Chapter Eight
RIDERS OF THE CLOUDS
 

"The journey of Gilgamesh in search of Immortality has undoubtedly been the fountainhead of the many tales, in subsequent millennia, of demi-gods or heroes claiming such a status, who have likewise gone to search for Paradise on Earth or to reach the Celestial Abode of the Gods. Without question, the detailed epic of Gilgamesh also served as a guide book in which the subsequent searchers sought to find the ancient landmarks by which the Land of the Living could be reached and the way to it ascertained.

"The similarity between the geographical landmarks, the man-made (or rather the god-made) tunnels, corridors, air locks and radiation chambers, and the bird-like beings, or "Eagles," as well as many other major and minor details - are far too numerous and identical to be mere accidents. At the same time, the epic tale of the journey can explain the confusion that reigned millennia later concerning the exact location of the cherished target, because as our detailed analysis has shown, Gilgamesh made not one but two journeys - a fact generally ignored by modern scholars and possible also by past ones.

"The Gilgamesh journey reached its culmination in the Land of Tilmun, an Abode of the Gods and a place of the Shems.

"....But that was not the first destination of Gilgamesh, and we ought to follow in his footsteps in the same sequence by which he himself had embarked on his journey: his first destination on the road to Immortality was not Tilmun, but the "Landing Place" on the Cedar Mountains within the great Cedar Forest.

"....From Tilmun the farthest heavens could be reached.

"....From the Landing Place the gods could "scale the skies" of Earth.

"....The gods indeed had two types of craft: the GIRs, the Rocketships that were operated from Tilmud; and what the Sumerians called a MU, a "Sky Chamber." It is a credit to the technology of the Nefilim that the uppermost section of the GIR, the Command Module - what the Egyptians called Ben-Ben could be detached and fly in Earth’s skies as a MU."

Mr. Sitchin at this point in his book explains the several graphics of different symbols of gods and goddesses who flew these craft. Also the several "visions" or "wheels," "whirlwind," "fiery chariots" the ancients of biblical import had, could well have been these kind of craft.

"....Gilgamesh almost made it to the Landing Place, for he had the permission and help of Shamash. But the wrath of Ishtar (when he turned down her advances) completely reversed the course of events."

There is another personality, from the Old Testament who unlike uninvited to the Landing Place like Gilgamesh was instead permitted to come to the place:

"....It was the king of Tyre - a city state on the coast of Lebanon, a short distance away from the cedar mountains, and the Deity (as told in chapter 28 of the book of Ezequiel) did enable him to visit the Sacred Mountain:

Thou have been in Eden, the Garden of God, every precious stone was thy thicket...
Thou are an annointed Cherub, protected; and I have placed thee in the Sacred Mountain.
As a god werest thou, moving within the Fiery Stones.

"....The king of Tyre was not only permitted to come to the place, but evidently was also given a ride in "the fiery stones," flying as a Cherub. As a result, "a god I am," he said, "in the Abode of the Deity I sat, in the midst of the waters." For his haughtiness of heart, the prophet was to inform him, he was to die the death of a heathen by the hands of strangers.

"Both the Hebrews of biblical times, and their neighbors to the north, were thus acquainted with the location and nature of the Landing Place in the Cedar Mountain which Gilgamesh attempted to penetrate in a previous millennium. It was, as we shall show, not a "mythological place, but a real one: not only texts, but also pictorial depictions exist from those ancient days, attesting to the existence and functions of the place. On the coast of Lebanon there was Tyre and Sidon; Ugarit, was discovered, around 1928, in ruins and under a mount, perhaps the northernmost outpost of the Canaanites at the border of the Hittite empire.

 

"The tablets, whose contents were first presented by Charles Villoraud over many years in the scientific periodical Syria, retrieved from relative obscurity the Canaanites, their life and customs, and their gods."

"At the head of the Canaanite pantheon was a supreme deity called El - a term which in biblical Hebrew was the generic term for "deity" stemming as it did from the Akkadian word Ilu, which literally meant "Lofty One."

"....In "olden times," "El was a principal deity of Heaven and Earth" Later, "....his abode was "in the mountains," at "the two headwaters."

At this stage it is explained in Mr. Sitchin’s book that El had three main children, (among many others) whose names, in later times gave way to the Greek mythology.

"....The links to Egyptian prehistorical recollections and beliefs were no less obvious than to those of Greece.

"Scholars have pointed out that all these tales were echoes, if no actual versions of the much earlier and original Sumerian tales: not only of Man’s Search for Immortality, but also of love, death and resurrection among the gods.... The tales are replete with episodes, details, epithets, and teachings which also fill the Old Testament - attesting to a common locale (greater Canaan), common traditions and common original versions.

"Kalesh, was encompassed in the territory of the biblical Patriarch Abraham; and the Canaanite tale of Danel is indeed replete with similarities to the biblical birth of Isaac, to the aging Abraham and Sarah."

Danel and his wife were childless, but he was granted a son by the god Baal (son of El). The child was named Aqhat.  In his youth, and in an argument with his sister Anat over a unique bow she persuades him to accompany her to the city of "The Father of the gods, the Lord of the Moon". There she asks Taphan "to sly Aqhat for his bow" but then "make him live again."

"....The transfer of action from the mountains of Lebanon to the "City of Lord Moon," is also an element found in the Gilgamesh epic. Throughout the ancient Midlle East, the deity associated with the Moon was Sin (Nannar in the original Sumerian). His Ugaritic epithet was "Father of Gods."

"....But whereas Gilgamesh arrived in the region of Sin after a long and hazardous trek, Anat - like Ishtar - could get around from place to place in no time - for she neither walked nor traveled on assback; instead, she flew from place to place.

"This ability "as a bird to fly," also attributed the Canaanite deities, features in all the epic tales discovered at Ugarit.

