Chapter Five
THE GODS WHO CAME TO PLANET EARTH

A note:

After having exquisitely explained The Stairway to Heaven, according to the Egyptian glyphs, Mr Sitchin continues his book with this chapter by opening the first lines with the account of our own astronauts and quotes the famous words:

"Houston!
Tranquility Base here;
The Eagle has landed!"

And

"O.K., Houston.
The Falcon is on the plain of Hadley!"

"Whereupon the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston announced to the world "That was a jubilant Dave Scott reporting Apollo 15 on the plain at Hadley!"

The beautiful medallion where the words "Apollo 11" together with an Eagle posed on the Moon, and Earth high above the Moon’s horizon, appear on the book to illustrate an important and significant point, if we recall who the Eagles were in The Twelfth Planet.

"Up to a few decades ago, the notion that a common mortal can put on some special clothes, strap himself in the front of a long object, then zoom off the face of Earth, seemed preposterous or worse. A century or two ago, such a notion would not have even come about, for there was nothing in human experience or knowledge to trigger such fantasies.

"Yet, as we have just described, the Egyptians - 5,000 years ago, could readily visualize all this happening to their Pharaoh: he would journey to a launch site east of Egypt; he would enter a subterranean complex of tunnels and chambers; he would safely pass by the installation’s atomic plant and radiation chamber (he had seen some of the gods radiating, in The Stairway to Heaven). He would don the suit and gear of an astronaut, entry the cabin of an Ascender, and sit strapped between two gods. And then as the double-doors would open, and the dawn skies would be revealed, the jet engines would ignite and the Ascender would turn into the Celestial Ladder by which the Pharaoh will reach the Abode of the Gods on their "Planet of Millions of Years."

"On what TV screen had the Egyptians seen such things happen, that they so firmly believed that all this was really possible?

"....the only alternative would have been to either go to the Spaceport and watch the rocketships come and go, or visit a "Smithsonian" and see the craft on display, accompanied by a knowing guide or viewing flight simulations. The evidence suggests that the ancient Egyptians had indeed done that: they had seen the launch site, and the hardware, and the astronauts with their own eyes. But the astronauts were not Earthlings going elsewhere: they were, rather, astronauts from elsewhere who had come to Planet Earth.

"Greatly enamored with art, the ancient Egyptians depicted in their tombs what they had seen and experienced in their lifetimes. The architecturally designs drawings of the subterranean corridors and chambers of the Duat come from the tomb of Seti I. An even more startling depiction has been found in the tomb of Huy (click image right), who was viceroy in Nubia and in the Sinai peninsula during the reign of the renowned Pharaoh Tut-Ankh-Amon....: to this very day a depiction in vivid colors of a rocketship, (explained also in The Twelfth Planet).

"As the Pyramid Texts make clear, the Pharaoh, in his Translation into an eternal Afterlife, embarked on a journey simulating the gods. Ra and Seth, Osiris and Horus and other gods had ascended in the heavens in this manner. But, the Egyptians also believed, it was by the same Celestial Boat that the Great Gods had come down to Earth in the first place. At the city of An (Heliopolis), Egypt’s oldest center of worship, the god Ptah built a special structure - a "Smithsonian Institution," if you will - where an actual space capsule could be viewed and revered by the people of Egypt. The secret object - the Ben-Ben - was enshrined in the Het Benben, the Temple of the Benben.

"....The Ben-Ben was, according to the ancient Egyptians, a solid object that had actually come to Earth from the Celestial Disk. It was the "Celestial Chamber" in which the great god Ra himself had landed on Earth. The term Ben (literally: "That Which Flowed Out") conveying the combined meanings of "to shine" and "to shoot up in the sky."

".... At the shrine, there was a fountain or well, whose waters acquire a reputation for their healing powers, especially in matters of virility and fertility. The term Ben and its hieroglyphic depiction in time indeed acquired the connotations virility and reproduction; and could well have been the source of the meaning "male offspring" that Ben has in Hebrew. In addition to virility and reproduction the shrine also acquired the attributes of rejuvenation, this in turn gave rise to the legend of the Ben bird, which the Greeks who had visited Egypt called it the Phoenix. As these legends had it, the Phoenix was an eagle with plumage partly red and partly golden; once every 500 years, as it was about to die, it went to Heliopolis and in some manner rose again from the ashes of itself (or of its father).

"Heliopolis and its healing waters remained venerated until early Christian times; local tradition claim that when Joseph and Mary escaped to Egypt with the child Jesus, they rested by the shrine’s well.

"....Nothing remains of it nowadays, the Ben-Ben is also gone. But it was depicted on Egyptian monuments as a conical chamber within which a god could be seen. Archaeologists have in fact found a stone-scale model of the Ben-Ben, showing a god at its open hatch-door in a gesture of welcome. The true shape of the celestial Chamber was probably accurate depicted in the tomb of Huy (left), that modern command modules - the capsule housing the astronauts atop rocketships at launching, and in which they splash down back to Earth - look so similar to the Ben-Ben, is no doubt a result of the similarity of purpose and function.

"....In the Book of the Dead nine objects affiliated with the hieroglyph for Shem were depicted in the division paralleling the shrine of Heliopolis, it could well be that there were indeed another nine space-related objects or spacecraft parts on display at the shrine.

"Archaeologists may have found a replica of one of these smaller objects. It is an oddly shaped circular object full of intricate curves and cutouts.... The object was carved from a solid block of schist - a rock which is very brittle and which easily splits into thin irregular layers....This has led other scholars, such as Cyril Aldred (Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom) to conclude that the stone object "possibly imitates a form originally made in metal."

