Chapter Eleven
A LAND OF WHICH THE INGOTS COME
 

"There is a land of which the ingots come"

This quote appears in a passage from the Book of Job (Bible) when the man Job holds a conversation with three friends....

Mr. Sitchin begins this chapter by introducing a man from the land of Uz, his name was Job. This he quotes from the Bible when Job, perfect and upright, was put to the test by Satan to the limits of man’s faith in God.

Job enters into a conversation with three friends, who point to him the wonders of the heavens and the earth, among them the "marvels of metals and their sources and the ingenuity of finding them and extracting them from the depths of the earth." Several verses are quoted from the biblical Book of Job.

"Does man know all these places? Job asked, did man by himself discover all the metallurgical processes? Indeed he challenged his three friends, where does this knowledge of metal and minerals come from?

After his friends reply, Job considers:

"Clearly, Job conceded, all this Knowledge comes from God - the one who had both enriched him and deprived him and who would restore him....

"The inclusion of the marvels of mining in Job’s discourse with his friends may have not been accidental. Though nothing is known of the identity of Job himself or of the land where he had lived, the names of the three friends provide some clues. The first one was Elipaz of Teman, from southern Arabia, his name meant "My God is Pure Gold." The second one was Bildad of Shuha, a country believed to have been located south of Carcemish, the Hittite city; the land’s name meant "Place of the deep pits." The third one was Zophar of Na’amah, a place named after the sister of Tubal-Cain, "the master of all smiths" according to the Bible. All three, thus, had come from lands associated with mining.

"....Job’s time is certainly long after Man’s first use of copper by hammering lumps of native copper into useful shapes, and well into the period when metals were obtained by ores that had to be smelted, refined, and cast.

"....Greek poets and philosophers, followed by Roman ones, perpetuated Plato’s division of human history according to four metal ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze (copper), and Iron, in which gold represented the ideal age when Man had been closer to his gods. A biblical division included in Daniel’s vision begins with clay before the list of metals and is a more accurate version of Man’s progress.

"....The early use of copper was therefore of copper-stones, and for that reason many scholars prefer to call the transition from the stone ages to the metal ages not a Copper Age but a Chalcolithic, Copper-stone Age.

"....Believed to have begun in the highlands surrounding the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, this metalworking of copper (and eventually of gold) was possible due to the circumstances particular to them.

"Gold and Copper are found in nature in their "natural state," not only as veins deep within the rocks inside the earth, but also in the form of nuggets and lumps (even dust in the case of gold) that the forces of nature - storms, floods, or the persistent flow of streams and rivers - have shaken loose out of the rocks as they became exposed.... Placer mining, most authorities believe that such mining was practiced in the highlands surrounding the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean eastern coasts as early as the fifth millennium B.C., and certainly before 4000 B.C.

"....It is noteworthy that although both gold and copper were thus available in their natural state, and gold was even more suitable for use because unlike copper it does not oxidize, Near East man of those early millennia did not utilize gold but limited his use to copper. The phenomenon usually goes without explanation; but it is our opinion that the explanation is to be found in the notions familiar from the New World - that gold was a metal belonging to the gods. When gold came into use, at the beginning of the third millennium B.C. or several centuries earlier, it was for enhancing the temples (literally "God’s House") and for making golden vessels for the service of the gods therein. It was circa 2500 B.C. that gold came into total use, indicating a change of attitudes whose reasons are yet to be explored.

"Sumerian civilization blossomed out circa 3800 B.C. and it is evident from archaeological discoveries that its beginnings, both in northern and southern Mesopotamia, were in place by 4000 B.C.; that is also the time when mining, the processing of ores and metallurgical sophistication, appeared on the scene - a complex and advanced body of knowledge that (as in the case of all other sciences) the ancient peoples said it was given them by the Anunnaki, the gods who had come to Earth from Nibiru. Reviewing the stages in man’s use of metal, L. Aitchison (A History of Metals) noted with astonishment that by 3700 B.C. "every culture in Mesopotamia was based in metalworking"; he concluded with obvious admiration that the metallurgical heights then reached "must inevitably be attributed to the technical genius of the Sumerians."

"Primitive hammering gave way to the art of casting; and the very complex process known as Cire perdue ("lost wax"), which enabled the casting and making of beautiful and useful objects (such as statuettes of gods and animals or temple utensils) was invented - in Sumer. The progress made there spread worldwide.... "it reached Egypt some three hundred years later and by 2500 B.C. the entire region between the Nile cataracts and the Indus is metal minded.... The Chinese did not become true metallurgists until the Lungshan period, 1800-1500 B.C.... In Europe the earliest metal objects are hardly earlier than 2000 B.C."

"Before the Deluge, when the Anunnaki had been mining gold in Southern Africa for their own needs in Nibiru, the smelted ores were shipped in submersible boats to their E.DIN. Sailing through what is now the Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf they delivered their cargo for final processing and refining at BAD.TIBIRA, an antediluvial "Pittsburgh." The name meant "Place established for Metallurgy."

"....After the Deluge it took nearly seven millennia for the plain (of Tigris-Euphrates) to become dry enough for people to resettle there and launch the Sumerian civilization.... The Sumerian metallurgical center was established where Bad-Tibira had once been. The fact that other people in the ancient Near East employed not only Sumerian technologies but also Sumerian terminologies attest to the centrality of Sumer in ancient metallurgy.

"....It is known from records and finds that Sumerian traders reached out to very distant sources for metals, offering in exchange not only Sumer’s staples - grains and woollen garments - but also finished metal products.

"....Sumerian pictographic writing included an impressive array of symbols pertaining to mining, many showing variety of mine shafts according to their structures or minerals mined therein.