"One such tale, in which a goddess flies to the rescue, is a text titled by scholars "The Legend of King Keret" - Keret being capable of interpretation as the king’s personal name, or the name of his city ("The Capital"). The tale’s main theme is the same as that of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh: Man’s striving for Immortality. But it begins like the biblical tale of Job, and has other strong biblical similarities."

The Land of Tyre,

in the Coast of Lebanon where Gilgamesh roamed ...

"Of greater importance to the understanding of greater events are the several epic tales dealing with the god themselves. In these, the ability of the gods to fly about is accepted as a matter of course, and their haven in the "Crest of Zaphon" is featured as the astronauts’ resting place. The central figures in these tales are Ba’al and Anat, the brother-sister who are also lovers. Ba’al’s frequent epithet is "The Rider of the Clouds" - an epithet which the Old Testament has claimed for the Hebrew deity.

Of Anat it is said:

She raises wing, the Maiden Anat,
she raises wing and tours about flying,
to the midst of the meadow of Samakh
which with buffaloes abounds.

"Seeing her, Ba’al signaled her to come down; but Anat began to play hide-and-seek. Annoyed, Ba’al asked whether she expects him to "anoint her 'horns'"- a lovemaking expression - "while in flight." Unable to find her, Ba’al took off "and went up ... in the skies" unto his throne-seat on the "Crest of Zaphon." The playful Anat soon appeared there soon," upon Zaphon in pleasure (to be).

"....In earlier years, Ba’al engaged in life-and-death struggles with other contenders for the godly throne, the prize for all these fights was a place known as Zarerath Zaphon - commonly translated "The Heights of Zaphon," but especially meaning "The Rocky Crest in the North."

"....(The fact that Ba’al, who had at least three wives, could not marry his beloved Anat confirms that she was a full, rather than a half sister of his).

Ba’al’s plans were to have supremacy over the Crest of Zaphon, and through Asherah, who convinces El, it is agreed that Ba’al will be allowed to be the master of the Crest of Zaphon: "let him build his house there."

But Ba’al also desired a Behmtam, commonly translated "house" but which literally means "a raised platform."

"The underground silo and raised platform were ready! Losing no time, Ba’al decided to test the facility:

Ba’al opened the Funnel in the Raised Platform.
the window within the Great House.
In the clouds, Ba’al opened rifts.
His goddly sound Ba’al discharges.
His godly sound convulses the earth,
The mountains quake ...
A-tremble are the ...
In east and west, earth’s mounts reel.

"As Ba’al soared skyward, the divine messengers Gapan and Ugar joined him in flight: "The winged ones, the twain, flock the clouds" behind Ba’al, "bird-like-the twain" soared above the snow-covered peaks of Zaphon. But with the new facilities the Crest of Zaphon was turned into the "Fastness of Zaphon," and Mount Lebanon ("The White One," after its snowy peaks) acquired the epithet Sirion - "The Armoured" Mountain.

"....Now that he had attained these powers and prerogatives, Ba’al’s ambitions grew in scope.

"....Pursuing his quest for mastery, Ba’al with the help of Anat - battled and annihilated such male adversaries as Lothan, "the Serpent"; Shalyat, "the seven-headed-dragon," Atak "the Bullock," as well as the goddess Hashat, "The Bitch." We know from the Old Testament that Yahweh, the biblical Lord, was also a bitter adversary of Ba’al, and as Ba’al’s influence grew among the Israelites when their king married a Canaanite princes, the prophet Elijah arranged a contest between Ba’al and Yahweh upon Mount Carmel.

"When Yahweh prevailed.... it was for Yahweh that the Old Testament claimed mastery over the Crest of Zaphon.

"....As Ba’al in the Canaanite texts, so was the Hebrew Deity "Rider of the Clouds."

"....The Hebrews were forbidden to worship, and therefore to make statues or engraved images. But the Canaanites who must have known of Yahweh, as the Hebrews had known of Ba’al, left us a depiction of Yahweh as conceived by them. A fourth century B.C. coin which bears the inscription Yahu ("Yahweh") depicts a bearded deity seated upon a throne shaped as a winged wheel.

"It was thus universally assumed in the ancient Near East that lordship over Zaphon established the supremacy among the gods who could fly about.

"....Seven years after the Fastness of Zaphon was completed, Ba’al faced a challenge by Mot, Lord of the southern lands and the Lower World. As it turned out, the dispute was no longer about the mastery of Zaphon, rather, it had to do with "who over all the Earth dominions shall have."

After plans and engaging in suspicious activities, Ba’al wanted to put one lip to Earth and one lip to Heaven. Ba’al engaged Anat to help him, but in the end of the struggle Ba’al was fallen by Mot and Anat, enraged, "with a sword she cleaved Mot."

The Craftman of the Gods was summoned, and Ba’al was miraculously resurrected. "But whether he was resurrected physically on Earth, or in a Celestial Afterlife (as Osiris) one cannot be certain."

"....This then is the evidence bequeathed to us from antiquity. Millennium after Millennium, the peoples of the ancient Near East were aware that within the Cedar Mountain there was a large platform for "moving stones," adjoined by a "great house," within which "a stone that whispers" was secreted.

"And, if we have been right in our interpretations of ancient texts and drawings - could it be that this grand and known place had vanished?

BA’AL

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Chapter Nine
THE LANDING PLACE
 

"The greatest Roman temple ruins lie not in Rome, but in the mountains of Lebanon.

"....Emperors and generals came to it in search of oracles, to find out their fate. Roman legionnaires sought to be billeted near it; the devout and the curious went to see it with their own eyes: it was one of the wonders of the ancient world.

"....The site is in the mountains of Lebanon.... the enclosed squarish area, with some sides almost 2,500 feet long, measured over five million square feet.

"....The temple proper was only the westernmost (and oldest) part of a four-part shrine to Jupiter, which the Romans are believed to have started to build soon after they occupied the place in 63 B.C.

