1 - The Host of Heaven

In the beginning
God created the Heaven and the Earth.

The very concept of a beginning of all things is basic to modern astronomy and astrophysics. The statement that there was a void and chaos before there was order conforms to the very latest theories that chaos, not permanent stability, rules the universe. And then there is the statement about the bolt of light that began the process of creation.

Was this a reference to the Big Bang, the theory according to which the universe was created from a primordial explosion, a burst of energy in the form of light, that sent the matter from which stars and planets and rocks and human beings are formed flying in all directions and creating the wonders we see in the heavens and on Earth? Some scientists, inspired by the insights of our most inspiring source, have thought so. But then, how did ancient Man know the Big Bang theory so long ago? Or was this biblical tale the description of matters closer to home, of how our own little planet Earth and the heavenly zone called the Firmament, or “hammered-out bracelet,” were formed? Indeed, how did ancient Man come to have a cosmogony at all? How much did he really know, and how did he know it?

It is only appropriate that we begin the quest for answers where the events began to unfold—in the heavens; where also, from time immemorial, Man has felt that his origins, higher values—God, if you will—are to be found. As thrilling as discoveries made by the use of microscopes are, it is what telescopes enable us to see that fills us with the realization of the grandeur of nature and the universe. Of all recent advances, the most impressive have undoubtedly been the discoveries in the heavens surrounding our planet.

Figure 1

And what staggering advances they have been! In a mere few decades we Earthlings have soared off the face of our planet; roamed Earth’s skies hundreds of miles above its surface; landed on its solitary satellite, the Moon; and sent an array of unmanned spacecraft to probe our celestial neighbors, discovering vibrant and active worlds dazzling in their colors, features, makeup, satellites, rings. For the first time, perhaps, we can grasp the meaning and feel the scope of the Psalmist’s words:
The heavens bespeak the glory of the Lord and the vault of heaven reveals His handiwork.

A fantastic era of planetary exploration came to a magnificent climax when, in August 1989, the unmanned spacecraft designated Voyager 2 flew by distant Neptune and sent back to Earth pictures and other data. Weighing just about a ton but ingeniously packed with television cameras, sensing and measuring equipment, a power source based on nuclear decay, transmitting antennas, and tiny computers (Fig. 1), it sent back whisper-like pulses that required more than four hours to reach Earth even at the speed of light.

On Earth the pulses were captured by an array of radiotelescopes that form the Deep Space Network of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); then the faint signals were translated by electronic wizardry into photographs, charts, and other forms of data at the sophisticated facilities of the Jet Propulsion The Host of Heaven 5 Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which managed the project for NASA.

Launched in August 1977, twelve years before this final mission—the visit to Neptune—was accomplished. Voyager 2 and its companion. Voyager I, were originally intended to reach and scan only Jupiter and Saturn and augment data obtained earlier about those two gaseous giants by the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 unmanned spacecraft. But with remarkable ingenuity and skill, the JPL scientists and technicians took advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets and, using the gravitational forces of these planets as “slingshots,” managed to thrust Voyager 2 first from Saturn to Uranus and then from Uranus to Neptune (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Thus it was that for several days at the end of August 1989, headlines concerning another world pushed aside the usual news of armed conflicts, political upheavals, sports results, and market reports that make up Mankind’s daily fare. For a few days the world we call Earth took time out to watch another world; we, Earthlings, were glued to our television sets, thrilled by close-up pictures of another planet, the one we call Neptune.

As the dazzling images of an aquamarine globe appeared on our television screens, the commentators stressed repeatedly that this was the first time that Man on Earth had ever really been able to see this planet, which even with the best Earth-based telescopes is visible only as a dimly lit spot in the darkness of space almost three billion miles from us. They reminded the viewers that Neptune was discovered only in 1846, after perturbations in the orbit of the somewhat nearer planet Uranus indicated the existence of another celestial body beyond it.

They reminded us that no one before that—neither Sir Isaac Newton nor Johannes Kepler, who between them discovered and laid down the laws of celestial motion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; neither Copernicus, who in the sixteenth century determined that the Sun, not the Earth, was in the center of our planetary system, nor Galileo, who a century later used a telescope to announce that Jupiter had four moons—no great astronomer until the mid-nineteenth century and certainly no one in earlier times knew of Neptune. And thus not only the average TV viewer but the astronomers themselves were about to see what had been unseen before—it would be the first time we would learn the true hues and makeup of Neptune.