"....This round object, some twenty-four inches in diameter and less than four inches at its thicker part, was obviously made to fit over a shaft and rotate around an axle.... But its possible function suddenly sprang to our mind in 1976 on reading on a technical magazine of some revolutionary designs of a flywheel being developed in California in connection with the American space program....

Where are all the other objects, where is the Ben-Ben itself? There were natural disasters, unrest and wars, anarchy reigned in Egypt, it was not united any more.

"....It was then perhaps, that Ra left his temple at Heliopolis and became Amon - "The Hidden God."

"When order was first restored at Upper Egypt under the Eleventh Dynasty the capital was established at Thebes, and the supreme god was called Amon (or Amen).... A temple was dedicated to Ra and topped it with a huge "pyramidon" to commemorate Ra’s Celestial Chamber.

"Soon after 2000 B.C. as the Twelfth Dynasty began to reign, Egypt was reunited, order was restored, and access to Heliopolis was regained."

The shrines were rebuilt in Heliopolis, two columns (over sixty-six feet high) of granite were built in front of the temple, they also carried the "pyramidon" encased in gold or white copper (electrum), in remembrance of the Celestial Chamber of Ra. The Greek called these columns "obelisks" meaning "pointed cutters". The Egyptians called them "Beam of the Gods".

Later, some of these obelisks were carted to New York, London, Paris, Rome.

"As stated by the Pharaohs, they raised these obelisks in order to "obtain (from the gods) the gift of Eternal Life" to "obtain Life Everlasting."

"The Egyptian name for these Celestial Beings was NTR - a term which in the languages of the ancient Near East meant "One Who Watches".... (Neter).... Margaret A. Murray (The Splendor That Was Egypt) has put forward a more current view. Showing that pottery from the earliest, pre-dynastic period was adorned with drawings of boats carrying a pole with two streamers as a standard, she concluded that "the pole with the two streamers became the hieroglyphic for God."

"Pictorially, then, the Egyptians affirmed from the very beginning that their gods had come to Egypt from elsewhere. This confirmed the tales of how Egypt began - that the god Ptah, having come from the south, and having found Egypt inundated, performed great works of dyking and land reclamation and made the land habitable. There was a place in Egyptian geography which they called Ta-Neter - "Place/Land of the Gods." It was the narrow straits at the southern end of the Red Sea which is now called Bab-el-Mandeb.

".... The Egyptian name for the Red Sea was the Sea of UR. The term Ta-Ur meant the Foreign Land in the East...

"....When archaeologists and linguists began to unravel, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the history and written records of Egypt, Ur was unknown from any other source, except the Old Testament. Chaldea, however, was known: it was the name by which the Greeks had called Babylonia, Mesopotamia’s ancient kingdom.

"....The more the nineteenth-century scholars learnt of Egypt, and matched the emerging historic picture with the writing of Greek and Roman historians, the more did two facts stand out: First, that Egyptian civilization and greatness were not like an isolated flower blooming in a cultural desert, part of overall developments throughout the ancient lands. And secondly, that the biblical tales of other lands and kingdoms, of fortified cities and trade routes, of wars and treaties, of migrations and settlements - were not only true but accurate.

"The Hittites, known for centuries only from brief mentions in the Bible, were discovered in Egyptian records as mighty adversaries of the Pharaohs. There was even a historical personal touch, for the Pharaoh ended up marrying the daughter of the Hittite king in an effort to cement peace between them.

"Philistines, "People of the Sea," Phoenitians, Hurrians, Amorites.... Greater of all, however, appeared to have been the veritable ancient empires of Assyria and Babylonia, but where were their magnificent temples, and other remains of their grandeur? And where were their records?

".... Back in 1686, a traveller named Engelbert Kampfer, visited Persepolis, the old Persian capital of the kings Alexander had fought. From monuments there he copied signs and symbols in such a wedge-shaped or cuneiform script, as on the royal seal of Darius. But he thought that they were only decorations. When it was finally realized that these were inscriptions, no one knew what their language was and how they could be deciphered.

"....As in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, so it was with the cuneiform writings: The key to the solution was a tri-lingual inscription, it was found on the rock of forbidding mountains, at a place in Persia called Behistum.... As it turned out, the tri-lingual rock inscription was in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian. Akkadian was the mother language of all the Semitic languages, and it was through the knowledge of Hebrew, that scholars were able to read and understand the Mesopotamian inscriptions of the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

In the 1840s, Henry Austen Layard a Paris-born Englishman, kept recalling that an officer in Alexander’s army reported seeing in the area of Iraq "a place of pyramids and remains of an ancient city" - a city whose ruins were considered ancient even in Alexander’s times!

The great ones of the biblical account were coming to surface, like Nimrod and the city of Nineveh.

" ....As the pace of the excavations gathered momentum, as archaeological teams from other nations joined the race, all the Assyrian and Babylonian cities named in the Bible (with one minor exception) were uncovered. But as the world’s museums filled up with the ancient treasures, the most important finds were the simple clay tablets - some small enough to be held in the palm of the scribe’s hand - on which the Assyrians, Babylonians and other peoples of western Asia wrote down commercial contracts, court rulings, marriage and inheritance records, geographical lists, mathematical information, medical formulas, laws and regulations, royal histories - indeed every aspect of life by advanced and highly civilized societies. Epic tales, Creation tales, proverbs, philosophical writings, love songs and the like make up a vast literary heritage. And there were matter celestial - lists of stars and constellations, planetary information, astronomical tables, and lists of gods, their family relationships, their attributes, their tasks and functions - gods headed by twelve Great Gods, "Gods of Heaven and Earth," with whom there were associated the twelve months, the twelve constellations of the Zodiac, and the twelve members of our solar system.

