Earthmare: The Lost Book of Wars

“First, God burrowed a hole and made the void.” These are the first words of the apocryphal Genesis found in the Accursed Mountains of Albania between 1997-1998. This book is a selection of a series of articles, lectures and presentations delivered by a wide array of scholars at different events and conferences hosted by the underground Abnoriens Kateschizeîn University as early as 2009 to the present. While their fields vary greatly, their point of departure is the same-the first day of Genesis described in the nine cuneiform tablets, or what the scholars call “the accursed tablets” after the place of their discovery.
Dating back to c. 1400-1100 BC, the tablets are among the oldest apocrypha materials ever found. They are as well of particular interest not only for their content, but also for the unusual site of their discovery. Following recent archaeological finds revealing the Philistines to be only one of a conglomerate of Ægean tribes that fought against God’s chosen people (Bierling 2002) these ancient warriors have been conjectured to be the ones who brought the tablets from Israel.

In his description of the Sea People pirate alliance, Ramesses II (c. 1285 BC) names some of these tribes, among them the Dardanians (Da-ar-d(a)-an-ya) who, after attacking Egypt, turned their attention to Israel. As it is well known, these were Aeneas’s people, the Trojans’ allies in the war. In ancient times, however, there was also a Dardanian kingdom in present-day Kosovo, likely one of the several colonies of that branch of the Dardanian tribe that traveled westward after the sack of Troy. The scholars have come to consider these people as the possible carriers of the ark and the cuneiform tablets.

Assuming that this might be what Israel called the Ark of the Covenant, which was lost to the Philistines in the wars described in 1 Samuel, the warriors who buried its contents in the Accursed Mountains may well be the ones referred to in the Bible as the giants, Goliath and company. These are the mythical giants north of Greece (ancient Gr. gegas), whose demonym still survives in the Gheg tribes of northern Albania.