Chapter 173. Five Thousand Years of Gods and Rulers: A Master Timeline (3000 BCE to Today) and the Co-Evolution of Religion and Politics

This is the study’s reference chapter. Its first half is a single dated table, from the Egyptian god-king to the Keshe Coin. Each row is keyed to the chapter that discusses it and to the source that gives the date. For the dating spine the chapter relies on two neutral works, the Encyclopedia of World History [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204] and, for East Asia, the History of East Asia [History of East Asia, #71236]. Where a date comes only from a partisan or self-reporting source (Keshe’s transcripts, Fomenko’s “new chronology”, Pacepa’s intelligence memoir), the table says so. Where the sources disagree, as they do on Zarathustra, the Exodus, 25 December and the Zohar, the table gives the alternatives as ranges. The second half reads across the table and sets out seven recurring patterns in how belief and power have shaped each other. The table now opens well before 3000 BCE, with rows for the prehistoric, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Levantine and Indo-Iranian material of Part 1 (chs. 2–8). Those dates are given as the Part 1 sources give them, and for prehistory they are archaeological estimates rather than events.

The master timeline

An earlier band: the Late Bronze Age world

Before the Axial Age there is an older synchronic band, the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. Within roughly a century the table holds the Mitanni treaty with its Vedic treaty-gods (c. 1380), Akhenaten’s state cult of the Aten (from c. 1353), the Assyrian effort from about 1300 to make Ashur the equal of Enlil, and the Ugaritic texts of c. 1275 (chs. 3–7). Each is a case of political power reshaping a pantheon. A treaty borrows gods as witnesses. A king makes one god exclusive and persecutes the others [Wikipedia: Atenism]. An imperial city raises its god to “chief of gods” [Black and Green, #70458, “Assur”]. Ugarit was destroyed c. 1200 BCE [Wikipedia: Canaanite religion], in the same crisis that Armstrong takes as the starting point of the western Axial Age [Armstrong, #82303]. The band below therefore begins where this one ends.

A synchronic band: the Axial Age

Karen Armstrong treats the years from about 800 to 200 BCE as a single band rather than a sequence. In China, she writes, the Zhou “had introduced an ethical ideal into a religion that had hitherto been unconcerned about morality”, and “their Axial Age would be inspired by the search for a just ruler, who would be worthy of Heaven’s mandate” [Armstrong, The Great Transformation, #82303]. In India, “by the ninth century, ritual experts in India had embarked on a liturgical reformation that inaugurated India’s Axial Age” [#82303]. In the West the starting point is a collapse: “In the twelfth century, the eastern Mediterranean was engulfed in a crisis that swept away the Greek, Hittite, and Egyptian kingdoms and plunged the whole region into a dark age” [#82303]. Seen this way, prophecy in Israel, the Upanishads, the Buddha and Confucius all respond to political breakdown and the violence of new states. Most of the patterns below begin in this band.

Pattern 1: sacral kingship and the mandate

The oldest pattern makes the ruler divine or makes him the client of a god. Part 1 shows both forms already in place in the third and second millennia. In early Assyria the title “king” belonged to the god Ashur, and the human ruler was “steward of Assur”. The Neo-Assyrian king was “not a god” but “the chief servant of the chief god” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Hammurabi says the gods gave him rule “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak” [Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi]. Exceptions occurred: Naram-Sin was “named god of the city” [Collins, The Sumerians, #64812] (chs. 3, 8). The Vedic king was “established” by Indra and “made victorious” by Soma but was “not viewed as divine” until the Mānava Dharmaśāstra made him “a god on earth” [Wikipedia: Monarchy in ancient India] (ch. 8). Roberts and Westad tie the pharaoh’s role as solar incarnation to the merger of the Horus and Amon-Re cults that followed political consolidation [Roberts & Westad, #69765, ch. 3]. The Achaemenid king is not a god. He rules “by the favour of Auramazda”, and in the later inscriptions also by the grace of “Anahita, and Mithra” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, pp. 52, 78]. The Chinese mandate adds a condition. If a ruler was “selfish, cruel, and oppressive”, Heaven would not support him [Armstrong, #82303]. Israelite kingship was subordinated to covenant and prophet, and the European divine right of kings revived the sacral claim inside Christianity (ch. 137). Mithra links these models. A second thread is cosmic order as the king’s charge. Egyptian kings “inherited the duty to ensure Maat remained in place”, and “an impious king could bring about famine” [Wikipedia: Maat]. The Iranian khvarenah stays with a king while he rules by asha and leaves him when druj enters his heart [Wikipedia: Khvarenah]. Mitra and Varuna “govern all the world with the ṛta” (RV 5.63.7) [Heckaman, #51915] (chs. 4, 7, 8). The ruler is legitimate as long as he keeps an order that is not his own, an early form of the Zhou condition. Gershevitch argues that the noun miθra- “means ‘contract'” and that “Mithra’s original function is to watch over the contract, and nothing else” [Gershevitch, #60160]. That is why he witnesses the Mitanni treaty, why Achaemenid kings invoke him, and why the Roman army took him up (chs. 19, 21, 23).

