Nobody. There was no such wall. It’s a legend. Glacial erratics are not a wall, incidentally.
White walkers…I think I saw this story in Game of Thrones, John Snow was the King
The wildlings and the crows would argue that an ice wall would work. Unless an evil dragon comes along.
Oh, I get it. Sargon of Akkad was also Bran the Builder. The Akkadians were the First Men. It all fits!
I’ve only watched the first season. 
It was too dark for me.
A very odd legend indeed. Why didn’t the Babylonians make their ancient heritage look better by making it more believable and relating it to something people could see? Sounds like silly Christians who believe in miracles a long time ago too…
If so, Mesopotamian tradition in the first millennium must have held that a Great Wall was located in the northern extremes of the World - far far away - where only one king had gone, where no man had gone before or since, this king being Sargon of Akkade.
It was very loosely framed around the Wars of the Roses and the rival factions of York and Lancaster (Stark and Lannister) with characters such Margaret of Anjou aka The She-wolf of France. In the end, it ended up with the Tudors and Henry VIII. GoT ended up with the disaster known as season eight.
2 Likes
It’s not an odd legend at all. It sounds quite like the great tree Yggdrasil, whose branches and roots extend through all the nine worlds. It also sounds like the Japanese all being descended from Amaterasu, or all the Navaho coming out of a hole in the ground, or any of the origin legends of all manner of people and peoples. Do you believe all ancient legends as a habit? Or just the ones you like?
2 Likes
Not canonical. Some day the books will catch up and we’ll all know what really happened.
1 Like
Hmm…only that I should consider the ones historians tell me were similar to what a historical figure presented about himself.
Even though the extant legend was written long after Sargon’s death, it is thought that it conveys the story Sargon would have presented regarding his birth, upbringing, and reign. Naru literature such as The Legend of Cutha (or derivatives from naru literature such as The Curse of Agade ) uses a well-known historical figure (in both cases Naram-Sin, Sargon’s grandson) to make a point concerning the proper relationship between a human being (especially a king) and the gods. Other naru literature, such as The Great Revolt and the Legend of Sargon , seeks to tell a tale of a great king’s military victory or life. In Sargon’s case, it would have been to his benefit, as an aspiring conqueror and empire builder, to claim for himself a humble birth and modest upbringing.
There is no way of knowing whether any of what Sargon says about his early life in the inscription is true; that is precisely the point of it.
The Bible lists Nimrod in such an odd way. He’s not listed with the sons of Cush. That’s weird…almost like he could have been adopted or something. 
And there’s that odd coincidence that the Bible has him ruling over the same cities that are in the Sargon legends as I explained in my original post. Oh well, just a legend…
Genesis 10
The sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. 7 The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan. 8 Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man.[a] 9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.” 10 The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. 11 From that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and 12 Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city. 13 Egypt fathered Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, 14 Pathrusim, Casluhim (from whom[b] the Philistines came), and Caphtorim.
I think that is a good answer. Circumstances are such that you cannot be 100% sure of your idea, but whoever gets 100%? Can you be 80% sure? Perhaps. Then perhaps you should do a small formal article, a write-up about your ideas. Do not let the remarks you get on this forum ever - ever - dissuade you from a short mission you think you have acquired and find interest in.
I for one will be interested in your article.
1 Like
Exactly. Just a legend, and in fact two separate legends that don’t correspond. When it says “Cush fathered Nimrod”, that isn’t how adoption works. Anyway, Nimrod is said to be a descendant of Ham, while Akkadians spoke a Semitic language and ought to be descendants of Shem, if you think there were any such people.
I see this weird theory isn’t original with you, but it’s still farfetched.
1 Like
Thanks! My post was my article. No, I’m not 100% sure. I think it could score 80 maybe. I originally wrote the post because @swamidass kept repeating the writer of Genesis didn’t know the earth was a globe, and it became my pet peeve, and I had already researched this by that point.
Since I found these patterns…
-
Some of the cities of Nimrod in the Bible and Sargon in the legends were described with the same words.
-
Naram-Sin likely just means Naram of Cush. Because Sin is likely another word for Cush’s name that gives the possibility that Sargon and Naram-Sin are the same person (some historians have argued this) and historians are wrong to say Naram-Sin is Sargon’s grandson merely because the Sumerian King’s list has one name in between these. This helps the history line up better with the history of the Bible than what what historians think about this period now.
-
Nimrod is so oddly inserted into the text of Genesis 10, giving the possibility he could be adopted which matches the Sargon birth legend
…I think Christians should take this argument pretty seriously.
There’s a lot of “likely” in there, I know, so maybe it falls to less than 50% but it’s still reasonably possible. If I wanted a master’s in history, I’d research this for my thesis for sure. I ended up reading several master’s theses online related to Sargon. But I was just researching for my own curiosity. I don’t want to take the time to look up all references. 
