'' The Endless Beginning ''

Evolution?

".....It is now recognized that in the normal course of evolution Man should still be typified by the Bushmen and not by us. It took Man some 2,000,000 years to advance in his "tool industries" from the use of stones as he found them to the realization that he could chip them and shape stones to better suit his purposes. Why not another 2,000,000 years to learn the use of other materials, and another 10,000,000 years to master mathematics and engineering and astronomy?
Yet here we are, less than 50,000 years from Neanderthal Man, landing astronauts on the Moon.

THE SUDDEN CIVILIZATION

" When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study and explain these monuments (pyramids, temple-cities half buried in the sands, guarded by strange stone beasts called sphinxes). One of his officers found near Rosetta a stone slab on which was carved a proclamation from 196 B.C. written in the ancient Egyptian pictographic writing (hieroglyphic) as well as in two other scripts.

A Capture of a village near Rosetta, by Luigi Mayer.
"The decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and language, and the archaeological efforts that followed, revealed to Western man that a high civilization had existed in Egypt well before the advent of the Greek civilization. Egyptian records spoke of royal dynasties that began circa 3100 B.C. - two full millennia before the beginning of Hellenic civilizations. Reaching its maturity in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Greece was a late comer rather than an originator.

"Was the origin of our civilization, then, in Egypt?
Mr. Z. Sitchin answers this question along his book.
"One of the greatest finds of Akkadian texts were the ruins of a library assembled in Nineveh by Ashurbanipal; Layard and his colleagues carted away from the site 25,000 tablets, many of which were described by the ancient scribes as copies of "olden texts". A group of twenty tablets ended with the statement: "23rd tablet: language of Shumer not changed....."

"...Except for mispronouncing the name - it should have been Shumer, not Sumer - Oppert was right (January 1869 Jules Oppert). Sumer was not a mysterious, distant land, but the early name for southern Mesopotamia, just as the book of Genesis had clearly stated: The royal cities of Babylon and Akkad and Erech were in "the Land of Shin'ar." (Shinar was the biblical name for Shumer).

"The first significant excavation of a Sumerian site was begun in 1877 by French archaeologists and the finds from this single site were so extensive that others continued to dig there until 1933 without completing the job.
Mr. Sitchin dedicates extensive research on the subsequent findings, and has included graphics of seals, cuneiform writings, clay tablets, and pictures in his book. These speak of the rulers of Sumer and their customs as a civilization.
"As masterful as even the first Sumerian temples were, they represent but the tip of the iceberg of the scope and richness of the material achievements of the first great civilization known to Man
The Sumerians invented writing and printing, the forerunner of our rotary presses, the cylinder seal.

More than with the divine and spiritual they concerned themselves with crops, measuring fields, calculating prices.

They had a parallel system of mathematics.
They invented the kiln.
They achieved textile and clothing industries.
They were well achieved in agriculture.

Their culinary art was admirable:
cereals were turned into flour, to produce leavened and unleavened breads, porridges, pastries, cakes, and biscuits. Barley was also fermented to produce beer. Wine was obtained from grapes and date palms. Milk was available from sheep, goats, and cows, it was used as beverage, for cooking and for converting into yogurt, butter, cream and cheeses. Fish was a common part of the diet. Mutton was readily available and the meat of pigs was considered a delicacy.

"Our admiration for the Sumerian culinary art certainly grows as we come across poems that sing the praises of fine foods. In deed, what can one say when one reads a millennia-old recipe for "coq au vin":
In the wine of drinking,
In the scented water,
In the oil of unction -
This bird have I cooked, and have eaten.

Sumerians engaged in deep-water seafaring. They searched for metals, rare woods, and stones, and other materials unobtainable in Sumer.
The wheel was first used in Sumer, being the first for using ox and horse power. Following are some "firsts" attributed to Sumerians (from a book by Samuel N. Kramer, one of the great Sumerologists), these are quoted by Mr. Sitchin in his own book:

first schools
first bicameral congress
first historian
first pharmacopoeia
first farmer's almanac
first cosmogony and cosmology
first "Job"
first proverbs and sayings
first library debates
first "Noah"
first library catalogue
first Man's Heroic Age
first law code and social reforms
first medicine, agriculture and search for world peace and harmony.
"Preceding the biblical book of Ecclesiastes by some two millennia, Sumerian proverbs conveyed many of the same concepts and witticisms.
Following are some sayings regarding Law and Justice:
If we are doomed to die- let us spend;
If we shall live long- let us save.

When a poor man dies, do not try to revive him.

He who possesses much silver, may be happy;
He who possesses much barley, may be happy;
But who has nothing at all, can sleep!

Man: for his pleasure: Marriage;
On his thinking it over: Divorce.

It is not the heart which leads to enmity;
it is the tongue which leads to enmity.

In a city without watchdogs, the fox is the overseer.

"The material and spiritual achievements of the Sumerian civilization were also accompanied by an extensive development of the performing arts. A team of scholars from the University of California at Berkeley made news in March 1974 when they announced that they had deciphered the world's oldest song.
What professors Richard L. Crocker, Anne D. Kilmer, and Robert R. Brown achieved was to read and actually play the musical notes written on a cuneiform tablet from circa 1800 B.C. found at Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast (now in Syria).

"We always knew", the Berkeley team explained, "that there was music in the earlier Assirio-Babylonian civilization, but until this deciphering we did not know that it had the same heptatonic-diatonic scale that is characteristic of contemporary Western music, and of Greek music of the first millennium B.C." Until now it was thought that Western music originated in Greece; now it has been established that our music - as so much else of Western civilization - originated in Mesopotamia.

This should not be surprising for the Greek scholar Philo had already stated that the Mesopotamians were known to "seek worldwide harmony and unison through the musical tones."

"There can be no doubt that music and song must also be claimed as a Sumerian "first"

"........Like so many other Sumerian achievements, music and song also originated in the temples. But, beginning in the service of the gods, these performing arts soon were also prevalent outside the temples. Employing the favorite Sumerian play on words, a popular saying commented on the fees charged by singers: "A singer whose voice is not sweet is a "poor" singer indeed."

"Many Sumerian love songs have been found, they were undoubtedly sung to musical accompaniment. Most touching, however, is a lullaby that a mother composed and sang to her sick child:
Come sleep, come sleep, come to my son.
Hurry sleep to my son;
Put to sleep his restless eyes...
You are in pain, my son;
I am troubled, I am struck dumb,
I gaze up to the stars.
The new moon shines down on your face;
Your shadow will shed tears for you.
Lie, lie in your sleep....
May the goddess of growth be your ally;
May you have an eloquent guardian in heaven;
May you achieve a reign of happy days....
May a wife be your support
May a son be your future lot.

"What is striking about such music and songs is not only the conclusions that Sumer was the source of Western music in structure and harmonic composition. No less significant is the fact that as we hear the music and read the poems, they do not sound strange or alien at all even in their depth of feeling and their sentiments. Indeed, as we contemplate the great Sumerian civilization, we find that not only are our morals and our sense of justice, our laws and architecture and arts and technology rooted in Sumer, but the Sumerian institutions are so familiar, so close. At heart, it would seem, we are all Sumerians.

Finding the First Temple Dedicated To Enki...

"In 1919, H. R. Hall came upon ancient ruins at a village now called El-Ubaid. The site gave its name to what scholars now consider the first phase of the great Sumerian civilization. Sumerian cities of that period -ranging from northern Mesopotamia to the southern Zagron foothills -produced the first use of clay bricks, plastered walls, mosaic decorations, cemeteries with brick-lined graves, painted and decorated ceramic wares with geometric designs, copper mirrors, beads of imported turquoise, paint for eye-lids, copper-headed "tomahawks," cloth, houses, and, above all, monumental temple buildings.

"Farther south, the archaeologists found Eridu - the first Sumerian city, according to ancient texts. As the excavators dug deeper, they came upon a temple dedicated to Enki, Sumer's God of Knowledge, which appeared to have been built and rebuilt many times over. The strata clearly led the scholars back to the beginnings of Sumerian civilization: 2500 B.C., 2800 B.C., 3000 B.C., 3500 B.C.

"The spades came upon the foundations of the first temple dedicated to Enki. Below that, there was virgin soil - nothing had been built before. The time was circa 3800 B.C. That is when civilization began.
"It was not only the first civilization in the true sense of the term. It was a most extensive civilization, all-encompassing, in many ways more advanced than the other ancient cultures that had followed it. It was undoubtedly the civilization on which our own is based.

"Having begun to use stones as tools some 2,000,000 years earlier, Man achieved this unprecedented civilization in Sumer circa 3800 B.C. And the perplexing fact about this is that to this very day the scholars have no inkling who the Sumerians were, where they came from, and how and why their civilization appeared.

"For its appearance was sudden, unexpected, and out of nowhere.

"H. Frankfort (Tell Uquir) called it "astonishing." Pierre Amiet, (Elam) termed it "extraordinary." A. Parrot (Sumer) described it as "a flame which blazed up so suddenly." Leo Oppenheim (Ancient Mesopotamia) stressed "the astonishing short period" within which this civilization had arisen. Joseph Campbell (The Masks of God) summed it up in this way: "With stunning abruptness ... there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden ... the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all the high civilizations of the world."
I sincerely believe that Mr. Sitchin has chosen the order of the chapters in "The 12th Planet" in a splendid manner. First he has showed us, through vast research, that the people of Sumeria were not much different than we are today. But most important they showed feelings, emotions, sorrow, desire to contact the sacred and these may only manifest when reason points to inner self, like in the relationship of the sorrowful mother who composed a lullaby to comfort her son and direct her own petitions high above, for the well being of the child.

I believe these perceptions of Mr. Sitchin are vital to offer the complete picture of what is to follow.

GODS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

The Importance of Number 12

Mr. Sitchin takes the reader through the Greek Olympian gods because through their history it is confirmed that the Greek never claimed that their gods came from the heavens. (Rather, they arrived from other lands with traditions and religion). Zeus arrived from the Mediterranean, via Crete. Aphrodite, from the Near East, via Cyprus.

Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans) brought the horse with him from Asia Minor. Athena, brought the olive, fertile and self-sown from the lands of the Bible. And it is in the Mediterranean Island that Mr. Sitchin looks for the origin of the Greek gods and their astral relationship with the number 12.

It is known that the Olympian gods could not exceed 12 in number, nor be less than 12 in number. The Hittites of the Old Testament also practiced this system of no more and no less than 12 gods of Heaven and Earth.

Mr. Sitchin also studies the Hindu system of the ancients and finds a similarity. To read "The 12th Planet" is a must to be able to appreciate and understand the correlation.
"What was it that after hundreds of thousands and even millions of years of painfully slow human development abruptly changed everything so completely, and in a one-two-three punch - circa 11,000-7400-3800 B.C. transformed primitive nomadic hunters and food gatherers into farmers and pottery makers, and then into builders of cities, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, metallurgists, merchants, musicians, judges, doctors, authors, librarians, priests?

".....It was summed up by one of the tenths of thousands of ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that have been uncovered: "Whatever seems beautiful, we made by the grace of the gods."

"The gods of Sumer. Who were they? Over the years, startling evidence has been unearthed!

THE BULL AND THE CROSS.

"There is now general agreement that the foundations of the distinct Greek civilization were laid on the Island of Crete, where the Minoan culture flourished from circa 2700 B.C. to 1400 B.C. In Minoan myth and legend, the tale of the minotaur is prominent. This half-man, half-bull was the offspring of Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos and a bull. Archaeological finds have confirmed the extensive Minoan worship of the bull, and some cylinder seals depict the bull as a divine being accompanied by a cross symbol, which stood for some unidentified star or planet. It has therefore been surmised that the bull worshiped by the Minoans was not the common earthly creature but the Celestial Bull - the constellation Taurus - in commemoration of some events that had occurred when the Sun's spring equinox appeared in that constellation, circa 4000 B.C.



THE "GOGGLES"


"The archaeological find showed conclusively that the Hittites worshiped gods that were of "Heaven and Earth", all interrelated and arranged into a genealogical hierarchy. Some were great and "olden" gods who were originally of the heavens. Their symbol - which in the Hittite pictographic writing meant "divine" or "heavenly god"- looked like a pair of eyes goggles. It frequently appeared on round seals as part of a rocket-like object.

"A long and well preserved Hittite epic tale, entitled "Kingship in Heaven" deals with this very subject - the heavenly origin of the gods. The recounter of those premortal events first called upon twelve "mighty olden gods" to listen to his tale and be witnesses to its accuracy:

Let there listen the gods who are in Heaven,
And those who are upon the dark-hued Earth!
Let there listen, the mighty olden gods.

(The epic tale is very extensive, suffice to say that in it are all the names mentioned below by Mr. Sitchin and more).
"Who were these "olden gods"? The answer is obvious, for all of them - Anu, Antu, Enlil, Ninlil, Ea, Ishkur - bear Sumerian names. Even the name of Teshub, as well as the names of other "Hittite" gods, were often written in Sumerian scripts to denote their identities. Also, some of the places named in the action were those of ancient Sumerian sites.
Mr. Sitchin has taken care of researching also how the Hittites inherited the Sumerian knowledge, the language was studied at Hattu-Shash (the capital city) and Sumerian-Hittite vocabularies were found there.

The bridge were a people called the Hurrians. The Old Testament refers to them as the Horites (free people), the Egyptians referred to their kingdom as the Mitanni. There is confirmation now that they were the Aryans. (Mr. Sitchin gives a vast explanation about this in his book)

It was the Hurrians who absorbed and transmitted the religion of Sumer. This was obvious from the frequent use of the original Sumerian divine names, epithets, and writing signs. Even the Hurrian duplicated Sumerian art, its form, its themes, and its symbols.

There is evidence that the Hurrians were present in Sumeria in the third millennium B.C., that they held important positions in Sumer in the last period of glory, that of the third dynasty of Ur.
"Over the years, startling evidence has been unearthed...."
Sumerian Father of the Gods....
Another Symbol "the Winged Star"
EL, the "lofty deity"....
"In the thirteenth century B.C., under the presence of vast migrations and invasions (including the Israelite thrust from Egypt to Canaan), the Hurrians retreated to the northeastern portion of their kingdom. Establishing their new capital near Lake Van, they called their kingdom Urarty ("Ararat"). There they worshiped a pantheon headed by Tesheba (Teshub), depicting him as a vigorous god wearing a horned cap and standing upon his cult symbol, the bull. They called their main shrine Bitanu ("house of Anu") and dedicated themselves to making their kingdom "the fortress of the valley of Anu, as we shall see, was the Sumerian Father of the Gods.

"......The lands that are today Israel, Lebanon, and southern Syria -which formed the southwestern band of the ancient Fertile Crescent -were then the habitat of peoples that can be grouped together as the Canaanites.

".....The pantheon that unfolds from the Canaanite texts bears many similarities to the later Greek one. At the head of the Canaanite pantheon, too, there was a supreme deity called EL, a word that was the personal name of the god and the generic term meaning "lofty deity."

"A stela found in Palestine depicts an elderly deity sitting on a throne and being served a beverage by a younger deity. The seated deity wears a conical headdress adorned with horns - a mark of the gods, as we have seen, from prehistoric times - and the scene is dominated by the Symbol of a Winged Star - the ubiquitous emblem that we shall increasingly encounter. It is generally accepted by the scholars that this sculptured relief depicts EL, the senior Canaanite deity.
The Winged Star, is a circle in which an eight point star is enclosed and wings sprang opened from the circle's each side.
"Whence had the Canaanites, for their part, drawn their culture and religion?

"The Egyptians believed in Gods of Heaven and Earth. Great Gods that were clearly distinguished from the multitudes of lesser deities. G.A. Wainwright (The Sky Religion in Egypt) summed up the evidence, showing that the Egyptian belief in Gods of Heaven who descended to Earth from the skies was "extremely ancient." Some of the epithets of these Great Gods - Greatest God-Bull of Heaven, Lord/Lady of the Mountains - sound familiar.

"Although the Egyptians counted by the decimal system, their religious affairs were governed by the Sumerian sexagesimal sixty, and celestial matters were subjected to the divine number twelve. The heavens were divided into three parts, each comprising twelve celestial bodies. The afterworld was divided into twelve parts. Day and night were each divided into twelve hours. And all these divisions were paralleled by "companies" of gods, which in turn consisted of - twelve gods each.

"The head of the Egyptian pantheon was Ra ("creator") who presided over an Assembly of the Gods that numbered twelve.

"......Ra was an unseen celestial god who manifested himself only periodically. His manifestation was the ATEN - the Celestial Disc, depicted as a Winged Globe.
Symbol.- The ATEN was a blank circle with wings spanning from each side. Ra had two sons, Osiris and Seth. Horus, son of Osiris is represented sometimes as a winged and horned deity. Obviously as representation of the Kingdom from Ra.
"The earlier notion that civilization may have begun in Egypt has been discarded by now. There is ample evidence now showing that the Egyptian - organized society and civilization, which began half a millennium and more after the Sumerian one, drew its culture, architecture, technology, art of writing, and many other aspects of a high civilization from Sumer. The weight of evidence also shows that the gods of Egypt originated in Sumer.

The Canaanites could not boast of an original pantheon. They, too, acquired their cosmogony, deities, and legendary tales from elsewhere. Their direct contacts with the Sumerian sources were the Amorites.

"In the 1980's archaeologists came upon the center and capital city of the Amorites, known as Mari. At a bend of the Euphrates, where the Syrian border now cuts the river, the diggers uncovered a major city whose buildings were erected and continuously reerected, between 3000 and 2000 B.C., on foundations that date to centuries earlier. These earlier remains included a step pyramid and temples to the Sumerian deities Inanna, Ninhursag, and Enlil.

"Who were these Gods of Heaven and Earth, divine yet human, always headed by a pantheon of inner circle and twelve deities?