"....From its monumental gateway staircase to its final western wall, the shrine extended for more than 1,000 feet in length. It completely dwarfed a very large temple to its south, which was dedicated to a male deity, some think Bacchus but probably Mercury, and a small round temple to the southeast, where Venus was venerated.

"....The Romans considered the site and its great temple as the ultimate attestations of the almightiness and supremacy of Jupiter. Calling him Iove (echo of the Hebrew Yehovah?), they inscribed upon the temple and its main statue the divine initials I.O.M.H. the legend standing for Iove Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus: the Optimal and Maximal Jupiter the Heliopolitan.

"The latter title of Jupiter stemmed for the fact that though the great temple was dedicated to the Supreme God, the place itself was considered to have been a resting place of Helios, the Sun god who could traverse the skies in his swift chariot. The belief was transmitted to the Romans by the Greeks, from whom they also adopted the name of the place Heliopolis. How the Greeks had come to so name the place, no one knows for sure; some suggest that it was so named by Alexander the Great.

"....In fact, the place and its association with certain gods go back to even earlier times. Archaeologists believe that there may have been as many as six temples built on the site before Roman times, and it is certain that whatever shrines the Greeks may have erected there, they - as the Romans after them - were only raising the structures atop earlier foundations, religiously and literally.

"....The hold the place had over the beliefs and imaginations of people throughout the millennia also manifested itself in the history of the place following its Roman veneration.... circa A.D. 400, Rome was already Christian and the site was already a target of zealous destruction. No sooner did Constantine the Great (A.D. 306-337) convert to Christianity, than he stopped all additional work there and instead began the conversion of the place into a Christian shrine. In the year 440, according to one chronicler, Theodosius destroyed the temples of the Greeks, he transformed into a Christian Church the temple of Heliopolis, that of Ba’al Helios, the great Sun-Ba’al of the celebrated Trilithon.

"....When the Muslims gained the area in the year 637, they converted the Roman temples and Christian churches atop the huge platform into a Muhammedan enclave. Where Zeus and Jupiter had been worshipped, a mosque was built to worship Allah.

"Modern scholars have tried to shed more light on the age-long worship at this place.... and have concluded that a basic triad had been worshipped throughout the ages.

"....The earliest Triad was headed, it appears, by Adad, who was alloted by his father Enlil - the chief god of Sumer - "the mountainlands of the north." The female member of the Triad was Ishtar. After he visited the area, Alexander the Great struck a coin honoring Ishtar/Astarte and Adad.

"....The third member of the Triad was the Celestial Charioteer, Shamash - commander of the prehistoric astronauts. The Greeks honored him as Helios.

"....Examining the Roman and Greek traditions and beliefs, we have arrived back at Sumer; we have circled back to Gilgamesh and his Search for Immortality in the Cedar Forest, at the "crossroads of Ishtar." Though in the territory of Adad, he was told, the place was also in the jurisdiction of Shamash. And so we have the original Triad: Adad, Ishtar, Shamash.

"Have we come upon the Landing Place?

"....Henry Seyrig, who as director of Antiquities of Syria devoted a lifetime to the studies of the vast platform and its meaning, found that the Greeks used to conduct their,

"rites of Mystery, in which Afterlife was represented as human Immortality - an identification with the deity obtained by the ascent (heavenward) of the soul."

The Greeks, he concluded, indeed associated this place with Man’s efforts to attain Immortality.

"Was then this place the very place in the Cedar Mountains, to which Gilgamesh had first gone with Enkidu, the Crest of Zaphon of Ba’al?

Mr. Sitchin explains in detail the colossal platform, built of stones heavier than 500 tons. The largest ones in the Great Pyramid of Egypt weigh 200 tons.

"....The stones for the Platform and Podium were quarried locally. Wood and Dawkings include one of these quarries in their panoramic sketch, showing some of the larger of the stone blocks strawn around in the ancient quarry (click image right). But the gigantic blocks were hewn, cut and shaped at another quarry, situated in the valley some three-quarters of a mile southwest of the sacred precinct. It is there that one comes upon a sight even more incredible than that of the Trilithon. Partly buried in the ground, there lies yet another one of the colossal granite slabs - left in situ by whoever the great quarrier was.... fully shaped and perfectly cut.... A person climbing upon it looks like a fly upon a block of ice.... It weighs, by conservative estimates, more than 1,200 tons.

"....Wherever the leftover colossal stone was intended to be placed, it serves as a mute witness to the immensity and uniqueness of the Platform and Podium nesting in the Mountains of Lebanon. The mind-boggling fact is that even nowadays there exists no crane, vehicle or mechanism that can lift such a weight of 1,000-1,200 tons - to say nothing of carrying such an immense object over valley and mountainside, and placing each slab in its precise position, many feet above the ground. There are no traces of any roadway, causeway, ramp or other earthworks that could even remotely suggest the hauling or dragging of these megaliths from the quarry to their uphill site.

"Yet in remote days, someone, somehow had achieved the feat....

"But who? Local tradition hold that the place had existed from the days of Adam and his sons, who resided in the area of the Cedar Mountains after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Adam, these legends relate, inhabited the place which is now Damascus, and died not far from there.

After mentioning several other legends Mr. Sitchin adds:

"....All these local legends, which as all legends contain a kernel of age-old recollections of actual events, agree that the place is of extreme antiquity. They ascribe its building to "giants" and connect its construction with the events of the Deluge. They connect it with Ba’al, its function being that of a "Tower of Babel" - a place from which to "scale the heavens."

"....The words and description of the Hidden Place in the Epic of Gilgamesh also keep echoing in our ears. The insurmountable wall, the gate which stuns whoever touches it, the tunnel to the "enclosure from where words of command are issued," the "secret abode of the Anunnaki," the monstrous Guardian with his "radiant beam."