"As the inscriptions themselves occasionally stated, their language stemmed from the Akkadian.

"....The royal city of Akkad was discovered southeast of Babylon; the ancient city of Kish was also discovered southeast of Akkad.

"....Ur - birthplace of Abraham - was also found, farther south, where the coastline of the Persian Gulf had reached in antiquity.

".... One of the greatest discoveries in Mesopotamia was the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.... Ashurbanipal himself stated in an inscription:

"The god of scribes has bestowed on me the gift of the knowledge of his art. I have been initiated into the secrets of writing. I can even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian. I understand the enigmatic words in the stone carvings from the days before the Deluge."

"....In the century that followed the first Mesopotamian discoveries, it has become evident beyond doubt that it was indeed in Sumer that modern Civilization (with a capital "C") began. It was there, soon after 4000 B.C - nearly 6000 years ago - that all the essential elements of a high civilization suddenly blossomed out, as though from nowhere and for no apparent reason. There is hardly any aspect of our present culture and civilization whose roots and precursors cannot be found in Sumer cities, high-rise buildings, streets, marketplaces, granaries, wharves, schools, temples; metallurgy, medicine, surgery, textile making, gourmet foods, agriculture, irrigation; the use of bricks, the invention of the kiln; the first-ever wheel, carts; ships and navigation; international trade; weights and measures; kingship, law, courts, juries; writing and recordkeeping; music, musical notes, musical instruments, dance and acrobatics; domestic animals and zoos; warfare, artisanship, prostitution. And above all, the knowledge and study of the heavens, and the gods "who from the heavens to Earth had come."

"Let it be clarified here that neither the Akkadians nor the Sumerians had called these visitors to Earth gods. It is through later paganism that the notion of divine beings or gods has filtered into our language and thinking. When we employ the term here, it is only because of its general acceptance and usage that we do so.

"The Akkadians called them Ilu - "Lofty Ones" - from which the Hebrew, biblical El stems E

"....From the Sumerian cosmological tales and epic poems, from texts that served as autobiographies of these gods, from lists of their functions and relationships and cities, from chronologies and histories called King Lists, and a wealth of other texts, inscriptions and drawings, we have pieced together a cohesive drama of what had happened in prehistoric times, and how it all began."

Discovering the Past of the Egyptians,

by searching into other cultures

"Their story begins in primeval times, when our solar system was still young. It was then that a large planet appeared from outer space and was drawn into the solar system. The Sumerians called the invader NIBIRU - "Planet of the Crossing"; the Babilonian name for it was Marduk. As it passed by the outer planets, Marduk’s course curved into a collision course with an older member of the solar system - a planet named Tiamat. As the two came together, the satellites of Marduk split Tiamat in half. Its lower part was smashed into bits and pieces creating the comets and the asteroid belt - the "celestial bracelet" of planetary debris that orbit between Jupiter and Mars. Tiamat’s upper part, together with its chief satellite, were thrown into a new orbit, to become Earth and the Moon.

"Marduk itself, intact, was caught in a vast elliptical orbit around the Sun, returning to the site of the "celestial battle" between Jupiter and Mars once in 3,600 Earth years. It was thus that the solar system ended up with twelve members - the Sun, the Moon (which the Sumerians considered a celestial body in its own right), the nine planets we know of, and one more - the twelfth, Marduk.

"When Marduk invaded our solar system, it brought with it the seed of life. In the collision with Tiamat, some of the seed of life was transferred to its surviving part - Planet Earth. As life evolved on Earth, it emulated evolution on Marduk. And so it was that when on Earth the human species just began to stir, on Marduk intelligent beings had already achieved high levels of civilization and technology.

It was from the twelfth member of the solar system, the Sumerians said, that astronauts had come to Earth - the "Gods of Heaven and Earth." It was from such Sumerian beliefs, that all the other ancient peoples acquired their religions and gods. These gods, the Sumerians said, created Mankind, and eventually gave it civilization - all knowledge, all sciences, including an incredible level of sophisticated astronomy.

"....There was the endless universe, full of stars. It was first-ever in Sumer - not centuries later in Greece, as has been thought - that the stars were identified, grouped together into constellations, given names and located in the heavens.

"....It has been recognized by some of the earlier scholars who combined their knowledge of Egyptology/Assyriology with astronomy, that the textual and pictorial depictions employed the Zodiac Age as a grand celestial calendar, where by events on Earth were related to the grander scale of the heavens. The knowledge has been employed in more recent times as a means of prehistoric and chronological aid in such studies as that by G. de Santillana and H. von Dechend (Hamlet’s Mill). There is no doubt, for example, that the Lion-like Sphinx of Heliopolis, or the Ram-like Sphinxes guarding the temples of Karnak, depicted the Zodiac ages in which the events they stood for had occurred, or in which the gods or kings represented had been supreme.

"....The "Imperishable Star" or the planet of "Millions of Years," the celestial abode of the gods. The ancient peoples, without exception, paid homage to this planet, the one with the vastest, most majestic orbit. In Egypt, in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, its ubiquitous emblem was that of the Winged Globe.

"Recognizing that the Celestial Disk, in Egyptian depictions, stood for the Celestial Abode of Ra, scholars have persisted in referring to Ra as a "Sun God" and to the Winged Disk as a "Sun Disk." It should now be clear that it was not the Sun, but the Twelfth Planet which was so depicted. Indeed, Egyptian depictions clearly distinguished between the Celestial Disk representing this planet, and the Sun.

