Preface

One day in early 2006 I received an email from an individual who had an email account with a large, well-known internet service provider (or so it appeared from the email header). The user's name, which I withhold for reasons that will become apparent as you proceed, suggested that it was from a female from the Middle East. There is nothing particularly remarkable about that -- I'm on a dozen mailing lists and my email address is unfortunately available to the web crawlers and webworms that feed both SPAM engines and viruses alike.

Nor was there anything all that unusual (at first glance) about the message itself. It began with the usual disclaimer:

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Dear Sir:

I got your address from a Friend who vouches for Youre Trustiness. May Allah Bless you Sir, as you are my Last Resort.

My name is ____ (deleted). I was educated in the French school near ____ (deleted), although my family lives not far from where the Tigris joins the Euphrates...

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I had automatically scanned to this point even as I reached for the "D" key, but this last bit caught my attention and intrigued me. I've gotten ``Nigerian Scam'' email from every state in Africa, from Hong Kong, from Russia, from several countries in South America, and even from a couple of countries in the Middle East, but never purporting to come from Iraq. Especially not from Iraq in the middle of a "war" that seemed like it would never end.

I should explain that I actually used to collect Nigerian Scam letters (and have a hundred or so squirreled away, each of them gems in their own way) until it became clear that the supply would eventually overwhelm my capacity to store them. I find them amusing. This by way of explanation as to why I actually read on instead of typing the key that would send the letter on to the oblivion it seemed that it deserved. Perhaps this piece of Iraqi/Nigerian Scam was a "keeper"...

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...and have made quite a Discovery1. One day last fall I was dressed in my burka and sweating profusely as I drove my father's goats to pasture. One of the kids became stuck in a thorn bush and as I worked to get it out a truck filled with Americans raced by not far away and struck a mine.

The explosion blew me literally out of my burka; I and my goat were thrown out of the bush and into a nearby hole (a large crater from one of the American bombings, partly filled with rocks and debris). I started to climb out, but heard the sounds of much fighting, and realized that the mine was but the first step of an ambush. Bullets buzzed over my head like flies, and several more of my goats (who were no fools) joined me in the hole.

The fight continued until only two men were left, one from each side. They grappled together trying to kill each other and in their struggles fought their way to the top of the pit in which I and my surviving goats were hiding. Just as they seemed about to fall in with me, one of them managed to trigger an explosive device attached to his body and the world vanished in a tremendous explosion.

I came to myself quite naked, bruised, and bleeding. Parts of goats (mixed with parts of men) were liberally scattered about me -- it was only the will of Allah that left me alive and not badly hurt. Where the men were standing before there was now another large hole in the ground on the rim of the crater, and I was half buried in rock and dirt that was blown out of the edge of the pit and down onto me.

With some difficulty I managed to pull myself out of the dirt and crawl up the slope past the new crater, pushing boots with feet still inside out of my way as I went. As I paused to rest and catch my breath, I noticed that there was a rectangular block sitting at the bottom of the new hole. From where I lay, I could see some sort of script on the sides.

I immediately thought that this must be some sort of Antiquity, a Treasure known to fetch a High Price among the foreigners who were now plundering our land. Since I had lost all of my father's goats and it seemed that it was Allah's will that we would all starve (if I got home alive at all) I thought that perhaps this Treasure was a means of my family's Salvation. Surely you will not be surprised, Sir, that I took a few moments and some care to cover the exposed rock with the loose dirt of the crater's rim that I might be able to return to it later with my older brothers and claim it.

Alas, it was Allah's will that I would be caught almost immediately by the surviving Freedom Fighters (whoever they might have been, as it is difficult to know who fights whom in this War) who had set the trap. As I was Naked (and hence clearly Irresistible by the standards of Islam that confine all women to live unseen by Men lest those men go Out of Control) they proceeded to rape me and beat me, in spite of my bruises and protestations of Faith in Allah.

No sooner had they tired of me when a second group of fighters appeared who slaughtered the ones who had raped me and took me from them as the spoils of war. I was subjected to Rape a second time, on the principle that I must be a Harlot of the soldiers of the Other Side.

An hour later (at least they were very quick about it) as I was staggering away from the accursed place, the Americans finally arrived with their jets and armored cars and fell upon {\em this} group in a rage. They efficiently Massacred every living thing but myself. However as they were accompanied by Woman Soldiers they forbore to Rape me further (for which I was very grateful) and after being questioned and threatened with prison I was released to limp home.

