Table of Contents
In Genesis, Cush is simply a son of Ham and the father of Nimrod. In Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis, the Cushites become something much larger: a red, sunburnt branch of the Atlantean stock, a vast early empire, a script, and a form of government. Most of what this site says about them comes from Donnelly, with a video on Kush and the origins of writing alongside. I brought it together here.
Son of Ham, father of Nimrod
Genesis 10 – Noah’s offspring lists Cush among the sons of Ham, with Mizraim, Phut and Canaan, and gives the verse that ties him to the first great king:
And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
Genesis 10:8 (KJV)
Red men of the Atlantean stock
Donnelly reads the name as a description. On The Question of Complexion he writes:
The Cushites and Ethiopians, early branches of the Atlantean stock, took their name from their "sunburnt" complexion; they were red men.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
The Oldest Son of Noah builds the same picture into his scheme of races, with a Hamitic family he calls “the sunburnt” race, a red race, and Conclusions of the Great Flood story says the flood story refers to the Mediterranean races, among them the Aryans, the Cushites, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews and the Egyptians. On The Destruction of Atlantis described in the deluge legends, the flood traditions are said to belong to three races: Aryan, Semitic, and Chamitic or Cushite.
The Ethiopians have their own page, Ethiopians, which follows Cush the son of Ham, the Gihon of Genesis 2 and the Ethiopian Bible.
The empire of Atlantis
On Traditions of Atlantis, Donnelly quotes Rawlinson on the reach of the early Cushite Empire, “from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the mouth of the Ganges,” and calls it the empire of Dionysos, the empire of “Ad,” the empire of Atlantis. The chapter links the Arv-ad of Genesis with the Ar-Ad of the Cushites.
Donnelly also sees a political model in it. On The antiquity of some of our great inventions:
The Cushite state was an aggregation of municipalities, each possessing the right of self-government, but subject within prescribed limits to a general authority; in other words, it was precisely the form of government possessed to-day by the United States.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
Writing and language
Several pages trace writing back to the Cushites. The Origin of Our Alphabet follows the alphabet back through the Egyptians and the archaic forms of the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Cushites, and treats archaic Ethiopian as the language of the Cushite branch of the Atlantean stock. The Oldest Son of Noah mentions an inscription at Samarcand in Himyarite or Cushite characters, and on The god Odin, Woden, or Wotan the language links reach into Arabian, Cushite, Chaldean and Phoenician tongues.
The video Kush, Cuniform and the Medu Neter goes further back. It describes older symbols used by southern African peoples that grew into the Cushite system, which then fed into the writing of Kemet, and it presents the Cushites as the founders of both cuneiform and the Medu Neter.
The pyramids of Kush
The kingdom of Kush also left monuments. The video Kushite pyramids and Timbuktu’s books starts at Meroe in Sudan, a capital of Kush, with its steep, narrow pyramids built well after the Old Kingdom for nobles and queens as well as kings. The narration describes tomb art Egyptian in script and local in the faces (watch at 4:00), and puts forward a theory that Kush shaped Egyptian pyramid building rather than the other way round.
Related pages
- The Question of Complexion
- Traditions of Atlantis
- The antiquity of some of our great inventions
- The Origin of Our Alphabet
- The Oldest Son of Noah
- Genesis 10 – Noah’s offspring
- Ethiopians
- Kush, Cuniform and the Medu Neter
- Kushite pyramids and Timbuktu’s books
For every page I tagged with Cushites, see the Cushites tag archive.
