Who Are the Pre-Adamites?

I am looking at a simple question. Were there people, or other intelligent races, here before the biblical Adam?

Those earlier beings are the Pre-Adamites.

Who are the Pre-Adamites? Early Islamic tradition already names jinn and hinn as earlier intelligent creatures. Hindu books of repeating ages tell a long story of races before this time. Persian story books and Nabatean farm legends tell that kind of story too. Isaac La Peyrère’s 1655 book on men before Adam is the written case I still use.

I put that next to the Nephilim. I also keep flood survivors, the Elohim, and the creation stories in view.

What Pre-Adamites are

When I say Pre-Adamites, I mean anyone said to be in the world before Adam. I am reading that through Genesis. They may be human. They may not be human.

Some accounts mean earlier people. Gentiles before the Hebrew Adam. Earlier Adams in long ages. Farm ancestors who already had parents.

Other accounts mean intelligent creatures that are not ordinary humans. Jinn, hinn, and related Arabian tradition belong there.

On this site I put Pre-Adamites with deep-time humanity, with giants, and with flood survivors. I do not force them into one list of races.

Early Islam: jinn and hinn

Medieval Islamic tradition often says mankind comes after earlier intelligent creatures. Those creatures include jinn and hinn.

Jinn are often pictured as human-like pre-Adamites. They are born of fire. They already walked the earth when Adam’s line arrived.

The Qur’an is close to that tradition. In Q 15:26–27, a standard tafsir reading says jinn were created before humankind from fire.

Tafsir is Qur’anic commentary.

I use that verse as scripture for “creatures before Adam.” It is not a full Pre-Adamite teaching by itself.

Hinn belong to Arabian and Islamic tradition of races before Adam. They stand next to the jinn.

Some lists also name binn, timm, and rimm.

Later historians sometimes say hinn or binn were cleared from the earth so jinn could live there. Those chains are often weak. I still take those stories seriously.

From the mid-9th century another idea appears. It is the idea of several Adams. Each age lasts about 50,000 years. Some Ismaili and Sufi teachers accepted that 50,000-year age.

Ismaili and Sufi groups are inner schools of Islamic teaching.

Mainstream voices often called that idea heretical. So “before Adam” can mean before this Adam. It does not have to mean before every possible Adam.

Mankind is the successor of earlier intelligent creatures such as jinn and hinn.

Jinn and hinn are non-human pre-Adamites. Earlier people and earlier Adams are human pre-Adamites. I keep those as two related questions.

I follow the small-people side of this trail on Little People.

Hindu cycles (brief)

Hindu Puranas describe repeating cycles of creation.

Puranas are Hindu books of gods, ages, and origins.

Humans, gods, and other beings rise and fall before the current age.

I read those repeating ages next to the Pre-Adamite idea. This is not a commentary on Genesis.

Earlier races belong there. So do flood figures who start humanity again, such as Manu. The world is older than a single first man.

La Peyrère: Prae-Adamitae (1655)

Isaac La Peyrère (c. 1596–1676) was a French theologian. Older forms of the name include Isaac de la Peyreira.

His Latin Prae-Adamitae appeared in 1655. The English Men before Adam followed in 1656, with Systema theologicum.

I review both books on their own pages: the Latin Praeadamitae of 1655 and the English Men before Adam of 1656.

He starts from Romans 5:12–14. If Adam sinned under law, and law began with Adam, then a lawless world already existed. People already lived in that world before Adam.

In his model, Gentiles came first. Adam is father of the Hebrews / Jews. Original sin tracks Adam’s line.

The Flood is partial. It wipes Adam’s race, except Noah’s family. It is not a total wipe of every human on earth.

The book was condemned and burned in Paris. La Peyrère later abjured Calvinism before Alexander VII.

Abjured means he formally took the teaching back. I still use the book.