They were even kind enough to lend me a jacket and such loose cloth as they had so I could cover my nakedness, but of course it wasn't proper garb for a good Muslim Girl and left my legs from the knees down exposed. Consequently I was Raped and otherwise manhandled a dozen more times before I made it home by goat herders and camel merchants and other Good Muslim Men. Unfortunately, my father was a Good Muslim Man as well, and seeing me dressed in such an outfit, half naked and obviously no longer a virgin he beat me soundly and cast me out into the street.

Fortunately my mother saw all that transpired between my father and myself and heard my piteous Pleas of Innocence and Faith as I was being beaten; she took it upon herself to risk my father's wrath by making me a bundle of clothing (including a fresh burka) and a few containers of food and a bit of money. After my father stormed off to the nearby tea-house to drink with his righteous friends (several of whom had Raped me while I was making my way home) she crept out and pressed this bundle into my hands. I believe it saved my life.

I lost no time in sneaking into the alley and dressing Properly (as I was getting rather tired of being Raped) so that no portion of me was visible save my eyes, which were already blackening from the beatings i received along with the Rapes. Once again dressed as a shapeless black form, I became an anonymous woman and as safe as a Muslim woman ever is. I walked away without looking back, and while walking I took my bearings, as it were. Although I felt a momentary twinge of guilt about it (mostly regarding my Mother) I decided that my family would just have to starve without the goat herd that was its sole means of income and that I was On My Own. I therefore made my way back to the vicinity of the crater, arriving there in the evening. It fortunately by now was deserted of living beings, although it was absolutely crowded with the recently dead and the ever-present vultures that come to prey on them. There I descended and managed to work the strangely carved object loose from the dirt I had pushed over it.

To my surprise, it was not a carved piece of an ancient building as at first I had supposed -- it was a small chest made of stone, with a tight fitting lid sealed with a greenish band of what might have been bronze metal or copper, but the last few fragments fell into dust flakes at my touch and I cannot be sure.

The chest itself was far too heavy for me to actually carry, and would not fit beneath my robes in any case. I felt certain that anything I was carrying outside of them would be at risk of being stolen, but once I left my Home Town (where my reputation was ruined and the only career path open to me was open whoredom until somebody decided to stone me to death) I might be safe from being Raped every five minutes. I therefore made the decision to open the chest and make off with whatever I found there. Using a knife from the belt of one of the dead to pry with, I managed to work the lid off of the chest and cut through what appeared to be a thick beaten gold foil underneath, taking care to preserve the gold.

To my surprise, the sole contents of the chest were a bundle of tightly rolled scrolls on golden spindles. I looked again at the cover of the chest, and noted that it appeared to display a woman, quite naked and of great beauty, surrounded by many children, flanked by two owls and standing above a cat. Above her head was an oval that represented something bright, with rays falling down upon her. Beneath her feet was an inscription which I, of course, cannot type to you in an email message but which appeared to be in a form of cuneiform, accompanied by a line of what appeared to be hieroglyphic text2 .

I emptied the large cloth shopping bag my mother had given me of food (taking a moment to eat, since I was about to begin a long journey and felt the need to restore my strength). Into this bag I placed the scrolls, carefully wrapped in my underthings, and I belted the whole thing firmly into place beneath my burka where Inshallah they would remain unmolested while I sought the opportunity to turn them into dinars. I then paused a moment to arm myself with Divers Arms -- a machine pistol and a handful of grenades from the bodies of the dead. Although they were quite heavy and unfamiliar to me I resolved to Never Again be Raped and indeed to See Rapists in Hell if they tried it.

I will not bore you with my Adventures on the road to Baghdad. Suffice it to say that (as a fallen woman and entitled now to charge money for the privilege of Rape) I arrived with far more means than I began with, and devoid of both grenades and ammunition for my machine pistol. Any number of would-be Rapists (who failed to properly negotiate on a monetary basis for the privilege) would Rape No More, including those that were still alive but missing certain parts when I finished with them.

Once there I promptly sought out a Foreign Benefactor with both money and a lust -- for Antiquities, of course. By using most of the money I'd accumulated to purchase western-style clothing (hoping that in Baghdad the probability of Rape for the sin of wearing less than a total cover was somewhat reduced) I managed to dress myself well enough in the western style to be permitted to frequent the foreign hotels after suitably bribing the hotel staff with money or my favors.

