenoi) settled central Italy (The sea west of Rome is called the Tyrrhenian Sea). Julius Caesar later claimed to have been descended from Aeneas, or Aineias, reputedly the son of Aphrodite who had fled Troy and stopped safely in Northern Africa (Carthage, the Phonenician or Tyrian “new city”) before landing in central Italy.
On Greece, Hellas, Achaiwia:
Achaiwia, or Greece, was peopled by Achaiwoi in Homer’s Iliad. The Mycenaen Greeks or Achaiwoi, a tribe of Hellenes (Greeks) from the legendary city Mycenae (in modern day Greece), were led by Agamemnon, High King of Hellas (Greece) and son of Atreus, who featured in Homer’s Iliad. The Achaioi or Achaiwoi are known to us as Achaeans, Achaians, or Greeks. The Hittites called the lands of the Achaiwoi “Ahhiyawa”, which we know from records of the Hittite Empire’s Foreign Office; Paraimu, a Trojan that could be Homer’s King Priam, also features in Hittite texts. The Hittites likely traded with or claimed Troy in the years before the fall of Troy VI.
Keftiu, also called Kaptara or Kaphtor, was the ancient name for the island of Crete, and was home to a civilization in full bloom before the modern Greek civilization rose; the Kaptaran culture is known to us as Minoan because of the mythic priest-king Minos, and their home of “the Green Sea” which of course is the Meditteranean (or specifically, the Aegean boundaries of it), was recorded by the Egyptians, with whom the Minoans traded. Shortly before the fall of Troy, the island was likely conquered by the Mycenaen Greeks. The Minoan language was lost, and the meaning of their pictographic alphabet and inscriptions remains unknown to this day. Some scholars find similarities between the Minoan civilization and the Khatti (Hittites) while others find affiliations to Semitic groups.
The “Pelasgoi” people of ancient Greece, or Hellas as it was known then, were perhaps from the city-state of Pylos, akin to Mycenae. They were the heroes of the Illiad and expert sailors, and may likely have fled after the “dark age” brought in by the invading, illiterate Dorian Greek highlanders from the moutainous fringes of Greece. Forced to flee their native land as the Doric Greeks swarmed over Hellas burning cities to the ground, the displaced Mycenaens and Pelasgoi could have taken to the water. Perhaps they then became a part of the piratic and warring “sea peoples” mentioned by Egyptian records in the years of upheaval following the fall of Troy and the fall of the entire Hittite Empire not much later. The Pelasgoi may have joined with other sea peoples such as the “Lukki” or Lykian (Hittites or Achaeans from Asia Minor) pirates of the Bible, which conjure parallels with later Viking raiders; some scholars even claim that th
e people of Denmark invaded the Hittite Empire at this time and perhaps became a part of the Phoenicians in Canaan. Some of the diverse “sea peoples” of that cataclysmic age might even have been the Etruscans (Trojans?) who founded Rome. Moreover, some of the Hellenes are also thought to have joined groups of Semitic tribes of Canaanites in modern Lebanon and taught them to master the sea. Together this new group likely formed the Phoenicians, also called Sidonians, Tyrians, and Phoinikes. The Phoenicians then ruled the seas as traders for nearly a thousand years (along with their colony Carthage); they, not the Greeks, invented our modern alphabet; aleph means “ox” in Phoenician, while bet means “house”, early symbols from which these letters derive. The Phoenician alphabet made widespread education in dark age, illerate Greece possible and indirectly influenced the rise of modern Greek civilization.
It is also probable that the “Philistines” of the Bible (I Samuel ) who supposedly came from Kaphtor (Crete) are derived from the Greek Pelasgoi, such as we might deduce from descriptions in the Bible of the bronze, “Mycenaen” armor of Goliath who faces David. This would mean that the Pelasgoi were the people who gave their name, a Greek name, to “Palestine.”
The Phoenician Carthginians (part Greek themselves) and Greeks later fought over colonies on Sicily and Sardinia; the Carthaginians were sometimes allied with the Etruscans and Latins who became Romans, until Rome destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars, burying it utterly so that it would never rise again. From this destruction of Phoenician Carthage we derive the term “Punic” and the word “punish”. The Carthaginians were punished and forgotten, the Eastern Phonecians having been destroyed by Alexander the Great. But one famous Carthaginian came afterward: Saint Augustine, author of “Confessions”.
