COMPENDIUM OF WORLD HISTORY

VOLUME 1

A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Ambassador College Graduate
School of Theology In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Theology

by Herman L. Hoeh

1962(1963-1965, 1967 Edition)

CHAPTER TWO

6000 Years of History

How long has Man been upon earth? Where, and through whom, did civilization
originate? What about ‘prehistoric man’? Can the history of the Bible be reconciled
with ancient history? with Egyptian and Babylonian chronology?

Historians and archaeologists are sharply divided over these questions today.
Many sense something is drastically wrong with the present explanation of the
ancient world. How did all this scholarly doubt arise?

It is Never Safe to Assume

Remove from a library shelf any volume on world history or ancient man and examine
its opening chapters. In it will be such expressions as: ‘it is thought,’ ‘there
appears to be some basis for believing,’ ‘it has been suggested,’ ‘it may be
presumed,’ ‘one may safely assume,’ and ‘others are of the opinion’ — just
to mention a few.

What do all these carefully chosen expressions really signify? Just this:
that no demonstrable evidence really exists for accepting as a fact what has
been written in the textbook. It is mere speculation!

The modern reconstruction of ancient history without God is almost 100% erroneous.
And no wonder! It is derived from only a part of the historical sources that
are available. It casts aside as ‘myth’ factual and datable evidence of the
past merely because God appeared in that evidence. without it, the modern historian
is able only to theorize about the time or the place man appeared upon the earth.
He cannot know. When these written records are rejected, not even archaeologists
or geologists can come to the historians’ aid and provide adequate dating.

Some modern writers, relying only on geological inferences, would place the
appearance of man about 25,000 to 35,000 years ago. Others suggest the period
is no less than 100,000 years ago. No small number of scholars assume it may
be 500,000 years ago. And there are a few who place it several hundred thousand
years earlier.

But how could intelligent, able men arrive at such absurdly varying figures
for the origin of man and the beginnings of ancient history? They all have access,
remember, to the same geological and archaeological sources of information.

The answer is, they are all interpreting geologic and archaeological evidence
in accordance with their private theories. They are only guessing. They have
no way of knowing.

One well-known writer phrased it this way: ‘We know that there is no absolute
knowledge, that there are only theories, but we forget this. The better educated
we are the harder we believe in axioms’ (from Lincoln Steffens ‘Autobiography’,
page 816).

But we can know. The God who has intervened in history, records of whose
acts we may read of in ancient sources from many nations — that God has made
known both the time and the place of origin of man. But historians, theologians
and scientists alike refuse to believe it, for it leaves them no room to guess!

Before we examine these ancient secular and Biblical records, let us notice
one classic illustration of the total inability of either archaeology or geology
to determine DURATION OF TIME. Take the case of the Neolithic (New Stone) colonists
of Wessex, England — near the site of famous Stonehenge. ‘Estimates of the
length of their sojourn have been very varied, the most extreme being that of
W. A. Sturge, President of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia in 1909, who
confidently stated and considered that he had proofd ‘on irrefragable evidence’
that the Neolithic period had lasted well over 200,000 years — a grossly inaccurate
estimate …. Five to ten generations of men, or 100-200 years, would perhaps
be nearer the mark as an estimate of time …,’ declared archaeologist J. F.
S. Stone recently (‘Wessex Before the Celts’, page 51).

Why such incomprehensible variations? Because no scientific means can determine
the speed with which geological deposits were laid in the past — or how long
ago the deposition occurred, or the cause. Nor can any archaeology determine
accurately the rate of accumulation of human remains unless there is some contemporary
written evidence!

No ‘Prehistory’ of Man

The modern idea that man has been upon earth for more than 6000 years is predicated
on the assumption that ‘prehistoric time’ once existed. Almost everyone takes
it for granted. Few have ever thought to question it.

As used by critical historians, ‘prehistoric time’ is said to refer to earliest
antiquity that is nowhere documented in written records. Is this kind of ‘prehistoric
time’ really a fact?

Turn to Genesis 1:1 for the answer. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth.’ Time is coeval with the creation, for time is measured by the
movements of the created heavenly bodies. But here also is a record of what
occurred at the beginning. Here is a documented account reaching back even to
the beginning of time. ‘Prehistoric time’ in this sense is therefore irreconcilable
with Scripture, for there is no period of time that is not documented in the
Bible.