"And there is no doubt left in our mind that in Baalbek we have found Ba’al’s Crest of Zaphon, the target of the first journey of Gilgamesh.

ROMAN RUINS IN BAALBEK, LEBANON

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

"Were there indeed such other places on Earth that could serve as Landing Places for the aircraft of the gods? Were there, besides upon the Crest of Zaphon, other "stones that whisper"?

"....Explaining the Egyptian pantheon of twelve gods to his countrymen, the Greek historian Herodotus also wrote of an "Immortal whom the Egyptians venerated as "Hercules." He traced the origins of the worship of this Immortal to Phoenicia, "hearing that there was a temple of Hercules at that place, very highly venerated." In the temple he saw two pillars. "One was of pure gold; the other was of emerald, shining with great brilliancy at night."

"Such sacred "Sun Pillars" - "Stones of the gods" - were actually depicted on Phoenician coins following the area’s conquest by Alexander. Herodotus provides us with the additional information that of the two connected stones, one was made of the metal which is the best conductor of electricity (gold); and the other of a precious stone (emerald) as is now used for laser communications, giving off an eerie radiance as it emits a high powered beam. Was it not like the contraption set up by Ba’al, which the Canaanite text described as "stones of splendor"?

"....The construction (or reconstruction) upon the Crest of Zaphon of a launching silo and a landing platform for Ba’al was not the cause of his fatal battle with Mot. Rather, it was his clandestine attempt to set up a "Stone of Splendor." This device could communicate with the heavens as well as with other places on Earth. But, in addition, it was:

A stone that whispers,
Men its messages will not know,
Earth’s multitudes will not comprehend.

"....In a most thorough study of the subject, Wilhem H. Roscher (Omphalos) showed that the Indo-European term for these oracle stones - navel in English, nabel in German, etc.- stem from the Sanskrit nabh, which meant "emanate forcefully." It is no coincidence that in the Semitic languages naboh meant to foretell and nabih meant "prophet." All these identical meanings undoubtedly harken back to the Sumerian, in which NA.BA(R) meant "bright-shiny stone that solves."

"....Delphi, the site of Greece’s most famous oracle was dedicated to Apollo ("He of Stone"), its ruins are still one of Greece’s leading tourist attractions. There too as at Baalbek, the sacred precinct consisted of a platform shaped upon a mountainside, also facing a valley that opens up as a funnel toward the Mediterranean Sea and the lands on its other shore.

"Many records established that an omphalos stone was Delphi’s holiest object. It was set into a special base in the inner sanctum of the temple of Apollo, some say next to a golden statue of the god and some say it was enshrined all by itself. In a subterranean chamber, hidden from view by the oracle seekers, the oracle priestess in trance-like oblivion, answered the questions of kings, and heroes by uttering enigmatic answers - answers given by the god but emanating from the omphalos.

"....How was Delphi chosen as an oracle place, and how did the omphalos stone come to be there? The traditions say that when Zeus wanted to find the center of the Earth, he released eagles from two opposite ends of the world. Flying toward each other, they met at Delphi whereupon the place was marked by erecting there a navel stone, an omphalos. According to the Greek historian Strabo, images of two such eagles were perched on top on the omphalos at Delphi.

"....No surprisingly, we find the twin Sacred Stones, accompanied by the two eagles, also depicted in Egyptian sacred writings, and many centuries before the Greeks even began to enshrine their oracle centers, an Egyptian Pharaoh depicted an omphalos with the two perched birds in his pyramids. He was Seti I, who lived in the fourteenth century B.C.; and it was in his depiction of the domain of Seker, the Hidden God, that we have the oldest omphalos to date.

"It was the communications means whereby messages - "words" - "were spoken to Seker everyday."

"In Baalbek, we have found the target of the first journey of Gilgamesh. Having followed the threads connecting the "whispering" Stones of Splendor, we arrived at the Duat.

"It was the place where the Pharaohs sought the Stairway to Heaven for an Afterlife. It was we suggest, the place whereto Gilgamesh, in search of Life, set his course on his second journey."

HERODOTUS WROTE ABOUT HERCULES

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Chapter Ten
TILMUN: LAND OF THE ROCKETSHIPS
 

"The goal of Gilgamesh was Tilmun, the land where the rocketships were raised up. To ask where he went to reach Tilmun, is to ask where Alexander went, deeming himself a Pharaoh and a god’s son. It is to ask: Where on Earth was the Duat? Because all these destinations, we must conclude, were one and the same. And the land where they hoped to find the Stairway to Heaven, we shall conclusively show, was the peninsula of Sinai.

"....The suggestion that the Pharaoh’s journey to the Afterlife had indeed taken him to the Sinai peninsula is supported by the fact that Alexander had emulated not only the Pharaohs, there was a deliberate effort to emulate the Israelite Exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses.

"....The arena for the biblical Exodus was the peninsula of Sinai. The conclusion from all the similarities and footstep-following can only be that it was toward the Sinai peninsula that Alexander, Moses and the Pharaohs set their course as they set east from Egypt. This, we will show, was also the destination of Gilgamesh.

"To reach Tilmun on his second and decisive journey Gilgamesh set sail in a "Ship of Magan," a ship of Egypt. Starting from Mesopotamia, his only course was to sail down the Persian Gulf. Then, rounding the Arabian peninsula, he would have entered the Red Sea (which the Egyptians called the Sea of Ur). As the name of his ship indicates, he would have sailed up the Red Sea toward Egypt. But his destination was not Egypt, it was Tilmun. Was he then intending to land on the western shores of the Red Sea - in Nubia? On the eastern shore - in Arabia? Or straight ahead, on the peninsula of Sinai?