"Where all these mines were located - certainly not in Sumer itself - is not always clear, for many place names remain unidentified. But some royal inscriptions indicate far and distant lands. A good example is [a] quote (appearing on book) from Cylinder A, column xvi of Gudea, king of Lagash (third millennium B.C.) in which he recorded the rare materials used in building the E.NINNU temple for his god....

"One of the key passages in the text (which Gudea repeated in Cylinder B, to make sure posterity remembers his pious achievements), is the use of "copper mixed with tin" to build the temple.

"As Gudea has correctly stated, bronze was a "mixture" of copper and tin, not a natural element; it was the product of alloying copper and tin in a furnace, and thus a totally artificial product.... Bronze, however, was a technological achievement in other ways too. It could be shaped only by casting, not hammering or annealing; and the tin for it must be obtained from its ores from a process called smelting and recovery, for it is very rarely found in nature in its native state. It must be recovered from an ore called cassiterite. This ore is generally found in alluvial deposits that resulted from the washing out of vein or lode tin from its rocks by natural forces such as heavy rains, floods, and avalanches. The tin is recovered from the cassiterite by smelting, usually in combination with limestone in the first phase of recovery. Even this oversimplified description of the metallurgical processes involved will suffice to make clear that bronze was a metal that required advanced metallurgical know-how at every stage of its processing.

"To add to the problems, it was also a metal difficult to find.... Some Sumerian texts mention two "tin mountains" in a far land whose identity is unclear.... It has been ascertained that in their search for this vital metal Sumerian traders, via intermediaries in Asia Minor, reached out to tin-ore sources along the Danube, (an other areas of Europe) especially in the provinces known nowadays as Bohemia and Saxony (where the ores have been long exhausted). Forbes has observed that the "finds in the Royal Cemetery of Ur (2500 B.C.) show that Ur smiths.... understood the metallurgy of bronze and copper perfectly. Where the tin ore they used came from, is still a mystery." The mystery, indeed, still persists.

"....For all these reasons, and perhaps because the gods - the Anunnaki - had to teach ancient man how to recover the tin from its ore through smelting, the metal was considered by the Sumerians to be a "divine" metal. Their word for it was AN.NA, literally "Heavenly Stone." (Likewise, when iron that required ore smelting came into use, it was called AN.BAR, "Heavenly Metal"). Bronze, the alloy of copper and tin was called ZA.BAR, "Gleaming Double Metal."

"The term for tin, Anna, was borrowed by the Hittites without much change. But in the Akkadian language, the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians and the other Semitic-speaking peoples, the term underwent a slight change to Anaku. The term is usually taken to mean "pure tin" ("Ana-ku"); but we wonder whether the change may have reflected a closer, more intimate association of the metal with the Anunnaki gods, for it has also been found spelled Annakum, meaning that which belongs to or comes from the Anunnaki.

"The term appears in the Bible several times. Ending with a soft kh, it meant a tin-plumbline, as in the prophecy of Amos envisioning the Lord holding an Anakh to illustrate his promise not to deviate anymore from his people Israel.... Anak also meant "giant" - a Hebrew rendering (as we have suggested in a previous volume) of the Mesopotamian "Anunnaki." It is a rendering that raises intriguing association with the legends of both the Old World and the New World attributing this or that feat to the "giants."

 

Sargon of Akkad .

"All these associations of tin with the Anunnaki may have stemmed from their original role in granting mankind this metal and the know-how it required. In fact, the slight but significant modification from the Sumerian AN.NA to the Akkadian Anaku suggests a certain time frame. It is well documented from archaeological discoveries as well as texts, that the great surge into the Bronze Age slowed down circa 2500 B.C. The founder of the Akkadian dynasty, Sargon of Akkad, valued the metal so much that he chosed it rather than gold or silver for commemorating himself, circa 2300 B.C.

"Metallurgical historians find confirmation of the dwindling supplies of tin in the fact that the percentage of tin in bronze kept being lowered, and in the discovery from texts that most of the new bronze objects were made from old bronze, by melting down earlier objects and mixing the molten alloy with more copper, sometimes reducing the tin content to as little as 2 %. Then, for unexplained reasons, the situation changed abruptly. "Only from the Middle Bronze Age onwards, say from 2200 B.C.," Forbes wrote, "are true bronze forms used and higher percentages of tin appear more regularly, and not only for intricate forms as in the earlier period."

"Having given mankind bronze with which to launch the great civilization of the fourth millennium B.C., the Anunnaki seemed to come to the rescue again over a millennium later. But while the unknown sources of tin in the first instance may have been Old World ones, the source in the second instance is a complete mystery.

"Here, then, is our daring thought: The new source was the New World.

"If as we believe, New World tin had reached the Old World’s civilization centers, it could have come from one and only one place: Lake Titicaca.

"This not because the name, as we have shown, signifies lake of "the tin stones"; but because this part of Bolivia is still, millennia later, a major source of the world’s tin. Tin, though not rare, is considered a scarce mineral, found only in a few places in commercial quantities.

Among other countries which produce tin, including Bolivia:

"In only two places has tin ore been found in its original lodes: Cornwall and Bolivia. The former has been exhausted; the latter still supplies the world from mountains that seem to be truly "tin mountains" as described in the Sumerian text of Inanna.

"These rich but difficult mining sources, at elevations exceeding 12,000 feet, are concentrated primarily southeast of La Paz, the Bolivian capital, and east of Lake Poopo. The much easier to attain alluvial cassiterite in riverbeds has come from the eastern coastal area of Lake Titicaca.

"Some of the most reliable research concerning Bolivian-Titicaca tin mining in antiquity was done by David Forbes (Researches on the Mineralogy of South America); conducted more than a century ago.... Among amazing findings of tin, gold nuggets (on the banks of Tipuani, a tributary of the Beni river), cassiterite, and nuggets and beads of metallic tin; this meant, convincingly, that whoever worked that area for its gold also knew how to process the tin-ore for its tin.... He stated that the "mystery" of the occurrence of the metallic tin in these areas "cannot be explained by purely natural causes." Near Sorata he found a bronze macehead which on analysis showed the alloy to be over 88% copper and just over 11% tin, "which is quite identical with many of the ancient bronzes" of Europe and the Near East. The sites appeared to be "from extremely ancient periods."