But two months before the August encounter, I had written an article for a number of U. S., European, and South American monthlies contradicting these long-held notions: Neptune was known in antiquity, I wrote; and the discoveries that were about to be made would only confirm ancient knowledge. Neptune, I predicted, would be blue-green, watery, and have patches the color of “swamplike vegetation”!

The electronic signals from Voyager 2 confirmed all that and more. They revealed a beautiful blue-green, aquamarine planet embraced by an atmosphere of helium, hydrogen, and methane gases, swept by swirling, high-velocity winds that make Earth’s hurricanes look timid. Below this atmosphere there appear mysterious giant “smudges” whose coloration is sometimes darker blue and sometimes greenish yellow, perhaps depending on the angle at which sunlight strikes them. As expected, the atmospheric and surface temperatures are below freezing, but unexpectedly Neptune was found to emit heat that emanates from within the planet.

Contrary to the previous The Host of Heaven ⁷ consideration of Neptune as being a “gaseous” planet, it was determined by Voyager 2 to have a rocky core above which there floats, in the words of the JPL scientists, “a slurry mixture of water ice.” This watery layer, circling the rocky core as the planet revolves in its sixteen-hour day, acts as a dynamo that creates a sizable magnetic field.

This beautiful planet (below image) was found to be encircled by several rings made up of boulders, rocks, and dust and is orbited by at least eight satellites, or moons. Of the latter, the largest, Triton, proved no less spectacular than its planetary master.

Voyager 2 confirmed the retrograde motion of this small celestial body (almost the size of Earth’s Moon): it orbits Neptune in a direction opposite to that of the coursing of Neptune and all other known planets in our Solar System, not anticlockwise as they do but clockwise. Besides its very existence, its approximate size, and its retrograde motion, astronomers knew nothing else of Triton. Voyager 2 revealed it to be a “blue moon,” an appearance resulting from methane in Triton’s atmosphere.

The surface of Triton showed through the thin atmosphere—a pinkish gray surface with rugged, mountainous features on one side and smooth, almost craterless features on the other side. Close-up pictures suggested recent volcanic activity but of a very odd kind: what the active, hot interior of this celestial body spews out is not molten lava but jets of slushy ice. Even preliminary assessments indicated that Triton had flowing water in its past, quite possibly even lakes that may have existed on the surface until relatively recent times, in geological terms.

The astronomers had no immediate explanation for “double-tracked ridge lines” that run straight for hundreds of miles and, at one or even two points, intersect at what appears to be right angles, suggesting rectangular areas (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

The discoveries thus fully confirmed my prediction:

• Neptune is indeed blue-green

• it is made up in great part of water

• it does have patches whose coloration looks like “swamp-like vegetation”

This last tantalizing aspect may bespeak more than a color code if the full implication of the discoveries on Triton is taken into consideration: there, “darker patches with brighter halos” have suggested to the scientists of NASA the existence of “deep pools of organic sludge.” Bob Davis reported from Pasadena to The Wall Street Journal that Triton, whose atmosphere contains as much nitrogen as Earth’s, may be spewing out from its active volcanoes not only gases and water ice but also ‘”organic material, carbon-based compounds which apparently coat parts of Triton.”

Such gratifying and overwhelming corroboration of my prediction was not the result of a mere lucky guess. It goes back to 1976 when The 12th Planet, my first book in The Earth Chronicles series, was published. Basing my conclusions on millennia-old Sumerian texts, I had asked rhetorically:

“When we probe Neptune someday, will we discover that its persistent association with waters is due to the watery swamps” that had once been seen there?

This was published, and obviously written, a year before Voyager 2 was even launched and was restated by me in an article two months before the Neptune encounter. How could I be so sure, on the eve of Voyager’s encounter with Neptune, that my 1976 prediction would be corroborated—how dared I take the chance that my predictions would be disproved within weeks after submitting my article? My certainty was based on what happened in January 1986, when Voyager 2 flew by the planet Uranus.

Although somewhat closer to us—Uranus is “only” about two billion miles away—it lies so far beyond Saturn that it cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It was discovered in 1781 by Frederick Wilhelm Herschel, a musician turned amateur astronomer, only after the telescope was perfected. At the time of its discovery and to this day, Uranus has been hailed as the first planet we known in antiquity to be discovered in modern times; for, it has been held, the ancient peoples knew of and venerated the Sun, the Moon, and only five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), which they believed moved around the Earth in the “vault of heaven”; nothing could be seen or known beyond Saturn.