"....Four hundred fifty thousand years ago - according to our Sumerian sources - astronauts from this "Celelestial Lord" landed on Planet Earth"

Return

Chapter Six
IN THE DAYS BEFORE THE DELUGE
 

"I understand the enigmatic words in the stone carvings from the days before the Deluge."

"So had stated in a self-laudatory inscription, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Indeed, throughout the diversified literature on ancient Mesopotamia, there were scattered references to a deluge that had swept over Earth....

"....Moreover, even the single sentence in Ashurbanipal’s inscription was full of scientific dynamite. He had not only confirmed that there had been a Deluge; he stated that his tutoring by the God of Scribes included the understanding of pre-Diluvial inscriptions, "the enigmatic words in the stone carvings from the days before the Deluge." It could only mean that even before the Deluge there had been scribes and stone carvers, languages and writing - that there had been a civilization in the remote days before the Deluge!...

"....Yet all these shocking revelations should have been old news to any one who had care to read the Old Testament’s words for what they actually said: that after Earth and the Asteroid Belt (the Raki’a or Heaven of Genesis) had been created, and Earth had taken shape, and life evolved, and "the Adam" created-Man was placed in the Orchard that was in Eden. But through the machinations of a brilliant "Serpent" who dared call the bluff of God, Adam and his female companion Eve acquired certain knowing which they were not supposed to possess. Thereupon, the Lord - speaking to unnamed colleagues - grew concerned that Man, "having become as one of us," might also help himself to the Tree of Life, "and eat, and live forever."

So he drove out the Adam;
And he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden
the Cherubim, and the Flaming Sword which revolveth,
to guard the way to the Tree of Life.

Mr. Sitchin then mentions the ten generations which followed after Adam and Eve’s third son: Seth.

"And so, through ten generations of pre-Diluvial patriarchs blessed with what scholars call "legendary" life spans, the biblical narrative reaches the momentous event of the Deluge.

"The Deluge is presented in the Book of Genesis as the opportunity seized by the Lord "to destroy the Man whom I had created from the face of the Earth." The ancient authors found it necessary to provide an explanation for such a far-reaching decision. It had to do, we are told, with Man’s sexual perversions, specifically, with the sexual relations between "the daughters of Man" and "the sons of the gods."

"....Now, it transpires from four enigmatic verses of Genesis VI that stage the set for the Deluge, that not only were there deities in the plural, but that they even had sons (in the plural). These sons upset the Lord by having sex with the daughters of Man, compounding their sins by having children or demi-gods born from this illicit lovemaking:

And it came to pass
When the Earthlings began to multiply upon the Earth, and daughters were born unto them -
That the sons of the gods saw the daughters of Adam, that they were good;
And they took them for wives, of all which they chose.

"And the Old Testament explains further:

The Nefilim were upon the Earth in those days and thereafter too;
Those sons of the gods who 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.

Mr. Sitchin picks up the Sumerian record of 450,000 years ago, which is very well expanded in The Twelfth Planet.

Astronauts who came from Marduk (Nibiru) in search of gold.
The first landing party of fifty astronauts, called Anunnaki.
The dyking of the waters by Enki, the third most important god.

The construction of a Mission Control Center, to direct rocketships from Earth, with the precious gold cargo, to their mothership and then to be transported to their home planet Nibiru. In charge of this enterprise was Enlil, Enki’s brother and second most important god.

The settlement in South East Africa, where the mines were located and eventually the creation of a "lulu" "primitive worker," after the Anunnaki had complained of too much hard labor working in the mines.

Ninhursag, half-sister of Enlil and Enki, who is also the Nurse who takes part in the creation of Man, for which a "primate from Earth" is chosen to be genetically manipulated.

"....All along, the astronauts who had come to Earth were preoccupied with the problem of longevity. Their biological clocks were set for their own planet; the time it took their planet to orbit the sun once, was to them but a single year of their life spans. But in such a single year, Earth orbited the Sun 3,600 times - a span of 3,600 years for Earth-originated life. To maintain their longer cycles on the quick-paced Earth, the astronauts consumed a "Food of Life" and "Water of Life" which were provided from the home planet. At his biological laboratories in Eridu, whose emblem was the sign of the Entwined Serpents, Ea (Enki) tried to unravel the secrets of life, reproduction, death. Why did the children born to the astronauts on Earth aged so much faster than their parents? Why did Apemen live short lives? Why did the hybrid Homo sapiens live much longer than Apeman, but only brief lives compared to the visitors to Earth? Was it environment, or inherit genetic traits?

"Concluding further experiments in genetic manipulation on the hybrids, and using his own sperm, Ea came up with a new "perfect model" of Earthling. Adapa, as Ea had named him, had greater intelligence, he acquired the all-important ability to procreate, but not the longevity of the astronauts.

With wide understanding
he had perfected him ....
To him he had given Knowing,
Lasting Life him he did not give.

"Enlil was outraged on discovering what Ea had done. It was never intended that Man should be able to procreate like the gods.

From his home planet, "....Anu (the father of the gods) too was perturbed....:" "Let them fetch Adapa hither!"

So Adapa was prepared to visit Anu’s abode....

"....Ea instructed him to avoid the food and water that would be offered to him, for they would contain poison.

"....When Anu saw Adapa he was impressed by his intelligence and the extent to which he had learned from Ea "The Plan of Heaven and Earth."