"Forbes was also surprised to realize that the Indians living around Lake Titicaca, descendants of the Aymara tribes, seemed to know where to find all these intriguing sites.

"The Spanish chronicler Barba (1640) stated that the Spaniards had found both tin an copper mines worked by the Indians; the tin mines were near Lake Titicaca. Posnansky found such pre-Inca mines six miles from Tiahuanacu.

"...."What sort of metal was the prehistoric man of the Andes seeking in the depths of the mountains in so remote a period?" Posnansky asked. "Was it gold or silver? Certainly not! A metal of much more use caused him to ascend to the highest peaks of the Andean mountain range: it was tin." And the tin, he explained, was needed to alloy with copper to create: "the noble bronze." That this was the purpose of man at Tiahuanacu, he stated, was confirmed by the discovery, within a radium of thirty leagues from Tiahuanacu, of many tin mines.

"But did Andean man require this tin to make his own bronze tools? Apparently not. A major study by the leading metallurgist Erland Nordenskiold (The Copper and Bronze Ages in South America) established that neither age had taken place there: There had been in South America no trace of a developed bronze or even copper age, and the reluctant conclusion was that whatever bronze tools had been found, were in fact based on Old World shapes and Old World technologies.... "it must be confessed (he continued), that there is considerable similarity between the metal technique of the New World and that of the Old during the Bronze Age." Significantly, some of the tools included in his examples had handles shaped as the head of the Sumerian goddess Ninti with her symbol of the twin umbilical cutters, later the Mistress of the Sinai mines.

"The history of bronze in the New World is thus linked to the Old World, and the story of tin in the Andes, where New World bronze originated, is inexorably linked to Lake Titicaca. In that, Tiahuanacu had a central role, tied to the minerals surrounding it; otherwise, why was it built there at all?

"The three civilization centers of the Old World arose in fertile river valleys; the Sumerian in the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, the Egyptian-African along the Nile, that of India along the Indus river. Their base was agriculture; trade, made possible by the rivers, provided the industrial raw materials and enabled the export of grains and finished products. Cities sprung up along the rivers, commerce required written records, trade flourished when society was organized and international relations developed.

"Tiahuanaco does not fit that pattern. It gives the appearance of being, as the popular saying goes, "all dressed up with no where to go." A great metropolis whose culture and art forms influenced almost the whole Andean region - built in the middle of nowhere on the shores of an inhospitable lake at the top of the world, and even if for the minerals, why there? Geography may provide an answer.

"It is customary to begin every description of Lake Titicaca by stating that it is the highest navigable body of water in the world, at an altitude of 13,861 feet. It is a rather large lake, with a surface area of 3,210 square miles. Its depths varies from a thousand feet to a hundred. Elongated in shape, it has a maximum length of 120 miles and a maximum width of 44 miles....

After explaining all the surroundings of the lake, ranges, flowing rivers, shore shapes, including also the town of Puno, the largest lakeside and port of the lake, and the nearby enigmatic ruins of Sillustani, plus the two important islands of the lake: Island of the Moon and Titicaca Island, where it all started and where Manco Capac was given the golden wand with which to found Cuzco and begin Andean Civilization. Mr Sitchin continues:

"It is at the southern shore of the lake that the water-filled cavity between all these mountain ranges continues as dry land, creating the valley or plateau on which Tiahuanaco is situated. No where else all around the lake is there such a level plateau. No where else is there a nearby lagoonlike body that connects with the rest of the lake, making waterborne transportation feasible. No where else around the lake is there a site like this, with passes through the mountains in the three landward directions and by water northward.

"And no where else are the prized metals right at hand - gold and silver, and copper and tin. Tiahuanacu was there because it was the best place for it to be for what it was: the metallurgical capital of South America, of the New World.

"All the various spellings that have been employed - Tiahuanacu, Tiahuanaco, Tiwanaku, Tianaku - are only efforts to capture the pronunciation of the name as it has been transmitted and retained by the native population. The original name, we suggest, was TI.ANAKU: the place of Titi and Anaku - TIN CITY.

"Our suggestion that Anaku in the place’s name stems from the Mesopotamian term which meant tin as the metal granted by the Anunnaki invokes a direct link between Tiahuanacu and Lake Titicaca and the ancient Near East. There is evidence to support such a suggestion.

"Bronze accompanied the sprouting of the Near East civilizations and came into full metallurgical utilization there by 3500 B.C. But by 2600 B.C. or so, the supplies of tin dwindled and almost petered out. Then, suddenly, fresh supplies appeared circa 2200 B.C.; the Anunnaki, somehow, had stepped in to end the tin crisis and save the very civilizations they had given Mankind. How was that achieved?
"Let us look at some known facts.

"Circa 2200 B.C., when tin supplies in the Near East improved so abruptly, an enigmatic people appeared in the Near Eastern scene. Their neighbors called them Cassites ("Kosseans" to the Greeks of later times). There is no explanation for the name that scholars know of. But it strikes us the possible source of cassiterite by which tin-ores have been known since antiquity; it implies a recognition of the Cassites as the people who could supply the ore or who had come from where the ore is found.

"Pliny, the first century Roman savant, wrote that tin, which the Greeks called "cassiteros," was more valuable than lead. He stated that is esteemed by the Greeks since the Trojan war (and is indeed mentioned by Homer by the name cassiteros)....

Following are guidelines of the main points to give evidence of the link Mr. Sitchin mentions above, however, in his book a few pages are dedicated to explain the details.