But how did the theory of ‘prehistoric time’ originate? Why was the idea
invented? Stuart Piggott, noted British archaeologist, summarized the development
of the theory in his book ‘Approach to Archaeology.’ Note carefully his wording:
‘The first step was the realization that non-documented antiquity could in fact
exist at all: that the whole creation and the sum of human history was not in
fact contained within the Biblical narrative. This was the repudiation of the
theological model of the past …’ (page 53).

‘Prehistory’ was developed to explain the presence of man without the Bible.
It is merely another facet of the ‘historical method’ which denies the possibility
of God in history.

The fallacy of ‘prehistory’ is clearly explained in the ‘Encyclopedia Americana’.
Here is its surprising statement: ‘… it is no longer accurate or logical to
use the term ‘prehistoric,’ unless it is employed to designate that vague and
hypothetical period in the beginnings of human development of which there exists
no positive and tangible record ….’ (from ‘History, its rise and development’.)

Could words be plainer?

‘Prehistoric’ — scholars now admit — denotes nothing more than a ‘vague
and hypothetical period … of which there exists no positive and tangible record’!

But what of the famous periods or ‘ages’ designated the Palaeolithic (Old
Stone), the Mesolithic (Intermediate Stone), the Neolithic (New Stone), the
Chalcolithic (Stone and Copper), the Bronze and the Iron?

Cultures, Not ‘Ages’

These terms do not represent ‘ages.’ They are CULTURAL appellations. It is a
historical deception to speak of the ‘Stone Age.’ There are only STONE CULTURES.
‘These names,’ writes William L. Langer in ‘An Encyclopaedia of World History’,
‘are excellent to identify cultures, but their use to designate periods of time
has led to much inaccuracy and confusion, as the dates of the cultures to which
they refer differ widely in different parts of the world’ (page 2).

That is, societies using iron were contemporary with other societies using
bronze or only stone. Most ancient societies used stone and bronze and iron.
Today one may see backward tribes with a stone culture in New Guinea, Australia,
areas of India, Africa and South America side by side with highly industrialized
civilizations. These tribes are not ‘prehistoric.’ They are contemporary. Throughout
history they have paralleled contemporary higher cultures, not ancestral to
higher cultures as anthropologists assume. Even the Bible makes special mention
of some of these degenerate tribes who anciently lived in Palestine and Sinai.
The reference is found in Job 30:1-8, Jewish translation:
‘But now they that are younger than I have me in derision,

Whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs of my flock ….

‘Men in whom ripe age is perished. They are gaunt with want and famine;

They gnaw the dry ground, in the gloom of wasteness and desolation.

‘They pluck salt-wart with wormwood;

‘And the roots of the broom are their food.

‘THEY ARE DRIVEN FORTH FROM THE MIDST OF MEN ….

‘In the clefts of the valleys must they dwell,

‘In holes of the earth and of the rocks.

‘Among the bushes they bray;

‘Under the nettles they are gathered together.

‘They are children of churls, yea, CHILDREN OF IGNOBLE MEN;

‘They were scourged out of the land.’

No evolution here. Only degeneration. civilized man did not descend from
degraded, ‘primitive’ tribes. But degraded tribes did descend from civilized
men of low birth and degenerate habits. They were anciently driven out from
the Middle East with its rising civilization, only to be rediscovered in tropical
forests in recent centuries!

These facts make it clear why evolutionists are forced to admit: ‘Evolution
is in the last analysis not a matter of evidence, but a matter of inference’
(from ‘New Views of Evolution’ by George Perrigo Conger, pp. 91).

Origin of the Study of History

Now we come to the origin of the scientific study of history. The facts are
surprising. Few historians are aware of the real origin of their discipline.
They generally take for granted as true the principles already laid down for
them by preceding historians. Yet one of the basic rules of any scientific study
is never to take anything for granted. Let us pull back the curtain on the study
of history and view a plot that has eluded even the historians’ keen eyes.

History as a scientific discipline may be said to have taken its rise with
Lorenzo della Valla. He demonstrated that the ‘Donation of Constantine’, on
which the secular claims of the Roman Catholic Church were originally based,
was a medieval forgery.

Forgery. That word became a touchstone. Soon non-catholic scholars everywhere
became critical, negative, looking for spurious documents. The Middle Ages provided
many rich finds.