"....The decision was to keep Adapa permanently on Marduk. So that he could survive, "the Bread of Life they brought him," and the Water of Life too. But forewarned by Ea, Adapa refused to eat or drink. When his erroneous reasons were discovered, it was too late; his chance to obtain everlasting life was missed.

"Adapa was returned to Earth.... He was ordained as the High Priest of Eridu....

"From then on, Mankind proliferated. The humans were no longer just slaves in the mines of serfs in the fields. They performed all tasks, built "homes" for the gods - we call them "temples" - and quickly learned how to cook, dance and play music for them. It was not long before the young Anunnaki, short of female company of their own, took to having sex with the daughters of Man. Since they were all of the first Seed of Life, and Man was a hybrid created with the genetic "essence" of the Anunnaki, the male astronauts and the female Earthlings discovered that they were biologically compatible; "and children were born unto them."
 

... "Enlil viewed these developments with apprehension....The good life seemed to be the main concern of the Anunnaki - and with a race of hybrids to boot!

"Nature, as it were, offered Enlil a chance to put a halt to the deteriorating morals and ethics of the Anunnaki. Earth was entering a new ice age, and the pleasant climate was changing. As it got colder it also became dryer. Rains became less frequent, the river waters sparser. Crops failed, famine spread. Mankind began to undergo great sufferings, daughters hid food from their mothers, mothers ate their young. At the urging of Enlil, the gods refrained from helping Mankind: let them starve, let them be decimated, Enlil decreed.

"In the "Great Below" - in Antarctica - the ice age was also causing changes. From year to year, the ice cap covering the continent at the South Pole grew thicker and thicker....

"....From the orbiting shuttlecraft, an alarm was sounded: the ice cap was becoming unstable; if it would happen to slip off the continent into the ocean - an immense tidal wave would engulf all of Earth!

"It was not an idle danger. In the heavens, the Twelfth Planet, was orbiting back to the Place of Crossing between Jupiter and Mars. As on previous occasions when it neared Earth, its gravitational pull caused earthquakes and other disturbances upon Earth and in its celestial motions. Now, it was calculated, this gravitational pull could well trigger the slippage of the ice cap, and inundate Earth with a global deluge. From this catastrophe, the astronauts themselves could not be immune.

"As preparations were made to assemble all the Anunnaki near the Spaceport, and ready the craft to take them aloft before the tidal wave struck, ruses were employed to keep the approaching catastrophe a secret from Mankind.

Pleads from ZI.U.SUD.RA (as the Sumerians called him) (the biblical Noah) were to no avail. Enlil declared in the Assembly of the gods:

"Let them (Mankind) perish; let the seed of Earthling be wiped off the face of Earth."

"....Acting on his own, but mindful of his oath, Ea saw in Ziusudra the chance to save Mankind.... Ea gave Ziusudra urgent instructions:

Tear down the house, build a ship!
Give up possessions, seek thou life!
Foreswear belongings, keep soul alive!
Aboard ship take thou the seed of all living things.
This ship thou shall build;
Her dimensions shall be to measure.

"The ship was to be a submersible vessel, a "submarine" that could withstand the avalanche of water....

"....Ea also provided Ziusudra with a navigator, instructing him to direct the vessel toward the "Mount of Salvation," Mount Ararat; as the highest range in the Near East, its peaks would be the first to emerge from under the waters.

"The Deluge came as expected. "Gathering speed as it blew" from the south, "submerging the mountains, overtaking the people like a battle."

The Anunnaki wept when looking down from their shuttlecraft....

"....When the waters subsided and the Anunnaki began to land on Ararat, they were elated to discover that the Seed of Mankind was saved. But as Enlil also arrived, "he was furious to see that "a living soul had escaped." It took the pleading of the Anunnaki and the persuasion of Ea, to bring him to their point of view - that if Earth was to be resettled, the services of Man were indispensable.

"....It is evident by now that the Sumerian tales of the Gods of Heaven and Earth, of the Creation of Man and of the Deluge, were the fountainhead from which the other nations of the ancient Near East drew their knowledge, beliefs and "myths." We have seen how the Egyptian beliefs matched the Sumerian ones, how their first sacred city was named after An, how the Ben-Ben resembled the Sumerian GIR, and so on.

".... The biblical hero of the Deluge, Noah, was the equivalent of the Sumerian Ziusudra (who was called Utnapishtim in the Akkadian version). But while the Sumerians asserted that the hero of the Deluge was made immortal, no such claim is made in the Bible for Noah. The immortalization of Enoch is also given short shrift, quite unlike the detailed Sumerian tale of Adapa or other texts dealing with other Ascents.
But this abrupt biblical attitude could not prevent the spread, over the millennia, of legends dealing with the biblical heroes and their sojourn in, or return, to Paradise."

At this point Mr. Sitchin gives a number of books which do not appear in the Bible, in which tales about Adam, Enoch, Noah, Moses, are mentioned, and which are extracts from the Sumerian records:

The Book of Adam and Eve, a composition almost 2000 years old. Book of Jubilees. It was also known in early times as the Apocalypse of Moses, for it allegedly was written down by Moses at Mount Sinai as an angel dictated to him the histories of days past. (Scholars, though, believe that the work was composed in the second century B.C.)

"....The various ancient books which show this extra light on the dramatic events in the Days before the Deluge, have been preserved in several versions that are all only translations (direct and indirect) of lost Hebrew originals. Yet their authenticity was confirmed with the renowned discoveries in recent decades of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for among the finds were fragments of scrolls which were undoubtedly parts of the Hebrew originals of such "memoirs of the Patriarchs."

