David Hatcher Childress - A Hitchhikers Guide to Armageddon

By
David Hatcher Childress

Copyright 2000
All Rights Reserved
David Hatcher Childress

Published by
Adventures Unlimited Press

www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com

Thanks to all the folks at Adventures Unlimited

The backward look behind the assurance of recorded history,
the backward half-look over the shoulder,
towards a primitive terror.
T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

Who controls the past controls the future;
who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell, 1984

You call this archaeology?
Wendell Jones, Sr.

T he light was blinding. It turned dark red and then orange. Then I opened my eyes. I saw flies buzzing around my face. It was another hot morning in the Middle East. I glanced up from my sleeping bag. I had spent that night in a park outside of Akko, an old crusader town in northern Israel.

Soon, the flies began to crawl over my face like army ants over a Brazilian farm. I pulled the sheet over my head and tried to get another 20 minutes of sleep.

Armageddon seemed far away then, back in 1978. Tension existed in the Middle East, but the omnipresent armed guards and gun-toting youths were not part of the overall Armageddon assault. That would come later. For now, things were relatively calm, and I was merely a young college dropout who was travelling across Asia and Africa.

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be alone? To be totally alone, where no one knows who you areor cares? One way to find out is to try hitchhiking in a foreign country, standing at a lonely crossroads in some remote junction miles from nowhere, with your thumb out, and maybe a sign with your destination on it. Suddenly youre no one, nobody, anybody. The man with no name, the man with any name. The man with no friends, and no enemies. A solitary man. A man standing on the road, waiting for ride.

I had hitchhiked from the Golan Heights, the former Syrian territory now occupied by Israel, and had made my way along the Lebanese border to this spot near the ancient castle of Akko. I had gotten several lifts to this point, one in an old truck full of watermelons. It was late when the watermelon truck dropped me off at the crossroads north of Haifa. An orchard nearby had plenty of trees and secluded spots to sleep for the night. I didnt have a tent, but it didnt seem like it would rain that evening.

That night I had dreamed of lost cities in the deserts and continents rising from the ocean. I dreamed of angry warriors laying waste to whole cities. I dreamed of Armageddon and its aftermath.

I had thought about Armageddon sometimes before. I had heard of it, mainly through television and movies, and the occasional book that I saw in bookstores such as The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. Lindsey, a fundamentalist Christian, believed that God had created the earth some six or seven thousand years ago, and that Armageddon was imminent. This massive conflagration, started by the Communists, would ultimately involve most of the world. The destruction wrought by this World War III would be considerable, literally the end of the world according to Lindsey.

I had always been interested in history, ancient civilizations, mysteries of the past, and unusual topics in general. Prophecy, and the general area of precognition and psychic predictions intrigued me a great deal. The topic of Armageddon piqued my interest, though my view of the universe was much broader than Reverend Lindseys.

The prophecies of the end times found in the writings of the Bible, Nostradamus, Mother Shipton and others fascinated me. These predictions indicated that a terrible world war is to be fought that will involve the Middle East. It has been suggested that this war was World War II, which did involve some fighting in the Middle East; it embroiled most of the world, and its images of destructive power are still very much with us today. Still, it seemed to me that Armageddon, and the subsequent building of the New Jerusalem (according to the Biblical Revelation) was an event yet to come. Others thought so, too.

However, as I brushed the flies away from my head and sat up in my sleeping bag, it occurred to me that the Armageddon of my dream could be looming on the horizon: the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had just been assassinatedby officers in his own army, no less.

A few days later, after hitchhiking to Jerusalem, and then on to Gaza, I was in Egypt. I was at the Great Pyramid, sitting on a block of stone. The dusty, noisy streets of Cairo and the Giza suburb lay below me. I gazed to the southwest and could see two more giant pyramids. Soldiers mounted on camels, with their automatic rifles slung across their laps, rode about in the distance.

The sun blazed down on me as I clutched my ticket for the Great Pyramid. Like hundreds of other tourists on this January day in 1978, I would climb up the face of the pyramid and enter into it. As I sat at the base of the Great Pyramid, I wondered again about Armageddon, and how the concept had originated.

The First Recorded Armageddon

The New Kingdom period of ancient Egypt was an exciting time. This was a time of great prosperity and, economically at least, Egypt was perhaps at its peak. It had begun expanding into Asia Minor, and the age saw great ocean voyages such as Queen Hatshepsuts voyage to the fabled land of Punt, thought to be in East Africa, or possibly as far south as Mozambique or Zimbabwe.

At the time Tuthmosis III (who had reigned as coregent with Queen Hatshepsut since 1504 BC) ascended to the throne on Hatshepsuts death in 1482 BC, four decades had passed without a major Egyptian military campaign in western Asia. Now the situation changed completely. The King of Qadesh, a strong fortified city on the River Orontes in northern Syria, led a Syrio-Hittite-Canaanite confederacy in a general rebellion against Egypt.

In response, Tuthmosis III, as yet a young man and often called the Napoleon of Egypt, marched into western Asia to regain the territories between the Nile and Euphrates that had been conquered forty years earlier by his ancestor Ahmose.

Over the next 20 years Tuthmosis III led a total of 17 campaigns in western Asia, at the end of which he had earned the reputation of being the mightiest of all the kings of the ancient world. The account of these various wars, copied from the daily records of the scribe who accompanied the army on its campaigns, can be found in the Annals, a 223-line document carved into the walls of the corridor surrounding the granite holy of holies Tuthmosis III built at Karnak.

The account begins with his departure at the head of his troops from the fortified border city of Zarw.

In answer to the question of which road to take for the approach to Megiddo, his officers replied: How can one go on this road which is so narrow? It is reported that the enemy stand outside and are numerous. Will not horse have to go behind horse, and soldiers and people likewise? Shall our own vanguard be fighting while the rear stands here in Aruna [the starting point of the narrow road] and does not fight?

However, in the light of fresh reports brought in by messengers, Tuthmosis III decided that he would make his way to Megiddo by the unappealingbut, to his enemies, unexpectednarrow road.

To this choice his officers replied: Thy father Amun prosper thy counsel The servant will follow his master.