The Genesis details he uses still help. Cain fears “whosoever findeth me.” A protective mark follows. A wife is already available. A city stands in Nod. All of that implies other people outside Adam’s tiny household:

Behold, Thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the land; and from Thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; and it will come to pass, that whosoever findeth me will slay me. … And the LORD set a sign for Cain, lest any finding him should smite him. And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife… and he builded a city…

Genesis 4:14–17 (JPS Tanakh 1917 substance)

The points I still use from his case:

1. Cain’s exile, mark, wife, and city imply other people already on earth.
2. The many kinds of people look older than one family after Eden.
3. Peoples spread across the earth are hard to squeeze into Adam’s immediate family alone.
4. Ancient civilizations appear too early for a short Adam-only timeline.
5. Giants / Nephilim do not fit a simple Adam-only family.
6. The Flood reads as regional, or limited to Adam’s race, in his model. It is not a total wipe of the planet.

Later writers twisted pre-Adamism into racist polygenism.

Polygenism is the claim of separate human origins used to rank races.

I do not take that abuse from La Peyrère. I read other races and intelligences before Adam as a paleo-contact and deep-time trail. That is not a racial ranking dressed as theology.

Huschenk-Nameh and Nabatean Agriculture

The Huschenk-Nameh is the Hushang-Nameh tradition as cited in 19th-century legend collections. Sabine Baring-Gould’s Legends of Old Testament Characters is one of those collections. It places pre-Adam people on the isle Muscham in the Maldives. The Muscham story is in Chapter 2, Adam.

Persians call the flat-headed men Nim-ser. Their king is Dambac. After Adam settles in Ceylon they submit. After his death they guard his tomb by day. Lions guard it by night. They guard it against the Divs.

Divs are demonic or anti-divine beings in Persian tradition.

This is a Persian and Eastern story book. The names are given. The picture is sharp. I use it as another story of a race before Adam.

Nabatean Agriculture (Kitāb al-Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya) was written or translated by Ibn Wahshiyya around 904. It claims people lived before Adam. It claims Adam had parents. It claims Adam came from India. In that telling Adam is father of an agricultural civilization. He is not father of all humanity.

The book circulated among Jewish philosophers. Judah Halevi and Maimonides dispute Sabian and Nabatean claims while they summarize them.

In Maimonides’ outline, Adam appears as an individual born of male and female. He is a prophet or envoy of the moon. He has compilations on cultivating the soil. He travels from India toward Babylon.

I read that as Adam the culture-bringer and farm founder, not only Adam the first man. I put that split next to creation stories and the Elohim pages.

Bailly: the Dives and the Peris

Bailly takes this from Persian stories as they stand in Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale. He does not open a Persian chronicle himself. The notes on these pages name Herbelot.

On page 132 he gives the saying. Before Adam was formed, God created the Dives and gave them the world to govern for seven thousand years. The Peris followed them and held the earth for two thousand years more. The Dives were powerful and strong, and a note says they were giants. The Peris were better and wiser.

He then pulls off the dress the fable put on them. The fable makes the Dives male and the Peris female. He says the two kinds stayed distinct, did not join as sexes, and were enemies rather than a couple. He is surprised that the Dives were made so wicked. He trusts the words more than that paint, and he thinks the memory under the paint is the one best kept.

His reason is the word itself, on the next page. In the East a divan is the assembly of the ministers who keep authority, and it is also a collection of writings, a source of instruction. He says that word is taken from Dive. So the Dives were strong and taught. People cursed them from one age to the next, and still kept, in that word, the force of their mind.

On page 134 their king is Gian, or Gian-ben-Gian, monarch of the Peris. He was famous for wars and for great works. Bailly counts the pyramids of Egypt among the monuments of that power. The king’s shield was kept for generations. It was not a shield against swords. It was said to break charms, and astronomy had a part in making it. Gian-ben-Gian reigned two thousand years over the Peris.

Then God sends Eblis, whom the note calls the same name as Satan, to hunt them for their disorders and to shut them into the most remote part of the earth. Gian-ben-Gian is beaten in one general battle, and the nation is scattered. An old line, which Bailly copies, asks what became of the people of Gian, son of Gian, and answers: look what time has done with them.

A later page, 162, is the one that makes them human. Herbelot says the Dives were not pure spirits. They had bodies, and they died. The Persians also use divmardum for a wild animal with a human figure. Bailly takes that as a faun, or what his own century called an orangutan. His conclusion is that Dive first meant a man. Distance and fear lifted the word above the human, and the Persian language kept the lifted form.