It took some time but finally I succeeded. An executive for one of the major American contracting firms expressed an interest in purchasing anything old that might be worth money while "taking me to dinner" -- a euphemism as that turned out to be for kidnapping me to a well-guarded house outside of Baghdad and proceeding to Rape me repeatedly while promising me vast riches. Unfortunately as I was now unarmed and he was supported in his Rape by his many minions I had to endure his attentions in hope he was honest about the eventual compensations I would receive.

Through this process (which involved the considerable disarrangement of my clothing) I had managed to keep the scrolls safe. Not an easy thing to do under western clothes, but simple enough in a large "purse", the handbag all Western Women wore and into which no man apparently dared to look.

Finally my host tired of his sport and was driven off in a great hurry to work, leaving me alone (but well guarded and effectively kept in a prison) in his household. That evening, he returned and after an admittedly excellent dinner, he Raped me repeatedly and then locked me into my room alone lest I turn on him for Revenge in his sleep. After a week of this I pretended to be Smitten and using Feminine Wiles I wheedled the use of his computer from him so that I could (purportedly) shop for clothes on the "Internet".

I was quite Gifted mathematically back in school (for a girl) and indeed put most of the boys in the school to shame, for which they (the boys) punished me in many ways -- mostly violent ones -- until my age made it impossible for me to associate with other male children at all lest I arouse their Lust and not just their Anger. At this point I was no longer permitted to attend school at all and was given instead the job of watching the goats while my fat and stupid brothers continued their education.

Fortunately my mother worked as a cleaning woman for some of the wealthier families in our town. From time to time she had secretly smuggled old magazines and other things to read from the trash of these families into our household (for me to read to her in secret when her work was done and the men were all away). It was therefore Allah's will that I knew what the Internet was, and what computers were, in some very general sort of way.

My captor, as it turned out, has no interest whatsoever in Antiquities, but rather has every interest in Juvenilities, in particular, in fourteen year old Fallen Girls such as myself (did I previously mention my age?) He has effectively kept me as a Sexual Slave for most of the last year. During this time I have learned many things, working all day on his computer system as a small return for the nights I spend satisfying his every perverted whim, for a mere pittance in money and gifts purchased from the Internet (as he otherwise never lets me out of my rooms, let alone out of the house).

One thing that I have learned to operate is his excellent scanner, which he uses in the evenings on documents that he brings to the house from his work. Using great care -- working for a whole day on a single scroll -- I have managed to scan all of the scrolls into image files. I also have used a drawing program to capture, as best I can remember, the general layout of the picture carved on the lid of the box and the characters underneath the engraved figure of the woman. I used search engines to try to find out how to read the scrolls and hence measure their worth, but alas this has proven to be difficult as online dictionaries of hieroglyphs are rare and incomplete, online dictionaries of cuneiform do not exist.

I even found a way of getting a free email account and a website that would sell me enough room to store the scanned images using my captor's Visa card number, as I became concerned that my captor would one day look through the directories he'd bequeathed to me on his personal system or conduct a thorough search of my room and belongings and discover my Only Treasure besides the ones that he soils every night in his Lust.

Alas, after suffering many months of uncompensated Rape my worst fears have finally come to pass. I have just celebrated my fifteenth birthday and my body has taken on a more Womanly Form, and my period has not come now for two months in a row. Consequently my host is less and less often interested in me, and when he does visit me he is finished after a single bout of Rape. I am afraid that soon he will tire of me and have me put to death by his willing servants and armed guards, probably after some more Rape if I know men (and by now, I know men Very Well Indeed).

I am about to take Desperate Measures to save myself from this fate. The scrolls themselves I have buried outside in the garden in a sealed can that once held powdered milk, where I can hope that they will be preserved if by some miracle I manage to Escape Before the End.

However, I do not wish for my discovery to perish with me should I be slain. I have therefore searched the net for a mentor, a savior, who can take custody of the content of these scrolls and puzzle out their meaning. For myself I care little -- I think that I am with child and have no desire to perpetuate the line of he who sired it upon me. Indeed, my life experiences are such that I would be likely to Castrate the Little Bugger should it turn out to be male. Once I am certain that the scrolls are safe, I will try to escape or die trying, and if I die I have taken certain steps that ensure that my captor dies with me. Or without me, for that matter.