In Mr. Sitchin’s words:

-The Early Mediterranean Greeks came into contact with the Hittites (or were, perhaps, Indo-European cousins of theirs).

-The islands that the Greeks call Cassiterites, "in consequence of their abundance of tin," he (Pliny) wrote, are out in the Atlantic facing the cape called The End of Earth; "they are the six Islands of the Gods, which some people have designated as the Isles of Bliss." It is an intriguing statement, for if the Hittites from whom the Greeks had learned all that spoke of the gods as being the Anunnaki, we have here a term with all the connotations of Anaku.

"The reference, however, is usually taken to mean the Scilly Islands off Cornwall, especially since the Phoenicians are known to have reached that part of the British Isles for its tin in the first millennium B.C.; the Prophet Ezequiel, their contemporary, specifically mentions tin as one of the metals that the Phoenicians of Tyre had imported in their seagoing vessels.... The Phoenicians (after the Assyrians ended the independence of the Phoenician city-states in the eastern Mediterranean in the ninth century B.C.), established a new center, Carthage.... in the western Mediterranean in North Africa.... they circumnavigated Africa (in 600 B.C.) in search of gold for the Egyptian king Necho.... and in 425 B.C. under a leader named Hanno they sailed around west Africa.

The evidence of the presence of Mediterranean artifacts is more compelling in South America than in North America.

"One of the few academicians who has stuck his neck out in this direction is Professor Cyrus E. Gordon (Before Columbus and Riddles in History).... he gave considerable credence to the so-called Paraiba Inscription that turned up in that north Brazilian site in 1872. Its disappearance soon thereafter and the vague circumstances of its discovery have induced most scholars to consider it a forgery, especially as its acceptance as authentic would undermine the notion that there had been no contacts between the Old and New Worlds.

"....It is certain that the Cassites were not Britishers in disguise. Near Eastern records place them to the East of Sumer, in what is nowadays Iran. They were related to the Hittites of Asia Minor as well as to the Hurrians (the biblical Horites, "People of the Shafts") who acted as a geographical and cultural link between Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia and the Indo-European peoples to the north. They and their predecessors, including the Sumerians, could have reached South America by sailing westward, around the tip of Africa and across the Atlantic to Brazil; or eastward, around the tip of Indochina and the island archipelago and across the Pacific to Ecuador and Peru. Each route would have required navigational feats and maps of sea routes.

Such maps, it must be concluded did exist.

Mr. Sitchin at this point explains the times of Columbus, then he continues:

"Indeed, by now a surprisingly large number of maps from pre-Columbian times have been found.... The best known of these improbable yet extant maps is that of Piri Re’is, a Turkish admiral, bearing a Moslem date equivalent to A.D. 1513.... But where did he obtain his data? C.H. Hapgood, in one of the best studies of the Piri Re’is map and its antecedents (Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings), has concluded that "the evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times.... of a true civilization of an advanced kind"; more advanced than Greece or Rome, and in nautical sciences ahead of eighteen-century Europe. He recognized that before them all was the Mesopotamian civilization, extending back at least 6,000 years; but certain features on the maps, such as Antarctica, made him wonder who had preceded the Mesopotamians.

"While most studies of these maps concentrate on their Atlantic features, the studies by Hapgood and his team established that the Piri Re’is map also depicts correctly the Andean mountains, the rivers including the Amazon that flow from them eastward, and the South American Pacific coast from about 4 degrees south to about 40 degrees south - ie., from Ecuador to Peru to midway in Chile. Amazingly, the team found that "the drawing of the mountains indicates that they were observed from the sea, from coastwise shipping, and not imagined." The coasts were drawn in such detail that the Paracas Peninsula could be discerned.

"Stuart Piggot (Aux portes de l’histoire) was one of the first to note that that stretch of Pacific coast of South America also appeared on the European copies of Ptolemy’s Map of the World. It was shown, however, not as a continent beyond a vast ocean, but as a Tierra Mitica, mythical land, extending from the tip of southern China beyond a peninsula called Quersoneso de Oro, the Peninsula of Gold, all the way southward to a continent we now call Antarctica.

"This observation prompted the noted South American archaeologist D.E. Ibarra Grasso to launch an extensive study of ancient maps; his conclusions were published in his La Representacion de America en mapas Romanos de tiempos de Cristo. As other researchers he concluded that the European maps leading to the Age of Discovery were based on the work of Ptolemy, which in turn was based on the cartography and geography of Marinus of Tyre and even earlier information.

"Ibarra Grasso’s study shows convincingly that the outline of the western coast of this "appendix" called Tierra Mitica conforms to the shape of the western coast of South America where it juts out into the Pacific. This is where legends placed the prehistoric landings all along!

"The European copies of Ptolemy’s maps included a name for a place in the midst of that mythical land, Cattigara; the location, Ibarra Grasso wrote, is "where in fact Lambayeque is situated, the principal center of gold metallurgy in the whole American continent." Not surprisingly, it is where Chavin the Huantar, the prehistoric processing center, was established, where the African Olmecs, the bearded Semites, and the Indo-Europeans had met.

"Did the Cassites also land there, or in the Bay of Paracas, nearer Tiahuanaco?

"The Cassites have left a rich legacy of metallurgical craftsmanship spanning the third and second millennia B.C.... They decorated their artifacts, as often as not, with images of their gods and of their legendary heroes, among whom a favorite was that of Gilgamesh wrestling with the lions.

"Incredibly, we find identical themes and artistic forms in the Andes.... Who ever had come from the Old World to tell and depict the tale here, did so also at Tiahuanacu: among the bronze objects found there, a bronze plaque, as at Luristan of the Cassites, clearly depicted the Near Eastern hero in the same scene.