We have entered the temples of the Greeks, and the Aryans, the Hittites and the Hurrians, the Canaanites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. We have followed paths that took us across continents and seas, and clues that carried us over several millennia. And all the corridors of all the temples have led us to one source: Sumer.
Has revealed 21 levels of occupation. During the time of the Pre-Israelites it was the leading city of many kingdoms. An important city along the Via Maris, trade route between Egypt and the FERTILE CRESCENT. Israel.

SUMER: LAND OF THE GODS

Anu, Head of the Family of Gods.... His Symbol

The head of this family of Gods of Heaven and Earth was AN (or Anu in the Babylonian/Assyrian texts). He was the Great Father of the Gods, The King of the Gods. His realm was the expanse of the heavens, and his symbol was a star. In the Sumerian pictographic writing, the sign of a star also stood for An, for "heavens" and for "divine being," or "god" (descended of An). This fourfold of the symbol remained through the ages, as the script moved from the Sumerian pictographic to the cuneiform Akkadian, to the stylized Babylonian and Assyrian."

Symbol.- The star was an eight point star for "An = star."

An eight point star was also for "heaven", but with four of its arms (from top) to its left like a sector shape (fan).
A cross with a small inverted triangle on the top arm and with two small triangles (one above the other) to its left arm, was for "god."
"The Sumerian claim that not only gods but also selected mortals could ascend to the Divine Abode in the heavens is echoed in the Old Testament tales of the ascents to the heavens by Enoch and the prophet Elijah.

".....Anu had a spouse ANTU.

"A tablet that belonged to an archive at Uruk enlightens us to the pomp and pageantry that accompany the arrival of Anu and his spouse on a "state visit." Because of damage to a tablet, we can read of the ceremonies only from some midpoint, when Anu and Antu were already seated in the temple's courtyard. The gods, "exactly in the same order as before" then formed a procession ahead of and behind the bearer of the scepter. The protocol then instructed:

They shall then descend to the Exalted Court,
and shall turn towards the god Anu.
The Priest of Purification shall libate the Scepter,
and the Scepter-bearer shall enter and be seated.
The deities Papsukal, Nusku and Shala
shall then be seated in the court of the god Anu.
Many activities would follow.
"While an "evening meal"- various drinks and appetizers - were being served, an astronomer-priest went up to the "topmost stage of the tower of the main temple" to observe the skies. He was to look out for the rising in a specific part of the sky of the planet named Great Anu of Heaven. Thereupon, he was to recite the compositions named: "To the one who grows bright, the heavenly planet of the Lord Anu" and "The Creator's image has risen."
Among other activities of preparation:
"Meanwhile the whole country was to light up and celebrate the presence of the two divine visitors. On a signal from the main temple, the priests from all the other temples of Uruk were "to use torches to start bonfires"; and the priests in other cities, seeing the bonfires at Uruk, were to do likewise.

"Then:
The people of the Land will light fires in their homes,
and shall offer banquets to all the gods ....
The guards of the cities shall light fires
in the streets and in the squares."
"The departure of the two Great Gods was also planned, not only to the day but to the minute.
On the seventeenth day,
forty minutes after sunrise,
the gate shall be opened before the gods Anu and Antu,
bringing to an end their overnight stay.
"By Sumerian tradition, rulership flowed from Anu; and the very term for "Kingship" was Anutu (Anu-ship). The insignia of Anu were the tiaria (the divine headdress), the scepter (symbol of power), and the staff (symbolizing the guidance provided by the shepherd). The shepherd's staff may now be found more in the hands of bishops than of kings. But the crown and scepter are still held by whatever kings Mankind has left on some thrones.

THE NEFILIM: PEOPLE OF THE FIERY ROCKETS

 
"Sumerian and Akkadian texts leave no doubt that the peoples of the ancient Near East were certain that the Gods of Heaven and Earth were able to rise from Earth and ascend into the heavens, as well as roam Earth's skies at will."

Inanna, was one who could roam "the heavens over many lands that lie far apart - feats only possible by flying."

"...Such a capability, by Inanna as well as the other major gods, was often indicated by the ancient artists by depicting the gods - anthropomorphic in all other respects as we have seen - with wings. The wings as can be seen from numerous depictions, were not of the body - not natural wings, but rather a decorative attachment to the god's clothing.

"....Her most celebrated journey was to the Lower World, the domain of her sister Ereshkigal. The journey was not only the subject of epic tales but also of artistic depictions on cylinder seals - the latter showing the goddess with wings, to stress the fact that she flew over from Sumer to the Lower World.

"....The texts dealing with this hazardous journey describe how Inanna very meticulously put on herself seven objects prior to the start of the voyage, and how she had to give them up as she passed through the seven gates leading to her sister's abode. Seven such objects are also mentioned in other texts dealing with Inanna skyborne travels:
1. The SHU.GAR.RA she put on her head.
2. "Measuring pendants," on her ears.
3. Chains of small blue stones, around her neck.
4. Twin "stones," on her shoulders.
5. A golden cylinder, in her hands.
6. Straps, clasping her breast.
7. The PALA garment, clothed around her body.
"Though no one has as yet been able to explain the nature and significance of these seven objects, we feel that the answer has long been available. Excavating the Assyrian capital Assur from 1903 to 1914, Walter Andrae and his colleagues found in the Temple of Ishtar a battered statue of the goddess showing her with various "contraptions" attached to her chest and back. In 1934 archaeologists excavating at Mari came upon a similar but intact statue buried in the ground. It was a life-size likeness of a beautiful woman. Her unusual headdress was adorned with a pair of horns, indicating that she was a goddess. Standing around the 4,000 years old statue, the archaeologists were thrilled by her lifelike appearance (in a snapshot, one can hardly distinguish between the statue and the living men). They named her The Goddess with a Vase because she was holding a cylindrical object.

"Unlike the flat carvings or bas-reliefs, this life-size, three-dimensional representation of the goddess reveals interesting features about her attire. On her head she wears not a milliner's chapeau but a special helmet; protruding from it on both sides and fitted over the ears are objects that remind one of a pilot's earphones. On her neck and upper chest the goddess wears a necklace of many small (and probably precious) stones; in her hands she holds a cylindrical object which appears too thick and heavy to be a vase for holding water.

"Over a blouse of see-through material, two parallel straps run across her chest, leading back to and holding in place an unusual box of rectangular shape. The box is held tight against the back of the goddess's neck and it is firmly attached to the helmet with a horizontal strap. Whatever the box held inside must have been heavy, for the contraption is further supported by two large shoulder pads. The weigh of the box is further increased by a hose that is connected to its base by a circular clasp. The complete package of instruments - for this is what they undoubtedly were - is held in place with the aid of the two set of straps that crisscross the goddess's back and chest.

"The parallel between the seven objects required by Inanna for her aerial journeys and the dress and objects worn by the statue from Mari (and probably also the mutilated one found at Ishtar's temple in Ashur) is easily proved. We see the "measuring pendants" - the earphones - on her ears; the rows or "chains" of small stones around her neck; the "twin stones" - the two shoulder pads - on her shoulders; the "golden cylinder" in her hands, and the clasping straps that crisscross her breast.
 
She is indeed clothed in a "PALA garment" ("ruler's garment"), and on her head she wears the SHU.GAR.RA helmet - a term that literally means "that which makes go far into the universe." All this suggests to us that the attire of Inanna was that of an astronaut.

ISHTAR GATE

The Nefilim.... Angels.... Emissaries.... Temples, enclosures for the "divine bird"
"....Jacob saw them going up a sky ladder, Hagar (Abraham's concubine) was addressed by them from the sky, and it was them who brought about the aerial destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

"....We learn that their appearance was sudden. Abraham "raised his eyes and lo and behold, there were three men standing by him." Bowing and calling them "My Lords," he pleaded with them, "Do not pass over thy servant" and prevailed on them to wash their feet, rest, and eat.

"Having done as Abraham had requested, two of the angels (the third "man" turned out to be the Lord himself) then proceeded to Sodom.
Lot the nephew of Abraham also invited them to the house offering to wash their feet, an overnight stay, and feed them.

Mr. Sitchin asks a good question:

"How were these men - who ate, drank, slept, and washed tired feet - nevertheless so instantly recognizable as angels of the Lord? The only plausible explanation is that what they wore - their helmets or uniforms - or what they carried - their weapons - made them immediately recognizable. That they carried distinctive weapons is certainly a possibility. The two "men" at Sodom, about to be lynched by the crowd, "smote the people at the entrance of the house with blindness.... and they were unable to find the doorway."
Referring once again to Ishtar/Inanna:

"The team headed by Andrea found yet another unusual depiction of Ishtar at her temple at Ashur. More a wall sculpture than the usual relief, it showed the goggles with a tight-fitting decorated helmet with the "earphones" extended as though they had their own flat antennas, and wearing very distinct goggles that were part of the helmet.
Needles to say, any man seeing a person - male or female - so clad, would at once realize that he is encountering an aeronaut.
"About two millennia earlier, when Sumerian ruler Gudea commemorated his building the temple for his god Ninurta, he wrote that there appeared to him "a man that shone like Heaven.... by the helmet on his head, he was a god." When Ninurta and two divine companions appeared to Gudea, they were standing beside Ninurta's "divine black wind bird." As it turned out, the main purpose of the temple's construction was to provide a secure zone, an inner special enclosure within the temple grounds, for this "divine bird."

"The ancient texts also describe some vehicle used to lift aeronauts into the skies.

"....The protected enclosure was described as MU.NA.DA.TUR.TUR ("strong stone resting place of the MU"). Urukagina who ruled in Lagash, said in regard to the "divine black wind bird": "The MU that lights up as a fire I made high and strong."

"Similarly, Lu-Utu, who ruled in Umma in the third millennium B.C., constructed a place for a mu, "which in a fire comes forth, "for the god Utu, in the appointed place within his temple."

"....That a mu - an oval topped, conical object - was indeed installed in the inner, sacred enclosure of the temples of the Great Gods of Heaven and Earth can, fortunately, be proved. An ancient coin found at Byblos (the Biblical Gebal) on the Mediterranean coast of present - day Lebanon depicts the Great Temple of Ishtar."
Mr. Sitchin has dedicated a whole page to describe this coin in his book The 12th Planet.
"....A hymn to Inanna/Ishtar and her journeys in the Boat of Heaven clearly indicates that the mu was the vehicle in which the gods roamed the skies far and high:

Lady of Heaven:

She puts on the Garment of Heaven;
She valiantly ascends towards Heaven.
Over all the people lands
she flies in her Mu
Lady, who in her Mu
to the heights of Heaven joyfully wings.
Over all the resting places
she flies in her Mu.
"There is evidence to show that the people of the eastern Mediterranean had seen such a rocket-like object not only in a temple enclosure but actually in flight. Hittite glyphs, for example, showed - against a background of starry heavens - cruising missiles, rockets mounted on launch pads, and a god inside a radiating chamber.

"....Indeed, a rocket with "wings" or fins - reachable by a "ladder" - can be seen on a tablet excavated at Gezer, a town in ancient Canaan, west of Jerusalem. The double imprint of the same seal also shows a rocket resting on the ground next to a palm tree. The celestial nature or destination of the objects is attested by symbols of the Sun, Moon, and zodiacal constellations that adorn the seal."
pIC OF Temple on Gebel Garabe. ncient Watchtower, Circular Temple of Venus, Lebanon- acob's Ladder, the biblical version- Lot and his Daughters, by Bartolomeo Manfredi- Ruins of the ancient Phoenician seaport of Byblos.

The Nefilim.... Mu.... Shu-Mu.... Sham, or Shem....
"The Mesopotamian texts that refer to the inner enclosures of temples, or to the heavenly journeys of the gods, or even to instances where mortals ascended to the heavens, employ the Sumerian term mu or its Semitic derivatives shu-mu ("that which is a mu"), sham, or shem. Because the term also connoted "that by which one is remembered," the word has come to be taken as meaning "name." But the universal application of "name" to early texts that spoke of an object used in flying has obscured the true meaning of the ancient records.

"....Wishing to worship their gods throughout the lands, and not only at the official "house" of each deity, the ancient peoples developed the custom of setting up imitations of the god within his divine "sky chamber." Some pillars shaped to simulate the oval vehicle were erected at selected sites, and the image of the god was carved into the stone to indicate that he was within the object.

"....The Sumerians called them NA.RU ("stones that rise"). The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians called them naru ("objects that give off light"). The Amuru called them nuras ("fiery objects"- in Hebrew, ner still means a pillar that emits light, and thus today's "candle"). In the Indo-European tongues of the Hurrians and the Hittites, the stelae were called hu-u-ashi ("fire bird of stone").

"....The realization that mu or shem in many Mesopotamian texts should be read not as a "name" but as "sky vehicle" opens the way to the understanding of the true meaning of many ancient tales, including the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
After pages of research on the Tower of Babel, Mr. Sitchin writes:

"There is little doubt now that the biblical tales, as well as the reports of the Greek historians of 2,000 years ago and on their predecessor Berossus, all stem from earlier - Sumerian - origins. A.H. Sayce (The Religion of the Babylonians) reported reading on a fragmentary tablet in the British Museum "the Babylonian version of the building of the Tower of Babel." In all instances, the attempt to reach the heavens and the ensuing confusion of tongues are basic elements of the version. There are other Sumerian texts that record the deliberate confusion of Man's tongue by an irate god.

"Mankind, presumably, did not possess at that time the technology required for such an aerospace project; the guidance and collaboration of a knowledgeable god was essential. Did such a god defied the others to help Mankind? A Sumerian seal depicts a confrontation between armed gods, apparently over the disputed construction by men of a stage tower.

"....Both the Mesopotamian texts and the biblical account impart the same moral: The flying machines were meant for the gods and not for Mankind."

"Men - assert both Mesopotamian and biblical texts - could ascend to the Heavenly Abode only upon express wish of the gods. And therein lie more tales of ascents to the heavens and even of space flights.
The first was Enoch. The other mortal was the prophet Elijah.
"....A little-known reference to a third mortal who visited the Divine Abode and was endowed there with great wisdom is provided in the Old Testament, and it concerns the ruler or Tyre (a Phoenician center on the eastern Mediterranean coast).

"We read in the Book of Ezequiel, Chapter 28 that the Lord commanded the prophet to remind the king how, perfect and wise, he was enabled by the Deity to visit with the gods:
Thou art molded by a plan,
full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.
Thou hast been in Eden, the Garden of God;
every precious stone was thy thicket....
Thou art an anointed Cherub, protected;
and I have placed thee in the sacred mountain;
as a god werest thou,
moving within the Fiery Stones.
"The Sumerian texts also speak of several men who were privileged to ascend to the heavens. One was Adapa, the "model man" created by Ea. To him Ea "had given wisdom; eternal life he had not given him." As the years went by, Ea decided to avert Adapa's mortal end by providing him with a shem with which he was to reach the Heavenly Abode of Anu, there to partake of the Bread of Life and the Water of Life.
 
When Adapa arrived at Anu's Celestial Abode, Anu demanded to know who had provided Adapa with a shem with which to reach the heavenly location.

The Construction of the Tower of Babel.
Elijah ascends to heaven... watched by Elisha, who remains on Earth as next prophet.

The Epic of Gilgamesh.....
"The futile search by mortal Man for the Tree of Life is the subject of one of the longest, most powerful epic texts bequeathed to human culture by the Sumerian civilization. Named by modern scholars "The Epic of Gilgamesh" the moving tale concerns the ruler of Uruk who was born to a mortal father and a divine mother. As a result, Gilgamesh was considered to be "two-thirds of him god, one-third of him human," a circumstance that prompted him to seek escape from the death that was the fate of mortals.

"Tradition had informed him that one of his forefathers, Utnapishtim - the hero of the Deluge - had escaped death, having been taken to the Heavenly Abode together with his spouse. Gilgamesh therefore decided to reach that place and obtain from his ancestors the secret of eternal life.

"....The "distant journey" Gilgamesh undertook was, of course, his journey to the Abode of the Gods; he was accompanied by his comrade Enkidu. Their target was the Land of Tilmun, for there Gilgamesh could raise a shem for himself. The current translations employ the expected "name" where the Sumerian mu or the Akkadian shumu appear in the ancient texts; we shall, however, employ shem instead so that the term's true meaning - a "skyborne vehicle" - will come through.
Several verses of the Epic appear on the book The 12th Planet, which describe the launching of a rocket ship.
"....Putting aside the literary and philosophic values of the epic tale, the story of Gilgamesh interests us here primarily for its "aerospace" aspects. The shem that Gilgamesh required in order to reach the Abode of the Gods was undoubtedly a rocket ship, the launching of one of which he had witnessed as he neared the "landing place." The rockets, it would seem, were located inside a mountain, and the area was a well guarded, restricted zone.

"No pictorial depiction of what Gilgamesh saw has so far come to light. But a drawing found in the tomb of an Egyptian governor of a far land shows a rocket-head above ground in a place where date trees grow. The shaft of the rocket is clearly stored underground, in a man-made silo constructed of tubular segments and decorated with leopard skins....

"....We can see that the rocket contained a number of compartments. The lower one shows two men surrounded by curving tubes. Above them there are three circular panels. Comparing the size of the rocket-head - the ben-ben - to the size of the two men inside the rocket, and the people above the ground, it is evident that the rocket-head - equivalent to the Sumerian mu, the "celestial chamber" - could easily hold one or two operators or passengers.

"TIL.MUN was the name of the land to which Gilgamesh set his course. The name literally meant "land of the missiles." It was the land where the shem's were raised, a land under the authority of Utu/Shamash, a place where one could see this god "rise up to the vaults of heaven."

"And though the celestial counterpart of this member of the Pantheon of Twelve was the Sun, we suggest that his name did not mean "Sun" but was an epithet describing his functions and responsibilities. His Sumerian name Utu meant "he who brilliantly goes in." His derivate Akkadian name - Shem-Esh - was more explicit: Esh means "fire," and we know now what shem originally meant.