But the very evidence gathered by Voyager 2 at Uranus proved the opposite: that at one time a certain ancient people did know about Uranus, and about Neptune, and even about the more-distant Pluto!

Plate A

Scientists are still analyzing the photographs and data from Uranus and its amazing moons, seeking answers to endless puzzles. Why does Uranus lie on its side, as though it was hit by another large celestial object in a collision? Why do its winds blow in a retrograde direction, contrary to what is normal in the Solar System? Why is its temperature on the side that is hidden from the Sun the same as on the side facing the Sun?

And what shaped the unusual features and formations on some of the Uranian moons? Especially intriguing is the moon called Miranda, “one of the most enigmatic objects in the Solar System,” in the words of NASA’s astronomers, where an elevated, flattened-out plateau is delineated by 100-mile-long escarpments that form a right angle (a feature nicknamed “the Chevron” by the astronomers), and where, on both sides of this plateau, there appear elliptical features that look like racetracks ploughed over by concentric furrows (Plate A and Fig. 4).

Figure 4

Two phenomena, however, stand out as the major discoveries regarding Uranus, distinguishing it from other planets. One is its color. With the aid of Earth-based telescopes and unmanned spacecraft we have become familiar with the graybrown of Mercury, the sulphur-colored haze that envelops Venus, the reddish Mars, the multihued red-brown-yellow Jupiter and Saturn. But as the breathtaking images of Uranus began to appear on television screens in January 1986, its most striking feature was its greenish blue color—a color totally different from that of all the previous planets seen (see Uranus below).

The other different and unexpected finding had to do with what Uranus is made of. Defying earlier assumptions by astronomers that Uranus is a totally “gaseous” planet like the giants Jupiter and Saturn, it was found by Voyager 2 to be covered not by gases but by water; not just a sheet of frozen ice on its surface but an ocean of water. A gaseous atmosphere, it was found, indeed enshrouds the planet; but below it there churns an immense layer—6,000 miles thick!—of “super-heated water, its temperature as high as 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit” (in the words of JPL analysts). This layer of liquid, hot water surrounds a molten rocky core where radioactive elements (or other, unknown processes) produce the immense internal heat.

As the images of Uranus grew bigger on the TV screen the closer Voyager 2 neared the planet, the moderator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory drew attention to its unusual green-blue color. I could not help cry out loud,

"Oh, my God, it is exactly as the Sumerians had described it!”

I hurried to my study, picked up a copy of The 12th Planet, and with unsteady hands looked up page 269 (in the Avon paperback edition). I read again and again the lines quoting the ancient texts. Yes, there was no doubt: though they had no telescopes, the Sumerians had described Uranus as MASH.SIG, a term which I had translated “bright greenish.”

A few days later came the results of the analysis of Voyager 2’s data, and the Sumerian reference to water on Uranus was also corroborated. Indeed, there appeared to be water all over the place: as reported on a wrap-up program on the television series NOVA (‘The Planet That Got Knocked on Its Side”), “Voyager 2 found that all the moons of Uranus are made up of rock and ordinary water ice”. This abundance, or even the mere presence, of water on the supposed “gaseous” planets and their satellites at the edges of the Solar System was totally unexpected.

Yet here we had the evidence, presented in The 12th Planet, that in their texts from millennia ago the ancient Sumerians had not only known of the existence of Uranus but had accurately described it as greenish blue and watery!

What did all that mean? It meant that in 1986 modern science did not discover what had been unknown; rather, it rediscovered and caught up with ancient knowledge. It was, therefore, because of that 1986 corroboration of my 1976 writings and thus of the veracity of the Sumerian texts that I felt confident enough to predict, on the eve of the Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune, what it would discover there.

The Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus and Neptune had thus confirmed not only ancient knowledge regarding the very existence of these two outer planets but also crucial details regarding them. The 1989 flyby of Neptune provided still more corroboration of the ancient texts. In them, Neptune was listed before Uranus, as would be expected of someone who is coming into the Solar System and sees first Pluto, then Neptune, and then Uranus. In these texts or planetary lists Uranus was called Kakkab shanamma, “Planet Which Is the Double” of Neptune.