"At Chavin de Huantar the Indo-European deity was the Bull God, a mythical animal for the other sculptors there. But although the bull was not present in South America until some were brought by the Spaniards, scholars have been surprised that some Indian communities near Puno on Lake Titicaca and even at Pucara (a legendary stop on the route of Viracocha from the lake to Cuzco) worship the bull in ceremonies that originated in pre-Hispanic times.... At Tiahuanacu and the southern Andes, this god was depicted with a lightning bolt and holding a metal wand - an image carved on stone, depicted on ceramics and on textiles. It is a combination of symbols well known from the ancient Near East, where the god called Ramman ("The Thunderer") by the Babylonians and Assyrians, Hadad ("Rolling Echo") by the West Semites, and Teshub ("Wind Blower") by the Hittites and Cassites, was depicted standing upon a bull, his cult animal, holding the metal tool in one hand and a forked lightning in the other.

 

Statue of the Hindu Bull God, "Nandi"; in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Although this is not an item mentioned by Zecahria Sitchin in his book at this point, the bull was indeed venerated in several areas in various ways.

"The Sumerians, where the Old World pantheons originated, called this god Adad or ISH.KUR ("He of the Far Mountains"), and depicted him with the metal tool and forked lightning. One of the epithets for him was ZABAR DIB.BA - "He who bronze obtains and divides." An illuminating clue.

"Was he not Rimac of the southern coasts of Peru, Viracocha of the Andean highlands, whose image with the metal tool and forked lightning appeared all over, whose symbol of a lightning appeared by itself in many monuments? He may have even been shown standing upon a bull in a stone carving, found southwest of Lake Titicaca by Ribero and von Tschudi.

"....Some time in those remote days Ishkur/Teshub/Viracocha placed his symbol of the forked lightning, for all to see from the air and from the ocean on a mountainside on the Bay of Paracas, the very bay the Hapgood team identified on the Piri Re’is map, the bay that was probably the anchorage harbor for the ships carrying the tin and bronze of Tiahuanacu to the Old World. It was a symbol proclaiming to gods and men alike:

"THIS IS THE REALM OF THE STORM GOD! 

"For as the book of Job had stated, there was indeed a land of which the ingots come, whose underground is upheavaled as with fire... a place so high among the peaks that "even a vulture knows not the way thereto, and a falcon’s eye has not discerned it." It was there that the god who provided the vital metals "set his hands to the granite... overturned mountains at their roots... cut galleries through the rocks."

Return

Chapter Twelve
GODS OF THE GOLDEN TEARS
 

"Some time after 4000 B.C. the great Anu, ruler of Nibiru, came to Earth on a state visit.

"It was not the first time he had made the arduous space journey. Some 440,000 Earth-years earlier - a mere 122 years in terms of Nibiru - his first son, Enki, had led the first group of fifty Anunnaki to Earth to obtain the gold with which this seventh planet was blessed. On Nibiru, nature and technological usages had combined to thin out and damage the planet’s atmosphere needed not only for breathing but that also had acted to envelope the planet into a greenhouse, preventing its inner-generated heat from dissipating. And only by suspending gold particles high above Nibiru, its scientists concluded, could Nibiru be saved from becoming a frozen and lifeless globe.

Mr. Sitchin, in this chapter recaptures the whole history of the Anunnaki which he has presented in his three previous books, which are transcribed on this site by quoting his own words in numerous excerpts. However, he expands several points which you will find in the following paragraphs.

"Since the Deluge, Nibiru had come once again near Earth, and vital materials had been received from it; but little of value was sent back. In the olden gold sources it was now necessary to locate hidden lodes, tunnel into mountainsides, cut shafts into the Earth, blast the rocks. Mankind had to be provided with tools - hard tools - to be able to extract what the Anunnaki could locate and blast with their ray guns. Fortunately the avalanche of water had also done some good, for it had exposed lodes, wash them out, filled riverbeads with golden nuggets mixed with mud and gravel. Getting hold of this gold could open up new sources - easier to work but more difficult to reach and transport; for the place where this kind of nugget gold was plentiful was on the other side of the Earth: there, along mountain chains that face the great ocean, untold golden riches had been exposed. It was just there for the taking - if the Anunnaki would go there, if a way could be found to ship that gold....

"And now that Nibiru had neared Earth again, the great Anu with his spouse Antu had come to Earth for a state visit, to see for himself where matters stood. What had been achieved by granting Mankind the two divine metals, AN.NA and AN.BAR with which to make the hard tools? What had been achieved by expanding the operations to the other side of the world? Were the storages filled with gold, as had been reported, ready to be shipped to Nibiru?

"We can understand the urgency of bringing metallurgy at Uruk to perfection: it had to do with Anu’s forthcoming state visit. Perhaps to impress on him that all was going well, that very city, Uruk, was built in his honor, and metallurgical achievements were shown off.

"....If by the time of this state visit, the Anunnaki had already been seeking gold in the New World, would Anu and Antu have sought to include the new lands in their itinerary? Would the Anunnaki on Earth seek to impress them with their new achievements, the new prospects, the promise of providing Nibiru with the vital metal in sufficient quantities, once and for all?

"If the answer is yes, then the existence of Tiahuanacu and much else about it could be explained. For if, in Sumer, a special city with a brand-new sacred precinct, with a golden enclosure, and an Avenue of the Gods and Holy Quays was established for the visit to the Olden Land, we could presume the similar establishment of a new city with a bran-new golden enclosure and a sacred avenue and sacred quays in the heart of the New Lands. And, as at Uruk, we would expect to find an observatory for determining the moment of the appearance of Nibiru in the evening skies, followed by the rising of the other planets.

"Only such parallelism, we feel, can explain the need for the observatory that the Kalasasaya had been, for its precision, and for its date: circa 4000 B.C. Only such a state visit, we suggest, can explain the elaborate architecture of Puma-Punku, its royal-like piers, and, yes, its gold-plated enclosure. For that is precisely what archaeologists had found at Puma-Punku....