During the same period a great revival in Classical Learning had been occurring,
The popes had encouraged Catholic scholars of the Renaissance to revive the
study of ancient Roman and Greek literature. In non-Catholic educational circles
Classical Learning became associated with Catholicism. The inevitable occurred.
Scholars who resented everything the word AUTHORITY stood for saw in the Greek
and Roman Classics the symbolism of authority and tradition. Tradition would
not be purged out, they reasoned, unless the Classics were also attacked and
labeled as spurious.

The frontal assault began. At the close of the eighteenth century Friedrich
August Wolf challenged the scholarly world with his ‘Prolegomena ad Homerum’
(1795). The ancient Greek poet Homer — famous for having composed the two great
epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey — did not compose either epic in its present
form, charged Wolf. Homer, he reasoned, did not know how to write. The epics,
he concluded, were pieced together about the seventh century from oral traditions,
long after Homer lived. They were therefore unauthentic, Wolf concluded.

The floodgates of criticism were now opened wide. Thousands of youths, flocking
to the German universities for their doctorates, were assigned the task of criticising
classical literature. At the height of the epidemic, scarcely a single ancient
work remained unimpugned as biased, untrue to fact, or unauthentic. Into the
swirl of condemned poems, dramas, myths were heaved the sober histories of Herodotus,
and Thucydides, the annals of the Greek city states, the Greek records of ancient
Egypt, Assyria and Media. All ancient Greek and Roman history was condemned
as spurious, unauthentic, fabulous, unhistorical — because writing, said the
critics, had not been known. How could the Greeks have preserved authentic histories
reaching back 2000 years before the time of Christ, asked the critics, if the
Greeks did not even know how to write till the seventh century before our era?

Historians Follow the Higher Critics

The historians of that day were greatly influenced by the subjective reasoning
of the German Higher Critics. They accepted their verdict. Greek records prior
to the seventh century disappeared from history books, or were labeled in footnotes
as fabulous, or, at best, garbled.

Nearly a half century elapsed. During that period a new science arose —
archaeology. The past was being dug up. What did the excavators discover? Writing
materials and documents dating more than 2000 years before the time of Christ!
And in the Greek world, too!

The Greeks did know how to write after all. The critics, including Wolf,
had been wrong. The imagined illiteracy of the early Greeks was a myth. The
argument that they could not have preserved their history correctly was false.

But did the new evidence make any difference to the critics or to the historians?
Were they willing to reconsider their conclusions? How were the historians going
to explain that the basis for rejecting Greek history had been exploded?

No answers came forth. The new evidence was greeted with silence. All who
brought up the problem were ridiculed as unscientific. Decades have passed,
but not once has the evidence been reconsidered. The plot to suppress the truth
had succeeded till now.

There is absolutely no reason why the records preserved by the Greeks should
not be reinstated in their proper place in history. Refusal to reconsider the
evidence is a standing indictment against the modern naturalistic interpretation
of history.

But the story does not end here.

Every year saw fresh hordes of students arrive at the German universities
demanding doctoral dissertations. Johann Gottlieb Fichte had made the German
educational system famous the world over. Many students from abroad were coming
to study in Germany under the great literary critics. The German professors
insisted that their students thresh again the old classics. But this was not
research. It was mere confirmation of what had already been universally accepted.
With the quantity of classical raw material strictly limited in the early nineteenth
century, a new field of study had to be thought up.

A ‘new discovery’ must be found, the critics agreed, if Germany was to maintain
absolute educational domination of the world. Such a discovery necessarily meant
something to attack, for assailing a commonly accepted idea always creates interest.
What literature, the critics asked themselves, did people believe to be true,
but which had not yet been subjected to higher criticism?

The Bible!

Protestant Germany had, since the days of Dr. Martin Luther, assumed the
absolute authenticity of Scripture. What a challenge! The opening wedge of the
attack had, in actuality, been made by Dr. Luther himself, for had he not denounced
the epistle of James as a book of straw?

All the methodology and reasoning, once feverishly applied to classical literature,
was now directed in a frontal assault on the authenticity and historicity of
Scripture. The Bible, proudly announced the critics, was pieced together from
tradition in much the same fashion as the ancient Greek and Roman classics had
been. The extremists declared it a pious fraud.

The literature of the Old Testament was rejected as contrary to human experience.
It was obviously unhistorical, they concluded, for no events of a supernatural
nature were befalling any nation today — and certainly not any German professors
and students! There was no God punishing them for their attacks upon Him, as
He had once punished Israel, or Egypt, or Babylon.