I found your name, Sir, and your email address, on your website in association with your works on religion and philosophy which have given me some comfort in my captivity. As you are a Teacher and a Poet, I feel that I can trust you with my Great Secret. Please Sir, if you will, Help a Poor Girl and visit (web address withheld) and retrieve that which you find there? I trust you will then make the best use of it that seems fit to you.

Sincerely yours,

(name deleted)

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This seemed a bit extreme either for a Nigerian Scam or for a web-based marketing or virus attack. Usually these are a lot more terse and quite direct -- "Supercharge your Love Handle" or a lot more oblique and badly worded -- "This about you" -- as they try to get you to be a fool and actually click on their link or execute their attachment. Five page letters to lead you to one measly link is not their style.

To be frank, it seemed much more likely to be a hoax perpetrated by one of my current or ex-students or (more likely) one of my colleagues in the computing business who knew enough to be able to forge an email header through enough hops to appear to be completely consistent with her story (not an easy thing to do, actually). Computer geeks often have the sense of humor of a small child and a well-known tendency to build elaborate and impossible jokes -- computer viruses being one common example of this sort of "joke", for example -- so this isn't as unlikely as it might seem.

However, hoax or not, I admit to being captivated by the tone and content of the story. Even if it turned out to be some sort of scam in the long run, I felt, I simply had to look at whatever it was she had placed on her website. As I run Linux as an operating system (and hence am somewhat less susceptible to the kinds of website-borne viruses that permeate the web) I took the chance and opened up the included link.

It is very fortunate that I did. I was astounded by what I found there. Well over five hundred separately scanned high-resolution images of what appeared to be rolls of brownish cloth -- linen? -- covered with the reddish lines of a faded, unrecognizable script alternating with lines of what appeared to be a mix of cuneiform and hieroglyphs of a more recognizable, but still ancient, form. Simply to assemble these images (for a hoax or otherwise) must have been a work of true dedication -- thousands of hours of work. Suddenly a hoax seemed a bit less likely -- nobody I know or work with has this kind of time on their hands, and who would generate 500 plus documents of this stuff for fun? That's more like work.

Fully intrigued now, I attempted to reply to the message (something I almost never do in the case of messages originating from remote and unregistered clients that -- from the IP numbers in the headers and the route taken -- appeared to actually be located somewhere in Iraq) but received no further communications. In the meantime (while waiting for a reply) I used a web tool to quickly grab the entire contents of the directory that contained the scroll images and scanned drawings and store them safely on my local system, taking care to burn a couple of backup copies onto a DVD for safekeeping right away. I then spent some hours looking them over.

I got no reply to my return email, but some days later I did note in the newspaper, mixed in with the usual daily listings of car bombings, machine gunnings, rocket launchings and the other violent business-as-usual in Iraq that a high official working for a rather notorious and scandal-ridden government contractor was killed when his villa outside of Baghdad was destroyed by a mysterious explosion. Although the article reported the deaths of several of his guards as well, no mention was made of the body of a young girl or the discovery of a powdered milk can full of antiquities.

Coincidence? Hard to say, but it stimulated my imagination. I'm something of a romantic at heart. So I decided to invest just enough effort to determine whether the images that one way or another had ended up in my possession were "real" or just part of a hoax.

What I discovered therein rapidly convinced me that this young girl is (or was) real and what she appeared and claimed to be. Indeed, she was obviously so intelligent and capable that to me at least it still seems quite possible that she managed to get away and get her revenge at the same time. In fact, I pray that this is so, and hope that one day I may yet come to meet her and shake her hand.

Publishing this work makes this only more likely -- if by chance you should read this, Ms. _____ (or whoever you really are), please rest assured that all the money that has been made from publication of this story, all of the fame that has descended upon it and upon me, as Lilith's amanuensis (as it were) rightfully belong to you. Permit me only to verify that it is indeed you (as only you would be familiar with certain details of the story that I still keep privy) and I will happily arrange for you to receive your long awaited Fortune and will do everything in my power to help you move to a country where you can enjoy it free from any possibility of further Rape.