"....Some of the gigantic statues of the Great God at Tiahuanacu, were inlaid with gold. Posnansky discovered and photographed the attachment holes, "some two millimeters in diameter, round about the reliefs." A principal gate at Puma-Punku that he named Gate of the Moon had its relief of Viracocha as well as the god’s face in the meander under it "inlaid with gold.... which made the principal hieroglyphs stand out with great brilliance."

"No less significant was the discovery of Posnansky that where these figures depicted the god’s eyes, the gold inlay and nails "secured into the slits of the eyes small round plates of turquoise. We have found" Posnansky reported, "many of these pieces of turquoise perforated in the center, in the cultural strata of Tiahuanacu" - a fact that led him to believe that not only the reliefs on the gates, but also the gigantic stone statues of gods that have been found at Tiahuanacu, were inlaid with gold on their faces and their eyes inlaid with turquoise.

"This discovery is most remarkable, for there is no turquoise - a semiprecious blue-green stone - anywhere in South America. It is a mineral whose earliest mining, at the end of the fifth millennium B.C. is believed to have taken place in the Sinai peninsula and Iran.

"....Virtually all the statues found at Tiahuanacu depict the gods shedding three tears from each eye. The tears were inlaid with gold, as can still be seen on some of the statues now on display at the Museo del Oro in La Paz.

"....The Andean people (like the Aztecs) called gold nuggets "tears of the gods." Since all these statues depicted the same deity as on the Gate of the Sun, where he is also shedding tears, he has come to be called "The Weeping God." In view of our evidence, we feel justified calling him "God of the Golden Tears." A gigantic carved monolith found at a satellite site (Wancai) depicts the deity with a conical and horned headdress - the typical headdress of Mesopotamian gods - and with lightning bolts instead of tears, clearly identifying him as the Storm God.

"....The finds at around Tiahuanacu of golden and bronze artifacts leave no doubt that gold preceded bronze (i.e., tin) in that area. Posnansky was emphatic in relating bronze to the third period of Tiahuanacu, and showed incidences where bronze clamps were used to repair structures from the golden era. Since the mines in the near mountains show clear evidence that tin ores and gold were obtained at the same sites, it was probably the discovery of gold followed by its placer mining in the Titicaca region that brought out the existence of cassiterite: the two are found intermingled in the same riverbeds and streams.

"....A look at a map of South America mineral resources provides a clear picture. Three bands of varying width of gold, silver, and copper lodes snake their way along the Andean ranges in the northwestern-southeastern slant, all the way from Colombia in the north to Chile and Argentina in the south. Dotted along the way are some of the world’s most renowned sources for these metals, some regarded as almost pure mountains of the minerals. The slow forces of nature, and no doubt the immense avalanche of water of the Deluge, have forced the metals and their ores out of their rock-embeded lodes - exposing them, washing then down mountainsides and into riverbeds.

"Some of the richest lodes of gold, partly washed down riverbeds, lie east and north of Lake Titicaca. It is there, in the Cordillera Real that embraces the lake from its northeast to its southeast that a fourth band joins the others: a band of tin in the form of cassiterite, (these bands also contain: platinum, bismuth, manganese, wolfram, iron, mercury, sulphur, antimony, asbestos, cobalt, arsenic, lead, zinc), and quite important for modern and ancient smelting and refining, coal and petroleum.

Mr. Sitchin explains in a previous paragraph, that it resembles the DNA entwined within itself with its counterpart RNA the genetic life and heredity of everything that lives on Earth.

".... It becomes prominent in the lake’s eastern shore, bends westward along the Tiahuanacu basin, then runs southward almost parallel to the Desaguadero River. It joins the other three bands near Oruro and Lake Poopo, and vanishes there.

"When Anu and his spouse arrived to see all the mineral riches, the sacred precinct of Tiahuanacu, its golden enclosure, its quays, were all in place. Whom did the Anunnaki enlist and bring over, at about 4000 B.C., to build all that? By then, the highland peoples in Sumer had already a tradition of rudimentary metallurgy and stoneworking, and they could have been among the artisans brought over. But the true metallurgical technology including that of casting, of high rise-construction, of building according architectural plans, and following stellar orientations, was in the hands of the Sumerians.

"The central effigy in the semisubterranean sacred enclosure is bearded, as are many of the stone heads attached to the enclosure’s wall that portray unknown dignitaries, many are turbaned, as Sumerian dignitaries had been.

"One must wonder where and how the Incas, continuing the custom of the ancient Empire, acquired the Sumerian (i.e, Anunnaki-given) rules of succession. Why was it that in their incantations the Inca priests invoked Heaven by uttering the magical words Zi-Ana and Earth by the words Zi-ki-a totally meaningless terms in either Quechua or Aymara (according to S.A. Lafone Quevedo, Ensayo Mitologico) - but words that in Sumerian mean "Heavenly Life" (ZI.ANA) and "Life of Earth and Water" (ZI.KI.A). And why did the Incas retain from ancient empire times the term Anta for metals in general and copper in particular - a term that in Sumeria, as AN.TA, would have been of a class with AN.NA (tin) and AN.BAR (iron).

"These relics of Sumerian metallurgical terms (which were borrowed by their successors) are augmented by the discovery of Sumerian mining pictographs.... symbols incised on rocks on the banks of the Manizales river in Colombia’s central gold region, and in the eastern region symbols were found carved on rocks above caves that have been artificially deepened. Many petroglyphs in the Andean gold centers, the routes to them, or at places where the term Uru appears as a name-component include symbols that resemble Sumerian cuneiform script or pictographs, such as the radiating cross found among petroglyphs northwest of Lake Titicaca - a symbol that the Sumerians had used to represent the planet Nibiru.

