\doc\web\99\12\giftjew.txt
The Gifts of the Jews
How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the 
Way Everyone Thinks and Feels
Thomas Cahill Doubleday 1998


p.271 


Chronology
BC
3200 Writing invented in Sumer
1850 Epic of Gilgamesh
     ~ Abraham journeys to Canaan 
1750 Code of Hammurabi
1700 Children of Israel arrive in Egypt
1377-58 Akhnaton rules Egypt and enforces
     exclusive worship of Aton sun God
1250 Moses leads Israel out of Egypt,
     Sinai encounter


5000ya rise of Herbrew, one of many semitic 
     languages
3000ya written Hebrew


p. 38 The discovery of this Sumerian Noah in the first attempts to
translate cuneiform tablets toward the end of the nineteenth century
raised as much anxiety as Darwin did among Victorians who had assumed
that everything in the Bible was without antecedent because it was
"Word of God".


p. 62 the ziggurat of Harran, that bold sumerian attempt to scale the
heavens that would one day become the fabulous foolish Tower of Babel
in Genisus.


p. 66 no evidence of Camels used as beasts of burden until 1000 BC


p. 171 Fall of Jericho... but Jericho's ruin apparently preceded
Isreael's invasion of Canaan by centuries; and it may be that its
ruined walls encouraged the Israelites of a later period to imagine
that they had been its conquerors.  The conquest of Canaan.. is a
grisly business [all men ,women and beasts are killed , settlements
burned to the ground]