"Utu/Shamash was "he of the fiery rocket ships." He was, we suggest, the commander of the spaceport of the gods.
Etana.... Thirteenth Ruler of Kish.... The Eagle.... Our Modern Astronauts....
"The Sumerian king lists inform us that the thirteenth ruler of Kish was Etana, "the one who to heaven ascended."

"....Etana, we are told, was designated by the gods to bring Mankind the security and prosperity that Kingship - an organized civilization - was intended to provide. But Etana it seems could not further a son who would continue the dynasty. The only known remedy was a certain known Plant of Birth that Etana could obtain only by fetching down from the heavens.

"Like Gilgamesh at a later time, Etana turned to Shamash for permission and assistance. As the epic unfolds it becomes clear that Etana was asking Shamash for a shem!
Oh Lord, may it issue from thy mouth!
Grant thou me the Plant of Birth!
Show me the Plant of Birth!
Remove my handicap!
Produce for me a shem!
"....But instead of speaking of a shem, Shamash told Etana that an "eagle" would take him to the desired heavenly place.

"Directing Etana to the pit where the Eagle had been placed, Shamash also informed the Eagle ahead of time of the intended mission.

"....Arriving at the mountain indicated to him by Shamash, "Etana saw the pit," and, inside it, "there the Eagle was." "At the command of valiant Shamash, "the Eagle entered into communication with Etana. Once more, Etana explained his purpose and destination; whereupon the Eagle began to instruct Etana on the procedure for "raising the Eagle from its pit." The first two attempts failed, but on the third one the Eagle was properly raised. At daybreak, the Eagle announced to Etana: "My friend ... up to the Heaven of Anu I will bear thee!"

".... As though reported by a modern astronaut watching Earth recede as his rocket ship rises, the ancient story teller describes how Earth appeared smaller and smaller to Etana:
When he had borne him aloft one beru,
the Eagle says to him, to Etana:
"See, my friend, how the land appears!
Peer at the sea at the sides of the Mountain House:
The land has indeed become a mere hill,
The wide sea is just like a tub."
And so goes the epic until the land had disappeared.
"....The tale of Etana informs us that, seeking a shem, Etana had to communicate with an Eagle inside a pit. A seal depiction shows a winged, tall structure (a launch tower?) above which an eagle flies off.

"What or who was the Eagle who took Etana to the distant heavens?

"We cannot help associating the ancient text with the message beamed to Earth in July 1969 by Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft: "Houston! Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!"
He was reporting the first landing by Man on the Moon. "Tranquility Base" was the site of the landing: Eagle was the name of the lunar module that separated from the spacecraft and took the two astronauts inside it to the Moon (and then back to their mother craft). When the lunar module first separated to start its own flight in Moon orbit, the astronauts told Mission Control in Houston:
"The Eagle has wings."

"But Eagle could also denote the astronauts who manned the spacecraft. On the Apollo 11 mission, "Eagle" was also the symbol of the Astronauts themselves, worn as an emblem on their suits. Just as in the Etana tale, they, too, were "Eagles" who could fly, speak and communicate.

"How would an ancient artist have depicted the pilots of the skyships of the gods? Would he have depicted them, by some chance, as eagles? That's exactly what we have found. An Assyrian seal engraving from circa 1500 B.C. shows two "eagle-men" saluting a shem!

"....The many depictions of the Eagles clearly show that they were not monstrous "bird-men", but anthropomorphic beings wearing costumes or uniforms that gave them the appearance of eagles.

"....The Mesopotamian texts invariable present Utu/Shamash as the god in charge of the landing place of the shem's and of the Eagles. And like his subordinates he was sometimes shown wearing the full regalia of an Eagle's costume.
Mr. Sitchin after presenting a series of sketches of the ancient rocket-ships, and explanations of the same, taken from various Temples, of Utu, and Anu, concludes:
"The evidence thus far submitted regarding the ancient gods and their vehicles should leave no further doubt that there were once indeed living beings of flesh and blood , people who literally came down to Earth from the heavens.
In the Old Testament.
"Even the ancient compilers of the Old Testament - who dedicated the Bible to a single God - found it necessary to acknowledge the presence upon Earth in early times of such divine beings.

"The enigmatic section - one of horror of translators and theologians alike - form the beginning of chapter 6 of Genesis. It is interposed between the review of the spread of Mankind through the generations following Adam and the story of the divine disenchantment with Mankind that preceded the Deluge. It states - unequivocally - that, at that time,
the sons of the gods saw the daughters of man, that they were good; and they took them for wives, of all which they chose.

The Nefilim were upon the Earth,
in those days and thereafter too,
when the sons of the gods
cohabited with the daughters of the Adam,
and they bore children unto them.
They were the mighty ones of Eternity -
The People of the shem.
"The above is not a traditional translation. For a long time, the expression "The Nefilim were upon the Earth" has been translated as "There were giants upon the earth;" but recent translators, recognizing the error, have simply resorted to leaving the Hebrew term Nefilim intact in the translation. The verse "The people of the shem," as one could expect, has been taken to mean "the people who have a name," and, thus, "the people of renown." But as we have already established, the term shem must be taken in its original meaning - a rocket, a rocket ship.

"....Irrespective of the theological implications, the literal and original meaning of the verses cannot be escaped: The sons of the gods who came to Earth from the heavens were the Nefilim.
And the Nefilim were the People of the Shem - the People of the Rocket Ships. Henceforth, we shall call them by their biblical name."

THE TWELFTH PLANET

 
"The suggestions that Earth was visited by intelligent beings from elsewhere postulates the existence of another celestial body upon which intelligent beings established a civilization more advanced than ours.

"....The Sumerians accepted the existence of such a "Heavenly Abode," a "pure place," a "primeval abode." While Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag went to Earth and made their home upon it, their father Anu remained in the Heavenly Abode as its ruler.

"....The Gods of Heaven and Earth of the ancient Near East not only originated in the heavens but could also return to the Heavenly Abode. Anu occasionally came down to Earth on state visits; Ishtar went back to Anu at least twice. Enlil's center in Nippur was equipped as a "bond-heaven-earth." Shamash was in charge of the Eagles and the launching place of the rocket ships. Gilgamesh went up to the Place of Eternity and returned to Uruk; Adapa, too, made the trip and came back to tell about it; so did the biblical king of Tyre.

"....Two-way travel was not only possible but actually contemplated to begin with, for we are told that, having decided to establish in Sumer the Gateway of the Gods (Babili), the leader of the gods explained:
When to the Primeval Source
for assembly you shall ascend,
There shall be a restplace for the night
to receive you all.
When from the Heavens
for assembly you shall descend,
There shall be a restplace for the night
to receive you all.
"Realizing that such two-way travel between Earth and the Heavenly Abode was both contemplated and practiced, the people of Sumer did not exile their gods to distant galaxies. The Abode of the Gods, their legacy discloses, was within our own solar system.

"....An Assyrian depiction of the Gateway of Anu in the Heavenly Abode confirms ancient familiarity with a celestial system such as our Sun and its planets. The Gateway is flanked by two Eagles - indicating that their services are needed to reach the Heavenly Abode. The Winged Globe - the supreme divine emblem - marks the gateway. It is flanked by the celestial symbols of the number seven and the crescent, representing (we believe) Anu flanked by Enlil and Enki.

"Where are the celestial bodies represented by these symbols? Where is the Heavenly Abode? The ancient artist answers with yet another depiction, that of a large celestial deity extending its rays to eleven smaller celestial bodies encircling it. It is a representation of a Sun, orbited by eleven planets.

"That this was not an isolated representation can be shown by reproducing other depictions on cylinder seals, like the one from the Berlin Museum of the Ancient Near East.

"....Now there is, of course, a catch to claiming that these depictions - of a Sun and eleven planets - represent our solar system, for our scholars tell us that the planetary system of which Earth is a part comprises the Sun, Earth and Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. This adds up to the Sun and only ten planets (when the Moon is counted as one).

"But that is not what the Sumerians said. They claimed that our system was made up of the Sun and eleven planets (counting the Moon), and held steadfastly to the opinion that, in addition to the planets known to us today, there has been a twelfth member of the solar system - the home planet of the Nefilim.

"We shall call it the Twelfth Planet.
Sumerian Accuracy versus Misconceptions....

Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930.
"....Up to 1870, then, and for centuries before that, people believed there were seven members of our solar system: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Earth was not counted as planet because it was believed that these other celestial bodies circled Earth - the most important celestial body created by God, with God's most important creation, Man, upon it.

"Our textbooks generally credit Nicolaus Copernicus with the discovery that Earth is only one of several planets in a heliocentric (Sun-centered) system. Fearing the wrath of the Christian church for challenging Earth central position, Copernicus published his study (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) only when on his deathbed, in 1543."

"....The heliocentric concept was only rediscovered by Copernicus; and the interesting fact is that astronomers knew more in 500 B.C. than in 500 A.D. and 1500.

"Indeed, scholars are now hard put to explain why first the later Greeks and then the Romans assumed that Earth was flat, rising above a layer of murky waters below which there lay Hades or "Hell," when some of the evidence left by Greek astronomers from earlier times indicates that they knew otherwise."

"....Hipparchus, in fact, confirmed in his writings that his studies were based on knowledge accumulated and verified over many millennia. He named as his mentors "Babylonian astronomers of Erech, Borsippa, and Babylon." Geminus of Rhodes named the "Chaldeans" (the ancient Babylonians) as the discoverers of the exact motions of the Moon. The historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C. confirmed the exactness of Mesopotamian astronomy; he stated that "the Chaldeans named the planets ... in the center of their system was the Sun, the greatest light, of which the planets were 'offspring,' reflecting the Sun's position and shine."

"The acknowledged source of Greek astronomical knowledge was, then, Chaldea; invariable, those earlier Chaldeans possessed greater and more accurate knowledge than the peoples that followed them. For generations, throughout the ancient world, the name "Chaldean" was synonymous with "stargazers," "astronomers."
Mr. Sitchin gives vast examples of the use of astronomy in the Old Testament; the study of the constellations also; therefore:
"....Knowledge of the zodiac, the scientific division of the heavens, and other astronomical information was thus prevalent in the ancient Near East well before the days of ancient Greece.

"....Many such later texts were, to be sure, more astrological than astronomical in nature. The heavens and the movements of the heavenly bodies appeared to be a prime preoccupation of mighty kings, temple priests, and the people of the land in general; the purpose of the stargazing seemed to be to find in the heavens an answer to the course of affairs on Earth: war, peace, abundance, famine.

"....The heliacal system - the system still in use today, which measures the rising and the setting of stars and planets in Earth's skies relative to the Sun.
Mr. Sitchin also explains how the ancients used the ephemeredes (tables that listed and predicted the future positions of the celestial bodies).
"....The unearthing of the Mesopotamian civilizations in the past one hundred years leaves no doubt that in the field of astronomy, as in so many others, the roots of our knowledge lie deep in Mesopotamia. In this field, too, we draw upon and continue the heritage of Sumer."

A Radiant Celestial Body....
"....The Babylonians and the Assyrians did not invent the calendar or the ingenious methods for its calculation. Their calendars - as well as our own - originated in Sumer. There the scholars have found a calendar, in use from the very earlier times, that is the basis for all other later calendars. The principal calendar and model was the calendar of Nippur, the seat and center of Enlil. Our present-day one is modeled on that Nippurian calendar.

"The Sumerians consider the New Year to begin at the exact moment when the Sun crossed the Spring equinox. Professor Stephen Langdon (Tablets from the Archives of Drenhem) found that records left by Dungi, a ruler of Ur circa 2400 B.C., show that the Nippurian calendar selected a certain celestial body by whose setting against the sunset it was possible to determine the exact moment of the New Year's arrival. This, he concluded, was done "perhaps 2,000 years before the era of Dungi" - that is, circa 4400 B.C.!

"....The Akkadian, Hurrian, Hittite, and other literary masterpieces of the ancient Near East, being translations or versions of Sumerian originals, were replete with Sumerian loanwords pertaining to celestial bodies and phenomena.
Mr. Sitchin gives many technical details of the ancients about astronomy. Also quotes scholars and their research into the matter. The constellations being of great importance to the ancients of Sumeria and beyond.

"....Because the constellations and their subdivisions, and even individual stars within the constellations, have reached the Western civilization with names and descriptions borrowed heavily from Greek mythology, the Western world tended for nearly two millennia to credit the Greek for this achievement. But it is now apparent that the early Greek astronomers merely adopted into their language and mythology a ready-made astronomy obtained by the Sumerians.

Several graphics in relation with the Zodiac are given in the book "The 12th Planet."
"....Just as it is evident that the Sumerian astronomers possessed knowledge that they could not possibly have acquired on their own, so is there evidence to show that a good deal of their knowledge was of no practical use to them.

"This pertains not only to the very sophisticated astronomical methods that were used - who in ancient Sumer really needed to establish a celestial equator, for example? - but also to a variety of elaborate texts that dealt with the measurement of distances between stars.

"One of these texts, known as AO.6478, the twenty six major stars visible along the line we now call the Tropic of Cancer, and gives distances between them as measured in three different ways:
First: "measured and weighed."

Second: in terms of degrees of the arc of the skies.
Third: in terms of the "length in the skies."
"....The availability of three different methods of measuring distances between stars conveys the great importance attached to the matter. Yet, who among the men and women of Sumer needed such knowledge - and who among them could devise the methods and accurately use them? The only possible answer is : The Nefilim had the knowledge and the need for such accurate measurements.

"Capable of space travel, arriving on Earth from another planet, roaming Earth's skies - they were the only ones who could, and did, possess at the dawn of Mankind's civilization the astronomical knowledge that required millennia to develop, the sophisticated methods and mathematics and concepts for an advance astronomy and the need to teach human scribes to copy and record meticulously table upon table of distances in the heavens, order of stars and groups of stars, heliacal risings and settings, a complex Sun-Moon calendar, and the rest of the remarkable knowledge of both Heaven and Earth.
Reviewing several other scholars and the Sumerian texts, it is conclusive that the number twelve was of great significance to Sumerians and the Nefilim.

Mr. Sitchin concluded, after the following text (K.3558):
Kakkabu/kakkabu
The number of its celestial bodies is twelve.
The stations of its celestial bodies twelve.
The complete months of the Moon is twelve.
"....We can now grasp the significance of the number twelve in the ancient world. The Great Circle of Sumerian gods, and of all Olympian gods thereafter, comprised exactly twelve; younger gods could join this circle only if older gods retired. Likewise, a vacancy had to be filled to retain the divine number twelve. The principal celestial circle, the way of the Sun with its twelve members, set the pattern, according to which each other celestial band was divided into twelve segments or was allocated twelve principal celestial bodies. Accordingly there were twelve months in a year, twelve double-hours in a day. Each division of Sumer was assigned twelve celestial bodies as a measure of good luck.
Here are other twelves mentioned in the book among several others:
"Twelve Greek Titans, twelve Tribes of Israel, twelve parts of the magical breastplate of the Israelite High Priest.... Twelve Apostles of Jesus, and in our decimal system we count one to twelve, and only after twelve we return to "ten and three" (thirteen) and so on.

"....Teaching humanity the true nature of Earth and the heavens, the Nefilim informed the ancient astronomers-priests not only of the planets beyond Saturn but also of the existence of the most important planet, the one from which they came:

THE EPIC OF CREATION

Enuma Elish....
"....An Akkadian seal from the third millennium B.C., now at the Vorderasiatische Abteilung of the State Museum in East Berlin (catalogued VA/243), departs from the usual manner of depicting the celestial bodies. It does not show them individually but rather as a group of eleven globes encircling a large, rayed star. It is clearly a depiction of the solar system as it was known to the Sumerians: a system consisting of twelve celestial bodies.

THE MOON
"....Treating the Moon as a proper celestial body, the Sumerian depiction fully accounts for all of our known planets, places them in the correct order (with the exception of Pluto), and shows them by size.

"....The Apollo 16 astronauts found on the Moon rocks (called breccias) that result from the shattering of solid rock and its rewelding together by extreme and sudden heat. When and how were these rocks shattered, then re-fused? Other surface materials on the Moon are rich in rare radioactive potassium and phosphorus, materials that on Earth are deep down inside.

"Putting such findings together, scientists are now certain that the Moon and Earth, formed of roughly the same elements at about the same time, evolved as separate celestial bodies.

"In the opinion of the scientists of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Moon evolved "normally" for its first 500 million years."

"....The Sumerians, then, were right to depict the Moon as a celestial body in its own right...."
PLUTO
"....The planet Pluto has been called "the enigma." While the orbits around the Sun of the other planets deviate only somewhat from a perfect circle, the deviation (eccentricity) is such that it has the most extended and elliptical orbit around the Sun...."

"....Because of its unusual characteristics, it has been suggested that this "misfit" might have started its celestial life as a satellite that somehow escaped its master and went into orbit around the Sun on its own."

"This, as we shall soon see, is indeed what happened - according to the Sumerian texts.
THE ASTEROID BELT
"Toward the end of the eighteenth century, even before Neptune had been discovered, several astronomers demonstrated that "the planets were placed at certain distances from the Sun according to some definitive law. The suggestion, that came to be known as Bode's Law, convinced astronomers that a planet ought to revolve in a place where hitherto no planet had been known to exist - that is, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter."

"....On the first day of the nineteenth century, the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered at the exact indicated distance a very small planet (485 miles across), which he named Ceres...."
 
"....To date, nearly 3,000 asteroids have been counted orbiting the Sun in what is now called the asteroid belt."
Many questions arise about the asteroid belt, but the answers to these puzzles have been handed down to us from antiquity.

