FOREWORD
 

"Since the earliest times, Earthlings have lifted their eyes into the heavens. Awed as well as fascinated, Earthlings learned the Ways of Heaven: the positions of the stars, the cycles of Moon and Sun, the turning of an inclined Earth. How did it all begin, how will it end - and what will happen in between?

"Heaven and Earth meet in the horizon. For millennia Earthlings have watched the stars of the night give way to the rays of the Sun at the meeting place, and chose as a point of reference the moment when daytime and night-time are equal, the day of the Equinox. Man, aided by the calendar, has counted Earthly Time from that point on.

"To identify the starry heavens, the skies were divided into twelve parts, the twelve houses of the zodiac. But as the millennia rolled on, the "fixed stars" seemed not to be fixed at all, and the Day of the Equinox, the day of the New Year, appeared to shift from one zodiacal house to another, and to Earthly Time was added Celestial Time - the start of a new era, a New Age.

"As we stand at the threshold of a New Age, when sunrise on the day of the spring equinox will occur in the zodiacal house of Aquarius rather than, as in the past 2,000 years, in the zodiacal house of Pisces, many wonder what the change might portend: good or evil, a new beginning or an end - or no change at all?

"To understand the future we should examine the past; because since Mankind began to count Earthly Time, it has already experienced the measure of Celestial Time - the arrival of New Ages. What preceded and followed one such New Age holds great lessons for our own present station in the course of Time."

Return

Chapter One
THE CYCLES OF TIME
 

"It is said that Augustine of Hippo, the Bishop in Roman Carthage (A.D. 354 - 430), the greatest thinker of the Christian Church in its early centuries, who fused the religion of the New Testament with the Platonistic tradition of Greek philosophy, was asked, "What is time?" His answer was, "If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain what it is to him who asks me, I do not know."

"Time is essential to Earth, and all that is upon it, and to each one of us as individuals; for, as we know from our own experience and observations, what separates us from the moment we are born and the moment when we cease to live is TIME.

"Though we know not what Time is, we have found ways to measure it. We count our lifetime in years - which come to think of it - is another way of saying "orbits," for that is what a "year" on Earth is....
We do not know what time is, but the way we measure it makes us wonder: would we live longer, would our life cycle be different, were we to live on another planet whose "year" is longer? Would we be "immortal" if we were to live upon a "Planet of millions of years" - as, in fact, the Egyptian pharaohs believed that they would be, in an eternal Afterlife, once they joined the gods on that "Planet of millions of years"?

"Indeed, are there other planets "out there," and, even more so, planets on which life as we know it could have evolved - or is our planetary system unique, and life on Earth unique, and we, humankind, are all alone - or did the pharaohs know what they were speaking of in their Pyramid Texts?

"....Man has looked skyward from time immemorial, and has been wondering whether there are others like him out there, upon other earths. Logic, and mathematical probability, dictate a Yes answer, but it was only in 1991 that astronomers, for the first time, it was stressed, actually found other planets orbiting other suns elsewhere in the universe.

"The first discovery, in July 1991, turned out to be not entirely correct.... they concluded that a rapidly spinning star identified as Pulsar 1829-10 has a "planet-sized companion" about ten times the size of the Earth. Pulsars are assumed to be the extraordinarily dense core of stars that have collapsed for one reason or another. Spinning madly, they emit pulses of radio energy in regular bursts, many times per second. Such pulses can be monitored by radio telescopes; by detecting a cyclic fluctuation the astronomers surmised that a planet that orbits Pulsar 1829-10 once every six months can cause and explain the fluctuation.... Their calculations (British astronomers) were imprecise and, therefore, they could not stand by their conclusion that the pulsar, some 30,000 light-years away, had a planetary satellite.

"....An American team had made a similar discovery pertaining to a much closer pulsar, identified as PSR 1257 + 12 - a collapsed sun only 1,300 light-years away from us. It exploded, astronomers estimated, a mere million years ago; and it definitely has two, and perhaps three, orbiting planets. The two certain ones were orbiting their sun at about the same distance as Mercury does our Sun; the possible third planet orbits its sun at about the same distance as Earth does our Sun.

""The discovery stirred speculation that planetary systems not only were fairly common but also could occur under diverse circumstances," wrote John Noble Wilford in The New York Times of January 9, 1992; "scientists said it was most unlikely that planets orbiting pulsars could be hospitable to life; but the findings encouraged astronomers, who this fall will begin a systematic survey of the heavens for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life."

