MAPS-EMPIRES-ASSYRIANS

MAPS-EMPIRES-ASSYRIANS
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Genesis 2
8. Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden
10. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
11. The name of the first is Pison..
13. the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
14. the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates

a) The African nation now called Ethiopia is not mentioned in the scriptures.
b) The actual word is Cush, not Ethiopia.
c) Cush is a descendant of Ham (one of the 3 sons of Noah)
d) Land areas/cities, locations were named after famous people
e) There are multiple locations/cities in the scriptures FAR AWAY FROM EACH OTHER with THE SAME NAMES.
f) To complicate things further, some of the same people and places have multiple spellings.
g) This particular 'Ethiopia' / CUSH is located in what is now called Iraq.
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The third river (Hiddekel in Iraq), goes East toward Assyria.
h) If you are sitting on a river in Iraq looking East, you would be looking toward modern day Iran.
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i) Iran may have been the starting area where the Assyrian Empire began, but it expanded west and south as far as Egypt.
An empire begins by a military force taking control of the land/people of another nation. After they take control, the men able to fight that are left in that conquered nation are placed in the military of the invaders.
The people in the conquered land become tributaries (slaves) who are forced to give their products/services to the invading empire.
The people who conquered, become part of that empire. It is the snow ball effect. As the empire/snowball keeps rolling, it becomes larger as it absorbs the people and land it rolls over.
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MAPS

If you go to the web and look for maps of any ancient place, you will see endless variations of the same empires.
Even in the creation of modern maps which show land areas of miles, a fraction of an inch would put a place miles.. hundreds of miles out of place.
Visual maps do not create precise locations, but they show places relative to other places.

EMPIRES... DOT TO DOT

In general a map of the area of interest is taken and the map maker looks at all the text of known places that are identified.
Using the most extreme outer KNOWN locations, the map maker draws a line from one known location to the next.. dot to dot.
When the places in ancient text can be located in the present, one can create a decent map of that empire.
Some times the map maker can limit the borders of an empire, when they know a city/location was part of another empire in that time period. (i.e. If you knew Canaan were west of the Jordan river, you would know where to stop that border.
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MUSICAL EMPIRES

As you read through ancient text, you will find the very same land areas/cities are part of different empires.
Physical locations do not move. Empires are defined by which political force controls a land area/people in a particular time period in history.
"Mexico" non existent nation before the Europeans, then it became part of the empire of Spain, after a civil war it became a separate nation Mexico, after another invading force took the northern part, it became the nation of Texas, then finally it became part of the empire/nation of America.
Canaan was a land area composed of dozens of Asian empires, then for a very short period in history it was consolidated under the power of a composite of those Asians (Israelites), Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Alexandria, Rome.
The Assyrian empire was composed of all people/land controlled by that political deity. The ancestors of all Israelites were a composite of the stock of Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittite, Persians, Greeks and Romans.
Ancient text reveals the identity of the wives / mothers / fathers of the Israelites and the Israelites were NOTHING BUT the physical descendants of these Asian/African ancestors.
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Genesis 25:12 The descendants of Ishmael
Genesis 25:18 And they dwelt from Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as thou goest toward Assyria. (Descendants of Ishmael also remained living in Israel)

HAVILAH
in the neighbourhood of *Eden. An area mentioned in the phrase 'from Havilah to Shur'; inhabited by the Ishmaelites (Gn. 25:18) and Amalekites (1 Sa. 15:7). It probably lay therefore in the area of Sinai and NW Arabia. SHUR. A wilderness-region in the NW part of the Sinai isthmus, S of the Mediterranean coastline and the 'way of the land of the Philistines', between the present line of the Suez Canal on its W and the 'River of *Egypt' Shur lay on the direct route to Egypt from S Palestine
Assyria (center of the political power) here appears to be north east of Canaan, so Assyria in this context can not be the empire of Assyria, because Canaan/Israel was part of the Assyrian empire which is shown in the empire of Assyria.
Some times the name of a location is ONLY a small region where a political power began. Other times that name identifies a vast area of the empire ...

Rome ... the city in Italy
Rome ... the empire that stretched from Britain to Egypt.
Persia, Assyria, Babylon... do not confuse the hub of an empire, with the whole empire.

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