Pattern 2: “religion and kingship are twins”

The Sasanian maxim has a long life. Shaked follows it from the Testament of Ardashir, “kingship and religion are twin brothers”, into Ibn al-Muqaffa’s theory of government [Shaked, From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam, #60406, art. VI]. Boyce describes Tansar’s church as created “under the direct and authoritarian control of Persia”. Wood objects that the royal mandate “does not seem to have been monopolized by any ‘Zoroastrian church'” [Boyce, #55117; Wood, #55093] (ch. 15). The Roman parallel is the fourth century. Jones argues that the political effect of Constantine’s conversion “was to nationalize Christianity—not to compel conversion” [Jones, Between Pagan and Christian, #67425, ch. 11]. Under Theodosius that national church became the only legal religion (chs. 54, 56). The Islamic versions are later and more explicit. Shah Ismail “declared that Twelver Shiism would be the official religion of his new empire” [Armstrong, #53062]. In 1744 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Ibn Saud “took an oath to each other and began decades of conquest” [Beck, #63847, ch. 4]. In wilayat al-faqih the jurist himself became the state, a step Banisadr warned Khomeini against [Ghattas, Black Wave, #72495, Part I] (ch. 144). In each case the “twins” are distinct partners, and the cleric is the junior one until 1979. The partnership is older than the maxim. Deimel’s 1920s “temple-state” made all of Lagash’s land the temple’s, but Collins reports that Diakonoff showed the calculations “erroneous” and that palace and private households also held land [Collins, #64812, “Temple-states and hydraulic states”] (chs. 3, 8). In Egypt the wealth of Karnak gave the high priest of Amun enough political power that Thebes became “virtually independent” in the Third Intermediate Period, though The Egyptians calls the usual picture of priestly power “probably exaggerated” [Bierbrier, #366518, “High Priest of Amun”; #363364] (ch. 4). In Vedic India the patron became “only a sponsor” of rites run by specialists, and the king’s purohita grew into a power beside him [Wikipedia: Vedic priesthood] (ch. 7).

Pattern 3: Church against Crown, and the sovereign state

Latin Christendom did something different: it kept the twins apart and set them against each other. Grzymała-Busse argues that “the wealth, human capital, administrative capacity, and spiritual authority of the medieval church far outweighed those of any king or prince”, and that “through the twin mechanisms of rivalry and emulation, of secular fear and envy, the church shaped” the European state. “Church administrative reforms were the forerunners of secular state institutions.” Where the papacy saw rulers as hostile, as in the Holy Roman Empire, “the resulting fragmentation greatly weakened the formation of central state institutions” [Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations, #62062]. Investiture (1075–1122), Avignon (1309–1377) and Westphalia (1648) are the stages of this process (ch. 138). The modern settlement varies. Jelen contrasts the US establishment clause with democracies that “provide government support for religious bodies (such as subsidies for schools or clergy salaries)”, and notes that “several European nations have legally established churches”. He reports the hypothesis that “this sort of governmental support results in a decline in religious” practice [International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, #5201, “Church and State”] (ch. 140).

Pattern 4: secular faiths

From 1789 the sacral function moves to the nation and the party. Le Bon reads the French Revolution as “a new religion” whose “fury and its hecatombs will then become intelligible” once it is seen as a religious phenomenon [Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, #364372, Part I, Book I, ch. 2]. Marxism is treated in ch. 141 as a secularised messianism. Jung puts the parallel most sharply: “The State, like the Church, demands enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and love”, and “it is still too early to say what might be the consequences of a general recognition of the fatal parallelism between the State religion of the Marxists and the State religion of the Church. The absolutist claim of a Civitas Dei that is represented by man bears an unfortunate resemblance to the ‘divinity’ of the State” [Jung, The Undiscovered Self, #44617]. Armstrong describes the twentieth-century fundamentalisms as reactions to this secular modernity, built in its own idiom [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. Heisman goes further and derives the secular faiths themselves from Christianity (ch. 162).

Pattern 5: persecution, heresy and survival

The same table can be read as a list of minorities. Its oldest dated case runs in the other direction: under Akhenaten “the worship of other gods” was met “with persecution” [Wikipedia: Atenism], and after his death “all known records of his reign were destroyed by the priests of Amen-Ra” [Mercatante, #72968, “Aten”] (ch. 4). Assmann’s “Mosaic distinction”, by which a group treats every religion outside it as illegitimate, names the logic that later heresy charges share [Wikipedia: Moses the Egyptian]. Boyce’s account of the daeva/asura inversion is an even earlier, undated case, in which the gods of one group became the demons of another [Boyce (ed.), #55116, “1.2.7”] (chs. 6, 7). Zoroastrians became dhimmis “humbled through the jizya” (ch. 18). Manichaeans lost the favour of the Persian kings when “Bahram I favored Zoroastrianism, resulting in Mani’s imprisonment” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “Manichaeanism”]. The Cathar toll at Béziers ranges in the sources from about 15,000 to 100,000 (ch. 61). The Templars were destroyed by a royal raid at dawn on 13 October 1307 [Vatican Secret Archives, #68123]. The Old Believers survived on merchant patronage (ch. 68). The Romanian Greek-Catholics were absorbed into Orthodoxy by decree in 1948, and Pacepa and Rychlak record the parallel forced “rejoining” of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics in 1946 [Pacepa & Rychlak, Disinformation, #76607] (a former intelligence chief’s account). Falun Gong has been persecuted since 1999 (ch. 103). The political use of heresy charges is constant: the label “heretic”, or in modern form “cult” or “extremist”, marks the group the ruler has decided to break (ch. 125).