As for the rest of you, you are doubtless wondering why she contacted me, instead of somebody famous (or even somebody who isn't famous but is at least an archaeologist of one sort or another). I wonder the same thing. This in spite of what she said, because I (at the time) knew nothing at all, really, of cuneiform, hieroglyphics, unknown scripts, or ancient scrolls. Perhaps my correspondent confused my (fairly common) last name with that of some well-known or little-known translator or collector of ancient texts, who knows. Or, of course, perhaps she told the truth and chose me because she happened to discover my personal website and was captivated by the poetry and writings on philosophy to be found there. Naturally, my personal vanity makes me wish that this were true even as my common sense and modesty tell me that it is unlikely...

At any rate, perhaps it was a fortunate choice. Although I was utterly incompetent on that day to translate a single hieroglyph recorded on those images, what I did know is both how to make computers do nearly anything and how (using computers) to find somebody that does know about this sort of thing. Using a web-engine to translate a few lines of the hieroglyphics left me flabbergasted. I worked like a madman on creating a rough draft translation but was left stymied by the fact that existing dictionaries (at least the ones available on the web or via the Duke library) were two sizes too small for the concepts being communicated. At this point I took a handful of the photographic images of these scrolls and my crude translation of same to a nearby researcher (found with my trusty search engines) who does work on archaeological finds of this sort. She took one look at the images themselves and then brushed my crude translation aside with a sniff. However, her obvious excitement at what she saw was almost too great to be contained. We decided to join forces.

Working together on the translation rapidly became an obsession of us both. With resources that at at one point involved hundreds of computers running what amounts to image enhancement and decryption software on top of symbolic analysis software on top of the guesses made as to the meaning and proper translation of some of the oldest (still untranslated) written text fragments known to mankind and scrawled out on shards of dried mud and baked pottery (and exercising a certain amount of latitude and editorial freedom to rewrite and smooth over the remaining rough spots), a dictionary for a previously unknown written proto-language that is oldest written language ever discovered emerged, along with a translation of the scrolls themselves.

From what my archaeologist friend tells me, the whole world should bow down before this brave young girl and place her on a pedestal along with the greatest archaeologists of all time. As you shall see, these scrolls make the Dead Sea scrolls look like kids' comic books in terms of both historical content and antiquity. Indeed, some of their content bears upon that of the Dead Sea scrolls -- in particular the unpublished translations from those of the scrolls that have been (according to my colleague, at any rate) withheld from the public eye but whose outrageous content is some sort of open secret among the archaeological community.

However, my archaeologist friend also insists that her name be withheld from this (in her view, premature) publication of the translation for the time being, because there are certain curious aspects of the translated result that -- in spite of the lack of any possible motivation for a hoax of such great expense and attention to detail -- continue to give her some small reason to doubt their authenticity. Until such a time as we obtain the still missing original sources the possibility is of course left open that we are both the victims of a monstrous hoax which would ruin her academic career. Although that time may well prove to be "never" unless other copies are extant, (as I by now fear that they and their powdered milk can container have been blown to hell by the tides of war and mayhem after being preserved for nearly six thousand years) she chooses not to take this risk.

I have no such scruples and don't care about the risk as I don't have any academic reputation to protect, at least in archeology. Besides, I am personally convinced that the scroll images that this poor, probably dead Iraqi maiden found in the desert and entrusted to me are totally genuine. I continue to keep my fingers metaphorically crossed that both my correspondent and the original scrolls were preserved, powdered milk tin and all, from the holocaust that consumed her captor and guards, so that modern methods of objective historical analysis (such as carbon dating and genetically analyzing spores and pollen trapped in the weave of the scrolls) eventually validate my perceptions of the scrolls' antiquity if not authenticity.

If this ever happens, I expect that it will be be more than enough for all but the most skeptical -- the scrolls simply cannot be ancient and have the content that they do without being genuine, and if genuine they might even be true! If so they tell an accurate, if astounding, story of the literal dawning of Humanity. At that time I will ensure that my archaeologist colleague gets the credit she so richly deserves for helping to translate the oldest piece of recorded human history ever discovered.

Enough of the history of the scrolls themselves -- you now know as much as I do of their (apparent) origin. What, then, is the content of these scrolls, the most ancient (if genuine) written record of human civilization? They tell, in triply replicated scripts, the story of none other than the first woman herself.

No, I do not mean Eve. Any serious student of the Bible, the Ur-tablets that tell the tale of Gilgamesh, and other ancient writings is aware of the fact that Eve was not (according to the ancient texts that predate the entire Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious tradition and likely served as the template folk tale from which e.g. the book of Genesis was eventually written) the first woman, or one of the first two people created "by the hand of God".