"....Just as the Cedar of Lebanon had served as a unique landmark for determining the first destination of Gilgamesh, so does the "Sea of the Waters of Death" serve as a unique clue to the whereabouts of Gilgamesh on his second journey.... It is so called to this day: the Dead Sea. Its waters are so saturated with salt and minerals that it is totally devoid of all marine and plant life.

"The city that overlooked the Sea of the Waters of Death was surrounded by a wall. Its temple was dedicated to Sin, the Moon-god. Outside the city there was an inn. The hostess took Gilgamesh in, extending to him hospitality, giving him information.

"The uncanny similarities to a known biblical tale cannot be missed. When the Israelite’s forty years of wondering in the Wilderness had come to an end, it was time to enter Cannan. Coming from the Sinai peninsula, they circled the Dead Sea from its eastern side until they reached the place where the Jordan River flows into the Dead Sea. When Moses stood upon a hill overlooking the plane, he could see - as Gilgamesh had seen - the shimmering waters of the "low-lying-sea." In the plain, on the other side of the Jordan, stood a city, Jericho. It blocked the Israelite’s advance to Canaan, and they sent two spies to explore its defenses. A woman whose inn was at the city’s walls extended to them hospitality, gave them information and guidance.

"The Hebrew name for Jericho is Yeriho. It literally means "Moon City" - the city dedicated to the Moon god, Sin....

"It was, we suggest, the very city reached by Gilgamesh fifteen centuries before the Exodus.

"Was Jericho already in existence circa 2900 B.C. when Gilgamesh was engaged in his searches? Archaeologists are agreed that Jericho has been inhabited since 7000 B.C., and served as a flourishing urban center since about 3,500 B.C.; it was certainly there when Gilgamesh arrived.

Through directions given to Gilgamesh, he was supposed to arrive to a city named Itla, Mr Sitchin continues:

"....Itla, it was located some distance from the Great Sea. Beyond Itla, in the Fourth Region of the gods, lay the restricted area.

"Was Itla a "City of the Gods" or a City of Men?

"The events there, described in a fragmented Hittite version of the Gilgamesh Epic, indicate that it was a place for both. It was a "sanctified city," with various gods coming and going through or within easy reach of it. But men too could go there: the way to it was indicated by road markers.

In the Old Testament it was known as Kadesh ("The Sanctified") "it was distinguished from a northern namesake (situated, significantly on the approaches of Baalbek) by being called Kadesh-Barnea (which stemming from the Sumer [symbol] (shown on book) could have meant "Kadesh of the Shiny Stone Pillars").

"....Scholars have advanced many theories regarding the origin of the peninsula’s name Sinai. For once, the obvious reason - that, as the name stated, it "Belonged to Sin" - has been among the preferred solutions.

We can see [shown on book] that the Moon’s crescent was the emblem of the deity in whose land the Winged Gate was located. We find that the main crossroads in the central Sinai, the well-watered place Nakhl, still bears the name of Sin’s spouse.

"And we can confidently conclude that the "Land Tilmun" was the Sinai peninsula.

"An examination of the geography, topography, geology, climate, flora and history of the Sinai peninsula will confirm our identification, and clarify the Sinai’s role in the affairs of gods and men.

And indeed it does. Mr. Sitchin gives a quote from texts and gives an identification with the actual land. The wadis are mentioned as part of the identification:

"Typical to most of the peninsula are the wadis.... The bulk of the peninsula’s rainwater is drained northward into the Mediterranean Sea, via the extensive Wadi El-Arish and its myriad tributaries, that look on a map as the blood vessels of a giant heart. In this part of the Sinai, the depths of the wadis that make up this network may change from a few inches to a few feet, the width - from a few feet to a mile and more after a sizable rain.

"The Bedouin (local nomads), as other seasoned travellers in the Sinai, can duplicate the miracle (of Moses), if the soil making up the wadi’s bed is right. The secret is that in many places the rocky bed lies above a layer of clay soil that captures the water as it quickly seeps through the rocks. With knowledge and luck, a little digging in a completely dry bed uncovers water only a few feet below the surface.

"Was this normal art the great miracle performed by the Lord? Recent discoveries in the Sinai throw a new light on the subject. Israeli hydrologists (associated with the Weizman Institute of Science) have discovered that, like parts of the Sahara Desert and some deserts in Nubia, there is "fossil water" - the remains of prehistoric lakes from another geological era - deep under the central Sinai. The vast underground reservoir, with enough water (they estimated) to suffice for a population as large as Israel’s for almost one hundred years, extends for some 6,000 square miles in a wide belt that begins near the Suez Canal and reaches under Israel’s arid Negev.

"....Could the Nefilim, with their space-age technology have missed this knowledge? Was this, rather than a little water in a dry wadi bed, the water that gushed forth after Moses had struck the rock, as indicated by the Lord?

As the tale of Moses in the Old Testament, striking the rock in the desert, and water poured forth for all the Israelites and their livestock; there is a similar Sumerian tale. A tale of bad times in Tilmun caused shortage of waters.

"....Ninsikilla, spouse of Tilmun’s ruler Enshag, complained to her father Enki:

The city which thou has given....
Tilmun, the city thou has given....
Has not waters of the river....
Unbathed is the maiden....
No sparkling water is poured in the city.

Father Enki answered Ninsikilla, his daughter....
"Let divine Utu position himself in the skies....
A missile let him tightly affix to his "breast"
and from high direct it toward the earth.....
From the source from whence issues Earth’s waters,
let him bring thee sweet water from the earth."

"Could a missile shot from the skies pierce the earth and cause potable water to come up? Anticipating the incredulity of its readers the ancient scribe affirmed at the tale’s end: "Verily, it was so." The miracle, the text went on, did work: Tilmun became a land "of crop raising fields and farms which bear grain;" and Tilmun-City "became port city of the land, the site of quays and mooring piers."

"The parallels between Tilmun and Sinai are thus double affirmed: first, the existence of the subterranean water reservoir, below the rocky surface; secondly, the presence of Utu/Shamash (the Spaceport’s commander) in the proximity.

