The first Cainite city.
The "Cainites" or "Children of Cain" are the dominant race of humans in the movie "Noah". They were a powerful, industrial civilization that collapsed due to environmental destruction and loss of resources.
The Cainites were ruled by Tubal-cain, their supreme leader and king.
History[]
Cain, son of Adam and the first murderer, was the presumable founder of the Cainite civilization and race. With the murder of Abel, he and his descendants became more violent and depraved. In spite of his sins, he and his descendants were sheltered and gifted with knowledge of creation by the Watchers, a band of fallen angels.
With the Watchers' assistance and tutelage, they built a great city and grew stronger as time went on. The Cainites spread throughout the world, establishing more cities and forging a world-wide industrial empire. But quickly they turned on their tutors. They began to enslave the Watchers, even killing them to mine their valuable tzohar bodies that contained their celestial immaterial forms. After the Watchers were saved from extinction by Methuselah of the Sethites, the corrupted humans withdrew and continued spreading their society for centuries, using the knowledge of their tutors to satisfy their perverted instincts and greed. While incessantly fighting between each other and expanding more and more their civilization, they consumed all the resources they had and came to the brink of famine.
The last Cainites were led by Tubal-cain to wage war and claim Noah's ark, but were drowned by a great flood. Some Cainites climbed on a mountaintop, only to be swept by a great wave and drowned into the oceans.
All that remained of the Canaite culture is Naameh, sister of Tubal-Cain and wife of Noah.
Society[]
Cainites climbing a fence to eat wild animals (and presumably their own children).
Cainite society involved industry, mining, smithing, and warfare. Meat was a major part of the Cainite diet, based on the cultural belief in superiority over animals and the weak.
As their society ran out of land to grow crops and animals to eat, the desperate Cainites resorted to cannibalism, killing and eating other Cainites to survive. This resulted in many ruins scattered throughout the now-barren lands.
When Tubal-cain was surveying a meat market, his guards dragged away some hungry beggars; behind them were more Cainites begging for food. Noah sneaked into Tubal-cain's camp to find a wife for his sons, and he was horrified by the sight of Cainite warriors dragging children to a fence, where they were most likely traded for meat, and then killed and eaten.
Knowledge and Technology[]
The Cainites have a high level of knowledge of creation, that was gifted to them by the Watchers and later on they improved and expanded upon. The Watchers taught them "magic and science, knowledge of plants and stars, metals and fire." Thanks to the knowledge of the Watchers, the Cainites became incredibly experts in smithing, mining, architecture, and industry. Their cities were highly developed with advanced feats of architecture and appear to feature skyscrapers, that were made of both stone and wood. The Cainites mined and used tzohar, a coal-like glowing combustible mineral and fossil fuel-based power source, in their industry (as seen from the smokestacks in Cainite cities), all supplies of which presumably were lost in the flood. Later, tzohar was used as propellant for rocket-launcher-like pipe guns for battle. These firearms were, as Tubal-Cain said, a recent creation of his chief armorer. Their level of technological development is further reinforced by the fact that the secrets of metalworking apparently existed and were presumably built upon for centuries. For example, Methuselah, who lived 969 years, fought against an entire army equipped with metal tools and weapons in his youth. Methuselah himself wore segmented plate armor and wielded a metal sword when confronting the Cainite soldiers.
Even though the Cainites were a civilization with advanced knowledge, they were largely uninterested in certain areas, despite the Watchers educating them in these fields. For example, they completely ignored sustainability, because of their desire to dominate the world, even though, the Watchers gave them the knowledge necessary to live in harmony with nature. Illustrative of this was that while the Cainites undoubtably had knowledge of agriculture, they exploited the soil and plants and overharvested their animals. Because of this, their society ran out of land to grow crops and out of animals to eat, causing them to resort to cannibalize the weaker members of their society for food. However, one area of cultural expertise the Cainites did value and further developed from the Watchers' initial teachings was knowledge of warfare. This is shown by them being able to create an army out of mostly untrained (and probably half-starved) refugees and a few professionally trained soldiers as instructors, and later, in their last stand, as force multipliers, to almost successfully save themselves by hijacking Noah's Ark. Tubal-cain and his subordinate warlords proved themselves to be cunning and intelligent tacticians and leaders in the final battle, showing that the Cainites had knowledge of generalship as well as personal combat.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The helmets worn by Cainites resemble welding masks.