What they are less likely to know is that Adam himself was also not the first, he was the second. At least according to these scrolls, whose authenticity I do not doubt, the book of Genesis has been considerably "sanitized", rewritten many times (doubtless by men) in Adam's favor.

No, the very first human being was Llth3 . Or L'l, or Lillake as she is known in the Ur-Epic of Gilgamesh: a handmaiden (or possibly harpy, the translations and context are not clear) of the goddess Inanna in ancient Sumeria. Or, as she is known in the relatively modern rendering of the few old-testament-era books and text fragments of the Jewish faith in which she appears, Lilith.

Note well that there are rich connections between these scrolls and ancient clay tablets, the dead sea scrolls, and other text fragments from antiquity that have also been preserved by accident of fate or human design. Tablets, scrolls, and sections of holy books, that were ultimately written (and rewritten) by the descendants of Adam, and that include additions, revisions and suppressions by whole generations of male priests, ministers, and clergy interested in preserving the patriarchal society that Adam sought to create in which women are basically chattel to men.

Most of these texts present an extremely biased picture of Lilith as being some sort of a biological construct made by God without a soul, who ultimately became the archetypical witch or vampire. Indeed, even a cursory examination of the religious rantings on the web that involve Lilith make her out to be the mother of all vampires, a she-demon who preys upon small children, a consort of the Devil and witch, or some sort of Mother Goddess worthy of worship and invocation in rites for her own sake, depending on which side of a very ancient fence you are on.

As the editor of this translation, I hold myself aloof from this antique (and somewhat silly) feud. As these scrolls faithfully and consistently reveal, neither of these views could be further from the truth and are clearly just Jungian archetypal projections of their adherents' personal religious views, a sort of metaphorical mutilation of an otherwise lovely tale.

Note well that the language of the scrolls is apparently far older than any surviving copies of the books of the Old Testament, far older than the dead sea scrolls, and even far older than the oldest of the cuneiform tablets that make up our earliest known historical documents. Given the the triple rendering (two of them in younger languages) it is likely that these scrolls are but copies on some sort of preserved linen of tablets or scrolls older still that have not survived, perhaps perishing in the calamitous burning of the Library of Alexandria along with much of the other knowledge of the ancient world. Without the original scrolls in our possession for analysis and dating we cannot be sure.

The scrolls are to all appearances an alternative version of the book of Genesis (one that precedes even the tablets of the Enuma Elish in the Ur-legend), and present a very different view of the story of the garden of Eden. That they were found, as it were, a mere stone's throw from where Eden is thought to have been4 only adds to the likelihood of their authenticity. It is also fairly clear from their content that they have not been subjected to the process of rewriting and editing (on the part of the early church patriarchs) that corrupts most of the Bible relative to the original source texts, old and new testament alike.

The final point of interest about these scrolls I hesitate to make known to you, as it will only serve as grist for the mill of those who would claim it as proof that the scrolls are some sort of hyper-intellectual hoax -- hyper-intellectual because only a genius could have created a prehistoric language -- symbol, syntax, grammar -- out of whole cloth in such a way that it seamlessly matches what is known of the languages of the most ancient tablets and fragments of Sumeria and Mesopotamia and Babylonia that have yet been discovered. A hoax produced by a hoaxer familiar with and capable of forging perfectly a text that is consistent with every detail of all the truly ancient greater Mesopotamian writings that still remain to us in original form -- the Enuma Elish, the Hullupu Tree, and of course the Epic of Gilgamesh. An Evil Genius hoaxer; no casual fly-by-night graduate student wishing to play a prank.

My archaeologist friend and colleague asserts that this is simply impossible -- she points out a dozen places that not even the world's greatest archaeologists working together for years would have been able to create a seamless linguistic interpolation of nearly all of the oldest fragments (including many tablet fragments not known to anyone outside of a very select community whose translations have been elucidated by our work on the scrolls). Then there are the nearly miraculous extension of these poorly understood written languages to a new written language (really of course a much older written language) with a far richer range of conceptual expression and with almost no visible overlap in syntax, grammar, or direct vocabulary with any known language of the world. It might as well be Martian for all one can discover historically without the aid of the translations provided within the scrolls themselves.