I also found one detail I’m much less sure of, but that’s fun. Here’s an illustration of Ham’s wife. I followed a lot of rabbit trails to come to this conclusion while researching this stuff. I couldn’t tell you how I got there. Kubaba - Wikipedia 
Maybe. If JRR Martin is spared.
Ham would be Nimrod’s grandfather if you look at Genesis 10. Nimrod’s father Cush is listed first, like the eldest of his children and probably had a favored position.
Sematic language, at this point in history just means it was spoken in Mesopotamia. I think it is likely that certain sons and grandsons of Ham and Shem were fairly mixed throughout Mesopotamia, while most of Japheth’s sons and grandsons were located in Asia and Europe, as Josephus has them. I only found one part of history where I thought Josephus is wrong. If I remember correctly I think he had Put in Libya and instead he should have put him in Ethopia and Somalia - but his tribe probably moved around Africa, so it’s not an egregious error if I’m right and he’s wrong. Land of Punt - Wikipedia
Not true. Sumerian and Hittite, for example, are not Semitic languages, but Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and of course Akkadian, are. Oddly enough, so is Amharic. Ham, on the other hand, is the ancestor of the supposed Hamitic people, whose languages include Egyptian. (Hamitic is an artificial classification, meaning only Afro-Asiatic but not Semitic; never mind.)
2 Likes
Honest question…the distinction between being listed as a son vs. fathered would be concerning line of succession, wouldn’t it? Fathered meaning bastard not included in the family line in terms of inheritance? There is a lot of reference throughout the bible regarding birthrights and maybe this is indicative of that issue?
1 Like
This is a really good point. Probably - I really don’t know.
Have you read the Sargon birth story? It begins with his adoption through being put in a basket in a river until someone found him. I didn’t know until I read it that Moses being put in a river was a culturally acceptable way to put your children up for adoption. It kind of seems weird.
But then I was thinking recently there is sort of that same symbolism in baptism - adoption through water. So maybe that actually makes a ton of sense to me after all, after I thought about it in a different way.
Thanks for correction. I had to check on the languages again and where I was placing Sargon / Nimrod. You may or may not have noticed, I’m placing Abraham (so Hebrew) right at the end of Sargon’s reign, but most of his life after it based on a severe famine in both of their stories. Just had to share this is fun. Akkadian Empire - Wikipedia For Abraham - Genesis 12:10
So the languages are interesting. I kept finding more and more of them (fits the Babel story) but it was very hard to keep track of who was speaking what, and it wasn’t something I focused on, so I apologize I didn’t remember.
But I found the Sumerian and Akkadian empire to be the same thing. I don’t think necessarily that God gave similar languages to each of Noah’s sons families separately. But I do think some of the cities Nimrod/Sargon were Semitic. But he started with his own family. Akkadian Empire - Wikipedia
What makes you think Abraham spoke Hebrew?
It does not.
You need to look again. There was no Sumerian Empire, just city states.
He started what with this own family? You really aren’t making a lot of sense, and you have a lot of unexpressed, false assumptions, or so it appears. Hard to untangle them.
The question of what language(s) Abraham spoke is certainly fascinating. My favorite professor would have answered “Kushitic Akkadian, but probably others as well.” I remember him noting that Akkadian favored 2-consonant roots (which are certainly more frequent in Arabic than in Hebrew) while Hebrew is based on 3-consonant roots.
I don’t had an adamant position on this. I found it an extremely complicated topic. Nevertheless, I’m not so sure that a Hebrew language known to Abraham would be as close to the Classical Hebrew of the Bible as many presume. So I am dubious about a lot of the all-too-casual “cognate-driven lexicography” [my own term for it] which I notice even in the academic literature from respected scholars. Yes, sometimes cognates are all we have to work from in deciphering ancient words (especially place-names) but we should be humble about our conclusions. It reminds me of Gleason Archer’s photographic memory for languages that he often displayed in faculty lounge conversations. Some ancient word would be under discussion and he would say, “Well, that’s very close to the Northwest Semitic word XYZ and the Ugaritic word XYW was probably the loan-word behind it because it meant . . .” In our day we would rarely rely on a similar-sounding Dutch or German word to define an English language word just because they may have shared an etymological path which branched out a thousand years in the past.
Meanwhile, “Were the Ancients Aware of a Globe?” always deserves the acknowledgment that even centuries later when some ancient astronomers and philosophers had solid reasons for assuming a spherical earth, that in itself doesn’t tell us much about what the average person, or even average ruler, understood about globe cosmology. The lack of clear documentation on this topic from the “very ancient” world explains why popularist writings often grasp at straws in hopes of establishing an ancient global mindset.