Historians who had heretofore acknowledged the authority of the historical
record in the Old Testament were impressed with the theories of the literary
scholars. Then, too, the theory of organic evolution was mushrooming. Rationalism
was king. Within a few decades the entire study of history was reshaped to meet
the new theories.

But how were historians to reconstruct ancient history without the Old Testament?
without God? without the supernatural? with all the early classical events removed?
What kind of framework would they use to date events? History had to have some
kind of chronological backbone.

Framework of History Founded on Egypt

A new reconstruction and interpretation of history without God or the supernatural,
and now without Genesis, was foisted upon the world in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. It first created the phantom of ‘prehistory’, as we have
already noted. To bolster their concept of ‘ancient man,’ the discoveries by
travellers of savage, cannibalistic tribes in far away places were heavily called
upon. It became a fad to picture ‘early man’ in the garb of a savage.

The next step was to tie ‘prehistory’ to modern history. What chronological
means was to be used? The answer is two-fold: astronomy and the history of Egypt.

Rationalism had disposed of all supernaturalism in history. God was excluded
from nature. Uniformitarianism became a basic concept. The astronomer was now
called on by the historian to date the past for thousands of years on the basis
of the present movement of heavenly bodies. All ancient historical records referring
to supernatural movements of the heavens were rejected as mythological. Away
went ‘Joshua’s long day,’ and the backward decline of the sun for ten degrees
in the kingship of Hezekiah. (See II Kings 20:8-11.)

From the Biblical record it would be impossible to determine the position
of any solar body prior to the time of Hezekiah. But historians postulated that
since God, according to their reasoning, could not intervene in the course of
nature, it would be possible to date the past by calculating backward the present
movements of the sun, moon and other planets, and the stars. All that was necessary,
said the historians, was to discover, through archaeological means, early calendars
and ancient documents that referred to positions of the sun, or moon, or the
rise of the stars on certain stated calendar days. A few documents were discovered
— but, alas, they did not agree with the present movements of the heavenly
body. The historians — unwilling to admit uniformitarianism an error — decided
the mistaken numbers lay in the scribes who copied the astronomical documents.
It was an easy task to change the figures on the cuneiform tablets and Egyptian
papyri.

Still a problem remained. Astronomical movements repeat themselves in varying
cycles. The 19-year cycle of the Hebrew calendar is an illustration. No ancient
date could be determined by astronomical means unless the approximate date had
already been determined by historical methods. Here is where Egypt comes on
the scene.

Egypt seemed to provide the best solution. Her earliest documents were more
likely to be preserved because of the warm, dry climate. Most of the monuments
were above ground, unlike those in Mesopotamia. This made it a much easier task
for the archaeologist. Egypt, decided the scholars, should become the historical
standard of the world. Its civilization was certainly one of the oldest and
earliest. Why not tie ‘prehistory’ and modern history together through Egypt.

Now came the difficulty. Archaeology could not always determine which Egyptian
monuments and which kings reigns came first. There were no buried cities, one
above another, as in Mesopotamia. No stratigraphy to determine the exact order
of events. The only solution was to adopt the traditional dynastic history of
Egypt. It is based on the Greek versions of Manetho, an Egyptian priest and
historian, who drew up the history of ancient Egypt under thirty dynasties.

The influence of Manetho on the order of events of ancient history is tremendous.
This is confirmed by Sir Alan Gardiner, one of the most famous Egyptologists
of the twentieth century. ‘That I have devoted so much discussion to what survives
of Manetho … will need no excuse for those familiar with the evolution of
our science; no Egyptologist has yet been able to free himself from the shackles
imposed by the native annalist’s thirty Dynasties, and these are likely always
to remain the essential framework of our modern expositions’ (‘Egypt of the
Pharaohs’, p. viii).

Is Egyptian History Correct?

The dynastic history of Egypt is universally assumed to be correct. NO historian
thinks of questioning it. It is simply one of the assumptions he has taken for
granted.

The time has come to explode this assumption! The story of how it became
universally accepted over 2000 years ago is one of the most intriguing in all
the annals of history. Let us roll back the centuries and discover the plot
that changed history.