The Sinai peninsula can also account for all the products for which Tilmun was renowned,

gemstones akin to bluish lapis lazuli
blue-green gemstone turquoise
blue-green mineral (malachite).

"....Indeed the Egyptian name for turquoise mafka-t (after which they called the Sinai "The Land of Mafkat), stems from the Semitic verb meaning "to mine, to extract by cutting." These mining areas were in the domain of the goddess Hathor, who was known both as "Lady of Sinai" and "Lady of Mafkat." A great goddess of olden times, one of the early sky gods of the Egyptians, she was nicknamed by them "The Cow." Her name Hat-Hor spelled hieroglyphically by drawing a falcon within an enclosure, has been interpreted by scholars to mean "House of Horus," (Horus having been depicted as a falcon). But it literally meant: "Falcon House," which affirms our conclusions regarding the location and functions of the Land of the Missiles.

"According to the Enciclopaedia Britannica, "turquoise was obtained from the Sinai peninsula before the fourth millennium B.C. in one of the first world’s important hard-rock mining operations." At the time the Sumerian civilization was only beginning to stir, and the Egyptian one was almost a millennium away. Who then could have organized the mining activities. The Egyptians said it was Thoth, the god of sciences.

"In this and in the assignment of the Sinai to Hathor, the Egyptians emulated Sumerian traditions. According to Sumerian texts, the god who organized the mining operations of the Anunnaki was Enki, the God of Knowledge; and Tilmun, the texts attested, was alloted in pre-Deluvial times to Ninhursag, sister of Enki and Enlil. In her youth she was a smashing beauty and the chief nurse of the Nefilim, but in her old age, she was nicknamed "The Cow" and as the goddess of the Date Palm, was depicted with cow’s horns.

The similarities between her and Hathor, and the analogies between their domains, are too obvious to require elaboration.

"The Sinai was also a major source of copper, and the evidence of this is that the Egyptians relied mostly on raiding expeditions to obtain it.... A Pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty (the time of Abraham) left us these comments of his deeds:

"Reaching the bounderings of the foreign lands with his feet, exploring the mysterious valleys, reaching the limits of the unknown." He boasted that his men lost not a single case of the seized booty.

"....(Beno Rothenberg, Sinai Explorations 1967-1972) "We could establish the existence of a fairly large industrial metallurgical enterprise .... There are copper mines, miner’s camps and copper smelting installations, spread from the western parts of southern Sinai to as far east as Elat at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba."

"....The tribe into which Moses married when he escaped from Egypt into the Sinai was that of the Qenites. Their name literally meant "smiths, metallurgists."

R.J. Forbes (The Evolution of the Smith) pointed out that the biblical term Qain ("smith") stemmed from the Sumerian KIN ("fashioner").

"Pharaoh Ramses III, who reigned in the century following the Exodus, recorded his invasion of these coppersmiths’ dwellings and the plundering of the metallurgical center of Timna-Elat.

"....It was to spend the rest of his life in the mines of Tilmun that the gods had sentenced Enkidu, and so it was that Gilgamesh conceived the plan to charter a "Ship of Egypt" and take his comrade along - since the Land of Mines and the "Land of Missiles" were both part of the same land. Our identification matches the ancient data.

"....A persistent school of thought, one of whose early advocates was P.B. Cornwall (One the Location of Tilmun), identifies Tilmun (sometimes transcribed "Dilmun") as the island of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf."

"....There are several flows in this interpretation. First, it could well be that only the capital city of Tilmun was on an offshore island: the texts leave no doubt that there was a land Tilmun and a Tilmun-city. Secondly, other Assyrian inscriptions which describes cities as being "in the midst of the sea" apply to coastal cities on a bay or a promontory, but not on an island (as, for instance, Arvad on the Mediterranean coast). Then, if the "sea where the sun rises" indicates a sea east of Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf does not qualify, since it lies to the south, not to the east, of Mesopotamia

"....Another major problem arising from a Bahrein-Tilmun identification concerns the products for which Tilmun was renowned.... Bahrein had none of these, except for some "ordinary dates."

Mr. Sitchin continues with more prove about the location of Tilmun. Of special importance is the explanation of the misunderstanding of some scholars:

"....In view of the proximity of Tilmun to Egypt, what about the statements that Tilmun was "where the sun rises" - meaning (scholars say) east of Sumer, and not west of it (as the Sinai is?)

The simple answer is that the texts do not make that statement at all. They do not say "where the Sun rises"; they state "where Shamash ascends" - and that makes all the difference. Tilmun was not at all in the east; but it certainly was the place where Utu/Shamash (the god whose celestial symbol was the Sun, and not the Sun itself) ascended skyward in his rocketships. The words of the Gilgamesh epic are quite clear:

At the Mountain of Mashu he arrived,
Where by day the Shems he watched
as they depart and come in....
Rocket-men guard its gate....
they watch over Shamash
as he ascends and descends.

"That indeed was the place whereto Ziusudra had been taken.

"....And so it was that Gilgamesh - denied permission to mount a Shem, and seeking therefore only to converse with his ancestor Ziusudra - set his steps to Mount Mashu in Tilmun - the Mount of Moshe (Moses) in the Sinai Peninsula.

Among the examples of the flora of Tilmun, Mr. Sitchin mentions the acacia tree, onions, tamarisks, and also:

"....The tree with which Tilmun was most associated in antiquity, however, was the date palm....
We know from Mesopotamian records that these dates were also exported from Tilmun in antiquity. The dates were so large and tasty that recipes for the meals of the gods of Uruk (the city of Gilgamesh) specified that "every day of the year, for the four daily meals, 108 measures of ordinary dates, and dates of the Land Tilmun, as also figs and raisings.... shall be offered to the deities." The nearest and most ancient town to the land route from Sinai to Mesopotamia was Jericho. Its biblical epithet was "Jericho, the city of dates."

