We're preaching it: Adam, Cain, Lamech, Nimrod. Both locations must be relatively near the Euphrates. Consult 1st Enoch for more history from this period.
For the very different question of the range 3kya please see my separate replies.
No problem, thank you for letting me go off-topic. As one of those crazies who doesn't believe in events more than 6013.3 years ago, I might not be the best to ask the original question. To those who say "Nobody's ever measured the speed of light changing," I add, "Yet!" This allows me to neatly compress all legends before 2000 BC into reasonable timeframes.
Thus my answers to OP, which may sound less inspired than other more cabal-glorifying responses. To be sure, I've found surprising new data lately on Tammuz and Ishtar; they were originally Dumuzid and Inana, and Dumuzid appears in the King List before Gilgamesh, so he and Mrs. are good candidates for cabal in the 5,000-year range. Trouble is, his character is entirely passive and Inana is the power broker from the start (thus echo of Adam and Eve's dalliance with cabal), so we don't get much, but it's a little. Your questions seem to ask about early locations of civilization, to which I'd refer you to Gen. 10, and before that you'd find Euphrates in Pangaea; but if you'd like to be more specific let me know.
Ah, it would be very hard to pin down among secret societies which is truly the "first Satanic cabal"; but knowledge is increasing. For that honor I first check WP on Tower of Babel candidates and discover Etemenanki built sometime 1400-800, possibly referred to in the Enuma Elish, but which doesn't seem far back enough for me to be the true site (see the ziggurat article for many more). Jubilees 10:20-21 and 3 Baruch 3:5-8 preserve construction details of Babel. I happened to have the latter translated from the Greek on my shelf, and WP doesn't quote it, so here it is (Slavonic says unaccountaby instead "80 thousand cubits in height, and in width 5 hundred and twenty"). The Greek preserves a quite cogent tradition (keeping in mind that verse 6 is a summary recapitulated in 7-8), including a reference to child slavery that can be read between the lines:
5 And he said, "These are the ones who plotted to build the tower. These whom you see forced many men and women to make bricks. Among them one woman was making bricks in the time of her delivery; they did not permit her to be released, but while making bricks she gave birth. And she carried her child in her cloak and continued making bricks. 6 And appearing to them, the Lord changed their languages; by that time they had built the tower 463 cubits (high). 7 And taking an auger, they attempted to pierce the heaven, saying, 'Let us see whether the heaven is (made) of clay or copper or iron.' 8 Seeing these things, God did not permit them (to continue), but struck them with blindness and with confusion of tongues, and he made them be as you see."
Tradition (not directly the Bible) says Nimrod, aka Ninus, built the tower, and was opposed by Abram, though much of the cabal's full cult system had not been worked out by that time and was later templated onto old mythos of Nimrod, who built several such cabal-style cities in Sumer. Obviously Nineveh, Assyria, has a similar name: we learn it was named after "Ninus" from Ctesias of Cnidas (both C's are silent!), the doctor for Artaxerxes II. Later expansion comes from Diodorus Siculus and then pseudo-Clement, as I noted:
A pseudo-Clement (Recognitions) first linked Ninus to Nimrod, on behalf of the Christians. Another pseudo-Clement (Book of Rolls) says specifically that Nimrod began building in Peleg's 50th year (Reu's 20th, or Reu's 50th in another source), became emperor in Reu's 163rd (or else 130th), and reigned 69 years. In my accounting Peleg's 50th is AM 1807 (2186 BC) and Reu's 163rd is AM 1950 (2043 BC); this accords well with Abraham's birth in AM 1948.
Later I added, "The EB in the public domain says Ctesias put the beginning of Ninus's reign in 2189 BC." But keep in mind a lot of the legends have been added to, and in particular Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons takes an uncritical eye in lumping strands of tradition together and antedating them without sufficient evidence, even though its survey of the archaeology is impressive.
As I said, we should also include temples to Ishtar in Akkad in this period as well, which date from the 3rd millennium BC. We have a number of tablets about Inanna (with whom Ishtar merged) from this period, of which I found Inanna's Descent into the Underworld instructive. This strand of mythos appears to have been about controlling individual practice of festival customs rather than political control, and seems to have been merged into the cabal concept much later, even though it has equal antiquity.
So I believe in a Tower of Babel about 4kya and a cabal hierarchy at that time with the core idolatry and abuse mechanisms. Before that time, the mythos seems overtly demon-driven rather than ostensibly human-driven, with the nephilim (aka rephaim) predominating, who rarely succeed in establishing a society or dynasty, only a temporary monarchy no better than any other human king. You can see that the Pyramids (about which little new can be said) carry a different strand of what we have today, and are probably older, but I think the astronomical evidence has been misinterpreted and they are mostly not older than the Flood, which I set at 2338-2337 BC. There the Book of the Dead gives the cult, and you'll note its superheroes compare favorably to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there's little there about cabal and conspiracy beyond the priestcraft, which was not then a matter of lying to the public but merely of withholding knowledge from them, so I find the Assyrian enslavement qualitatively different from the Egyptian, though that may be speculative.