"Were then the pharaohs right?

"Long before the pharaohs and the Pyramid Texts, an ancient civilization - Man’s first known one - possessed an advanced cosmogony. Six thousand years ago, in ancient Sumer, what astronomers have discovered in the 1990s was already known....

"....One long text, written on seven tablets, has reached us primarily in its later Babylonian version. Called The Epic of Creation and known by its opening words Enuma Elish, it was publicly read during the New Year festival that started on the first day of the month Nissan, coinciding with the first day of spring.

"....Philosophers and scientists, contemplating the universe and offering modern cosmogonies, invariably end up discussing Time. Is Time a dimension in itself, or perhaps the only true dimension in the universe? Does time only flow forward, or can it flow backward? Is the present part of the past or of the future? And, not least of all, did Time have a beginning?  For, if so, will it have an end? If the universe has existed forever, without a beginning and thus without an end, is Time too without a beginning and without an end - or did the universe indeed have a beginning, perhaps with the Big Bang assumed by many astrophysicists, in which case Time began when the universe began?

"Those who conceived the amazingly accurate Sumerian cosmogony also believed in a Beginning ( and thus, inexorably, in an End), it is clear that they conceived Time as a measure, the pacesetter from, and the marker of, a beginning in a celestial saga; for the very first word of the ancient Epic of Creation, Enuma, means When.

"....It must have taken great scientific minds to conceive of a primordial phase when "naught existed but primordial Apsu, their begetter; Mummu, and Tiamat" - when Earth had not yet come into being; and to realize that for Earth and all upon in the "big bang" was not when the universe or even the Solar System was created, but the event of the Celestial Battle (when the planet Nibiru’s satellites and the planet itself later collided with the planet Tiamat). It was then, at that moment, that Time began for Earth - the moment when, separated from the half of Tiamat that became the Asteroid Belt ("heaven"), Earth was shunted to its new orbit and could start counting the years, the months, the days, the nights - to measure Time.

"This scientific view, central to ancient cosmogony, religion, and mathematics, was expressed in many other Sumerian texts besides the Epic of Creation. A text treated by scholars as the "myth" of "Enki and the world order," but which is literally the autobiographical tale by Enki, the Sumerian god of science, describe the moment when - When - Time began to tick for Earth.

"....Another text, in words often repeated on Sumerian clay tablets, conveyed the notion of Beginning by listing the many aspects of evolution and civilization that had not yet come into being before the crucial event. Before then, the text asserted, "the name of Man had not yet been called" and "needful things had not yet been brought into being." All those developments started to take place only "after heaven had been moved away from Earth, after Earth had been separated from heaven."

"It is not surprising that the same notions of Time’s beginnings also ruled Egyptians beliefs, whose development was subsequent to those of the Sumerians. We read in the Pyramid Texts (para. 1466) the following description of the Beginning of Things:

When heaven had not yet come into existence,
When men had not yet come into existence,
When gods had not yet been born,
When death had not yet come into existence...

"This knowledge, universal in antiquity and stemming from the Sumerian cosmogony, was echoed in the very first verse of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible:

In the beginning
Elohim created the heaven and the earth,
And the earth was without form and void
and darkness was upon the face of Tehom,
and the wind of the Lord swept over its waters.

"It is now well established that this biblical tale of creation was based on Mesopotamian texts such as Enuma Elish, with Tehom meaning Tiamat, the "wind" meaning "satellites," in Sumerian, and "heaven," described as the "hammered out bracelet," the Asteroid Belt, the Bible, however, is clearer regarding the moment of the Beginning as far as Earth was concerned; the biblical version picks up the Mesopotamian cosmogony only from the point of the separation of the Earth from the Shama’im the Hammered Bracelet, as a result of the breakup of Tiamat.

"For Earth, Time began with the Celestial Battle.

Of the Planet Nibiru/Marduk it is said:

He established the station of Nibiru,
to determine their heavenly bands,
that none might transgress or fall short ...

He established for the planets their
sacred heavens,
He keeps hold on their ways,
determines their courses.

"Thus, states Enuma Elish (Tablet V, line 65), "He created the Heaven and the Earth" - the very same words used in the book of Genesis.