The historians of the last century inherited their views of history from
the classical professors, for ancient history was for a long time an aspect
of classical studies. The classical professors were interested in attacking
LITERATURE. But they needed history for background if they were to demonstrate
that early writings were merely garbled oral traditions and mythical accounts
of heroes.

It suited their purpose to retain the commonly accepted view of history —
especially Homer’s story of the fall of Troy. The earlier that ancient events
could be placed the longer the time for oral traditions and myths to develop.
The greater the likelihood for events to become garbled and untrue to fact.

Thus the framework of history remained essentially the same as it has been
all through the Middle Ages.

Medieval and Modern Europe inherited its account of the past mainly through
Catholic scholars and historians. Sextus Julius Africanus (early third century),
Eusebius (early fourth century), and George the Monk, known as Syncellus (eighth
to ninth century) contributed greatly to the transmission of ancient history.
These men, together with the Jewish historian Josephus, obtained their information
from earlier Greek documents long since lost. But from where did the Greek world
obtain its history of Egypt? From the Egyptians.

The framework of all history, in simple terms, is derived ultimately from
Egypt — particularly through the writings of Manetho.

‘In the arrangement of … Egyptian materials within a framework of consecutive
dynasties, all modern historians are dependent upon an ancient predecessor.
This was an Egyptian priest and writer Manetho who lived under Ptolemy II Philadelphus
(285-246 B.C.). Manetho was born at Sebennytus (now Samannud) in the Delta.
Eventually he rose to be high priest in the temple at Heliopolis. Berossos of
Babylon,’ continues Finegan, ‘was practically a contemporary, and the two priests
became rivals in the proclamation of the antiquity and greatness of their respective
lands.’ (From ‘Light from the Ancient Past’, by Jack Finegan, pp. 65-66.)

In Manetho’s time this spirit of competition reached a climax. Egypt and
Babylonia were vying with each other for influence over the Greek-speaking world.
Each sought to be known as the founder of civilization, of cultural and religious
institutions, of political unity. Vanity was coupled in both by a deep sense
of inferiority, for both were peoples subject to the Greeks. To rise above that
feeling, each claimed to be the first people of earth, not alone in the sense
of civilization, but in the sense of time.

Distorting History

To justify their claims to antiquity, Manetho and Berossos utilized their early
records, the king lists of the various cities, and cleverly marshalled them
together in consecutive order. Manetho summarized the history of Egypt under
the rule of thirty dynasties, or ruling houses, from the royal cities of Abydos,
Memphis, Elephantine, Heracleopolis, Xois, Thebes, Tanis, Bubastis, Sais and
other cities. The history of the royal families of each city was drawn up to
make it appear that only one city at a time dominated Egypt, and that Egypt
was, from its beginning, under the government of only one ruler at a time. The
result was that Egypt appeared to be extremely ancient and the first land to
establish unity — thousands of years before the Greek city-states were united.
It was a fraud!

The internal details of the reigns of the kings of the various dynasties
were scrupulously correct — they had to be to make the history look valid —
but the order in which the dynasties appeared was a historic lie. Manetho cleverly
told the history of the ruling families of each city, then attached them end
to end to make Egypt appear the oldest and earliest unified nation on earth.

Egypt was a confederation. Its several kings exercised authority under the
most powerful who was called Pharaoh. The word ‘Pharaoh’ means the Great House
— as there were also lesser houses ruling.

Even the Bible preserves an account of more than one king in Egypt at the
same time: ‘Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us,’ said the Arameans,
‘the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians’ (II Kings 7:6).

Like Egypt, the land of Assyria also had more than one king at the same time:
‘At that time did king Ahaz send unto the kings of Assyria to help him’ (II
Chronicles 28:16). Historians falsely charge these verses are untrue to fact.

As an example of the strength of a great confederation, one may name Germany.
Few are really aware that the German Empire, like the ancient Egyptian Empire,
was a confederation governed by several kings even at the time of World War
I. The supreme ruler was of the Prussian House of Hohenzollern, William II (1888-1918).
Ruling with him in the German Confederation were Frederick Augustus III (1904-1918),
king of Saxony: William II (1891-1918), king of Wuerttemberg Louis III (1913-1918),
king of Bavaria and Ernest Augustus (1913-1918), duke of Brunswick. All lost
their thrones in November of 1918.

To return to the theme of the story. Succeeding chapters of this compendium
will now demonstrate how the true history of Egypt may be restored. Never before
has the history of the ancient world been made clear as it will now be.