Daniel envisioned Nebuchadnezzar (rebuilder of Etemenanki) as a tree to which all beasts were subservient, meaning that Babylon carried on the separate strengths of Egypt and Assyria. John later prophesied that the Roman Empire would have all the strengths of prior empires in Rev. 13:2, where the lion's mouth there refers back to Babylon in Dan. 7:4. So we probably should count the ziggurats and pyramids as two early cabals that merged; I don't have any data on whether either were built before the flood and then were rediscovered by new pagans. (Of course the ark link for the original satanists was Mrs. Ham, who was said to carry on the line of Cain.) It seems that eventually we will have a provable prediluvian idol artifact if research goes on.
We're preaching it: Adam, Cain, Lamech, Nimrod. Both locations must be relatively near the Euphrates. Consult 1st Enoch for more history from this period.
For the very different question of the range 3kya please see my separate replies.
No problem, thank you for letting me go off-topic. As one of those crazies who doesn't believe in events more than 6013.3 years ago, I might not be the best to ask the original question. To those who say "Nobody's ever measured the speed of light changing," I add, "Yet!" This allows me to neatly compress all legends before 2000 BC into reasonable timeframes.
Thus my answers to OP, which may sound less inspired than other more cabal-glorifying responses. To be sure, I've found surprising new data lately on Tammuz and Ishtar; they were originally Dumuzid and Inana, and Dumuzid appears in the King List before Gilgamesh, so he and Mrs. are good candidates for cabal in the 5,000-year range. Trouble is, his character is entirely passive and Inana is the power broker from the start (thus echo of Adam and Eve's dalliance with cabal), so we don't get much, but it's a little. Your questions seem to ask about early locations of civilization, to which I'd refer you to Gen. 10, and before that you'd find Euphrates in Pangaea; but if you'd like to be more specific let me know.
Ah, it would be very hard to pin down among secret societies which is truly the "first Satanic cabal"; but knowledge is increasing. For that honor I first check WP on Tower of Babel candidates and discover Etemenanki built sometime 1400-800, possibly referred to in the Enuma Elish, but which doesn't seem far back enough for me to be the true site (see the ziggurat article for many more). Jubilees 10:20-21 and 3 Baruch 3:5-8 preserve construction details of Babel. I happened to have the latter translated from the Greek on my shelf, and WP doesn't quote it, so here it is (Slavonic says unaccountaby instead "80 thousand cubits in height, and in width 5 hundred and twenty"). The Greek preserves a quite cogent tradition (keeping in mind that verse 6 is a summary recapitulated in 7-8), including a reference to child slavery that can be read between the lines:
Tradition (not directly the Bible) says Nimrod, aka Ninus, built the tower, and was opposed by Abram, though much of the cabal's full cult system had not been worked out by that time and was later templated onto old mythos of Nimrod, who built several such cabal-style cities in Sumer. Obviously Nineveh, Assyria, has a similar name: we learn it was named after "Ninus" from Ctesias of Cnidas (both C's are silent!), the doctor for Artaxerxes II. Later expansion comes from Diodorus Siculus and then pseudo-Clement, as I noted:
Later I added, "The EB in the public domain says Ctesias put the beginning of Ninus's reign in 2189 BC." But keep in mind a lot of the legends have been added to, and in particular Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons takes an uncritical eye in lumping strands of tradition together and antedating them without sufficient evidence, even though its survey of the archaeology is impressive.
As I said, we should also include temples to Ishtar in Akkad in this period as well, which date from the 3rd millennium BC. We have a number of tablets about Inanna (with whom Ishtar merged) from this period, of which I found Inanna's Descent into the Underworld instructive. This strand of mythos appears to have been about controlling individual practice of festival customs rather than political control, and seems to have been merged into the cabal concept much later, even though it has equal antiquity.
So I believe in a Tower of Babel about 4kya and a cabal hierarchy at that time with the core idolatry and abuse mechanisms. Before that time, the mythos seems overtly demon-driven rather than ostensibly human-driven, with the nephilim (aka rephaim) predominating, who rarely succeed in establishing a society or dynasty, only a temporary monarchy no better than any other human king. You can see that the Pyramids (about which little new can be said) carry a different strand of what we have today, and are probably older, but I think the astronomical evidence has been misinterpreted and they are mostly not older than the Flood, which I set at 2338-2337 BC. There the Book of the Dead gives the cult, and you'll note its superheroes compare favorably to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there's little there about cabal and conspiracy beyond the priestcraft, which was not then a matter of lying to the public but merely of withholding knowledge from them, so I find the Assyrian enslavement qualitatively different from the Egyptian, though that may be speculative.
Daniel envisioned Nebuchadnezzar (rebuilder of Etemenanki) as a tree to which all beasts were subservient, meaning that Babylon carried on the separate strengths of Egypt and Assyria. John later prophesied that the Roman Empire would have all the strengths of prior empires in Rev. 13:2, where the lion's mouth there refers back to Babylon in Dan. 7:4. So we probably should count the ziggurats and pyramids as two early cabals that merged; I don't have any data on whether either were built before the flood and then were rediscovered by new pagans. (Of course the ark link for the original satanists was Mrs. Ham, who was said to carry on the line of Cain.) It seems that eventually we will have a provable prediluvian idol artifact if research goes on.