The Voyager 2 data goes far to uphold this ancient notion. Uranus is indeed a look-alike of Neptune in size, color, and watery content; both planets are encircled by rings and orbited by a multitude of satellites, or moons. An unexpected similarity has been found regarding the two planets’ magnetic fields: both have an unusually extreme inclination relative to the planets’ axes of rotation—58 degrees on Uranus, 50 degrees on Neptune.

“Neptune appears to be almost a magnetic twin of Uranus,” John Noble Wilford reported in The New York Times.

The two planets are also similar in the lengths of their days: each about sixteen to seventeen hours long. The ferocious winds on Neptune and the water ice slurry layer on its surface attest to the great internal heat it generates, like that of Uranus. In fact, the reports from JPL state that initial temperature readings indicated that,

“Neptune’s temperatures are similar to those of Uranus, which is more than a billion miles closer to the Sun.”

Therefore, the scientists assumed “that Neptune somehow is generating more of its internal heat than Uranus does”—somehow compensating for its greater distance from the Sun to attain the same temperatures as Uranus generates, resulting in similar temperatures on both planets—and thus adding one more feature “to the size and other characteristics that make Uranus a near twin of Neptune.”

“Planet which is the double,” the Sumerians said of Uranus in comparing it to Neptune. “Size and other characteristics that make Uranus a near twin of Neptune,” NASA’s scientists announced. Not only the described characteristics but even the terminology—“planet which is the double,” “a near twin of Neptune”—is similar. But one statement, the Sumerian one, was made circa 4,000 B.C., and the other, by NASA, in AD. 1989, nearly 6,000 years later. . . .

In the case of these two distant planets, it seems that modern science has only caught up with ancient knowledge. It sounds incredible, but the facts ought to speak for themselves. Moreover, this is just the first of a series of scientific discoveries in the years since The 12th Planet was published that corroborate its findings in one instance after another.
Those who have read my books (The Stairway to Heaven, The Wars of Gods and Men, and The Lost Realms followed the first one) know that they are based, first and foremost, on the knowledge bequeathed to us by the Sumerians. Theirs was the first known civilization.

Appearing suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere some 6,000 years ago, it is credited with virtually all the “firsts” of a high civilization: inventions and innovations, concepts and beliefs, which form the foundation of our own Western culture and indeed of all other civilizations and cultures throughout the Earth. The wheel and animal-drawn vehicles, boats for rivers and ships for seas, the kiln and the brick, high-rise buildings, writing and schools and scribes, laws and judges and juries, kingship and citizens’ councils, music and dance and art, medicine and chemistry, weaving and textiles, religion and priesthoods and temples—they all began there, in Sumer, a country in the southern part of today’s Iraq, located in ancient Mesopotamia.

Above all, knowledge of mathematics and astronomy began there. Indeed, all the basic elements of modern astronomy are of Sumerian origin: the concept of a celestial sphere, of a horizon and a zenith, of the circle’s division into 360 degrees, of a celestial band in which the planets orbit the Sun, of grouping stars into constellations and giving them the names and pictorial images that we call the zodiac, of applying the number 12 to this zodiac and to the divisions of time, and of devising a calendar that has been the basis of calendars to this very day. All that and much, much more began in Sumer.

Figure 5

The Sumerians recorded their commercial and legal transactions, their tales and their histories, on clay tablets (Fig. 5a); they drew their illustrations on cylinder seals on which the depiction was carved in reverse, as a negative, that appeared as a positive when the seal was rolled on wet clay (Fig. 5b). In the ruins of Sumerian cities excavated by archaeologists in the past century and a half, hundreds, if not thousands, of the texts and illustrations that were found dealt with astronomy. Among them are lists of stars and constellations in their correct heavenly locations and manuals for observing the rising and setting of stars and planets.

There are texts specifically dealing with the Solar System. There are texts among the unearthed tablets that list the planets orbiting the Sun in their correct order; one text even gives the distances between the planets. And there are illustrations on cylinder seals depicting the Solar System, as the one shown in Plate B that is at least 4,500 years old and that is now kept in the Near Eastern Section of the State Museum in East Berlin, catalogued under number VA/243.

Plate B

If we sketch the illustration appearing in the upper left-hand comer of the Sumerian depiction (Fig. 6a) we see a complete Solar System in which the Sun (not Earth!) is in the center, orbited by all the planets we know of today. This becomes clear when we draw these known planets around the Sun in their correct relative sizes and order (Fig. 6b). The similarity between the ancient depiction and the current one is striking; it leaves no doubt that the twinlike Uranus and Neptune were known in antiquity.