"....Alongside the Winged Disk (the emblem of the Twelfth Planet), the symbol most widely depicted by all the ancient nations was the Tree of Life.

"....The source of all these depictions and beliefs were Sumerian records of the Land of Living, Tilmun,

Where old woman says not "I am an old woman,"
Where old man says not "I am an old man."

"The Sumerians, masters of word-plays, called the Land of the Missiles TIL.MUN, yet the term could also mean "Land of Living," for TIL also meant "Life." The Tree of Life in Sumerian was GISH.TIL; but GISH also meant a man-made, a manufactured object; so that GISH.TIL could also mean "The Vehicle to Life" - a rocketship. In art too, we find the Eagle-men sometimes saluting not the date palm, but a rocket.

"....The binding knots tighten further, as we find that in Greek religious art, the omphalos was associated with the date palm.

"....We have found earlier that the omphalos served as a link between Greek, Egyptian, Nubian and Canaanite "oracle centers" and the Duat. Now we find this "Stone of Splendor" linked to the date palm - The Tree of the Land of Living.

"Indeed, Sumerian texts accompanying depictions of the Cherubim included the following incantation:

The dark-brown tree of Enki I hold in my hand;
The tree that tells the count, great heavensward weapon,
I hold in my hand;
The palm tree, great tree of oracles, I hold in my hand.

"A Mesopotamian depiction shows a god holding up in his hand this "palm tree, Great tree of oracles." He is granting this Fruit of Life to a king at the place of the "Four Gods." We have already come upon this place, in Egyptian texts and depictions; they were the Four Gods of the Four Cardinal Points, located by the Stairway to Heaven in the Duat. We have also seen that the Sumerian Gateway to Heaven was marked by the date palm.

"And we have no more doubt that the target of the ancient Search of Immortality was a Spaceport - somewhere in the Sinai peninsula.

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Chapter Eleven
THE ELUSIVE MOUNT
 

"Somewhere in the Sinai peninsula, the Nefilim had established their post-Diluvial Spaceport. Somewhere in the Sinai peninsula, mortals - a selected few, with their god’s blessing - could approach a certain mountain.

• There, "Go back!" the guarding bird-men ordered Alexander, "The ’for land on which you stand belongs to God alone."

• There, "Do not come nearer!" the Lord called out to Moses, "for the place whereon thou standest is sacred ground."

• There, eagle-men challenged Gilgamesh with their stun-rays, only to realize he was no mere mortal.

"The Sumerians called the mount of encounter Mount MA.SHU - the Mount of the Supreme Barge. The tales of Alexander named it Mount Mushas - the Mountain of Moses.

"....The Israelite Exodus from Egypt has been commemorated each year for the past thirty-three centuries by the celebration of the Passover. The historical and religious records of the Hebrews are replete with reference to the Exodus, the wanderings in the Wilderness, the Covenant at Mount Sinai. The people have been constantly reminded of the Theophany, when the whole nation of Israel had seen the Lord Yahweh alight in his glory upon the sacred mount. Yet its location was de-emphasized, lest attempts be made to make the place a cult center.

"The modern pilgrim, as pilgrims have done for centuries past, sets its course to the monastery of Santa Katarina, so named after the martyred Katherine of Egypt whose body angels carried to the nearby peak bearing her name. After an overnight stay, at daybreak, the pilgrims begin the climb to Gebel Mussa ("Mount Moses" in Arabic). It is the southern peak of a two mile massif rising south of the monastery - the "traditional" Mount Sinai with which the Theophany and the Lawgiving are associated.

"....From the peak of Gebel Mussa, one can see some of the other peaks which make the granite heartland, of which this mount is a member. Surprisingly, it appears to be lower than many of its neighbors!

"Indeed in support of the Saint Katherine legend, the monks have put up a sign in the main building which proclaims:

Altitude 5012 FT
Moses Mount 7560 FT
St. Katherine Mount 8576 FT

"As one is convinced that Mount Katherine is indeed the higher one - in fact, the highest in the peninsula - and thus rightly chosen by the angels to hide the saint’s body thereon, one is also disappointed that - contrary to long-held beliefs - God had brought the Children of Israel to this forbidding area, to impress upon them his might and his laws not from the tallest mount around.

"Had God missed the right mountain?

"....Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, studying Arabic and Muslim customs, on April 15, 1816, he set on camelback from the town of Suez, at the head of Gulf of Suez. His goal was to retrace the route of the Exodus, and thereby to establish the true identity of Mount Sinai. Following the presumed route taken by the Israelites, he travelled south along the western coast of the peninsula.... As he went south, Burckhardt noted the geography, topography, distances. He compared conditions and place names with the descriptions and names of the stations of the Exodus as mentioned in the Bible. Where the limestone ends, nature has provided a sandy belt which separates the plateau from a belt of Nubian sandstone serving as a cross-Sinai avenue. There Burckhardt turned inland, and after a while set his course southward into the granite heartland, reaching the Katherine monastery from the south (as today’s air traveller does).

"Some of his observations are of a lingering interest. The area, he found, produced excellent dates....

"....Additional research established that the main monastic center in Sinai, through most of the centuries, was at Wadi Feiran, near Serbal - and not St. Katherine.

"When Burckhardt published his findings (Travels in Syria and the Holy Land ) his conclusions shook the scholarly and biblical world. The true Mount Sinai, he stated was not Mount Mussa, but Mount Serbal!