It is from these originals where it is discovered that Genesis VI had wrongly called the sons of the gods: Instead of the wrong term "Watchers" nor "giants," the correct translation to the word Nefilim ought to be:

"Mighty ones, the People of the Rocketships."

"....The Great Anunnaki who decree the fate sat exchanging their counsels regarding the Earth.

"....The decision to establish on Earth four Regions was thus coupled with a decision to install intermediaries (priest-kings) between the gods and Mankind; so kingship was again lowered to Earth from Heaven.

"....Asia and Europe were assigned to Enlil and his offspring; to Ea, Africa was given.

"....NAN.NAR (Sin in Akkadian), a benevolent god (son of Enlil), he supervised the construction of Sumer, rebuilding pre-diluvial cities at their original sites and establishing new cities.

"....A third son to Ea, was named by him after the home planet, MARDUK, and was taught by Ea all knowledge of sciences and astronomy. (Circa 2000 B.C., Marduk usurped the Lordship of Earth and was declared Supreme God of Babylon and of "the Four Quarters of the Earth.") And, as we have seen, a son whose Egyptian name was Ra presided over the core civilization of this Region, the civilization of the Nile Valley.

"The Third Region, as was discovered only some fifty years ago, was in the subcontinent of India. There too, a great civilization arose in antiquity, some 1,000 years after the Sumerian one. It is called the Indus Valley Civilization, and its center was a royal city unearthed at a site called Harappa.

"....It was in need of a Spaceport that the Fourth Region was set aside by the Great Anunnaki - a region not for Mankind, but for their own exclusive use."

Their original site, Sippar, in the low lands of Mesopotamia had been all washed out by the Deluge, and the area was still too muddy to be able to rebuild the old site.

"....Another place - more elevated yet suitable, secluded but accessible had to be found for the Spaceport and its auxiliary installations. It was to be a "sacred zone" - a restricted area, accessible only by permission. It was called in Sumerian TIL.MUN - literally, "Land of the Missiles."

"....In the days before the Deluge, traditions held, a few chosen mortals had been taken aloft from the Spaceport:

Adapa
Enmeduranki
Ziusudra

After the Deluge there was:

Etana
Pharaoh Thothmes III

".... And there, in Sumer, they recorded the tale of a man who - uninvited by the gods - set out to reverse his feat nevertheless.

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Chapter Seven
GILGAMESH: THE KING WHO REFUSED TO DIE
 

"The Sumerian tale of the first known Search for Immortality concerns a ruler of long long ago, who asked his divine godfather to let him enter the "Land of the Living." Of this unusual ruler, ancient scribes wrote down epic tales. They said of him that:

Secret things he has seen;
What is hidden from Man, he found out.
He even brought tidings
of the time before the Deluge;
He also took the distant journey,
wearisome and under difficulties.
He returned, and upon a stone column
all his toil he engraved.

After much research on site, tablets and reconstructed texts, gave the impression to scholars that the story concerned the mighty king Nimrod.

"....More finds and much further research established the Sumerian origin of the tale, and the true reading of the hero’s name: GIL.GA.MESH. It has been confirmed from other historical texts - including the Sumerian King Lists - that he was a ruler of Uruk, the biblical Erech, circa 2900 B.C. The Epic of Gilgamesh, as this ancient literary work is now called, thus takes us back nearly 5,000 years.

"....An offspring of the great god Shamash on his father’s side, Gilgamesh was considered to be "two-thirds god, one-third human" but by the further fact that his mother was the goddess NIN.SUN, he was thus accorded the privilege of having his name written with the prefix "divine."

"....The more knowledge he acquired of the histories of gods and men, the more he became philosophical and restless. In the midst of merriment, his thoughts turned to death. Would he, by virtue of his divine two-thirds live as long as his demi-gods forefathers, or would his one-third prevail and determine for him the life span of a mortal human? Before long, he confessed his anxiety to Shamash:

In my city man dies, oppressed in my heart.
Man perishes, heavy is my heart...
Man, the tallest, cannot stretch to heaven;
Man, the widest, cannot cover the earth.

"Will I too ’peer over the wall?’ he asked Shamash, "will I too be fated thus?"

"Evading a direct answer - perhaps not knowing it himself - Shamash attempted to have Gilgamesh accept his fate, whatever it might be, and to enjoy life while he could:

When the gods created Mankind,
Death for Mankind they alloted;
Life they retained in their own keeping.

"....But Gilgamesh refused to accept this fate. Was he not two-thirds divine, and only one-third human? Why then should the lesser mortal part, rather than his greater godly element, determine his fate?

"....One night, he saw a vision which he felt was an omen. He rushed to his mother to tell her:

My mother,
During the night, having become lusty,
I wondered about.
In the midst (of night) omens appeared.
A star grew larger and larger in the sky.
The handiwork of Anu descended towards me!

"The handiwork of Anu" that descended from the skies fell to Earth near him, Gilgamesh continued to relate:

I sought to lift it;
It was too heavy for me.
I sought to shake it,
I could neither move nor raise it.

"The object’s fall to Earth was apparently seen by many, for "the whole of Uruk was gathered around it."

"....The Gilgamesh text describes the lower part, which was grabbed by the heroes (the strongmen), by a term that may be translated "legs." It had however other pronounced parts and could even be entered:

I pressed strongly its upper part,
I could neither remove its covering,
nor raise its Ascender...
With a destroying fire its top I (then) broke off,
and moved into its depths.
Its movable That Which Pulls Forward
I lifted, and brought it to thee.