Fig. 6

The Sumerian depiction also reveals, however, some differences. These are not artist’s errors or misinformation; on the contrary, the differences—two of them—are very significant. The first difference concerns Pluto. It has a very odd orbit—too inclined to the common plane (called the Ecliptic) in which the planets orbit the Sun, and so elliptical that Pluto sometimes (as at present and until 1999) finds itself not farther but closer to the Sun than Neptune. Astronomers have therefore speculated, ever since its discovery in 1930, that Pluto was originally a satellite of another planet; the usual assumption is that it was a moon of Neptune that “somehow”—no one can figure out how—got torn away from its attachment to Neptune and attained its independent (though bizarre) orbit around the Sun.

This is confirmed by the ancient depiction, but with a significant difference. In the Sumerian depiction Pluto is shown not near Neptune but between Saturn and Uranus. And Sumerian cosmological texts, with which we shall deal at length, relate that Pluto was a satellite of Saturn that was let loose to eventually attain its own “destiny”—its independent orbit around the Sun.

The ancient explanation regarding the origin of Pluto reveals not just factual knowledge but also great sophistication in matters celestial. It involves an understanding of the complex forces that have shaped the Solar System, as well as the development of astrophysical theories by which moons can become planets or planets in the making can fail and remain moons. Pluto, according to Sumerian cosmogony, made it; our Moon, which was in the process of becoming an independent planet, was prevented by celestial events from attaining the independent status.

Modern astronomers moved from speculation to the conviction that such a process has indeed occurred in our Solar System only after observations by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft determined in the past decade that Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, was a planet-in-the-making whose detachment from Saturn was not completed. The discoveries at Neptune reinforced the opposite speculation regarding Triton, Neptune’s moon that is just 400 miles smaller in diameter than Earth’s Moon. Its peculiar orbit, its volcanism, and other unexpected features have suggested to the JPL scientists, in the words of the Voyager project’s chief scientist Edward Stone, that,

“Triton may have been an object sailing through the Solar System several billion years ago when it strayed too close to Neptune, came under its gravitational influence and started orbiting the planet.”

How far is this hypothesis from the Sumerian notion that planetary moons could become planets, shift celestial positions, or fail to attain independent orbits? Indeed, as we continue to expound the Sumerian cosmogony, it will become evident that not only is much of modern discovery merely a rediscovery of ancient knowledge but that ancient knowledge offered explanations for many phenomena that modern science has yet to figure out.

Even at the outset, before the rest of the evidence in support of this statement is presented, the question inevitably arises:
How on Earth could the Sumerians have known all that so long ago, at the dawn of civilization?

The answer lies in the second difference between the Sumerian depiction of the Solar System (Fig. 6a) and our present knowledge of it (Fig. 6b). It is the inclusion of a large planet in the empty space between Mars and Jupiter. We are not aware of any such planet; but the Sumerian cosmological, astronomical, and historical texts insist that there indeed exists one more planet in our Solar System—its twelfth member: they included the Sun, the Moon (which they counted as a celestial body in its own right for reasons stated in the texts), and ten, not nine, planets.

It was the realization that a planet the Sumerian texts called NIBIRU (“Planet of the Crossing”) was neither Mars nor Jupiter, as some scholars have debated, but another planet that passes between them every 3,600 years that gave rise to my first book’s title, The 12th Planet—the planet which is the “twelfth member” of the Solar System (although technically it is, as a planet, only the tenth).

It was from that planet, the Sumerian texts repeatedly and persistently stated, that the ANUNNAKI came to Earth. The term literally means “Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came.” They are spoken of in the Bible as the Anakim, and in Chapter 6 of Genesis are also called Nefilim, which in Hebrew means the same thing: Those Who Have Come Down, from the Heavens to Earth.

And it was from the Anunnaki, the Sumerians explained—as though they had anticipated our questions—that they had learnt all they knew. The advanced knowledge we find in Sumerian texts is thus, in effect, knowledge that was possessed by the Anunnaki who had come from Nibiru; and theirs must have been a very advanced civilization, because as I have surmised from the Sumerian texts, the Anunnaki came to Earth about 445,000 years ago. Way back then they could already travel in space. Their vast elliptical orbit made a loop—this is the exact translation of the Sumerian term—around all the outer planets, acting as a moving observatory from which the Anunnaki could investigate all those planets. No wonder that what we are discovering now was already known in Sumerian times.