"....The next major journey to Sinai was undertaken by the American Edward Robinson together with Eli Smith. Like Burckhardt, they left Suez City on camelback armed with his book and the Laborde’s maps, (a French Count, Leon de, who had toured Sinai back in 1826 and 1828). It took them thirteen early spring days to reach St. Katherine. There, Robinson gave the monk’s legends a thoroughgoing examination. He found out that at Feiran there indeed was a superior monastic community, sometimes led by full bishops, to which Katherine and several others monastic communities in southern Sinai were subordinate, so that tradition must have placed greater emphasis on Feiran. In the tales and documents, he discovered that mounts Mossa and Katherine were of no Christian consequence in the early Christian centuries, and that Katherine’s supremacy developed only in the seventeenth century, when the other unfortified monastic communities fell prey to invaders and marauders. Checking local Arab traditions, he found that the biblical names "Sinai" and "Horeb" were totally unknown to the local Bedouins, it was the Katherine monks who began to apply these names to certain mountains.

"Was Buckhardt then right?

More researchers came along and the same results were presented.

"....But if not Mount Mussa, why Mount Serbal? Besides its "correct" location at Wadi Feiran, Lepsius (Karl Richard, great Egyptologist and founder of scientific archaeology), found some concrete evidence. Describing the mount in glowing terms, he reported finding on its top: "A deep mountain hollow around which the five summits of Serbal unite in a half circle and form a towering crown." In the middle of this hollow he found ruins of an old convent. It was at that hallowed spot, he suggested that the "Glory of the Lord" had landed, in full view of the Israelites (who were gathered in the plain to the west). As to the fault that Robinson had found with Burckhardt’s Exodus route to Serbal - Lepsius offered an alternative detour which corrected the problem.

Many years of research were dedicated trying to find the route of the Exodus. Mr. Sitchin reviews them in some detail mentioning the Archaeologists, Cartographers, Authors, Explorers, and their opinions.

"As the debate continued to engross the scholarly and biblical world, it became apparent that the basic unresolved issue was this: Insofar as the Crossing was concerned, the weight of the evidence negated a northern body of water; but insofar as Mount Sinai was concerned, the weight of the evidence negated a southern location. The impasse focused the attention of scholars and explorers on the only remaining compromise: the Central Plain of the Sinai peninsula.

"The long occupation of the Sinai by Israel, in the aftermath of the 1967 war with Egypt, opened up the peninsula to study and research on an unprecedented scale. Archaeologists, historians, geographers, topographers, geologists, engineers examined the peninsula from tip to toe.

"....Beno Rothenberg (Sinai Explorations 1967 - 1972 and other reports), mostly under the auspices of Tel-Aviv University. In the Northern coastal strip, many ancient sites reflected the "bridge-like nature of this area." In the Central Plain of north Sinai, no ancient sites of permanent abode were found, but only evidence of camping sites, attesting that this was only a transit area. When the camping sites were plotted on the map, they formed "a clear line from the Negev toward Egypt, and this should be considered as the direction of prehistory movements across the ’Desert of the Wanderings’ (the el-Tih)."

Yet another controversial site was offered by a Hebrew University biblical geographer, Menasher Har-El, proposing another site of Crossing, and for the battle of Israel with Amalekites, according to him in the coast of the Gulf of Suez.

"This suggestion has been rejected by Israeli military experts familiar with the terrain and history of warfare in the Sinai.

"Where then, was Mount Sinai? We must look again at the ancient evidence.

"The Pharaoh, in his journey to the Afterlife, went eastward. Crossing the watery barrier he set his course to a pass in the mountains. He then reached the Duat, which was an oval-shaped valley surrounded by mountains. The "Mountain of Light" was situated where the stream of Osiris divided into tributaries, (pictorial shown in book).

"We have found similar pictorial evidence from Assyria.

The Assyrian kings, it should be remembered, arrived at the Sinai from the opposite direction, to that of the Egyptians kings: from the northeast, via Canaan. One of them, Esarhaddon, engraved on a stela what amounts to a route map of his own quest for "Life." It shows the date palm - the code emblem for the Sinai, a farming area symbolized by the plough, and a "Sacred Mount." In the upper register we see Esarhaddon at the shrine of the Supreme Deity, near the Tree of Life. It is flanked by the sign of the bull - the very image (the "golden calf") that the Israelites had fashioned at the foot of Mount Sinai.

"All this does not bespeak the harsh, barren granite peaks of southern Sinai. Rather, it suggests northern Sinai and its dominant Wadi El-Arish, whose very name means Stream of the Husbandman. It is among its tributaries, in a valley surrounded by mountains, that the Mount was located.

"There is only one such place in the whole of the Sinai peninsula. Geography, topography, historical texts, pictorial depictions - all point at the Central Plain in Sinai’s northern half.

"....The Central Plain.... its hard gravel top meant that it was admirably suited for the Spaceport of the Nefilim. And if Mount Mashu marked the gateway to the Spaceport, it had to be located on the outskirts of this facility.

"There have been found Sumerian cylinder seals depicting the appearance of a deity unto a shepherd. They show the god appearing from between two mountains, with a rocket-like tree behind him - perhaps the Sneh ("Burning Bush") of the biblical tale. The introduction of the two peaks in the shepherd scene fits the frequent biblical reference to the Lord as El Shaddai - God of the Two Peaks. It thus raises yet another distinction between the Mount of the Lawgiving and the Mountain of the Gods: the one was a solitary mount in a desert plain; the other seems to have been a combination of two sacred peaks.

"The Ugaritic texts also recognize a "Mountain of the Young Gods" in the environs of Kadesh, and two peaks of El and Asherah - Shad Elim, Shad Asheraht u Rahim - in the south of the peninsula. It was to that area at mebokh naharam ("Where the two bodies of water begin"), Kerev apheq tehomtam ("near the cleft of the two seas") that El had retired in his old age. The texts, we believe, describe the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula.

"There was, we conclude, a Gateway Mount on the perimeter of the Spaceport in the Central Plain. And there were two peaks in the peninsula’s southern tip that also played a role in the comings and goings of the Nefilim. They were the two peaks that measured up.

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