Mr. Sitchin then goes to mention about the vast literature existing, comparing the Mesopotamian text of the Chaldean Genesis with Biblical accounts of Genesis. Being of extreme importance are "The Seven Tablets of Creation."
"....Now called "The Creation Epic," the text was known in antiquity by its opening words, Enuma Elish ("When in the Heights").

"....As more tablets and fragments were found and translated, it became evident that the text was not a simple literary work: It was the most hallowed historical-religious epic of Babylon, read as part of the New Year rituals.

"....There is enough evidence to show that the Babylonian version of the epic was a masterful political-religious forgery of earlier Sumerian versions, in which Anu, Enlil, and Ninurta were the heroes.

"....Most scholars see it as a philosophical work...."

"....But why not take the epic at face value, as nothing more nor less the statement of cosmologic facts as known to the Sumerians, as told them by the Nefilim?

"The stage on which the celestial drama of Enuma Elish unfolds is the primeval universe. The celestial actors are the ones who create as well as the ones being created."
Mr. Sitchin describes Act 1 of the Epic, where AP.SU ("one who exists from the beginning"); MUM.MU (one "who was born"); and TIAMAT ("maiden of life") existed. They were the Sun; Mercury "the fast messenger of the gods" as the Romans and Greeks thought of it; Tiamat, was the "monster" which later "Marduk," the arriving planet from deep space, shattered it.

The space between Apsu and Tiamat (also known as the Virgin Mother of the first Divine Trinity) was not void, it was filled with the primordial elements, the primordial waters. These "waters" "commingled" and a pair of celestial gods - planets - were formed in the space between Apsu and Tiamat.

LAHMU (Mars "the God of War").
LAHAMU (Venus, both "the Goddess of Love and War").
ANSHAR (Saturn, "foremost of the heavens," to whom a satellite was born,
GAGA (Pluto, counselor and emissary of Anshar) Sumerians placed Pluto next to Saturn not beyond Neptune).
KI.SHAR (Jupiter, "foremost of the firm lands").
ANU (Uranus, (he of the heavens").
NUDIMMUD ((Ea) "artful creator").
"....As Act 1 of the "Epic of Creation" came to an end, there was a solar system made up of the Sun and nine planets.

"Where were the Earth and the Moon? They were yet to be created, products of the forthcoming collision.
The Epic is beautifully explained in the book "The 12th Planet," with the rich depth of thought the ancients placed in their writings.

MARDUK ... The Arrival ...

"With the end of the majestic drama of the birth of the planets, the authors of the Creation epic now raise the curtain to Act II, on a drama of celestial turmoil. The newly created family of planets were gravitating toward each other; they were converging on Tiamat, disturbing and endangering the primordial bodies.
The divine brothers banded together;
They disturbed Tiamat as they surged back and forth.
They were troubling the "belly" of Tiamat
By their antics in the dwellings of heaven.
Apsu could not lessen their clamor;
Tiamat was speechless at their ways.
Their doings were loathsome....
Troublesome were their ways.
"We have here obvious erratic orbits. The new planets "surged back and forth"; they got too close to each other ("banded together"); they interfered with Tiamat's orbit; they got too close to her "belly"; their ways were troublesome. Though it was Tiamat that was principally endangered, Apsu, too, found the planet's ways "loathsome". He announced his intention to "destroy, wreck their ways."
Apparently Ea (Neptune) with its outer most orbit seemed to neutralize the effect of the primordial "waters".
"....Did its own orbit around the Sun affect the Sun's magnetism and thus its radioactive outpourings? Or did Neptune itself emit, upon its creation, some vast radiations of energy?" "....Whatever the effects were, the epic likened them to a "pouring of sleep" - a calming effect - upon Apsu (the Sun). Even "Mummu, (Mercury) the Counselor, was powerless to stir."

"....By depriving the Sun of its creativity - stopping the process of emitting more energy and matter to form additional planets - the gods (planets) brought temporary peace to the solar system.

"....How long was it before the celestial peace was broken once more? The epic does not say. But it does continue, with little pause, and raises the curtain to Act III:
In the Chamber of Fates, the place of Destinies,
A god was engendered, most able and wisest of gods;
In the heart of the Deep was MARDUK created.
THE ARRIVAL
"A new celestial "god" - a new planet - now joins the cast. He was formed in the Deep, far out in space, in a zone where orbital motion - a planet's "destiny" - had been imparted to him. He was attracted to the solar system by the outermost planet: "He who begot him was Ea" (Neptune). The new planet was a sight to behold.

"....As Marduk neared the other planets, "they heaped upon him their awesome flashes," and he shone brightly, "clothed with the halo of ten gods." His approach thus stirred electrical and other emissions from the other members of the solar system. And a single word here confirms our decipherment of the Creation epic: Ten celestial bodies awaited him - the Sun and only nine other planets. And as Marduk, still in a very plastic stage as it must have been, passes Ea/Neptune, the gravitational pull bulged one side. Later, as he passes Anu/Uranus, matter tore off and four satellites were formed for Marduk.

"....The approach of Marduk soon began to disturb Tiamat and the inner planets (Mars, Venus, Mercury).

"....The gravitational pull of the large approaching planet soon began to tear away parts of Tiamat. From her midst there emerged eleven "monsters" ....satellites who separated themselves from her body and "marched at the side of Tiamat."

"....Of particular importance to the epic and to Mesopotamian cosmogony was Tiamat's chief satellite, who was named KINGU, "the first born among the gods who formed her assembly."
The epic continues giving beautiful recounts of the nearing to Saturn, it was at this point that Pluto loosened from its course and went further to the outer edge.

Finally Marduk and Tiamat confront each other.
"Here, then, is a most original theory explaining the celestial puzzles still confronting us. An unstable solar system, made up of the Sun and nine planets, was invaded by a large, comet-like planet from outer space. It had acquired seven satellites on its passing.

"But the two planets did not collide, a fact of cardinal astronomical importance: It was the satellites of Marduk that smashed into Tiamat, and not Marduk himself. They "distended" Tiamat's body, made in her a wide cleavage.

"....The first encounter between Marduk and Tiamat left her fissured and lifeless; but her final fate was still to be determined by future encounters between the two. Kingu, leader of Tiamat's satellites, was also to be dealt with separately. But the fate of the other ten, smaller satellites of Tiamat was determine at once:
After he had slain Tiamat, the leader,
Her band was shattered, her host broken up.
The gods, her helpers who marched at her side,
Trembling with fear,
Turned their backs about so as to save
and preserve their lives.
"Can we identify this "shattered ... broken" host that trembled and "turned their backs about" - reversed their direction?

"By doing so we offer an explanation to yet another puzzle of our solar system - the phenomenon of the comets.
Mr. Sitchin goes to explain how, then he concludes:
"Astronomers are unable to say what force, what event created the comets and threw them into their unusual orbits. Our answer: Marduk. Sweeping in the reverse direction, in an orbital plane of his own, he shattered, broke the host of Tiamat into smaller comets and affected them by his gravitational pull, his so-called net.

"Having "vanquished" Tiamat, Marduk sailed on in the heavens, out into space, around the Sun, and back to retrace his passage by the other planets....

"....Then his new orbital path returned Marduk to the scene of his triumph, "to strengthen his hold on the vanquished gods, "Tiamat and Kingu."
Earth and Moon.... Heaven and Earth.... "Station Nibiru"....
"As the curtain is about to rise on Act V, it will be here - and only here, though this has not hitherto been realized - that the biblical tale of Genesis joins the Mesopotamian "Epic of Creation"; for it is only at this point that the tale of the Creation of Heaven and Earth really began.

"Completing his first - ever orbit around the Sun, Marduk "then returned to Tiamat, whom he had subdued."

"Marduk himself now hit the defeated planet, splitting Tiamat in two, severing her "skull" or upper part. Then another of Marduk's satellites, the one called North Wind, crashed into the separated half. The heavy blow carried this part - destined to become Earth - to an orbit where no planet had been orbiting before.

"Earth had been created!

"The lower part had another fate: on the second orbit, Marduk himself hit it, smashing it to pieces.

"The pieces of this broken half were hammered to become a "bracelet" in the heavens, acting as a screen between the inner planets and the outer planets. They were stretched out into a "great band."
The asteroid belt had been created.
"Astronomers and physicists recognize the existence of great differences between the inner, or "terrestrial" planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and its Moon, and Mars) and the outer planets (Jupiter and beyond), two groups separated by the asteroid belt. We now find, in the Sumerian epic, ancient recognition of these phenomena."

"Every puzzle that we have mentioned is answered by the "Epic of Creation" as we have deciphered it. Moreover, we also have the answer to the question of why Earth's continents are concentrated on one side of it and a deep cavity (the Pacific Ocean's bed) exists on the opposite side...."
 
"....Tiamat was called the Watery Monster, and it stands to reason that Earth, as part of Tiamat, was equally endowed with these waters....

"BIBLICAL SCHOLARS NOW RECOGNIZE THAT THE HEBREW TEHOM ("WATERY DEEP") STEMS FROM TIAMAT; THAT TEHOM-RABA MEANS "GREAT TIAMAT," AND THAT THE BIBLICAL UNDERSTANDING OF PRIMEVAL EVENTS IS BASED UPON THE SUMERIAN COSMOLOGIC EPICS. IT SHOULD ALSO BE CLEAR THAT FIRST AND FOREMOST AMONG THESE PARALLELS ARE THE OPENING VERSES OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS, DESCRIBING HOW THE WIND OF THE LORD HOVERED OVER THE WATERS OF TEHOM, AND HOW THE LIGHTNING OF THE LORD (MARDUK IN THE BABYLONIAN VERSION) LIT THE DARKNESS OF SPACE AS IT HIT AND SPLIT TIAMAT, CREATING EARTH AND THE RAKIA (LITERALLY, "THE HAMMERED BRACELET"). THIS CELESTIAL BAND (HITHERTO TRANSLATED AS "FIRMAMENT") IS CALLED "THE HEAVEN."

"....As part of the new celestial order upon Earth, Marduk "made the divine Moon appear ... designated him to mark the night, define the days every month....

"....Earth is Tiamat reincarnated. The Moon is called Earth's "protector"; that is exactly what Tiamat called Kingu, her chief satellite.

"....Marduk, then, did not destroy Kingu. Shrunk to a smaller size, Kingu remained a "god" - a planetary member of our solar system. Without an orbit he could only become a satellite again. As Tiamat's upper part was thrown into a new orbit (as the new planet Earth), we suggest, Kingu was pulled along. Our Moon, we suggest, is Kingu, Tiamat's former satellite.

"The puzzles of our solar system - the oceanic cavities upon Earth, the devastation upon the Moon, the reverse orbits of the comets, the enigmatic phenomena of Pluto - all are perfectly answered by the Mesopotamian Creation epic, as deciphered by us.

"Having thus "constructed the stations" for the planets, (orbits), Marduk took for himself "station Nibiru," and "crossed the heavens and surveyed" the new solar system. It was now made up of twelve celestial bodies, with twelve Great Gods as their counterparts.
Return
 
 

KINGSHIP OF HEAVEN
 

Marduk = Nibiru .... Planet of Crossing ....

"Studies of THE "EPIC OF CREATION" and parallel texts, (for example, S. Langdon's The Babylonian Epic of Creation) show that sometime after 2000 B.C., Marduk, son of Enki, was the successful winner of a contest with Ninurta, son of Enlil, for supremacy among the gods. The Babylonians then revised the original Sumerian "Epic of Creation," expunged from it all references to Ninurta and most references to Enlil, and renamed the invading planet Marduk.

"The actual elevation of Marduk to the status of "King of the Gods" upon Earth was thus accompanied by assigning to him, as his celestial counterpart, the planet of the Nefilim, the Twelfth Planet. As "Lord of the Celestial Gods [the planets]" Marduk was thus also "King of the Heavens."

"The "Epic of Creation" clearly states that Marduk was an invader from outside the solar system, passing by the outer planets (including Saturn and Jupiter) before colliding with Tiamat. The Sumerians called the planet NIBIRU, the "planet of crossing."
The Babylonian version of the epic retained astronomical information, which:
"....provide the additional and conclusive information that in dividing the other planets into two equal groups, (by the asteroid belt) the Twelfth Planet in "the midst of Tiamat keeps crossing." Its orbit takes it again and again to the site of the celestial battle, where Tiamat used to be.

"If Marduk's orbit takes it where Tiamat once was, relatively near us (between Mars and Jupiter), why have we not yet seen this planet, which is supposedly large and bright?

"....It thus occurred to Franz Kugler (Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babylon) that Marduk was a fast-moving celestial body, orbiting in a great elliptical path just like a comet.

"Such an elliptical path, focused on the Sun as a center of gravity, has an apogee - the point farthest from the Sun, where the return flight begins - and a perigee - the point nearest to the Sun, where the return to outer space begins.

"We find that two such "bases" are indeed associated with Marduk in the Mesopotamian texts. The Sumerian texts described the planet as going from AN.UR ("Heaven's base") to E.NUN ("lordly abode").
The Creation epic said of Marduk:
He crossed the Heaven and surveyed the regions...
The structure of the Deep the Lord then measured.
E-Shara he established as his outstanding abode;
E-Shara as a great abode in the Heaven he established.
"One "abode" was thus "outstanding" - far in the deep region of space. The other was established in the "Heaven," within the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter.

"Following the teaching of their Sumerian forefather, Abraham of Ur, the ancient Hebrews also associated their supreme deity with the supreme planet...."

"The Book of Job, having described the collision, contains these significant verses telling us where the lordly planet had gone:
Upon the Deep he marked out an orbit;
Where light and darkness [merge]
In his farthest limit.
"Not less explicit, the Psalm outlined the planet's majestic course:
The Heavens bespeak the glory of the Lord;
The Hammered Bracelet proclaims his handiwork...
He comes forth as a groom from the canopy
Like an athlete he rejoices to run the course.
From the end of heavens he emanates,
And his circuit is to their end.
"Recognized as a great traveller in the heavens, soaring to immense heights at its apogee and then "coming down, bowing unto the Heaven" at its perigee, the planet was depicted as a Winged Globe.

"....Central to the religious beliefs and astronomy of the ancient world was the conviction that the Twelfth Planet, the "Planet of the Gods" remained within the solar system and that its grand orbit returned it periodically to Earth's vicinity. The pictographic sign of the Twelfth Planet, the "Planet of Crossing," was a cross. This cuneiform sign, which also meant "Anu" and "divine" (a cross with a triangle on top arm, and two triangles on left arm touching each other by the angles) evolved in the Semitic languages to the letter tav, (a slanted cross with lower arm longer than the other three) which meant "the sign."
Mesopotamian and Biblical Records.... Number 3,600....

The reader is reminded, that the Hebrews associated their supreme deity with the supreme planet. At this point, this becomes most important to understand what the Biblical records are talking about: The Twelfth Planet, mainly, in the prophetic context.
"Indeed, all the peoples of the ancient world considered the periodic nearing of the Twelfth Planet as a sign of upheavals, great changes, and new eras. The Mesopotamian texts spoke of the planet's periodic appearance as an anticipated, predictable, and observable event....

".... Many of the texts dealing with the planet's arrival were omen texts prophesying the effect the event would have upon Earth and Mankind....

"....Like the Mesopotamian savants, the Hebrew prophets considered the time of the planet's approaching Earth and becoming visible to Mankind as ushering in a new era. The similarities between the Mesopotamian omens of peace and prosperity that would accompany the Planet of the Throne of Heaven, and the biblical prophesies of the peace and justice that would settle upon Earth after the Day of the Lord, can best be expressed by the words of Isaiah:
And it shall come to pass at the End of Days
...the Lord shall judge among the nations
and shall rebuke many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation.
"In contrast with the blessings of the new era following the Day of the Lord, the day itself was described by the Old Testament as a time of rains, inundations, and earthquakes. If we think of the biblical passages as referring, like their Mesopotamian counterparts, to the passage in Earth's vicinity of a large planet with a strong gravitational pull, the words of Isaiah can be plainly understood:
Like the noise of a multitude in the mountains,
a tumultuous noise like of a great many people,
of kingdoms of nations gathered together;
it is the Lord of Hosts,
commanding a Host to battle.
From a far away land they come,
from the end-point of the heaven
do the Lord and his weapons of wrath
come to destroy the whole Earth....
Therefore will I agitate the Heaven,
and Earth shall be shaken out of its place
when the Lord of Hosts shall be crossing,
the day of his burning wrath.
"While on Earth "mountains shall melt ... valleys shall be cleft," Earth's axial spin would also be affected. The prophet Amos explicitly predicted:
It shall come to pass on that Day,
sayeth the Lord God,
that I will cause the Sun to go down at noon
and I will darken the Earth in the midst of daytime.
"Announcing, "Behold, the Day of the Lord is come!" the prophet Zechariah informed the people that this phenomenon of an arrest in Earth's spin around its own axis would last only one day:
And it shall come to pass on that Day
there shall be no light - uncommonly shall it freeze.
and there shall be one day, known to the Lord,
when at eve-time there shall be light.
"On the Day of the Lord, the prophet Joel said, "the Sun and Moon shall be darkened, the stars shall withdraw their radiance"; "the Sun shall be turned into darkness, and the Moon shall be as red blood."

"Mesopotamian texts exalted the planet's radiance and suggested that it could be seen even at daytime: "visible at sunrise, disappearing from view at sunset." A cylinder seal, found at Nippur, depicts a group of plowmen looking up with awe as the Twelfth Planet (depicted with its cross symbol) is visible in the skies.

"The ancient peoples not only expected the periodic arrival of the Twelfth Planet but also charted its advancing course.