"Add to all that the possibility that some of the Sumerians brought over to Lake Titicaca may have survived to present times. Nowadays only a few hundred of them are left; they live on some islands in the lake, sailing upon it in reed boats. Aymara and Kholla tribesmen that now make up most of the area’s inhabitants consider them remnants of the area’s earliest dwellers, aliens from another land, whom they call Uru. The name is taken to mean "the Olden Ones"; but have they been so called because they came from the Sumerian capital Ur?

"According to Posnansky, the Urus named five deities or Samptni: Pacani-Malku, meaning Olden or Great Lord; Malku, meaning Lord; and the gods of the Earth, the Waters, and the Sun. The term malku is of obvious Near Eastern origin, where it meant (as it still does in Hebrew and Arabic) "king." One of the few studies of the Urus, by W. La Barre (American Anthropologist vol. 43), reports that Uru "myths" relate that,

"we, the people of the lake, are the oldest on this Earth. A long time we are here, from before the time when the Sun was hidden ... Before the Sun hid himself we were already a long time in this place. Then the Kollas came ... they used our bodies for sacrifices when they laid the foundations for their temples ... Tiahuanaco was built before the time of darkness."

"We have already established that the Day of Darkness, "when the Sun was hidden," occurred circa 1400 B.C.

Besides the similarities of names, building patterns of the temples and sites, remembrance of Lake Titicaca’s inhabitants today, Mr. Sitchin mentions many more, among them:

"There were the many customs that led the arriving Spaniards to see in the Indians descendants of the Ten Tribes of Israel. There were the coastal cities and their temples that brought to explorers’ minds the sacred precincts and ziggurats of Sumer. And how account for the incredibly ornate textiles of the coastal tribe of the people near Tiahuanacu, unique in the Americas, except by comparison with the Sumerian textiles, especially those of Ur, that were renowned in antiquity for their exquisite design and colors?

"Why the portrayal of gods with conical headdresses, and a goddess with the Umbilical Cutter of Ninti? Why a calendar as in Mesopotamia, and a zodiac as in Sumer, with Precession and twelve houses?

"Without rehashing all the evidence that has filled the previous chapters, it seems to us that all the pieces of the puzzle of Andean beginnings fall into place if we acknowledge the hand of the Anunnaki and the presence of Sumerians (along or with their neigbors) in this region circa 4000 B.C. The legends of the ascent heavenward of the Creator and his two sons, the Moon and the Sun, from the sacred rock on the Island of the Sun (Titicaca Island) may well be recollections of the departure of Anu, his son Sin and his grandson Shamash; having made a short trip by boat from Puma-Punku to a waiting airborne-craft of the Anunnaki.

"On that memorable night at Uruk, as soon as Nibiru had been sighted, the priests lit torches that were a sign to nearby villages.

"....Whether or not people then realized that they were viewing a celestial sight that occurs once in 3,600 Earth-years, they certainly knew it was a phenomenon once in their lifetimes. Mankind has not ceased to yearn for the return of that planet, and it justly recalls that era as a Golden Age: not only because it was physically so, but also because it culminated a period of peace and unparalleled progress for Mankind.

"But no sooner (in Anunnaki terms) had Anu and Antu returned to Nibiru than the peaceful division of Earth among the Anunnaki clans was disturbed.

Mr. Sitchin reminds us of the times of the Tower of Babel, the splitting of civilization, the peoples of the Nile who flourished circa 3100 B.C., Thoth, Marduk/Ra’s brother, now a god without a people....

Then he continues:

"....It is our suggestion that accompanied by some of his faithful followers he (Thoth) chose an abode in the New Realms - in Mesoamerica.

"And we further suggest that it happened not just "circa 3100 B.C." but exactly in 3113 B.C. - the time, the year, and even the day from which the Mesoamericans began their Long Count.

"The Western Christian calendar counts the years from the birth of Christ. The Moslem calendar begins with the Hegira, the migration of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina.... we shall mention the Jewish Calendar, which is in effect the ancient (and first-ever) Calendar of Nippur, the Sumerian city dedicated to Enlil. Contrary to the common assumption that the Jewish count of years (5,748 in 1988) is from the "beginning of the world," it is actually from the beginning of the Nippurian calendar in 3760 B.C. - the time, we assume, of Anu’s state visit to Earth.

"Why not then accept our suggestion that the arrival of Quetzalcoatl, i.e., the Winged Serpent, in his new realm was the occasion for starting the Long Count of the Mesoamerican calendar - especially since it was this very god who had introduced the calendar to this lands?

"Having been overthrown by his own brother, Thoth (known in Sumerian texts as Ningishzidda - Lord of the Tree of Life) was a natural ally of his brother’s adversaries, the Enlilite gods and their Chief Warrior, Ninurta. It was Thoth who had designed a ziggurat-temple for Ninurta to be built by Gudea, he may have also specified the rare materials for it, and had a hand in assuring the supplies. As a friend of the Enlilites, he had to be friendly with Ishkur/Adad and the Andean realm that was put under his control in the Titicaca region; he was probably even a welcomed guest there.

"Indeed, we can discern evidence that a Serpent God and his African followers probably lent a hand in developing some of the satellite metal-processing sites around Tiahuanacu.

"Posnansky, stung by criticism of his "fantastic" antiquity, did not attempt to date the transition from Period I, when sandstone was used for construction and statuary, to the most sophisticated Period II when hard andesite stone began to be used. But the fact that the changeover also marked the shifting of Tiahuanacu’s focus from gold to tin suggests to us the 2500 B.C. period. If, as we surmise, the Enlilite gods in charge of Near Eastern highland domains (Adad, Ninurta) were away in the New Realm, busy establishing the Cassite colony, it explains why, at about that time, Inanna/Ishtar usurped the power in the Near East and launched a bloody offensive against Marduk/Ra to avenge the death of her beloved spouse Dumuzi, (caused, she claimed, by Marduk).