On Britain and India:
“Clas Myrddin” means “Myrddin’s enclosure” and is an ancient name for Britain, the druids’ “isle of the dead”. It belonged to Iberians first, then also became the land of the ancient goidelic (Gaelic) speaking Indo-European Celts; some sources say Britain only became a complete island around 1800 BC. Myrddin was a solar deity worshipped at Stonehenge, built to read the position of the sun and moon. The name “Myrddin” bears no coincidental affinity to “Merlin”.
The Celts, ruled by warrior kings and an intellectual caste of druids (a word which might mean “oak knowledge”), themselves lived across Europe by 1000BC and even moved into areas that are a part of modern-day Turkey; they were the Galatians of Asia Minor in the Bible, to whom Paul wrote his great epistle, and many Celtic colonies still lived under the Roman Empire; for example, the great “Roman” poet Virgil, who wrote the Aeneid, was only a small part Etruscan; he was in fact a Celt from Cisalpine Gaul.
I have taken liberties using the root “Vedas”, which are the religious myth-hymns of the Indo-European Aryans who came to Hammaran India in 1500BC and from which modern Hinduism in part derives; I use “vedas” in conjuction with an abbreviation of the word “druid” or “oak” to recognize the similarity between the Vedas and ancient Celtic tales, no doubt the most ancient surviving legends once common to all the Indo-European peoples of Europe. ( An example of this can be seen in the Hindu god “Agni” or fire; the latin name is “igni” from which is derived “ignite”.) The connection I make of “Diraovedas” between Celtic and Vedic culture reflects the fact that one culture believed in rebirth, the other in the transmigration of souls, but both ideas might have developed from similar shared religious beliefs, lost before recorded time.
On Egypt and Palestine:
Kemet, or Kemit–the ancient name of Egypt which meant “black land”, a land rich and fertile that had sprung up around the ever-changing Nile River, which they called “iteru aa”. Its people were the “remet en Kemet”. Shu, Nut, Ptah, Horus, Anubis were among the ancient gods of Egypt. Egyptian blue faience, used in making valuable “paste” beads and to fashion ceramic animal sculptures in forms such as the hippo, were a commodity in the ancient world. Bronze was also a valuable commodity created from highly prized tin alloyed with copper (of which a good source was the isle of Alasiya or Alashiya, now called “Cyprus” after the copper for which it was famous).
At the same time, the secret of iron was for a long period a prized monopoly of the Hittites, whose secret was only dispersed when their Empire fell, shortly after the fall of Troy. The Hittites probably moved south to their remaining territories in the region of Syria (references to Hittites in Canaan occur in the Old Testament). Around this time, Moses of Egypt led away the “Aperu” or “Hapiru”–likely the Hebrew slaves of the Bible. The Hebrews, a nomadic, monotheistic, Semitic race returned to Canaan, where they mingled with their ancient polytheistic Canaanite brothers: the Sidonians, or Phoenicians who called themselves Canaanites.
This was the situation when the Hittites and Philistines, perhaps Trojan and Greek refugees, arrived from Syria, once a part of the Hittite Empire, to the north of Canaan, and from the sea. The Pelasgoi may have been the “Pelesh”, a tribe of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt by land and by sea; thus the connection between “Pelasgoi”, “Pelesh”, “Philistine”, all the same race by different names. The “Pelethites” in I Samuel are likely Pelasgoi (with some Luwian, or Hittite, connections) and the “Cherithites” are Kaptarans, and the “Denyen” or “Danuna” people of Khattti (a Greek-Hittite kingdom) may have become the Israelite tribe of Dan (whom the Bible mentions changed their religion to Judaism).