"....Among the many Mesopotamian texts that dealt with the subject, one is quite clear:
Planet of the god Marduk:
Upon its appearance: Mercury.
Rising thirty degrees of the celestial arc: Jupiter.
When standing in the place of the celestial battle: Nibiru.
Mr. Sitchin explains the time when the Twelfth planet will align itself with Mercury; when crossing Jupiter at certain degrees (which he points out); and when arriving at the point of the celestial battle with Tiamat.
"The anticipation of the Day of the Lord in the ancient Mesopotamian and Hebrew writings (which were echoed in the New Testament's expectations of the coming of the Kingship of Heaven) was thus based on the actual experiences of Earth's people: their witnessing the periodic return of the Planet of Kingship to Earth's vicinity.

"The planet's periodic appearance and disappearance from Earth's view confirms the assumption of its permanence in solar orbit."
Also Mr Sitchin explains Nibiru's orbit, and that the planet would be found by today's astronomers in the same manner that Neptune and Pluto were found, mathematically and by disturbances of other planet's orbits.
"....The Mesopotamian and biblical sources present strong evidence that the orbital period of the Twelfth Planet is 3,600 years. The number 3,600 was written in Sumerian as a large circle. The epithet for the planet - shar ("supreme ruler") also meant "a perfect circle" a "completed cycle." It also meant the number 3,600 and the identity of the three terms - planet/orbit/3,600 - could not be a mere coincidence.

First King.... Ten Rulers before Deluge.... What is a Year?.... Life Beyond Earth?....
"Berossus, the Babylonian priest-astronomer-scholar, spoke of ten rulers who reigned upon Earth before the Deluge.
Summarizing the writings of Berossus, Alexander Polyhistor wrote:
"In the second book was the history of the ten kings of the Chaldeans, and the periods of each reign, which consisted collectively of an hundred and twenty shar's, or four hundred and thirty-two thousand years (432,000) reaching to the time of the Deluge"

"Abydenus, a disciple of Aristotle, also quoted Berossus in terms of ten pre-Diluvial rulers whose total reign numbered 120 shar's. He made clear that these rulers and their cities were located in ancient Mesopotamia:
"It is said that the first king of the land was Alorus....He reigned ten shar's.
Now, a shar is esteemed to be three thousand six hundred years....
After him Alaprus reigned three shar's, to him succeeded Amilarus from the city of panti-Biblon, who reigned thirteen shar's....
After him Ammenon reigned twelve shar's; he was of the city of panti-Biblon. Then Megalurus of the same place, eighteen shar's.
Then Daos, the Shepherd, governed for the space of ten shar's....There were afterwards other rulers, and the last of all Sisithrus; so that in the whole, the number amounted to ten kings, and the term of their reigns to an hundred and twenty shar's."
"Apollodorus of Athens also reported on the pre-historical disclosures of Berossus in similar terms: "Ten rulers reigned a total of 120 shar's (432,000 years), and the reign of each one of them was also measured in the 3,600-year shar units."

LANDING ON PLANET EARTH

Landing on Planet Earth....The Symbol of the Seven Dots.... The Seven Stations....
"We have set foot only on the Moon, and have probed only the planets closest to us with unmanned craft. Beyond our relatively close neighbors, both interplanetary and outer space still outside the reach of even small scanning craft. But the Nefilim's own planet, with its vast orbit, has served as travelling observatory, taking them through the orbits of all the outer planets and enabling them to observe at first hand most of the solar system.

"No wonder, then, that when they landed on Earth, a good deal of the knowledge they brought with them concerned astronomy and celestial mathematics. The Nefilim, "Gods of Heaven" upon Earth, taught Man to look up unto the heavens - just as Yahweh urged Abraham to do.
Mr. Sitchin explains the reason for so many findings dealing with symbols of constellations, planets and the relationship with the "gods."
"What was the meaning of the symbol of the seven dots? Many clues leave no doubt that it was the celestial symbol of Enlil.

"....The planet of Enlil was Earth. Earth - to the Nefilim - was the seventh planet.

"....Our astronomy is geared to the notion that Earth is the third planet - which, indeed, it is if one begins the count from the center of our system, the Sun.

"But to someone nearing our solar system from the outside, the first planet to be encountered would be Pluto, the second Neptune, the third Uranus - not Earth. Fourth would be Saturn; fifth Jupiter; sixth Mars.

"And Earth would be seventh."

"No one but the Nefilim, travelling to Earth past Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars could have considered Earth "the seventh."

"....Earth is not the only planet whose numerical position in the solar system was represented symbolically. Ample evidence shows that Venus was depicted as an eight-pointed star: Venus is the eighth planet, following Earth, when counted from the outside. The eight-pointed star also stood for the goddess Ishtar, whose planet was Venus.

"Many cylinder seals and other graphic relics depict Mars as the sixth planet. A cylinder seal shows the god associated with Mars (originally Nergal, then Nabu), seated on a throne under a six-pointed "star" as his symbol. Other symbols on the seal show the Sun, much in the same manner we would depict it today; the Moon; and the cross, symbol of the "Planet of Crossing," the Twelfth Planet.
Mr. Sitchin explains the central religious events of ancient Mesopotamia, and the finding of Marduk's seven stations.

THE SEVEN STATIONS:

The first station of Marduk, "House of Holiness."
The second station, "Where the Field Separates."
The third station, (the name partly mutilated) had an epithet "Lord of Poured-Out Fire."
The fourth station, "Holy Place of Destinies."
The fifth station, "The Roadway."
The sixth station, "Traveller's Ship."
The seventh station, "House of building life on Earth."
On each station Marduk had an epithet, and the epithet of the seventh house was "God of the House of Resting."
"It is our contention that the seven stations in the procession of Marduk represented the space trip of the Nefilim from their planet to Earth:
That the first "station," the "House of Bright Waters," (Marduk's epithet) represented the passage by Pluto
The second ("Where the Field Separates") was Neptune
The third, Uranus
The fourth - a place of celestial storms - Saturn
The fifth, where "The Roadway" became clear, "where the shepherds word appears," (Marduk's epithet), was Jupiter
The sixth, where the journey switched to "The Travellers' Ship," was Mars
"And The seventh station was Earth - the end of the journey, where Marduk provided "House of Resting" (the god's "house of building life on Earth").
Aeronautics and Space Administration of the Nefilim....

THE CRAFT....

"How did the "Aeronautics and Space Administration" of the Nefilim view the solar system in terms of the space flight to Earth?

"Logically - and in fact - they viewed the system in two parts. The one zone of concern was the zone of flight, which embraced the space occupied by the seven planets extending from Pluto to Earth. The second group, beyond the zone of navigation, was made of four celestial bodies - Moon, Venus, Mercury and the Sun. In astronomy and divine genealogy, the two groups were considered separate.

"....In the skies, each group was supposed to stay in its celestial zone, and the Sumerians assumed that there was a "celestial bar" keeping the two groups (of "Four" and "Seven") apart.

"The Four were located in a celestial zone the Sumerians termed GIR.HE.A ("celestial waters where rockets are confused"), MU.HE ("confusion of spacecraft"), or UL.HE ("band of confusion"). These puzzling terms make sense once we realize that the Nefilim considered the heavens of the solar system in terms of their space travel.

"Only recently, the engineers of Comsat (Communications Satellite Corporation) discovered that the Sun and Moon "trick" satellites and "shut them off." Earth satellites could be "confused" by showers of particles of solar flares or by changes in the Moon's reflection of infrared rays. The Nefilim, too, were aware that rocket ships or "spacecraft entered a "zone of confusion" once they passed Earth and neared Venus, Mercury, and the Sun.

"....First to be encountered by the Nefilim approaching the solar system was Pluto. The Mesopotamian lists name this planet SHU.PA ("supervisor of the SHU"), the planet that guards the approach to the Supreme Part of the solar system.

"....Next to the Shupa was IRU ("loop"). At Neptune, the spacecraft of the Nefilim probably commenced its wide curve or "loop" toward its final target. Another list named the planet, HUM.BA, which connotes "swampland vegetation." When we probe Neptune someday, will we discover that its persistent association with waters is due to the watery swamps the Nefilim saw upon it?

"Uranus was called Kakkab Shanamma ("planet which is the double"). Uranus is truly the twin of Neptune in size and appearance. A Sumerian list calls it EN.TI.MASH.SIG ("planet of bright greenish life"). Is Uranus, too, a planet on which swampy vegetation abounded?

"Beyond Uranus looms Saturn, a giant planet (nearly ten times Earth's size) distinguished by its rings, which extend more than twice as far out as the planet's diameter. Armed with a tremendous gravitational pull and the mysterious rings, Saturn must have posed many dangers to the Nefilim and their spacecraft. This may well explain why they called the fourth planet TAR.GALLU ("the great destroyer"). Throughout the ancient Near East, the planet represented the punisher of the unjust. Were these names expressions of fear or references to actual space accidents?
Among other details found in the Akitu rituals, which Mr. Sitchin mentions, the following was found in a very early Sumerian text:
It has been created like a weapon;
It has charged forward like death ...
The Anunnaki who are fifty,
it has smitten....
The flying, birdlike SHU.SAR
it has smitten on the breast.
"The text does not identify "it", whatever destroyed the SHU.SAR ("the flying supreme chaser") and its fifty astronauts. But fear of celestial danger was evident only in regard to Saturn.

"....They called the fifth planet Barbaru, Jupiter, ("bright one") as well as SAG.ME.GAR ("great one, where the space suits are fastened"). Another name for Jupiter SIB.ZI.AN.NA ("true guide in the heavens"), also described its probable role in the journey to Earth: it was the signal for curving into the difficult passage between Jupiter and Mars, and the entry into the dangerous zone of the asteroid belt. From the epithets, it would seem that it was at this point that the Nefilim put on their me's, their spacesuits.

"Mars, appropriately, was called UTU.KA.GAB.A ("light established at the gate of the waters") reminding us of the Sumerian and biblical descriptions of the asteroid belt as the celestial "bracelet" separating the "upper waters" from the "lower waters" of the solar system. More precisely, Mars was referred to as Shelibbu ("one near the center" of the solar system).
THE CRAFT
"An unusual drawing on a cylinder seal suggests that, passing Mars, an incoming spacecraft of the Nefilim established communication with "Mission Control" on Earth.

"The central object in this ancient drawing simulates the symbol of the Twelfth Planet, the Winged Globe. Yet it looks different: It is more mechanical, more manufactured than natural. Its "wings" look almost exactly like the solar panels with which American spacecraft are provided to convert the Sun's energy to electricity. The two antennas cannot be mistaken.

"The circular craft, with its crownlike top and extended wings and antennas, is located in the heavens, between Mars (the six-pointed star) and Earth and its Moon.

"On Earth, a deity extends his hand in greeting to an astronaut still out in the heavens, near Mars. The astronaut is shown wearing a helmet with a visor and a breastplate. The lower part of his suit is like that of a "fish-man" - a requirement, perhaps, in case of an emergency splashdown in the ocean. In one hand he holds an instrument; the other hand reciprocates the greeting from Earth.

"And then, cruising on, there was Earth, the seventh planet.

Earth, the Seventh Planet as Counted from Pluto, the way the Nefilim Would Count.... Enlil's Flight Charts....
"....In the lists of the "Seven Celestial Gods" it was called SHU.GI ("right resting place of SHU"). It also meant the "land at the conclusion of SHU," of the Supreme Part of the solar system - the destination of the long space journey.

"....Paralleling the seven stations of Marduk's journey, the planet's names also bespeak a space flight. The land at the journey's end was the seventh planet, Earth.

"We may never know whether, countless years from now, someone on another planet will find and understand the message drawn on the plaque attached to Pioneer 10. Likewise, one would think it futile to expect to find on Earth such a plaque in reverse - a plaque conveying to earthlings information regarding the location and the route from the Twelfth Planet.

"Yet such extraordinary evidence does exist.
Mr. Sitchin explains and provides copies of a tablet, which unlike others, is a circular disc, found in the ruins of the royal Library in Nineveh.

Despite damaged areas on the disc, still several areas remained clear to be able to be deciphered; after several personalities tried to interpret it, still presented a problem, a repetition of syllables in the Assyrian language:
lu bur di lu bur di lu bur di
bat bat bat kash kash kash alu alu alu alu.

and

na na na na a na a na nu (along the descending line)
sha sha sha sha sha sha (along the circumference)
sham sham bur bur Kur (along the horizontal line).
Treating these syllables rather as Sumerian word-syllables, Mr. Sitchin concludes in a spectacular manner:
"....What unfolds here is a route map, marking the way by which the god Enlil "went by the planets" accompanied by some operating instructions.

"The line incline at 45 degrees appears to indicate the line of a spaceship's descent from a point which is "high high high high," through "vapor clouds" and a lower one that is vaporless, toward the horizon point, where the skies and the ground meet.

"In the skies near the horizontal line, the instructions to the astronauts makes sense: they are to "set set set" their instruments for the final approach; then, as they near the ground, "rockets rockets" are fired to slow the craft, which apparently should be raised ("piled up") before reaching the landing point because it has to pass over a high or rugged terrain ("mountain mountain").
Let this be just an example of a vast explanation about the disc's inscriptions. One must really view the graphics to comprehend, therefore the book of The 12th Planet is a must for one to appreciate the importance and seriousness of this finding.
"In sign language and in words, the Nefilim have sketched for us the route from their planet to ours.

Paraphrased:

"The full span of 3,600 Earth years, which applied to tenures of office and other activities of the Nefilim upon Earth, suggests that they might have preferred.... a short trip an a stay in Earth's skies coinciding with the arrival of the Twelfth Planet itself. This would have called for the launching of the spaceship...when the Twelfth Planet was about midway on its course back from the apogee. With the planet's own speed rapidly increasing, the spaceship required strong engines to overtake its home planet and reach Earth.... a few years ahead of the Twelfth Planet."

"Based on complex technical data, as well as hints in Mesopotamian texts, it appears that the Nefilim adopted for their Earth missions the same approach NASA adopted for the Moon missions: When the principal spaceship neared the target planet (Earth), it went into orbit around that planet without actually landing. Instead, a smaller craft was released from the mother ship and performed the actual landing.

"....The landing craft had to rejoin its mother ship, which then had to fire up its engines and accelerate to extremely high speeds, for it had to catch up with the Twelfth Planet, which by then was passing its perigee between Mars and Jupiter at its top orbital speed."

"....Dr. (Amnon Sitchin) has calculated that there were three points in the spaceship's orbit of Earth that lent themselves to a thrust toward the Twelfth Planet. The three alternatives offered the Nefilim a choice of catching up with the Twelfth Planet within 1.1 to 1.6 Earth years.

"Suitable terrain, guidance from Earth, and perfect coordination with the home planet were required for successful arrivals, landings, take offs, and departures from Earth.

"We shall see, the Nefilim met all these requirements.




CITIES OF THE GODS

Cities of the Gods.... As Above so Below.... E.RI.DU, First Settlement....
"The story of the first settlement of Earth by intelligent beings is a breathtaking saga no less inspiring than the discovery of America or the circumnavigation of Earth. It was certainly of greater importance, for, as a result of this settlement, we and our civilizations exist today.

"The "Epic of Creation" informs us that the "gods" came to Earth following a deliberate decision by their leader. The Babylonian version, attributing the decision to Marduk, explains that he waited until Earth's soil dried and hardened sufficiently to permit landing and construction operations. Then Marduk announced his decision to the group of astronauts:
In the deep Above,
where you have been residing,
"The kingly House of Above" have I built.
Now, a counterpart of it
I shall build in the Below.

"Marduk then explained his purpose:

When from the Heavens
for assembly you shall descend,
there shall be a restplace for the night
to receive you all.
I will name it "Babylon"-
The Gateway of the Gods.
"Earth was thus not merely the object of a visit or a quick, exploratory stay; it was to be a permanent "home away from home."

"...As the Nefilim searched for an additional "home," Earth must have struck them favorably. Its blue hues indicated it had life-sustaining water and air; its browns disclosed firm land; its greens, vegetation and the basis for animal life. Yet when the Nefilim family voyaged to Earth, it must have looked somewhat different from the way it does to our astronauts today. For when the Nefilim first came to Earth, Earth was in the midst of an ice age - a glacial period that was on the icing and de-icing phases of Earth's climate:
Early glaciation - begun some 600,000 years ago
First warming (interglacial period) - 550,000 years ago
Second glacial period - 480,000 to 430,000 years ago.
"When the Nefilim first landed on Earth some 450,000 years ago, about a third of Earth's land area was covered with ice sheets and glaciers.

Mr. Sitchin expands on other Earth conditions, like the depth of the waters was different than today, and more. Then, he continues:
"....They searched, no doubt, for a place with a relatively temperate climate, where simple shelters would suffice and where they could move about in light working clothes rather than in heavily insulated suits. They must also have searched for water for drinking, washing, and industrial purposes, as well as to sustain the plant and animal life needed for food.

"....The attention of the Nefilim, now we know, focused on three major river systems and their plains: The Nile, the Indus, and the Tigris-Euphrates. Each of these river basins was suitable for early colonization; each, in time, became the center of an ancient civilization.

"....The Nefilim, judging by the Sumerian practice and records, made extensive use of petroleum and its derivatives; it stands to reason that in their search for the most suitable habitat on Earth, the Nefilim would prefer a site rich in petroleum.

"....The Land of the Two Rivers, Mesopotamia, was doubtless put in first place. Some of the world's richest oil fields stretch from the tip of the Persian Gulf to the mountains where the Tigris and Euphrates originate.

"The Book of Genesis describes God's abode on Earth - Eden - as a place of temperate climate...... "It was a place that drew its waters from a network of four rivers....

"While opinions regarding the identity of the first two rivers, Pishon ("abundant") and Gihon ("which gushes forth") are inconclusive, there is no uncertainty regarding the other two rivers the Tigris and the Euphrates....