Pattern 6: secret societies and claims of hidden rule

Here the documented record and the claims diverge most. Jacob holds that Freemasons “did not cause the French Revolution of 1789, as the conspiracy theorists right up to the Nazis claimed, but they did make it more rather than less likely to happen” [Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry, #78059, ch. 1]. Djuvara writes that “the Revolution of 1848, like the Union of the Principalities of 1859, was the work of the young Masons” [Djuvara, #18387] (ch. 114). Against these, Icke has Franklin’s lodges “manipulate the French Revolution” and calls him “a member of the Satanic Hellfire Club” [Icke, The Biggest Secret, #68245]. Synarchy derives the elite forums from a “Committee of 300” [#67074]. Webb’s counter-argument is that conspiracy theorists treat “absence of evidence” as proof [Webb, #62861] (ch. 148). The memberships are mostly real. That they steered events is an inference, and the sources differ on how far it goes. The hidden-rule claims also reach back to Part 1. Pike holds that the Egyptian priesthood “utilized the Mysteries to claim divine authority” and that the Osiris legend underlies the Master’s Degree [Pike, #378717] (ch. 4). Sitchin reads the Anunnaki as a real ruling dynasty [Sitchin, When Time Began, #75551] (ch. 3). None of the Egyptological or Assyriological works cited in those chapters supports either claim.

Pattern 7: present geopolitics and the projected end-points

The four cases in ch. 147 bring the patterns up to date. In Russia, Kirill warned of “forces of evil” hostile to “the unity of the Russian people and Church” [Matthews, Overreach, #66606, ch. 4], a return of the “twins”. In China, sinicisation since 2015 is state control of religion of the Westphalian-absolutist kind [Wikipedia: Religious policy of Xi Jinping]. Ghattas dates the Iran–Saudi contest to 1979, a rivalry between two models of the twins [Ghattas, #72495]. Mearsheimer and Walt count Christian Zionists, “a subset of the broader politically oriented Christian Right”, within the Israel lobby [Mearsheimer & Walt, #75004]. The library also holds two projected end-points. Keshe proposes “One Nation” with “no borders, armies, and no wars” under the Universal Council, a World Peace Treaty and a foundation currency [Keshe, KSW 183, #377826; KSW 649, #378361] (ch. 157). Heisman’s subtitle states his: “Why Liberal Democracy Leads to the Rational Biological Self-Destruction of Humans and the Rational Technological Creation of God” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, table of contents], a “Techdom of God” in the phrase used in ch. 166. One end-point keeps the soul and abolishes the state, the other keeps the technology and abolishes the human.

Key points

• The table now opens with Part 1: Mousterian burials, the painted caves, Göbekli Tepe (c. 9500 BCE), Sumer, Egypt, the Rigveda, the Mitanni treaty (c. 1380 BCE), Amarna and Ugarit (chs. 2–8).
• A Late Bronze Age band (Mitanni, Amarna, Ashur’s rise, Ugarit) shows rulers reshaping pantheons before the Axial Age, and ends in the twelfth-century collapse.
• Servant-kings (Assyria, Hammurabi), a god-king (pharaoh) and rulers bound to a cosmic order (Maat, asha/ṛta, khvarenah) are all attested before the Achaemenids. Temple and palace partnerships (Lagash, Karnak, the purohita) predate the Sasanian “twins”.
• The neutral spine (Encyclopedia of World History #5204, History of East Asia #71236) dates most entries. Fomenko, Pacepa and Keshe supply some dates that only they report, and these are marked as such.
• Zarathustra’s date runs from the Greek “6000 years before Xerxes” to the Parsi 660–583 BC. Moulton, Jackson and Boyce each argue for a different position (ch. 9).
• Armstrong’s Axial Age links the Zhou mandate, the Indian ritual reformation and the post-collapse West as responses to political crisis.
• The sacral king and the contract-god Mithra represent the earliest fusion of religion and politics. The Sasanian “twins” maxim runs from Tansar through Ibn al-Muqaffa to the Safavids, the Saudi pact and velayat-e faqih.
• Grzymała-Busse argues that the Latin Church acted as both template and rival for the European state. Jelen reports that state support may lower religiosity.
• Le Bon and Jung read the revolutionary and Marxist states as religions. Jung calls it the “fatal parallelism”.
• Persecution of minorities and charges of heresy or “cult” recur in every empire in the table.
• The library’s two projected end-points are Keshe’s soul-centred One Nation and Heisman’s technologically created God.