By 1050 BC David I, a shrewd Hebrew leader who had once been a mercenary for the Philistines, appeared as king over Israel. His son Solomon then contracted Phoenician builders to build a magnificent temple for the people of Israel, and the two peoples traded for several generations, until religious strife drove a wedge between the two races (which remains to this day between the people of Israel and Lebanon). Centuries after the reign of King David, around 700BC and after Israel fell internally and then to outside Assyrian conquerors, ten tribes of Israel were taken to the lands of the Assyrian King Sargon II, never to return. They became the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. The two tribes of Judah were later taken in exile to Babylon shortly afterward, where Nebuchadrezzar (Nabu-kudurri-usur) II reigned.
On Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria:
The Sumerians called the land of Sumer (in modern-day Iraq) Kalam, Ki-engi or Kengir and themselves Un-sanni, and possibly Sag-giga or Uku. To the North, Ki-Uri, or Akkad, bordered Sumer, and in ancient times, their histories closely overlapped. Sumerian culture was mostly adopted by the Semitic Akkadian conquerors (though they were not actually conquerors in the traditional sense, as Akkadians and Sumerians had co-existed in the same lands for thousands of years). From this merging of Sumerian and Akkadian culture, which incidentally gave us Noah of the Bible (called Ziusudra and later Utnapishtim), the later mighty kingdom of Babylon and the feared Assyrian Empire grew. (Babylonian and Assyrian are both Akkadian languages; Assyria developed to the north of Akkadia and Sumer, while Babylonia eventually encompassed both Akkadia and Sumer, creating a new North-South division of two larger ethnically linked Akkadian kingdoms: Assyria and Babylonia).
Babylon, whose famous “hanging gardens” were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world was the home of Hammurapi, given credit for creating a famous code of laws, although he merely documented tradional Babylonian law already in practice. Babylon comes from the word “Bab-ilani” meaning “gate of the gods” and the older Akkadian form “Bab-ilim”. In the Bible it is “Babel” and famous for the tower, a Sumerian ziggurat, but the meaning of the city’s first name “Babil” is unknown. Babylon was sacked by Hittite invaders around 1595 BC, but for various reasons the invaders immediately left it (an epidemic being a factor); Babylon was then taken by a Sealand invader king. Babylon fell into a dark age for more than a century, until being captured by the mysterious invaders from the eastern mountains, the Kassites. Four centuries later Babylon was captured by the Assyrian Empire around 1225BC, shortly after
the fall of Troy. It is likely that the Hittite King, Emperor Hattulsilas, and Pharoah Ramses II, who reigned at the time of Troy VI, were worried about the rising power of the ancient Assyrians (which soon swept like a tide over the ancient world, defeating Israel and even mighty Egypt within a few centuries); Hattusilias had his eastern border to worry about as well. Therefore, as Hittite Foreign Office records do indeed tell us, the Hittite emperor regarded his city-sacking Achaian (Greek) neighbors as equals, perhaps because, by ackowledging the Achaian Kings as equals (though he wouldn’t have believed they were), the Hittite King Hattusilias hoped to keep a peace with them.
Incidentally, Eridu, Uruk, Nippur, Kish, Jarmo, Umma, and Ur did exist. It is in these cities that writing and the first real civilizations on Earth began.
The Sumerian religion spoke of a paradise between two rivers reflected in the Bible as the garden of Eden (Abraham, founder of the Israelites was from Ur, in Sumeria, which bordered the Chaldaen land.) Sumerian religion permeated the Akkadian culture that followed and its children, the Assyrian and Babylonian religions. The bull-cult of Baal may have originated in Sumer and Akkadia; it was transmitted to many kingdoms in the ancient world, including the Hittite Empire and Canaan. Through the Hittites, the “people of a thousand gods”, Sumerian religion even influenced the religion of ancient Greece. “Ishtar” became “Astarte” in Phoenicia, and “Aphrodite” in Greece. “Baal-Adon” became “Adonis”, and “Melqart” became Herakles, Cadmus of Phoenicia became a Greek legendary figure… (observations of this were made by Roman historians). The Hurrians (who lived in Mitanni, beside Assyria) gave the Hittites the legend of Kumarbi, father of the gods who was deposed and castrated by his own son; this became Kronos and Zeus in Greece; the Hurrians also transmitted religious ideas and tales to the Hebrews.