"....The biblical name Eden is of Mesopotamian origin, stemming from the Akkadian Edinu, meaning "plain." We recall that the "divine" title of the ancient gods was DIN.GIR ("the righteous/just one of the rockets"). A Sumerian name for the god's abode, E.DIN, would have meant "home of the righteous ones" - a fitting description.
Mr. Sitchin mentions as well that the Nefilim at times would land in a splash down, and they would choose what today is the Arabian Sea (the western part of the Indian Ocean), the astronauts were prepared with special suits. Their craft were initially termed "celestial boats."
"Why would the Nefilim splash down in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from their selected site in Mesopotamia, instead of the Persian Gulf, which is so much closer? The ancient reports indirectly confirm the second glacial period, when today's Persian Gulf was not a sea but a stretch of marshlands and shallow lakes, in which a splashdown was impossible.

"In Mesopotamia they established their very first settlement on our planet. They named it E.RI.DU ("house in far away built"). What an appropriate name"!

Earth Station I....Work on the Land.... Nippur, Mission Control Site .... Sophisticated Instruments and Weapons....
"At Eridu, in southern Mesopotamia, the Nefilim established Earth Station I, a lonely outpost on a half-frozen planet.

"....A Sumerian text, believed to have been the original of the Akkadian "Deluge," relates the following regarding five of the first seven cities:

Only part of the text given here:
The first of the cities, ERIDU,
he gave to Nudimmud, the leader,
The second, BAD-TIBIRA,
he gave to Nugig.
The third, LARAK,
he gave to Pabilsag.
The fourth, SIPPAR,
he gave to the hero, Utu.
The fifth, SHURUPPAK,
he gave to Sud.
"The name of the god who lowered Kingship from Heaven, planned the establishment of Eridu, and four other cities, and appointed their governors or commanders, is unfortunate obliterated. All the texts agree, however, that the god who waded ashore to the edge of the marshlands and said: "Here we settle" was Enki, nicknamed "Nudimmud" ("he who made things") in the text.

"This god's two names - EN.KI ("lord of firm ground") and E.A ("whose house is water") - were most appropriate.

Some of the works performed on the land and water were:
the cleaning of the small rivers,
drain the marshes,
obtain cleaner, potable water,
implement controlled irrigation
landfillings or the raising of dikes to protect the first houses from the omnipresent waters.
Many other works were recorded in a poem: here are some:
He marked the marshland,
placed in it carp . . . - fish;
He marked the cane thicket,
placed in it . . . - reeds and green-reeds.
Enbilulu, the Inspector of Canals,
he placed in charge of the marshlands.

Him who set net so no fish escapes,
whose trap no . . . escapes,
whose snare no bird escapes,
...the son of . . . a god who loves fish
Enki placed in charge of fish and birds.

Enkimdu, the one of the ditch and dike,
Enki placed in charge of ditch and dike.

Him whose . . . mold directs,
Kulla, the brick maker of the Land,
Enki placed in charge of mold and brick.
"....The Sumerian king lists indicate that Enki and his first group of Nefilim remained alone on Earth for quite a while: Eight shar's (28,000 years) passed before the second commander or "settlement chief was named."

"Interesting light is shed on the subject as we examine the astronomical evidence.
A serious study is also offered taking in consideration the passing of the constellations. Mr. Sitchin continues:
"If Enki landed on Earth - as we believe - at the start of an Age of Piscis, witnessed a precessional shift to Aquarius, and stayed through a Great Year (25,920 years) until an age of Capricorn began, then he was indeed in sole command on Earth the purported 28,000 years.
The book continues with more study and conclusions.
"But while Enki was enduring the hardships of a pioneer on Earth, Anu and his other son Enlil were watching the developments from the Twelfth Planet. The Mesopotamian texts make it clear that the one who was really in charge of the Earth Mission was Enlil; and as soon as the decision was made to proceed with the mission, Enlil himself descended to Earth. For him a special settlement or base named Larsa was built by EN.KI.DU.NU ("Enki digs deep"). When Enlil took personal charge of the place, he was nicknamed ALIM ("ram"), coinciding with the "age" of the zodiacal constellation Aries.

"....Larsa launched a new phase in the settlement of Earth by the Nefilim. It marked the decision to proceed with the tasks for which they had come to Earth, which required the shipping to Earth of more "manpower," tools, and equipment, and the return of valuable cargoes to the Twelfth Planet."

"....From Larsa Enlil proceeded to establish a "Mission Control Center" - a sophisticated command post from which the Nefilim from Earth could coordinate space journeys to and from their home planet.

"....The site Enlil selected for this purpose, known for millennia as Nippur, was named by him NIBRU.KI ("Earth's crossing").

Sophisticated instruments in Nippur:
"...a "lifted 'eye' which scans the land"
"...a "lifted beam which searches the heart of all the land."
Awesome weapons:
"....Its sight is awesome fear, dread"; from "its outside no mighty god can approach." Its "arm" was a "vast net," and in its midst there crouched a "fast-stepping bird," a "bird" whose "hand" the wicked and the evil could not escape. Was the place protected by some death ray, by an electronic power field? Was there in its center a helicopter pad, a "bird" so swift no one outrun its reach?
Other features were:
".... the dark, crownlike chamber"....where stars charts were kept; where the astronaut's communications were received and instructed from.
"....Archaic Sumerian pictographs show a structure of a high tower of antennas rising from it, as well as a contraption that looks very much like the giant radar nets erected nowadays for capturing and emitting signals - the "vast net" described in the texts.

The Spaceport at Sippar....The ancient symbol of "Target"
"While these centers were being established (the seven cities), the completion of Nippur was followed by the construction of the spaceport of the Nefilim on Earth. The text made clear that Nippur was the place where the "words" - commands - were uttered: There, when Enlil commanded: "Towards Heaven!"... that which shines forth rose like a sky rocket." But the action itself took place "where Shamash rises," and that place - the "Cape Kennedy" of the Nefilim - was Sippar, the city in the charge of the Chief of the Eagles, (Shamash, Enlil's grandson) where multistage rockets were raised within its special enclave, the "sacred precinct."

"Completing the list of the first seven cities of the Gods and the correspondence with the twelve zodiac constellations was Larak, where Enlil put his son Ninurta in command. The city list calls him PA.BIL.SAG ("great protector"); it is the same name by which the constellation Sagitarius was called.

"It would be unrealistic to assume that the first seven Cities of the Gods were established haphazardly. These "gods" who were capable of space travel, located the first settlements in accordance with a definite plan, serving a vital need: to be able to land on Earth and to leave Earth for their own planet.

"What was the master plan?

"As we searched for an answer, we asked ourselves a question: What is the origin of Earth's astronomical and astrological symbol, a circle bisected by a right-angle cross - the symbol we use to signify "target."

The symbol goes back to the origin of astronomy and astrology in Sumer and is identical with the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for "place."

"Is this a coincidence, or significant evidence? Did the Nefilim land on Earth by superimposing on its image or map some kind of "target"?
Mr. Sitchin explains that Mt. Ararat, from which two picks arise, Little Ararat and Great Ararat, like two shining beacons, permanently snow-covered, plus other features in the surrounding areas, served the Nefilim as landing site; plus coordinations of south-north meridian, and the convenience of a river location.
"....A meridian drawn through the center of the twin-peaked Ararat bisected the Euphrates. That was the target - the site selected for the space port.
Explaining the possibilities, Mr. Sitchin confirms three questions:
To the question of "could one easily land and take off there? The answer was Yes.

"Could astronauts and materials be brought there without too much difficulty? The answer was Yes.

"Was there a nearby source of energy, of fuel for light and power? The answer was an emphatic Yes.

"The bend in the Euphrates River where Sippar was to be established was on of the richest known sources in antiquity of surface bitumens, petroleum products that seeped up through natural wells and could be collected from the surface without any deep digging or drilling.

"In Near Eastern languages, the name, Sippar, means "bird." Sippar was the place where the Eagles would come to nest.

"How would the space shuttles glide down to Sippar?

By navigation, using the familiar Earth features, which had in fact had been: Cuneiform Planisphere
Nineveh, Assyria

"drawn on a ceramic unearthed at Susa, in a stratum dated to about 3,200 B.C. This shows:
"A triangle of waters and mountains on each side, pointing like an arrow toward Sippar. An "X" would mark Nippur, in the center.

"It brings to mind the planisphere that described the flight path and procedures, which was based on 45-degree segments.
Because the ceramic of the "Target" is so incredible, Mr. Sitchin explains:
"Incredible as it may seem, this sketch was not made by us...."

"...This we believe, was the master plan of the Nefilim. Having selected the best location for their spaceport (Sippar), they laid out the other settlements in a pattern outlining the vital flight path to it. In the center they placed Nippur, where the "bond Heaven-Earth" was located"

View of satellite Eureka as it flies over Cape Canaveral (Kennedy Space Center), taken from shuttle Atlantis.

It reminds of what is found in The 12th Planet:
"Enlil commanded "Toward Heaven"; that which shines forth rose like a sky rocket...."
TARGET - This photo is of the Space Station Mir. But the symbol of "target," the "cross" in the center for docking, is exactly the same used in the ancient charts for landing, found at Susa, and believed to have belonged to Enlil and the "astronauts" under Enlil's command.

Ark of the Covenant.... "Black Boxes" .... Ziggurats....

Mr. Sitchin takes times to explain the many instruments the Sumerians had possessed in their Spaceport and at the "Mission Control" in Nippur. Some of these instruments bring to mind the Ark of the Covenant.

Mr. Sitchin comments:

"...These "black boxes", when we see what they look like, bring to mind the Ark of the Covenant built by Moses under God's instructions. The chest was to be made of wood, overlaid with gold both inside and outside - two electricity-conducting surfaces were insulated by the wood between them. A kapporeth, also made of gold, was to be placed above the chest and held up by two cherubim cast of solid gold. The nature of the kapporeth (meaning, scholars speculate "covering") is not clear; but this verse from Exodus suggests its purpose: "And I will address thee from above the Kapporeth, from between the two Cherubim."

"The implication that the Ark of the Covenant was principally a communication box, electrically operated, is enhanced by the instructions concerning its portability. It was to be carried by means of wooden staffs passed through four golden rings. No one was to touch the chest proper; and when one Israelite did touch it he was killed instantly - as if by a charge of high-voltage electricity.

"Such apparently supernatural equipment - which made it possible to communicate with a deity though the deity was physically somewhere else - became objects of veneration, "sacred cult symbols." Temples at Lagash, Ur, Mari, and other ancient sites included among their devotional objects "eye idols." The most outstanding example was found at an "eye temple" at Tell Brak, in northwestern Mesopotamia. This fourth-millennium temple was so named not only because hundreds of "eye" symbols were unearthed there but mainly because the temple's inner sanctum had only one altar, on which a huge stone "double eye" was displayed.

"In all probability, it was a simulation of the actual divine object - Ninurta's "terrible eye," or the one at Enlil's Mission Control Center at Nippur, about which the ancient scribe reported: "His raised eye scans the land ... His raised Beam searches the land."
Mr. Sitchin continues on to explain the building of the ziggurats, their measurements, and the probable relation with the distances and locations of the Cities of the Gods.

He continues:

"But were the ziggurats raised only to observe the stars and planets, or were they also meant to serve the spacecraft of the Nefilim? All the ziggurats were oriented so that their corners pointed exactly north, south, east, west. As a result, their sides run precisely at 45-degrees angles to the four cardinal directions. This meant that a space shuttle coming in for a landing could follow certain sides of the ziggurat exactly along the flight path - and reach Sippar without difficulty.

"....Even scholars who have approached the subject without our "space" interpretation could not escape the conclusion that the ziggurats had some purpose other than to make the god's abode a "high rise" building. Samuel N. Kramer summed up the scholastic consensus: The ziggurat, the stagetower, which became the hallmark of Mesopotamian temple architecture ... was intended to serve as a connecting link, both real and symbolic, between the gods in heaven and the mortals on earth.

"We have shown, however, that the function of these structures was to connect the gods in Heaven with the gods - not the mortals - on Earth"

"The assertion, first recorded and then transmitted by the Sumerians, that "Man" was created by the Nefilim, appears at first sight to clash both with the theory of evolution and with the Judeo-Christian tenets based on the Bible. But in fact, the information contained in the Sumerian texts - and only that information - can affirm the validity of the theory of evolution and the truth of the biblical tale - and show that there really is no conflict at all between the two.

"....The Sumerian texts state that when the Nefilim first came to Earth, the arts of grain cultivation, fruit planting, and cattle raising had not yet extended to Earth. The biblical account likewise places the creation of Man in the sixth "day" of phase of the evolutionary process....

"....All the Sumerian texts assert that the gods created Man to do their work. Putting the explanation in words uttered by Marduk, the Creation epic reports the decision:
I will produce a lowly Primitive;
"Man" shall be his name.
I will create a Primitive Worker;
He will be charged with the service of the gods,
that they might have their ease.
"....That man was created to be a servant of the gods did not strike to ancient peoples as a peculiar idea at all. In biblical times, the deity was "Lord," "Sovereign," "King," "Ruler," "Master." The term that is commonly translated as "worship" was in fact "avod" ("work"). Ancient and biblical Man did not "worship" his god; he worked for him.

"....In the Sumerian versions, the decision to create Man was adopted by the gods in their Assembly. Significantly, the Book of Genesis - purportedly exalting the achievements of a sole Deity - uses the plural Elohim (literally, "deities") to denote "God," and reports an astonishing remark:

And Elohim said:

" Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness."
"Whom did the sole but plural Deity address, and who were the "us" in whose plural image and plural likeness Man was to be made? The book of Genesis does not provide the answer. Then, when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowing, Elohim issued a warning to the same unnamed colleagues: "Behold, Man has become as one of us, to know good and evil."

"Since the biblical story of Creation, like the other tales of beginnings in Genesis, stems from Sumerian origins, the answer is obvious. Condensing the many gods into a Supreme Deity, the biblical tale is but an edited version of the Sumerian reports of the discussions in the Assembly of the Gods.

"The Old Testament took pains to make clear that Man was neither a god nor from the heavens. "The Heavens are the Heavens of the Lord, unto Mankind Earth He hath given." The new being was called "the Adam" because he was created of the "adama," the Earth's soil. He was, in other words, "the Earthling."

"Lacking only certain "knowing" and a divine span of life, the Adam was in all other respects created in the image (selem) and likeness (dmut) of his Creator(s). The use of both terms in the texts was meant to leave no doubt that
"Man was similar to the Gods both physically and emotionally, externally and internally.
"....Although the biblical admonition against the worship of pagan images gave rise to the notion that the Hebrew God had neither image nor likeness, not only the Genesis tale but other biblical reports attest to the contrary. The god of the ancient Hebrews could be seen face-to-face, could be wrestled with, could be heard and spoken to, he had a head and feet, hands and fingers, and a waist. The biblical God and his emissaries looked like men and acted like men - because men were created to look like and act like the gods.

"But in this very simplicity lies a great mystery. How could a new creature possibly be a virtual physical, mental, and emotional replica of the Nefilim?  How, indeed, was Man created?
"....In November 1859, an English Naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin published a treatise called "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," or the "Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life."

"....The Christian world had been jostled earlier when, from 1788 on, noted geologists had begun to express their belief that Earth was of great antiquity, much, much greater than the roughly 5,500 years of the Hebrew calendar. Nor was the notion of evolution as such the explosive: Earlier scholars had noted such a process, and Greek scholars as far back as the fourth century B.C. compiled data on the evolution of animal and plant life.

"Darwin's shattering bombshell was the conclusion that all living things - Man included - were products of evolution. Man, contrary to the then-held belief, was not generated spontaneously.

"....Evolution cannot account for the appearance of Homo sapiens, which happened virtually overnight in terms of the millions of years evolution requires, and with no evidence of earlier stages that would indicate a gradual change from Homo erectus.

"THE HOMINID OF THE GENUS HOMO IS A PRODUCT OF EVOLUTION. BUT HOMO SAPIENS IS THE PRODUCT OF SOME SUDDEN, REVOLUTIONARY EVENT. HE APPEARED INEXPLICABLY SOME 300,000 YEARS AGO, MILLIONS OF YEARS TOO SOON."

"The scholars have no explanation, but we do. The Sumerian and Babylonian texts do. The Old Testament does.

"Homo sapiens - modern Man - was brought about by the ancient gods.

"....As we have already shown, the orbit of the Nefilim's planet equaled a shar, or 3,600 Earth years. Forty shars, or 144,000 Earth years, after their landing, the Anunnaki protested, "No more!" If the Nefilim first landed on Earth, as we have concluded, some 450,000 years ago, then the creation of Man took place some 300,000 years ago!

"The Nefilim did not create the mammals or the primates or the hominids. "The Adam" of the Bible was not the genus Homo, but the being who is our ancestor - the first Homo sapiens. It is modern Man as we know him that the Nefilim created."

"The key to understand this crucial fact lies in the tale of a slumbering Enki, aroused to be informed that the gods had decided to form an adamu, and that it was his task to find the means. He replied:
"The creature whose name you uttered - "IT EXISTS!"
"....and he added: "Bind upon it" - on the creature that already exists - "the image of the gods."

"Here, then, is the answer to the puzzle: The Nefilim did not "create" Man out of nothing; rather, they took an existing creature and manipulated it, to "bind upon it" the "image of the gods.
Mr. Z. Sitchin gives an overview, that at their arrival on Earth, 435,000 years ago, the Nefilim very possibly were observing the primitive mammals, or even captured this interesting primates.
"Many cylinder seals have been found that depict this shaggy ape-man among his animal friends.

"....Faced with the need for manpower, resolved to obtain a Primitive Worker, the Nefilim saw a ready-made solution: to domesticate a suitable animal.

"The animal was available - but Homo erectus posed a problem. On the one hand, he was too intelligent and wild to become simply a docile beast of work. On the other hand, he was not really suited to the task.... He needed enough cleverness and understanding to be an obedient and useful "amelu" - a serf.