On 2 April 1778 he puts them on a map. The mountains where the Peris lived, and beyond which the Dives were set apart, are Caf and Damavend. Damavend was a town of Adherbigian, old Media, at 37 degrees, at the foot of a chain that runs into the Caucasus. He says the mountains of Caf are the Caucasus itself. The chain goes from the Black Sea to the Caspian, then south across Asia under the name Imaüs, as far as China. It is the wall between the northern climates and the warmer countries. The Scythians lived beyond that wall, as the Dives were said to live beyond Caf, and he likens the Scythians and the Tartars who followed them to the Dives: conquerors, feared, living off the people who worked the ground.

In the letter before that he says the same thing without the map. The Dives, the Peris, and the fairies were not lesser gods. They were a race of men, far back in time, seen through a veil, and made larger by fear and by love. He counts four lost peoples he can show: the Atlantes, a neighboring people Plato points to, the Dives, and the Peris.

So the Persian memory, as he uses it, is an earlier people, strong and instructed, set on the far side of the Caucasus, and then broken and scattered in one war. The fairies and the devils are the later dress.

The parallel in Oahspe

I find the same pattern in Oahspe, in the First Book of the First Lords. It has two early peoples living side by side. The I’hins are small, wise and holy. They match the Peris. Oahspe itself calls the I’hins “the little people”. I come back to that on Little People. The druks are tall and stout. Oahspe says they had not the light of the Father in them, and that they went away into the wilderness. They match the Dives.

The I'hins were white and yellow, but the druks were brown and black; the I'hins were small and slender, but the druks were tall and stout.

Oahspe, First Book of the First Lords, Ch. II, v. 4

Oahspe also has a third kind. The Yaks are ground people. They do not walk wholly upright, and their arms are long. They sit close to Herbelot’s divmardum, the wild animal with a human figure.

Now, because the druks had not previously obeyed the Lord, but went and dwelt with the asu'ans, there was a half-breed race born on the earth, called Yak, signifying ground people; and they burrowed in the ground like beasts of the forest. And the Yaks did not walk wholly upright, but also went on all fours.

Oahspe, First Book of the First Lords, Ch. II, v. 5

The war fits too. The druks stored nothing for the winter. They plundered the stores of the I’hins, and the war spread over the whole earth. The I’hins were scattered. That is close to the one battle that broke Gian-ben-Gian and scattered his nation.

And the druks plundered the I'hins; and evil spirits sat upon the I'hins also, and many of them were inspired to defend their stores. And war ensued; and it spread around about the whole earth.

Oahspe, First Book of the First Lords, Ch. III, v. 14

The two accounts also differ. In Bailly the Dives rule first and the Peris follow. In Oahspe the I’hins come first and the druks are born after them. Oahspe calls the asu’ans Adams, so its peoples are not from before Adam. The numbers of years do not match, and Oahspe does not set these peoples beyond the Caucasus.

Out of the I’hins and the druks came the I’huans, and Oahspe’s Book of Wars Against Jehovih says Parsi’e was “peopled with very giants”. I follow that line on The I’huan, I’hins, Druks, and Yaks.

Genesis: Adamites, Cain, Nod, Nephilim, flood

Genesis is where I use Pre-Adamites as a paleo-contact trail.

Adam is the named first man in the standard Genesis reading. Pre-Adamite questions ask what else was already here. Other people. Other intelligences. Or earlier Adams.

Cain, Nod, wife, and city is La Peyrère’s main argument from Genesis. Fear of strangers points past a closed Adamite family of four. So do a protective mark, a wife, and a built city.

Nephilim / giants in Genesis 6 do not fit a simple Adam-only family. I follow that on the Nephilim. They are hybrid. They are tall. They stand next to the Adamite line in deep time.

Flood / Noah is the reset question. La Peyrère’s partial flood leaves room for other survivors and other lines. I put that next to Utnapishtim, Ziusudra, and Noah.

Romans 5:12–14 is still the theology he starts from. Law, death, and Adam turn on that text. That is not proof that nothing intelligent lived earlier.

I also keep the 12 Elohim for the idea that Elohim is a host of creators. I keep the Dead Sea for the geography of destruction next to flood and judgment stories.

I read Pre-Adamites, Nephilim, and flood survivors as a long human story next to the biblical Adam.

Ancestry from a single couple

No positive evidence that we can trace our ancestry exclusively from a single couple.