"....But his mother, the goddess Ninsun, had to disappoint him. That which descended like a star from Heaven, she said, foretells the arrival of "a stout comrade who rescues, a friend is come to thee ... he is the mightiest in the land ... he will never forsake thee. This is the meaning of thy vision."

"....It was ENKI.DU, "a creature of Enki."

This creature was to divert the restless Gilgamesh and restrain him, be a match for him, a contender. A first encounter took place. They fought fiercely. Gilgamesh lost strength and bent his knee. But as he was leaving the scene, Enkidu spoke to him, and as Gilgamesh remembered his Mother’s words, they became inseparable friends.

After discussions on how to enter the "Abode of the Gods" in the mountains, a plan was thought: by going to "the underground place of Shamash" in the Cedar Mountain, to be enabled to "scale heaven" as the gods do.

"....Apparently Gilgamesh was permitted to go ahead - but at his own risk. His goal was to obtain a Shem - the vehicle by which "one attains eternity."

His preoccupation became how to defeat Huwawa, the guard of the "Abode of the Gods." Dissuasions did not work. He was determined to proceed:

We hear that Huwawa is wondrously built;
Who is there to face his weapons?
Unequal struggle it is
with the siege-engine Huwawa.

As no one was supporting Gilgamesh, he went with Enkidu to the presence of his mother, Ninsun, the Great Queen. After explaining what he was about to do he asked Ninsun:

"Oh my mother, pray thou to Shamash on my behalf!"

Ninsun agreed and called upon Shamash to protect Gilgamesh:

Until he reaches the Cedar Forest,
Until he has slain the fierce Huwawa,
Until the day that he goes and returns.

"....As the populace heard that Gilgamesh was going to "the Landing Place" after all, "they pressed closer to him" and wished him success.

"....Ninsun asked Enkidu to protect Gilgamesh: "although not of my womb’s issue art thou, I herewith adopt thee (as a son)," she told him, "guard the king as thy brother!" Then she placed her emblem around the neck of Enkidu.

They proceeded, and Gilgamesh did not listen to Enkidu’s suggestions to return. In the night at the foots of the Forest, as they were asleep, Gilgamesh had an awesome sight:

In my vision, my friend,
the high ground toppled,
It laid me low, trapped my feet ...
The glare was overpowering!
A man appeared:
the fairest in the land was he ...
From under the toppled ground he pulled me out.
He gave me water to drink; my heart quieted.
On the ground he set my feet.

"Who was this "man" - "the fairest in the land."

Yet another vision:

The vision that I saw was wholly awesome!
The heavens shrieked, the earth boomed.
Tough daylight was dawning, darkness came.
Lightning flashed, a flame shot up.
The clouds swelled; it rained death!
Then the glow vanished; the fire went out.
And all that had fallen was turned to ashes.

"Gilgamesh must have realized that he had witnessed the ascent of a "Sky Chamber."

"....In the morning, Gilgamesh and Enkidu attempted to penetrate the forest.... Enkidu found the gate, of which he had spoken to Gilgamesh. But as he tried to open it, he was thrown back by an unseen force. For twelve days he laid paralyzed.

"When he was able to move he pleaded to Gilgamesh not to go down into the heart of the forest. But Gilgamesh.... had found a tunnel. By the sounds heard from it, Gilgamesh was sure that it was connected to "the enclosure from which words of command are issued."

"Gilgamesh must have been right, for the Sumerian text states that

Pressing on into the forest,
the secret abode of the Anunnaki
he opened up.

"....While Gilgamesh cut down the trees, Enkidu dug up" the soil and rocks. But just as they made enough of a clearance, terror struck: "Huwawa heard the noise, and became angry...." His appearance was "Mighty, his teeth as the teeth of a dragon, his face the face of a lion, his coming as the onrushing floodwaters." Most fearsome was "his radiant beam," emanating from his forehead, "it devoured trees and bushes." From its killing force, "none could escape." ".........

"....In the nick of time, rescue appeared from the heavens.... "down from the skies spoke to them divine Shamash."

Huwawa was finally defeated:

""Enkidu struck the guardian, Huwawa, to the ground. For two leagues the cedars resounded," so immense was the monster’s fall. Then Enkidu "Huwawa put to death." "The secret abode of the Anunnaki was no longer blocked."

"The place as stated earlier in the epic, was the "Crossroads of Ishtar." The goddess herself was wont to come and go from this "Landing Place." She enticed Gilgamesh to become her lover, and at his refusal "Ishtar asked Anu to let the "Bull of Heaven" smite Gilgamesh."

Gilgamesh and Enkidu returned to Uruk, but on the way a battle ensued. Gilgamesh managed to reach the city. Enkidu remained to battle with the "Bull of Heaven" in the outskirts of the city, finally Enkidu came out victorious.

"What exactly the Bull of Heaven was is not clear, the Sumerian term - GUD.AN.NA could also mean "Anu’s attacker," his "cruise missile."

"Ancient artists, fascinated by the episode, frequently depicted Gilgamesh or Enkidu fighting with an actual bull, with the naked Ishtar (and sometimes Adad) looking on. But from the epic’s text it is clear that this weapon of Anu was a mechanical contraption made of metal and equipped with two piercers (the "horns") which were "cast from thirty minas of lapis, the coating on each being two fingers thick." Some ancient depictions show such a mechanical "bull," sweeping down from the skies.

"After the Bull of Heaven was defeated, Gilgamesh, "called out to the craftsmen, the armorers, all of them" to view the mechanical monster and take it apart. Then, triumphant, he and Enkidu went to pay homage to Shamash.

"But Ishtar, in her abode, set up a wail."