Why anyone would bother to come to this speck of matter we call Earth, not by accident, not by chance, not once but repeatedly, every 3,600 years, is a question the Sumerian texts have answered. On their planet Nibiru, the Anunnaki/Nefilim were facing a situation we on Earth may also soon face: ecological deterioration was making life increasingly impossible. There was a need to protect their dwindling atmosphere, and the only solution seemed to be to suspend gold particles above it, as a shield. (Windows on American spacecraft, for example, are coated with a thin layer of gold to shield the astronauts from radiation).

This rare metal had been discovered by the Anunnaki on what they called the Seventh Planet (counting from the outside inward), and they launched Mission Earth to obtain it. At first they tried to obtain it effortlessly, from the waters of the Persian Gulf; but when that failed, they embarked on toilsome mining operations in southeastern Africa. Some 300,000 years ago, the Anunnaki assigned to the African mines mutinied. It was then that the chief scientist and the chief medical officer of the Anunnaki used genetic manipulation and in-vitro fertilization techniques to create “primitive workers”—the first Homo sapiens to take over the backbreaking toil in the gold mines.

The Sumerian texts that describe all these events and their condensed version in the Book of Genesis have been extensively dealt with in The 12th Planet. The scientific aspects of those developments and of the techniques employed by the Anunnaki are the subject of this book. Modern science, it will be shown, is blazing an amazing track of scientific advances—but the road to the future is replete with signposts, knowledge, and advances from the past. The Anunnaki, it will be shown, have been there before; and as the relationship between them and the beings they had created changed, as they decided to give Mankind civilization, they imparted to us some of their knowledge and the ability to make our own scientific advances.

Among the scientific advances that will be discussed in the ensuing chapters will also be the mounting evidence for the existence of Nibiru. If it were not for The 12th Planet, the discovery of Nibiru would be a great event in astronomy but no more significant for our daily lives than, say, the discovery in 1930 of Pluto. It was nice to learn that the Solar System has one more planet “out there,” and it would be equally gratifying to confirm that the planetary count is not nine but ten; that would especially please astrologers, who need twelve celestial bodies and not just eleven for the twelve houses of the zodiac.
 

But after the publication of The 12th Planet and the evidence therein—which has not been refuted since its first printing in 1976—and the evidence provided by scientific advances since then, the discovery of Nibiru cannot remain just a matter involving textbooks on astronomy. If what I have written is so— if, in other words, the Sumerians were correct in what they were recording—the discovery of Nibiru would mean not only that there is one more planet out there but that there is Life out there. Moreover, it would confirm that there are intelligent beings out there—people who were so advanced that, almost half a million years ago, they could travel in space; people who were coming and going between their planet and Earth every 3,600 years.

It is who is out there on Nibiru, and not just its existence, that is bound to shake existing political, religious, social, economic, and military orders on Earth. What will the repercussions be when—not if—Nibiru is found? It is a question, believe it or not, that is already being pondered.
 

GOLD MINING—HOW LONG AGO?

Is there evidence that mining took place, in southern Africa, during the Old Stone Age? Archaeological studies indicate that it indeed was so.

Realizing that sites of abandoned ancient mines may indicate where gold could be found, South Africa’s leading mining corporation, the Anglo-American Corporation, in the 1970s engaged archaeologists to look for such ancient mines. Published reports (in the corporation’s journal Optima) detail the discovery in Swaziland and other sites in South Africa of extensive mining areas with shafts to depths of fifty feet. Stone objects and charcoal remains established dates of 35,000, 46,000, and 60,000 B.C. for these sites. The archaeologists and anthropologists who joined in dating the finds believed that mining technology was used in southern Africa “during much of the period subsequent to 100,000 B.C.”

In September 1988, a team of international physicists came to South Africa to verify the age of human habitats in Swaziland and Zululand. The most modern techniques indicated an age of 80,000 to 115,000 years. Regarding the most ancient gold mines of Monotapa in southern Zimbabwe, Zulu legends hold that they were worked by,

“artificially produced flesh and blood slaves created by the First People.”

These slaves, the Zulu legends recount, “went into battle with the Ape-Man” when “the great war star appeared in the sky” (see Indaba My Children, by the Zulu medicine man Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa).
 

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