Mitochondrial Eve

In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also mt-Eve, mt-MRCA) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman.

In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 155,000 years ago, consistent with a date later than the speciation of Homo sapiens but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal. LINK

Not the only woman
One common misconception surrounding Mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her, she must have been the only woman alive at the time. However, nuclear DNA studies indicate that the effective population size of the ancient human never dropped below tens of thousands. Other women living during Eve’s time may have descendants alive today but not in a direct female line.

Pre-Adamic race of men

Now that we have some clues for a pre-adamic race of men, where can we find evidence for this?

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

Genesis 2:19-20

From: Rudolf Steiner: ATLANTIS AND LEMURIA

The first sub-race of the Atlanteans is called in Theosophical literature the Rmoahal. The memory of this race was especially derived from vivid sense-impressions. Colours which the eye had seen, tones which the ear had heard, continued to operate long within the soul. This was manifested in the fact that the Rmoahals developed feelings quite unknown to their Lemurian ancestors. For instance, adherence to that which had been experienced in the past constituted part of such feelings.

Now the development of speech depended on that of memory. As long as man did not remember the past, there could be no narration of experiences by means of speech. And because the first rudiments of a memory appeared in the latest Lemurian period, it was only then possible that the ability to give names to things heard and seen could begin to appear. It is only those who have the faculty of recollection who can make any use of a name which has been given to an object; and consequently it was in the Atlantean period that speech found its development. And with speech a tie was formed between the human soul and things exterior to man, since he then produced the spoken word from within himself, and this spoken word appertained to the objects of the outer world. Through communication by means of speech a new bond also arose between man and man. All this, indeed, was still in an elementary form at the time of the Rmoahals; but nevertheless it distinguished them profoundly from their Lemurian ancestors.

Alexander Winchell, 1824-1891

How I use this in my research

Pre-Adamites give me the before-Adam question that I take to other pages.

The Nephilim holds giants and other beings outside a single Adamite line. Creation stories holds origins, a prior cosmos, and Elohim. Utnapishtim, Ziusudra, and Noah holds flood survivors and a deep-time flood. The 12 Elohim holds Genesis creator-host language. The Dead Sea holds destruction and judgment geography.

Jinn and hinn strengthen the same trail. So do La Peyrère’s Gentiles-before-Adam, Nabatean farm legends, and Cain’s neighbors in Nod. Genesis sits inside a longer world of races and intelligences. It is not a closed timeline that starts at Adam alone.

FAQ

Who are the Pre-Adamites?

People or intelligent races said to exist before the biblical Adam.

These include Early Islamic jinn and hinn. They also include several-Adams ages. La Peyrère’s Gentiles before the Hebrew Adam belong here. So do Nabatean legends of people before Adam, and Persian story-book races before Adam.

What do Early Islam traditions say about Pre-Adamites?

Mankind often comes after jinn and hinn as earlier intelligent creatures. Some mid-9th-century teachers speak of several Adams and ages of about 50,000 years. Qur’anic readings place jinn before humankind from fire. That is a creatures-before-Adam verse. It is not the whole teaching by itself.

Who was Isaac La Peyrère?

Author of Prae-Adamitae (1655) and Men before Adam (1656). He used Romans 5:12–14 plus Cain’s mark, wife, and city in Nod. He argued for people before Adam. He argued for two creations: Gentiles first, then Adam as Hebrew father. He argued for a partial Flood. Later racist polygenism misused that trail. I do not.

How do the Nephilim fit with Pre-Adamites?

Genesis 6 giants / Nephilim do not fit a simple Adam-only family. I read them with the Pre-Adamites, and with deep-time and paleo-contact research. See the Nephilim.

How do I use Pre-Adamites in research?

As the before-Adam question. The close pages are Nephilim, creation stories, Utnapishtim / Noah flood survivors, Elohim, and Dead Sea geography. I use it as paleo-contact and deep-time research where the trail fits.

Related on this site

1. The Nephilim: giants and other beings beside the Adamite line.
2. Creation stories: origins, prior cosmos, and Elohim neighbors.
3. Utnapishtim, Ziusudra, and Noah: flood survivors and deep-time deluge.
4. The 12 Elohim: Genesis Elohim / creator-host trail.
5. The Dead Sea: destruction and judgment geography.