"....Observing the various forms of life on Earth, the Nefilim and their chief scientist, Ea, needed little time to realize what had happened: During the celestial collision, their planet had seeded Earth with its life. Therefore, the being that was available was really akin to the Nefilim - though in a less evolved form.

"The process that Ea recommended in order to achieve a quick evolutionary advancement of Homo erectus was, we believe, genetic manipulation.
"We should assume that the Nefilim - being capable of space travel 450,000 years ago - were also equally advanced, compared to us today, in the field of life sciences. We should also assume that they were aware of the various alternatives by which two preselected sets of chromosomes could be combined to obtain a predetermined genetic result; and that whether the process was akin to cloning, cell fusion, genetic transplant, or methods as yet unknown to us, they knew these processes and could carry them out, not only in the laboratory flask but also with living organisms.

"....It is quite conceivable that before resorting to the creation of a being in their own image, the Nefilim attempted to come up with a "manufactured servant" by experimenting with other alternatives: the creation of a hybrid ape-man-animal. Some of these artificial creatures may have survived for a while but were certainly unable to reproduce....

"Sumerian texts, too, speak of deformed humans created by Enki and the Mother Goddess (Ninhursag), in the course of their efforts to fashion a perfect Primitive Worker.

"....But finally the perfect Man was achieved, the one Enki named Adapa; the Bible, Adam; our scholars, Homo sapiens. This being was so much akin to the gods that one text even went so far as to point out that the Mother Goddess gave to her creature, Man, "a skin as the skin of a god" - a smooth, hairless body, quite different from that of the shaggy ape-man.

"With this final product, the Nefilim were genetically compatible with the daughters of Man and able to marry them and have children by them. But such compatibility could exist only if Man had developed from the same "seed of life" as the Nefilim. This, indeed, is what ancient texts attest to.

"....Called upon to fashion a man, the Mother Goddess "Washed her hands, pinched off clay, mixed it in the steppe." (It is fascinating to note here the sanitary precautions taken by the goddess. She "washed her hands." We encounter such clinical measures and procedures in other creation texts as well).

"Following the mixing of the "blood" and "clay," the childbearing phase would complete the bestowal of a divine "imprint" on the creature.
The new born's fate thou shalt pronounce;
Ninki will fix upon it the image of the gods;
And what it will be is "Man."
Ninki being a spouse of Enki.

"Scholars have surmised that references to Adapa as a "son" of Ea implied that the god loved this human so much that he adopted him. But in the same text Anu refers to Adapa as "the human offspring of Enki." It appears that the involvement of Enki's spouse in the process of creating Adapa, the "model Adam," did create some genealogical relationship between the new Man and his god: It was Ninki who was pregnant with Adapa!

"Ninki blessed the new being and presented it to Ea."

"....Once Adapa/Adam proved to be the right creature, he was used as the genetic model or "mold" for the creation of duplicates, and those duplicates were not only male but male and female. As we showed earlier, the biblical "rib" from which Woman was fashioned was a play on words on the Sumerian TI ("rib" and "life") - confirming that Eve was made of Adam's "life's essence."
Mr. Sitchin does not leave the tales of the Old Testament out. He compares them, and indicates that the biblical texts are condensations of the original Sumerian sources, sometimes creating contradictions.

But Adam had duplicates, and Mr. Sitchin provides the several verses from texts where it is indicated how 14 female were used to deposit the "mixed clay" in their womb. There were surgical procedures, with hygienic measures.

How was the Creation of Man accomplished?

"The text "When the gods as men" contains a passage whose purpose was to explain why the "blood" of a god had to be mixed into the "clay." The "divine" element required was not simply the dripping blood of a god, but something more basic and lasting. The god that was selected, we are told, had TE.E.MA - a term the leading authorities on the text (W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard of Oxford University) translate as "personality." But the ancient term is much more specific; it literally means "that which houses that which binds the memory." Further on, the same term appears in the Akkadian version as etemu, which is translated as "spirit."
 
"In both instances we are dealing with that "something" in the blood of the god that was the repository of his individuality. All these, we feel certain, are but roundabout ways of stating that what Ea was after, when he put the god's blood through a series of "purifying baths" was the god's genes.

"The purpose of mixing this divine element thoroughly with the earthly element was also spelled out:
In the clay, god and Man shall be bound,
to a unity brought together;
So that to the end of days
the Flesh and the Soul
which in a god have ripened -
that Soul in a blood-kingship be bound;
As its Sign life shall proclaim.
So that this not be forgotten,
Let the "Soul" in a blood-kingship be bound.
"These are strong words, little understood by scholars. The text states that the god's blood was mixed into the clay so as to bind god and Man genetically "to the end of days" so that both the flesh ("image") and the soul ("likeness") of the gods would become imprinted upon Man in a kingship of blood that could never be severed.

"....Te evidence of the ancient texts, Mesopotamian as well as biblical, suggests that the process adopted for merging two sets of genes - those of a god and those of Homo erectus - involved the use of male genes as the divine element and female genes as the earthly element. Repeatedly asserting that the Deity created Adam in his image and in his likeness, the Book of Genesis later describes the birth of Adam's son Seth in the following words:
"And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years,
and had an offspring
in his likeness and after his image;
and he called his name Seth."
"The terminology is identical to that used to describe the creation of Adam by the Deity. But Seth was certainly born to Adam by a biological process - the fertilization of a female egg by the male sperm of Adam, and ensuing conception, pregnancy, and birth.

"....If the "clay" onto which the godly element was mixed was an earthly element - as all texts insist - then the only possible conclusion is that the male sperm of a god - his genetic material - was inserted into the egg of an ape-woman!

"The Akkadian term for the "clay" - or, rather, "molding clay" - is tit. But its original spelling was TI.IT ("that which is with life"). In Hebrew, tit means "mud"; but its synonym is bos, which share a root with bisa ("marsh") and besa ("egg").

"The story of Creation is replete with plays on words. We have seen the double and triple meanings of Adam-adama-adamtu-dam. The epithet for the Mother Goddess, NIN.TI, meant both "lady of life" and "lady of the rib." Why not, then, bos-bisa-besa ("clay-mud-egg") as a play of words for the female ovum?

"....The texts make abundantly clear that while Ea built a brick house by the water in Eridu, in the Abzu (southern Africa) he built a house adorned with precious stones and silver. It was there that his creature, Man, originated.

"One can even conclude from the various texts that the creation of Man caused a rift among the gods. It would appear that at least at first the new Primitive Workers were confined to the Land of Mines. As a result, the Anunnaki who were toiling in Sumer proper were denied the benefits of the new manpower.
But Enlil heard the plea of the Anunnaki in Sumer and by force brought manpower from Abzu to do the toiling.
 

 
 

THE END OF ALL FLESH

The "Knowing" of Adam and Eve....
"The only complete account of the events that befell Man following his transportation to the Abode of the Gods in Mesopotamia is the biblical tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden:

Explaining that the Adam was created by the Deity Yahweh, and the placing of the two Trees, the last five verses mention:
"Of every tree of the orchard eat you shall;
but of the Tree of Knowing good and evil
thou shall not eat of it;
for on the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shall surely die."
"Though two vital fruits were available, the Earthlings were prohibited from reaching only for the fruit of the Tree of Knowing. The Deity - at that point - appeared unconcerned that Man might try to reach for the Fruit of Life. Yet Man could not adhere even to that single prohibition, and tragedy followed.

"The idyllic picture soon gave way to dramatic developments, which biblical scholars and theologians call the Fall of Man. It is a tale of unheeded divine commandments, divine lies, a wily (but truth-telling) Serpent, punishment, and exile.

"Appearing from nowhere, the Serpent challenged God's solemn warnings.

"....Reading and rereading the concise yet precise tale, (the discussion of the Serpent, Adam and Eve), one cannot help wondering what the whole confrontation was about. Prohibited under threat of death from even touching the Fruit of Knowing, the two Earthlings were persuaded to go ahead an eat the stuff, which would make them "knowing" as the Deity. Yet all that happened was a sudden awareness that they were naked.

"The State of nakedness was indeed a major aspect of the whole incident.... Not only were they naked, they were unaware of the implication of such nakedness....

"....The continuing biblical narrative confirms the connection between nakedness and the lack of knowing, for it took the Deity no time at all to put the two together:

"And He said:
"Who told thee that thou are naked?
Has thou eaten of the tree,
whereof I commanded thee not to eat?"
"Admitting the truth, the Primitive Worker blamed his female mate, who, in turn, blamed the Serpent....

"....While no Mesopotamian counterpart of the biblical tale has yet been found, there can be little doubt that the tale - like all the biblical material concerning Creation and Man's prehistory - was of Sumerian origin. We have the locale: the Abode of the Gods in Mesopotamia. We have the telltale play on words in Eve's name ("she of life," "she of rib.") And we have two vital trees, the Tree of Knowing and the Tree of Life, as in Anu's abode.

"Even the words of the Deity reflect a Sumerian origin, for the sole Hebrew Deity has again lapsed into the plural, addressing divine colleagues, who were featured not in the Bible but in Sumerian texts:

Then did the Deity Yahweh say:
"Behold, the Adam has become as one of us,
to know good and evil.
And now might he not put forth his hand
and partake also of the Tree of Life,
and eat, and live forever?"
"And the Deity Yahweh expelled the Adam from the orchard of Eden.

"As many early Sumerian depictions show, there had been a time when Man, as a Primitive Worker, served his gods stark naked. He was naked whether he served the gods their food and drink, or toiled in the fields or on construction jobs.
Mr. Z. Sitchin explains that Man had been not given the "knowing" that he was different than the animals.
"Did the lack of "knowing," then, mean that, naked as an animal, the newly fashioned being also engaged in sex as, or with, the animals? Some early depictions indicate that this was indeed the case.

"....If this "knowing" meant only that Man had come to recognize that having sex with animals was uncivilized or evil, why were Adam and Eve punished for giving up sodomy? The Old Testament is replete with admonitions against sodomy, and it is unconceivable that the learning of a virtue would cause divine wrath.
 
"The "knowing" that Man obtained against the wishes of the Deity - or one of the deities - must have been of a more profound nature. It was something good for Man, but something his creators did not wish him to have.
"Throughout the Old Testament the term "to know" is used to denote sexual intercourse, mostly between a man and his spouse for the purpose of having children. The tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is the story of a crucial step in Man's development: the acquisition of the ability to procreate.

"That the first representatives of Homo sapiens were incapable of reproduction should not be surprising. Whatever method the Nefilim had used to infuse some of their genetic material into the biological makeup of the hominids they selected for the purpose, the new being was a hybrid, a cross between two different, if related, species. Like a mule (a cross between a mare and a donkey), such mammal hybrids are sterile.

"Were the Nefilim, at first, simply producing "human mules" to suit their requirements?
There are depictions on a rock in the mountains of southern Elam, which give indications of mass reproduction of beings all looking alike. Mr. Z. Sitchin explains this in detail and the graphic is shown on the book.
"The inability of hybrids to procreate, it has been discovered recently, stems from a deficiency in the reproductive cells. While all cells contain only one set of hereditary chromosomes, Man and other mammals are able to reproduce because their sex cells (the male sperm, the female ovum) contain two sets each. But this unique feature is lacking in hybrids. Attempts are now being made through genetic engineering to provide hybrids with such a double set of chromosomes in their reproductive cells, making them sexually "normal."

"Was that what the god whose epithet was "The Serpent" accomplished for Mankind?

"The biblical Serpent surely was not a lowly, literal snake - for he could converse with Eve, he knew the truth about the matter of "knowing," and he was of such high stature that he unhesitatingly exposed the deity as a liar. We recall that in all ancient traditions, the chief deity fought a Serpent adversary - a tale whose roots undoubtedly go back to the Sumerian gods.

"....The possibility that the biblical antagonists - the Deity and the Serpent - stood for Enlil and Enki seems to us entirely plausible.

"....Although Enki had been the true pioneer, while Enlil stayed at the comfortable Mission control Center at Nippur, Enki was sent to organize the mining operations in the Lower World. The mutiny of the Anunnaki was directed at Enlil and his son Ninurta; the god who spoke out for the mutineers was Enki. It was Enki who suggested, and undertook, the creation of Primitive Workers; Enlil had to use force to obtain some of this wonderful creatures. As the Sumerian texts recorded the course of human events, Enki as a rule emerges as Mankind's protagonist, Enlil as its strict discipliner if not outright antagonist. The role of a deity wishing to keep the new humans sexually suppressed, and of a deity willing and capable of bestowing on Mankind the fruit of "knowing," fit Enlil and Enki perfectly.

"Once more, Sumerian and biblical plays on words come to our aid. The biblical term for "Serpent" is nahash which does mean "snake." But the word comes from the root NHSH, which means "to decipher, to find out"; so that nahash could also mean, "he who can decipher, he who finds things out," an epithet befitting Enki, the chief scientist, the God of Knowledge of the Nefilim.

"....Most pertinent to our findings is the fact that in the Mesopotamian texts, the god who eventually granted "knowledge" to Adapa was none other than Enki:
Wide understanding he perfected for him....
Wisdom, [he had given him]....
To him he had given Knowledge;
Eternal Life he had not given him.

Eventually:

"Cast out of the Abode of the Gods, doomed to a mortal's life, but able to procreate, Man proceeded to do just that.
"....The Sumerian texts, which describe the early stages when the gods were alone in Sumer, describe with equal precision the life of humans in Sumer at a later time, but before the Deluge. The Sumerian (and original) story of the Deluge has its "Noah" a "Man of Shuruppack," the seventh city established by the Nefilim when they landed on Earth.

"At some point then, the human beings - banished from Eden - were allowed to return to Mesopotamia, to live alongside the gods, to serve them, and to worship them. As we interpret the biblical statement, this happened in the days of Enosh. It was then that the gods allowed Mankind back into Mesopotamia, to serve the gods "and to call upon the name of the deity."
The Deluge....
"Humanity, it appears, was undergoing great deprivations when Noah was born. The hard work and the toil were getting it nowhere, for Earth, which was to feed them, was accursed. The stage was set for the Deluge - the momentous event which was to wipe off the face of Earth not only the human race but all life upon the land and in the skies.
And the Deity saw that the wickedness of Man
was great on the earth,
and that every desire of his heart's thoughts
was only evil; every day.
And the Deity repented that He had made Man
upon the earth, and His heart grieved.
And the Deity said:
"I will destroy the Earthling whom I have created
off the face of the earth.
"These are broad accusations, presented as justifications for drastic measures to "end all flesh." But they lack specificity, and scholars and theologians alike find no satisfactory answers regarding the sins or "violations" that could have upset the Deity so much.

"...The Deity grieved over the evil "desire" of Man's thoughts. Man, it would seem, having discovered sex, had become a sex maniac.

But the gods were also lovers, they engaged in tender, illicit, and violent love.

"Such gods could hardly turn against Mankind for behaving as they themselves did.

"The Deity's motive, we find, was not merely concern for human morals. The mounting disgust was caused by a spreading defilement of the gods themselves. Seen in this light, the meaning of the baffling opening verses of Genesis 6 becomes clear:
And it came to pass,
When the Earthlings began to increase in number
upon the face of the Earth,
and daughters were born unto them,
that the sons of the deities
saw the daughters of the Earthlings
that they were compatible,
and they took unto themselves
wives of whichever they chose.
"As these verses should make clear, it was when the sons of the gods began to be sexually involved with Earthling's offspring that the Deity cried, "Enough!"

And the Deity said:
"My spirit shall not shield Man forever;
having stray, he is but flesh."
"The statement has remained enigmatic for millennia.

"Read in the light of our conclusions regarding the genetic manipulation that was brought to play in Man's creation, the verses carry a message to our own scientists. The "spirit" of the gods - their genetic perfection of Mankind - was beginning to deteriorate. Mankind had "strayed," therefore reverting to being but "flesh" - closer to its animal, simian origins.
Mr. Z. Sitchin, referring to contradictions encountered in the biblical record, continues:
"These nagging doubts of the story's veracity disperse, however, when we realize that the biblical account is an edited version of the original Sumerian account. As in the other instances, the monotheistic Bible has compressed into one Deity the role played by several gods who were not always in accord.

"Until the archaeological discoveries of the Mesopotamian civilization and the decipherment of the Akkadian and Sumerian literature, the biblical story of the Deluge stood alone, supported only by scattered primitive mythologies around the world. The discovery of the Akkadian "Epic of Gilgamesh" placed the Genesis Deluge tale in older and venerable company, further enhance by later discoveries of older texts and fragments of the Sumerian original.

"....The parallels with the biblical story are obvious: A Deluge is about to come; one Man is forewarned; he is to save himself by preparing a specially constructed boat; he is to take with him and save the "seed of all living things." Yet the Babylonian version is more plausible. The decision to destroy and the effort to save are not contradictory acts of the same single Deity, but the acts of different deities. Moreover, the decision to forewarn and save the seed of Man is the defiant act of one god (Enki), acting in secret and contrary to the joint decision of the other Great Gods.

Enki advised Utnapishtim, (Akkadian), (the hero of the Mesopotamian Deluge account), all details to the very instant when Utnapishtim was to board himself:
When Shamash who orders a trembling at dusk
will shower down a rain of eruptions -
board thou the ship, batten up the entrance!
"The storm came "with the first glow of dawn."

"The will of Enlil and the Assembly of Gods was done.

But unknown to them the scheme of Enki had also worked:
Floating in the storming waters was a vessel carrying men, women, children, and other living creatures.
"...In the Genesis version, it was Yahweh who vowed never again to destroy Mankind. In the Babylonian version it was the Great Goddess who vowed: "I shall not forget.... I shall be mindful of these days, forgetting them never. By the doings of Enki, Enlil was pacified after his anger to discover that Man had survived. Enki gave the merits to Utnapishtim, as the "wise Man" who had survived, and he was taken to live among the gods, elevated to eternal life.