"It was at that time, and probably as a consequence of the instability in the Old Realms, that the concerned gods decided to create a new civilization away from it all - in the Andes. Tiahuanacu was to focus on supplying tin, there were almost inexhaustible sources of gold all along the Andean slopes. All that was needed was to give the Andean Man the necessary know-how and tools to go after the gold.

"And so it was, circa 2400 B.C. - just as Montesinos had concluded - that Manco Capac was given the golden wand at Titicaca and sent to the gold region of Cuzco.

"What was the shape and purpose of this magical wand? One of the most thorough studies on the subject is Corona Incaica by Juan Larrea. Analyzing artifacts, legends, and pictorial depictions of Inca rulers, he concluded that it was an axe, an object called Yuari that when first given to Manco Capac was named Tupa-Yuari, Royal Axe. But was it a weapon or a tool?

"To find an answer, we go to ancient Egypt, the Egyptian terms for "gods, divine" was Neteru, "Guardians." That however was exactly the term by which Sumer (actually, Shumer) was called - "Land of the Guardians"; and in early translation of biblical and pseudo-biblical texts into Greek, the term Nefilim (alias Anunnaki) was rendered "Guardians." The hieroglyph for this term was an axe; E.A. Wallis Budge (The Gods of the Egyptians) in a special chapter titled "The Axe as a Symbol of God" concluded that it was made of metal....

"....The tales of Manco Capac and the Ayar brothers in all probability also mark the end of the Mesopotamian and gold phases of Tiahuanacu.... the Cassites arrived and moved the tin or ready bronze via the transpacific route. In time other routes developed. The existence of settlements with an astonishing abundance of bronzes points to a route along the Beni River eastward to Brazil’s Atlantic coast, thence with the help of ocean currents all the way to the Arabian Sea, and Red Sea to Egypt, or the Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia. There could and probably was a route via the Ancient Empire and the Urubamba river, as suggested by the megalithic sites and the discovery of a pure lump of tin at Machu Picchu. This route led to the Amazon and the northeastern tip of South America, thence across the Atlantic to West Africa and the Mediterranean.

"....A third and quicker alternative was offered by its narrow neck that provided a virtual land-bridge between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic via the Caribbean Sea - a route essentially followed, in reverse, by the conquistadores.

"The third route, that of the Olmec civilization, must have become the preferred route after 2000 B.C., as evidenced by the presence of Mediterraneans; for in 2024 B.C. the Anunnaki led by Ninurta, fearing that the spaceport in Sinai would be overrun by followers of Marduk, destroyed it with nuclear weapons.... Losing no time, Marduk marched in with an army of Canaanite and Amorite followers, declaring kingship in Babylon.

"It was then we believe, that the decision was made to grant the African followers of Thoth/Quetzalcoatl civilization in his Mesoamerican realm.

"One of the rare academic studies admitting that the Olmecs were negroid Africans was Africa and the Discovery of America by Leo Wiener, professor of Slavic and other languages at Harvard University.

"....More than half a century had to pass before another major academic study, Unexpected Faces in Ancient America by Alexander von Wuthenau, tackled the problem head on.... he surmised that the first links between the Old and New World developed during the reign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III (twelfth century B.C.) and that the Olmecs were Kushites from Nubia (Egypt’s principal source of gold). Some other black Africans, he felt, could have come over on "Phoenician and Jewish ships" between 500 B.C. and A.D. 200....

"....This conclusion was prompted by the notion that the giant Olmec heads were from about that time; but now we know that Olmec beginnings go back to circa 2000 B.C. Who, then, were these Africans?

"....When one compares the faces on the colossal Olmec heads with those of West Africans (as this one of Nigeria’s leader, General J.B. Banagida) (appearing on book), the gap of thousands of years is bridged by the obvious similarity.

"It is from that part of Africa that Thoth could have brought over his followers expert in mining, for it is there that gold and tin, and copper to alloy bronze with, have been abundant. Nigeria has been renowned for its bronze figurines - cast in the telltale Lost Wax process - for millennia; recent research has carbon-dated some of the sites, in which the most ancient ones have been found to date to about 2100 B.C.

"....In time, as we have shown, these operations and the miners, the Olmecs, moved south, first to Mexico’s Pacific shores, then across the isthmus into northern South America, their ultimate destination was the Chavin area; there they met the gold miners of Adad, the people of the golden wand.

"The golden age of the New Realms did not last forever. Olmec sites in Mexico underwent destruction; the Olmecs themselves and their companions met a brutal end. Mochica pottery depicts enslaving giants and winged gods warring with metal blades. The Ancient Empire witnessed tribal clashes and invasions. And in the highlands of Titicaca, Aymara legends recalled invaders who marched up the mountains from the sea coast and slew the white men who were still there.

"Were these reflections of the conflicts among the Anunnaki, in which they increasingly involved Mankind? Or did it all begin to happen after the gods had left - sailing off upon the sea, ascending heavenward?

"Whichever way it happened, it is certain that in time the links between the Old Realms and the New Realms were broken off. In the Old World the Americas became only a dim memory - hints by this or that classical writer, tales of Atlantis heard from Egyptian priests, even perplexing maps that trace unknown continents. Was it all myth, were there really lands of gold and tin beyond the Pillars of Hercules? In time, the New Realms became the Lost Realms as far as Westerners were concerned.

"In the New Realms themselves, the golden past became only a legendary memory as the centuries rolled on. But the memories would not die, and the tales persisted - of how it all began and where, of Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, of how they will one day return.

"As now we find colossal heads, megalithic walls, abandoned sites, a lonely gate with its Weeping God, we must wonder: Were the American peoples right in telling us that these gods were among them, in expecting them to return?

"For until white man came again and only wrought havoc, the people of the Andes, where it all began, could only look at the empty golden enclosures and hope against hope to see once again their winged God of the Golden Tears.

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