This new language contains words and ideas that simply did not exist in the common languages of the times of cuneiform and hieroglyph and we had to work very hard to analyze the entire (fortunately very long) document to succeed. Without my computers and my partner's very considerable historical and linguistic expertise, we would never have succeeded. In the process it became clear from parenthetical remarks and linguistic style that two very different individuals wrote the hieroglyphic and cuneiform versions of the text -- one a relatively cosmopolitan Egyptian female and the other a somewhat stuffy Sumerian priest. The tension between these two writers and the contrast between their variations of the story were invaluable aids as we attempted to discern meaning in languages that are several sizes too small.

Academic honesty now compels me to make this -- problem -- known to you in case you wish to skip reading the text altogether as a consequence, or read it as a work of presumed modern fiction (worthwhile in its own right, I think) instead of as the Mother of Myths that it otherwise appears to be. The translation of the scrolls, as accurately as we are able to make it out, is full of anachronisms. This in indeed obvious almost from the beginning, and is internally explained by the content of the documents themselves.

This is rather frightening; so much so that I fully expect most people to reject their authenticity on this basis alone. Of course we should expect a prophetic work to contain anachronisms. All truly prophetic works are {\em by definition} anachronistic. Prophecy is anachronism.

However, Biblical prophecy usually falls absurdly short of the mark. Where in the Bible are things like computers, nuclear bombs, or the Internet predicted? Or anything like a reference to evolution, the big bang, optical nanoscale computing and information storage devices, bluetooth, even something really modest like the fact that planets are worlds that orbit the sun instead of the other way around?

They're just not there. And they should be. Instead, the Bible has the sun stopping in the sky and doing other remarkable things that egregiously violate known physical law, making God out to be something of a liar who would violate the laws that He (or She, or It if you prefer) decreed. Not to pick on the Judeo-Christian-Muslim Old Testament, of course -- all religious texts routinely include reports of historical miracles that can no longer be scientifically repeated or verified mixed with prophecy.

The anachronisms -- prophecies if you like -- in The Book of Lilith are not like this at all. They are up front, in your face references to future knowledge all the way up to our present time and beyond. They contain clear references to modern physics and cosmology, to evolution and to genetics, even to theories of psychology and to much foreknowledge of computer science. It is simply impossible that all of this could have been known by a primitive people (people for whom even an abacus was still in the unknown future), yet is it equally impossible that it could be a hoax.

This is, of course, the kind of accuracy one should expect the prophets of the One True Religion to have. If a prophet is truly "inspired by God", they should get it right and not mask the truth in some sort of metaphorical allegorical hyperbolic story that can be interpreted however the reader wishes, as are (for example) the equally anachronistic works of Nostradamus or the unintelligible, probably ergot-induced hallucinogenic ravings of Revelations.

We actually find this sort of metaphorical vagueness to be rather comforting, of course. There is nothing more terrifying than a prophet that actually predicts things in clear, unambiguous terms. For example, imagine Revelations' impact on the world if they had stated things like "A man named Adolph Hitler will take over a country named Germany and wipe out six million Jews, ten million Russians, and a few million miscellaneous assorted others." Which of course never happens -- dates, times, specifics are all anathema to the prophet, as when the date passes and the specific prophecy fails to come to pass, well, that can wreck your reputation as a prophet really quickly. We mustn't forget that there are also serious problems with causality and prophecy (explored by many a science fiction novel) where such a prophecy causes Hitler to be killed as a child thus guaranteeing that any real prophecy is almost certain to be self-defeating instead of self-fulfilling.

The prophets that survived (or rather, whose reputation has survived) to the current day are those that did not make this sort of elementary mistake. It's pure evolution -- survival of the fittest, where in this case fitness means vaguest (hardest to prove wrong) and most apocalyptic (scariest should they prove right).

The "prophecies" in the scrolls are nothing like this. They aren't even presented as prophecies. Rather they are presented in almost an offhand way, as unimportant future background to the description of the present of that time. They were the terrifying, unambiguous sort, like you'd expect a real prophet to make, and because they were lost for some five or six thousand years, they did not have a chance to modify their own effectiveness, to become self-defeating.

"Expected" or not, these anachronisms present one with a stark choice. You, dear reader, can choose (or not) to read the text and then decide for yourself whether (or not) the words have the ring of truth to them. There is no other possible basis for decision, as the scrolls themselves are apparently lost and are too old to be directly referenced by newer texts.