After listening to Ishtar’s complaints, and Shamash pleads to spare their lives, in the assembly of the gods, it was decided that:

"Enkidu was commuted to hard labor in the depths of the mines - there to spend the rest of his days. To carry out the sentence and take him to his new home, Enkidu was told, two emissaries "clothed like birds, with wings for garments" shall appear unto him:

He will be dressed like an Eagle,
By the arm will he lead thee.
"Follow me," (he will say); he will lead you
To the House of Darkness,
the abode below the ground;
The abode which none leave who have entered into it.
A road from which there is no return;
A House whose dwellers are bereft of light,
where dust is in their mouths
and clay is their food.

"....Hearing the sentence passed on his comrade, Gilgamesh had an idea. Not far from the Land of Mines, he had learned, was the Land of the Living: the place whereto the gods had taken those humans who were granted eternal youth!

"....Was it not the place whereto the hero of the Deluge, Ziusudra/Utnapishtim, had been taken - the very place from which Etana "to heaven ascended?"

"....And so it was, that "the Lord Gilgamesh, toward the Land of the Living set his mind."

"....Gilgamesh was advised by the elders of Uruk and his goddess mother to first obtain the permission of Utu/Shamash.... Thus forewarned and advised, Gilgamesh offered a sacrifice to Utu, and appealed for his consent and protection:

O Utu,
The Land I wish to enter;
be thou my ally!
The Land which with the cool cedars is aligned
I wish to enter, be thou my ally!
In the places where the Shems have been raised up,
Let me set up my Shem!

Instead of going through the hardships the desert would offer, Gilgamesh, [with] fifty rowers and Enkidu decided to try the journey by sea. However it was not an easier journey, eventually they were defeated by calamity, the boat capsized, the row men died. Gilgamesh and Enkidu made it to shore, but Enkidu died shortly after.

Gilgamesh proceeded alone.

"....At long last, as versions found at Nineveh and at Hittite sites relate, he neared habitations.
When he arrived at a mountain pass he saw lions and grew afraid.
After daybreak, Gilgamesh traversed the mountain pass. In the distance below, he saw a body of water, like a vast lake, "driven by long winds." In an adjoining island he saw a city "closed-up about" surrounded by a wall. There the Temple to Sin (the father of Shamash) was dedicated."
He saw an inn, there he saw the "Ale-woman, Siduri."

She was holding "a jug (of ale), a bowl of porridge."

She explained to him he had seen the "Sea of Death."
She gave him directions how to cross it.
The boatman Urshanabi helped Gilgamesh to cross the Sea of Death, after much inquiring of his identity.
"Using long poles, they moved the raft forward. In three days, "a run of a month and fifteen days" - a forty five day journey overland - "they left behind."

"He arrived at TIL.MUN - "The Land of the Living."

Urshanabi instructed Gilgamesh he had to reach to a mountain called Mashu.

"....The Mount’s functions required it to be connected both to the distant heavens and to the far reaches of Earth.

"....There was a way to go to the Mount, but the entrance, the "gate," was closely guarded.

"....When Gilgamesh beheld the terrible glowing, (from the Rocketman guard’ spotlight) his face he shielded, regaining his composure. "

Gilgamesh had to explain his identity again, as humans would have not survived the spotlight.

Finally:

"....Gilgamesh went in, following the "path taken by Shamash, his journey lasted twelve beru (double-hours)...."

During the first eleven beru he could not see clearly and at times he screamed in fear, but finally as "dawn was breaking in brightness he resided."

"....He saw "as an enclosure of the gods" wherein there "grew" a garden made up entirely of precious stones!

"....He was clearly in a simulated "Garden of Eden."

"....Gilgamesh finally encountered Utnapishtim."

In his query, how was Utnapishtim eternal if he looked like a human?

"....In answer to this question, Utnapishtim said to Gilgamesh: "I will reveal to thee Gilgamesh, a hidden matter, a secret of the gods I will tell thee"

 

The secret was the Tale of the Deluge:

The decision of the Anunnaki, to let Mankind perish;
The interferance of Enki, with his instructions to Utnapishtim to construct a special submersible;
The return of the Anunnaki after the waters subsided;
The anger of Enlil, and the conviction other gods presented to him that it was a great idea that Mankind had been saved;
Earth, would still be habitable with the help of Mankind.
Enki passed all the ingenuity as if it would have been Utnapishtim who engineered the whole plan of salvation, and Enlil believing this was so moved that took Utnapishtim and his wife to the abode of the gods and granted eternal life.

"....On learning the Tale, and realizing that it is only the gods, in assembly, who can decree eternal life, and that he, on his own, could not attain it - Gilgamesh fainted.

Gilgamesh had to be returned to Uruk, but as he was about to board Urshanabi’s boat, Utnapishtim took pity of him, and told him about the "plant of youth" which prolonged life. It grew underwater, but it was full of thorns and pricks.

Gilgamesh went to fetch the plant into the deep by attaching stones to his feet. Once in possession, he finally made way back to Uruk.

"....But Fate, as with all those who in the millennia and centuries that followed went in the search of the Plant of Youth, intervened.

"As Gilgamesh and Urshanabi were preparing for the night Gilgamesh saw a well whose water was cool. He went down to it to bathe in the water. Then calamity struck: "A ’ snake sniffed the fragrance of the plant and carried off  the plant...."

Gilgamesh never regained it, and this according to the Sumerian King Lists, is how it all ended:

"The divine Gilgamesh, whose father was a human, a high priest of the temple precinct, ruled 126 years. Ur-lugal, son of Gilgamesh, ruled after him.

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