"But what happened to Mankind in general? The biblical tale ends with an assertion that the Deity then permitted and blessed Mankind to "be fruitful and multiply." Mesopotamian versions of the Deluge story also end with verses that deal with Mankind's procreation. The partly mutilated texts speak of the establishment of human "categories:"
"....Let there be a third category among Humans.
Let there be among the Humans
Women who bear, and women who do not bear.
"There were, apparently, new guidelines for sexual intercourse....

"Enlil was outmaneuvered. Mankind saved and allowed to procreate. The gods opened up Earth to Man.

WHEN THE GODS FLED FROM EARTH

 
"What was this Deluge, whose raging waters swept over Earth?

"....The Old Testament is a masterpiece of literary brevity and precision. The words are always well chosen to convey precise meanings; the verses are to the point; their order is purposeful; their length is no more than is absolutely needed. It is noteworthy that the whole story from Creation through the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is told in eighty verses. The complete record of Adam and his line, even when told separately for Cain and his line and Seth, Enosh, and their line, is managed in fifty eight verses. But the story of the Great Flood merited no less than eighty seven verses. It was, by any editorial standard, a "major story." No mere local event, it was a catastrophe affecting the whole of Earth, the whole of Mankind. The Mesopotamian texts clearly state that the "four corners of the Earth" were affected.

".... There were the events and the cities and the people before the Deluge, and the events and cities and people after the Deluge. There were all the deeds of the gods and the Kingship that they lowered from Heaven before the Great Flood, and the course of godly and human events when Kingship was lowered again to Earth after the Great Flood. It was the great time divider.

"....No, the Deluge was no local occurrence or periodic inundation. It was by all counts an Earthshaking event of unparalleled magnitude, a catastrophe the likes of which neither Man nor gods experienced before or since.
Some questions regarding the Deluge:
"....Why was the launching of a space vehicle from Sippar the signal to Utnapishtim to enter and seal the ark? Where were the gods when the waters covered even the highest mountains? And, Why did they so cherished the roasted meat sacrifice offered by Noah/Utnapishtim?

"As we proceed to find the answers to these and other questions, we shall find that the Deluge was not a premeditated punishment brought about by the gods at their exclusive will. We shall discover that though the Deluge was a predictable event, it was an unavoidable one, a natural calamity in which the gods played not an active but a passive role. We will also show that the secret the gods swore to was a conspiracy against Mankind - to withhold from the Earthlings the information they had regarding the coming avalanche of water so that, while the Nefilim saved themselves, Mankind should perish.

"....After describing the hard work of the Anunnaki, their mutiny, and the ensuing creation of the Primitive Worker, the epic relates how Man ( as we also know from the biblical version) began to procreate and multiply. In time, Mankind began to upset Enlil.

"....Enlil, once again cast as the prosecutor of Mankind - then ordered a punishment. We would expect now to read of the coming Deluge. But not so. Surprisingly, Enlil did not even mention a Deluge or any similar watery ordeal. Instead, he called for the decimation of Mankind through pestilence and sicknesses.
This failed, through the intervention of Atra-Hasis, believed to be Utnapishtim, whom Enki called "the exceedingly wise", which in Akkadian is atra-hasis.
"....Enlil complained bitterly to the gods that "the people have not diminished; they are more numerous than before!"

"He then proceeded to outline the extermination of Mankind through starvation. "Let supplies be cut off from the people; in their bellies, let fruit and vegetables be wanting." The famine was to be achieved through natural forces, by a lack of rain and failing irrigation.

"....Even the sources of sea food were to disappear. Enki was ordered to "draw the bolt, bar the sea," and "guard" its food away from the people.

"....By the sixth "passing", (a year of Anu) cannibalism was rampant.
When the sixth sha-at-tam arrived
they prepared the daughter for a meal
the child they prepared for food....
one house devoured the other.
The gods went to Assembly, and after much argument:
"....The reaction of Enki was outstanding:
The god got fed up with the sitting;
in the Assembly of the Gods,
laughter overcame him.
"....But he (Enlil) said, there was still a chance to doom Mankind. A "killing flood" was in the offing. The approaching catastrophe had to be kept a secret from the people. He called on the Assembly to swear themselves to secrecy and, most important, to "bind prince Enki by an oath."
Enlil opened his mouth to speak
and addressed the Assembly of all the gods:
"Come, all of us, and take an oath
regarding the Killing Flood!"
Anu swore first; Enlil swore; his sons swore with him."

"At first Enki refused to take the oath. "Why will you bind me with an oath?" "Am I to raise my hands against my own humans?" But he was finally forced to take the oath. But Enki, subtly, spoke to Noah/Utnapishtim and the story is remarkably told in The Twelfth Planet. Utnapishtim, was warned of the Killing Flood.

"....Enki provided him with precise instructions regarding the boat, its measurements, and its construction. Steeped in bible stories, we imagine this "ark" as a very large boat, with decks and superstructures. But the biblical term - teba - stems from the root "sunken," and it must be concluded that Enki instructed his Noah to construct a submersible boat - a submarine.

Noah offers a sacrifice when leaving the Ark. The "gods" were attracted by the aromas and came down, (from their spacecraft). The "gods" had been deprived from food during the rains of the Deluge and the settling of the waters....as explained in The 12th Planet.

"The Akkadian text quotes Enki as calling for a boat "roofed over and below," hermetically sealed with "tough pitch." There were to be no decks, no openings, "so that the sun shall not see inside." It was to be a boat "like an Apsu boat," a sulili; it is the very term used nowadays in Hebrew (soleleth) to denote a submarine.

"....Noah's father had hoped that his birth signaled the end of a long time of suffering. The people's problem was a draught - the absence of rain, the shortage of water. Who in his right mind would have thought that they were to perish in an avalanche of water?

"Yet if the humans could not read the signs, the Nefilim could. To them, the Deluge was not a sudden event; though it was unavoidable, they detected its coming. Their scheme to destroy Mankind rested not on an active but on a passive role by the gods. They did not cause the Deluge; they simply connived to withhold from the Earthlings the fact of its coming.

"Aware, however, of the impending calamity, and of its global impact, the Nefilim took steps to save their own skins. With Earth about to be engulfed by water, they could go in only one direction for protection: skyward. When the storm that preceded the Deluge began to blow, the Nefilim took to their shuttlecraft, and remained in Earth orbit until the waters began to subside.

"The day of the Deluge, we will show, was the day the gods fled from Earth.

"The sign for which Utnapishtim had to watch, upon which he was to join all other in the ark and seal it, was this:
When Shamash,
who orders a trembling at dusk,
will shower down a rain of eruptions -
board thou the ship,
batten up the entrance!
"Though the Nefilim were prepared for the Deluge, its coming was a frightening experience: "The noise of the Deluge... set the gods trembling." But when the moment to leave Earth arrived, the gods, "shrinking back, ascended to the heavens of Anu.

"....Orbiting Earth, the Nefilim saw a scene of destruction that affected them deeply.... Crammed into their spacecraft, the gods strained to see what was happening on the planet from which they had just blasted off.

"....Tablet III of the Atra-Hasis epic describes the conditions on board where some of the Anunnaki shared accommodations with the Mother Goddess:
The Anunnaki, great gods,
were sitting in thirst, in hunger....
Ninti wept and spent her emotion;
she wept and eased her feelings.
The gods wept with her for the land.
She was overcome with grief,
she thirsted for beer.
Where she sat, the gods sat weeping;
crouching like sheep at a trough.
Their lips were feverish with thirst,
They were suffering cramp from hunger.
"....The orders to the Nefilim became clear: Abandon Earth, "ascend up to Heaven." It was a time when the Twelfth Planet was nearest Earth, within the asteroid belt ("Heaven"), as evidence by the fact that Anu was able to attend personally the crucial conference shortly before the Deluge.

"....Enki was obviously in yet another spacecraft, or else he would have disclosed to the others that he had managed to save the seed of Mankind. No doubt he had other reasons to feel less gloomy, for the evidence suggests that he had also planned the encounter at Ararat.

"....The Nefilim, as we have shown, used the peaks of Ararat as landmarks from the very beginning. As the highest peaks in that part of the world, they could be expected to reappear first from under the mantle of water. Since Enki, "The Wise One, the All Knowing," certainly could figure that much out, we can surmise that he had instructed his servant to guide the ark toward Ararat, planning the encounter from the very beginning.

From Berossus's version of the Flood, as reported by the Greek Abydenus, relates:
 

"....Sisithros (which is atra-asis reversed), was instructed to "sail immediately to Armenia"- to the land of Ararat.
"What was this catastrophe - predictable yet unavoidable? An important key to unlocking the puzzle of the Deluge is the realization that it was not a single, sudden event, but a climax of a chain of events. Unusual pestilences affecting man and beast and a severe drought preceded the ordeal by water - a process that lasted, according to the Mesopotamian sources, seven passings or sar's. These phenomena could be accounted for only climatic changes. Such changes have been associated in Earth's past with the recurring ice ages and interglacial stages that had dominated Earth's immediate past. Reduced precipitation, falling sea and lake levels, and the drying up of subterranean water sources have been the hallmarks of an approaching ice age. Since the Deluge which abruptly ended those conditions was followed by the Sumerian civilization and our own present, postglacial age, the glaciation in question, could only have been the last one.

"Of the many theories advanced by the scientists, we are intrigued by the one suggested by Dr. John T. Hollin of the University of Maine. He contended the Antarctic ice sheet periodically breaks loose and slips into the sea, creating an abrupt and enormous tidal wave!

"In 1964, A.T. Wilson of Victoria University in New Zealand offered the theory that ice ages ended abruptly in such slippages, not only in the Antarctic but also in the Arctic. We feel that the various texts and facts gathered by us justify a conclusion that the Deluge was the result of such slippage into the Antarctic waters of billions of tons of ice, bringing an abrupt end to the last ice age.

"The "Epic of Gilgamesh" is specific about the direction from which the storm came: It came from the south. Clouds, winds, rain, and darkness indeed preceded the tidal wave which first tore down the "posts of Nergal" in the Lower World....

"How could the Nefilim predict when the Deluge would burst out of Antarctica?

"The Mesopotamia texts, we know, related the Deluge and the climatic changes preceding it to seven "passings" -undoubtedly meaning the periodic passage of the Twelfth Planet in Earth's vicinity.

"....Could it be that the Nefilim, observing the climatic changes and the instability of the Antarctic ice sheet, realized that the next, seventh "passing" of the Twelfth Planet would trigger the impending catastrophe?

"Ancient texts show that it was so.
There are several hymns from ancient texts which tell of the passing of the Twelfth Planet and attest that he was the triggering factor of the Deluge.

Mr. Sitchin also quotes from the Bible in this regard, Psalm 29; Psalm 77; Psalm 104.
"The words of the prophet Amos are even more explicit:
Woe unto you that desire the Day of the Lord;
To what end is it for you?
For the Day of the Lord is darkness and no light....
Turneth morning into death's shadow,
Maketh the day dark as night;
Calleth forth the waters of the sea
and poureth them upon the face of the Earth.
"These, then, were the events that took place "in olden days." "Day of the Lord" was the day of the "Deluge."
Mr. Sitchin ends this chapter with an "Event" chart, commencing at 445,000 years ago, when the Nefilim, led by Enki, arrive on Earth from the Twelfth Planet. Eridu - Earth Station I - is established in southern Mesopotamia. Following the moves of the Nefilim accompanied by climatic changes, with the climax at 13,000 years ago, when the Deluge sweeps over Earth, abruptly ending the ice age.

KINGSHIP ON EARTH
 

"The Deluge, a traumatic experience for Mankind, was so no less for the "gods" - the Nefilim.
"An effort of 120 shar's was wiped away overnight. The south African mines, the cities in Mesopotamia, the control center at Nippur, the spaceport at Sippar - all lay buried under water and mud. Hovering in their shuttlecraft above devastated Earth, the Nefilim impatiently awaited the abatement of the waters so that they could set foot on solid ground.

"How were they going to survive henceforth on Earth when their cities and facilities had gone, and even their manpower - Mankind - was totally destroyed?

"When the frightened, exhausted, and hungry groups of Nefilim finally landed on the peaks of "Mount of Salvation," they were clearly relieved to discover that Man and beast alike had not perished completely. Even Enlil, at first enraged to discover that his aims had been partly frustrated, soon changed his mind.

"The deity's decision was a practical one. Faced with their own dire conditions, the Nefilim cast their inhibitions about Man, rolled up their sleeves, and lost no time in imparting to Man the art of growing crops and cattle. Since survival, no doubt, depended with the speed with which agriculture and animal domestication could be developed to sustain the Nefilim and a rapidly multiplying Mankind, the Nefilim applied their advanced scientific knowledge to the task.

"...."Sowing and Harvesting" were described in Genesis as divine gifts granted to Noah and his offspring as part of the post-Diluvial covenant between the Deity and Mankind:
For as long as the Earth's days shall be,
There shall not cease
Sowing and Harvesting,
Cold and Warmth,
Summer and Winter,
Day and Night.
"....The Sumerian texts, too, ascribed to the gods the granting to Mankind of both agriculture and the domestication of animals.

"Tracing the beginnings of agriculture, modern scholars have found that it appeared first in the Near East, but not in fertile and easily cultivated plains and valleys. Rather, agriculture began in the mountains skirting the low-lying plains in a semicircle.

"....The only plausible answer is that the low-lying lands were, at the time when agriculture began, uninhabitable.

"....The Sumerian texts state that Enlil first spread cereals "in the hill country...." The name of this mountainous land east of Sumer, E.LAM, meant "house where vegetation germinated." Later, two of Enlil's helpers, the gods Ninazu and Ninmada, extended the cultivation of cereals to the low-lying plains so that, eventually, "Sumer, the land that knew not grain, came to know grain."
Mr. Sitchin explains thereon that for the rapid appearance of grains, as wheat and barley, (domesticated wild emmer), it would have taken thousands of generations of genetic selection by nature:
"Yet the period, time, or location in which such a gradual and very prolonged process might have taken place on Earth are nowhere to be found.

"There is no explanation for this botanogenetic miracle, unless the process was not one of natural selection but of artificial manipulation.

"Spelt, a hard-grained type of wheat, poses an even greater mystery...." "It is definitely the result of mixing the genes of several plants. The whole notion that Man, in a few thousand years, changed animals through domestication, is also questionable.

"Modern scholars have no answers to these puzzles, nor to the general question of why the mountainous semicircle in the ancient Near East became a continuous source of new varieties of cereals, plants, trees, fruits, vegetables, and domesticated animals.

"The Sumerians knew the answer. The seeds, they said, were a gift sent to Earth by Anu from his Celestial Abode. Wheat, barley, and hemp were lowered to Earth from the Twelfth Planet. Agriculture and the domestication of animals were gifts given to Mankind by Enlil and Enki, respectively.

"....It appears that the Nefilim, passing knowledge to Man in measured doses, did so in intervals matching the periodic returns of the Twelfth Planet to Earth's vicinity....

"....The "Epic of Etana" provides a glimpse of the deliberation that took place. In the days that followed the Deluge, it says:
The great Anunnaki who decree the fate
sat exchanging their counsels regarding the land.
They who created the four regions,
who set up the settlements, who oversaw the land,
were too lofty for Mankind.
"....As a bridge between themselves as lords and Mankind, they introduced "Kingship" on Earth: appointing a human ruler who would assure Mankind's service to the gods and channel the teachings and laws of the gods to the people.

"A text dealing with the subject describes the situation before either tiara or crown had been placed on a human head, or scepter handed down; all these symbols of Kingship - plus the shepherd's crook - the symbol of righteousness and justice - "lay deposited before Anu in Heaven." After the gods had reached their decision, however, Kingship descended from "Heaven to Earth."

"Both Sumerian and Akkadian texts state that the Nefilim retained the "lordship" over the lands, and had Mankind first rebuild the pre-diluvial cities exactly where they had originally been.... Eridu, then, was first to be rebuilt.

"The Nefilim then helped the people plan and build the first royal city, and they blessed it. "May the city be the nest, the place where Mankind shall repose. May the King be a Shepherd."

"The first royal city of Man, the Sumerian texts tell us, was Kish.

"The Sumerian king lists, unfortunately, are mutilated just where the name of the very first human king was inscribed.
By deduction, Mr. Sitchin mentions, that from the biblical "Table of Nations" listed is Nimrud the patriarch of the kingdoms at Uruk, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria - as descended from Kish.

After Noah, three regions became of concern to the great Anunnaki, Mesopotamia and the Near Eastern lands, where Shem and descendants settled. Africa and parts of Arabia, where Ham and descendants settled. Japhet, and descendants, the Indo-Europeans in Asia Minor, Iran, India, and Europe.

Mr. Sitchin also gives the main points of the development of each subsequent civilization as they flourished.
But in the "Epic of Etana", it is mentioned "four regions," so which is the fourth region?
"Three of them - Mesopotamia, the Nile valley, and the Indus valley - were settled by Man.

"The fourth region was "holy" - a term whose original meaning was "dedicated, restricted." Dedicated to the gods alone, it was a "pure land," an area that could be approached only with authorization; trespassing could lead to quick death by "awesome weapons" wielded by fierce guards. This land or region was named TIL.MUN (literally, "the place of the missiles"). It was the restricted area where the Nefilim had reestablished their space base after the one at Sippar had been wiped out by the Deluge.

"Once again the area was placed under the command of Utu/Shamash." The one in charge of the Eagles.

"But where was this elusive land of the divine connection?
The question can be answered. The clues are there. But beyond it loom other questions. Have the Nefilim been encountered ever since? What will happen when they will be encountered again?
"And if the Nefilim were the "gods" who "created" Man on Earth, did evolution alone, on the Twelfth Planet, create the Nefilim?"