Are these indeed the writings of Lilith herself -- for they are written in the first person, unlike any other work that has survived from this era -- dare I say miraculously preserved and and discovered in the nick of time for our lost generation to read and learn from, or are they a hoax inspired by a mad genius with a near-supernatural education and too much time on his or her hands? It is up to you.

I know which one I believe.

As a final note, please observe that the translated text is sprinkled liberally with annotations on the translation process. Every effort has been made to render a language that is almost incomprehensibly difficult into colloquial English (since preserving any sense of the original poetry is all but impossible anyway). In some cases (especially early in the process) the literal translations of the accompanying cuneiform and hieroglyphic passages are included to that the reader can accompany us on our journey to truth and see how we arrived at the final translation. Lilith's first person discourse has also been rendered, at some small expense in verbatim accuracy, in the modern form with quotation marks and so on to offset conversations she holds with God and the other important characters of her drama.

There are, regrettably, a few holes in the text translated from the scrolls that we have attempted to interpolate. In some cases these are literally holes -- perhaps a single moth was trapped with the scrolls when they were first sealed up and enjoyed a sumptuous last meal before dying of dehydration and suffocation. If so, the carbon dioxide the moth doubtless exhaled as it expired seems to have acted as a miraculous preservative across the millennia. However, two scrolls were also damaged by some other action. The first is simply unreadable except for a few dozen lines of disconnected text. One contains (fortunately!) the tale of Lilith's final days but ends before we learn what became of Cain.

From the images, the fabric itself of this last scroll appears to be at least partly intact and covered with smudges that might have been text. Perhaps it could be re-scanned with ultra-violet light and the resulting image enhanced if we had possession of the original scrolls, but in the otherwise remarkably well-done scans in our possession this is alas impossible, even using image enhancement tools developed by NASA and the Department of Defense for space photography. We can only pray that the war in Iraq ends quickly so that a proper search can be instituted for the originals, that they may be brought into the light of day and given the scientific scrutiny they so richly deserve.

So, dear Reader, you should be aware even as you begin that the story of how Lilith's legacy was passed on and how the scrolls themselves came to be saved as they were and survive to our time is as much a mystery to us now as it was before the scrolls themselves were found. However, there are clues aplenty in the world around us that suggest how at least part of it might have worked out, and of course the world of today is what it is because of it. I would like to think that Grandmother Lilith would be proud of at least some of the Soul apparent in our world of today, even as she would be appalled at how fragile our own understanding of "that which watches the watcher, watching the world" still is.

1. My obviously female correspondent was not terribly literate and made many misspellings and used capitalization (sometimes of whole words) to emphasize points. I have preserved her actual words in this first part so that you can see that her language was consistent with who she claimed to be but I have made many editorial corrections in the following to make it easily readable, while trying to leave the Victorian Charm of the prose intact.

2. This only confirmed my initial impulse to believe this whole letter a fraud, of course. How would the daughter of a goat herder have learned what these even are let alone how to recognize them? Yet this is explained in the later course of the letter, where it also becomes quite obvious that my correspondent was really amazingly bright.

3. This is a very rough translation of characters in a lost language -- possibly, from the content of the scrolls themselves the lost proto-indo-european language from the Indus river civilization! However, my colleague asserts that if this is the case it will take years of painstaking work to prove it. Note well that we have no proper Rosetta stone beyond the crude triple-translation table written into the scrolls themselves that preserved both the original language and a crude rendering in newer and less sophisticated tongues. In particular the characters used do not greatly resemble those of any known language except perhaps Sanskrit, and aside from tantalizing words here and there that might be related to more modern (but still incredibly ancient) works there is little to go on. So it is difficult to know if our assigned pronunciations are correct, if the language indeed used implicit vowels in some way we cannot detect from the script (imagine how English is pronounced relative to how it is spelled, or French), save from their translations in non-phonetic languages altogether.}

4. Recalling that the fourth river mentioned in Genesis as flowing out of Eden is Euphrates.

Notice

This is a work of fiction. Any Gods, Goddesses, Religious Figures, and Demons portrayed herein are strictly products of my imagination and are not intended to resemble in any way certain similarly named Gods, Goddesses, Religious Figures or Demons otherwise portrayed in certain well-known religious texts and either worshipped or despised by large numbers of people around the planet. Really, it is just a coincidence that they often have similar names.

Honest.

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Robert G. Brown

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