"The Celestial Battle eliminated Tiamat as a member of the old Solar System, thrust half of it into a new orbit to become Planet Earth, retained the Moon as a vital component of the Solar System, detached Pluto into an independent orbit, and added Nibiru as the twelfth member of the New Order in our heavens. For Earth and its inhabitants, those were to become the elements that determined time.

"To this day, the key role that the number twelve played in Sumerian science and daily life (in line with the twelve member Solar System) has accompanied us throughout the millennia. They divided the "day" (from sunset to sunset) into twelve "double-hours," retained into modern times in the twelve-hour clock and the twenty-four hour day. The twelve months in the year are still with us, as are the twelve houses of the zodiac. This celestial number had many other expressions, as in the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve apostles of Jesus.

The Sumerian mathematical system is called sexagesimal, i.e. "based on sixty" rather than on 100 as in the metric system (in which one meter is equal to 100 centimeters).

This system, the sexagesimal, has been explained in previous books by Mr. Sitchin.

"The sar, 3,600 Earth-years, was the orbital period of Nibiru around the Sun; for any one in Nibiru, it was just one Nibiru-year. According to the Sumerians, there were indeed others, intelligent beings, on Nibiru, evolving there well ahead of hominids on Earth. The Sumerians called them Anunnaki, literally meaning "Those who from Heaven to Earth came."

"....Texts known as the Sumerian King Lists which describe the first settlements of the Anunnaki on Earth, list the governorship of the first ten Anunnaki leaders before the Deluge in sars, the 3,600 Earth-year cycles. From the first landing to the Deluge, according to those first texts, 120 sars had passed: Nibiru orbited the Sun one hundred and twenty times, which equals 432,000 Earth-years. It was on the one hundred twentieth orbit that the gravitational pull of Nibiru was such that it caused the ice sheet that accumulated over Antarctica to slip off into the southern oceans, creating the immense tidal wave that engulfed the Earth - the great flood or Deluge, recorded in the Bible from much earlier and much more detailed Sumerian sources.

"Legends and ancient lore gave this number, 432,000, cyclical significance beyond the land then called Sumer. In Hamlet’s Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, searching for "a point where myth and science join," concluded that "432,000 was a number of significance from old." Among the examples cited by them was the Teutonic and Norse tale of the Valhalla, the mythic abode of the slain warriors who, on the Day of Judgment, will march out of the Valhalla’s gates to fight at the side of the god Odin or Woden against the giants. They would exit through the Valhalla’s 540 doors, eight hundred warriors would march out of each. The total number of warrior-heroes, Santillana and von Dechend pointed out, was thus 432,000.

""This number," they continued, "must have had a very ancient meaning, for it is also the number of syllables in the Rigveda," the "Sacred Book of Verses" in the Sanskrit language, in which have been recorded the Indo-European tales of gods and heroes. Four hundred thirty-two thousand, the two authors wrote, "goes back to the basic figure 10,800, the number of stanzas in the Rigveda, with 40 syllables to a stanza" (10,800 x 40 = 432,000).

"Hindu traditions clearly associated the number 432,000 with the yugas or ages that Earth and Mankind had experienced. Each caturyuga ("great yuga") was divided into four yugas or Ages whose diminishing lengths were expressions of 432,000:

* first the Fourfold Age (4 x 432,000 = 1,728,000 years) which was the Golden Age,
* then the Threefold Age of Knowledge (3 x 432,000 = 1,296,000 years), followed by
* the Double or Twofold Age of Sacrifice (2 x 432,000 = 864,000 years); and finally
* our present era, the Age of Discord which lasts a mere 432,000 years.

All in all these Hindu traditions envision ten eons, paralleling the ten Sumerian rulers of the pre-Diluvial era but expanding the overall time span to 432,000 years.

 

"Further expanded, such astronomical numbers based on 432,000 were applied in Hindu religion and traditions to the kalpa, the "Day" of the Lord Brahma. It was defined as a eon comprising twelve million devas ("Divine Years"). Each Divine Year in turn equals 360 Earth-years. Therefore, a "Day of the Lord Brahma" equaled 4,320,000,000 Earth-years - a time span very much like modern estimates of the age of our Solar System - arrived at by multiplications of 360 and 12.

Mr. Sitchin continues:

4,320,000,000 is, however, a thousandfold great yugas - a fact brought out in the eleventh century by the Arab mathematician Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, who explained that the kalpa consisted of 1,000 cycles of caturyugas. One could thus paraphrase the mathematics of the Hindu celestial calendar by stating that in the eyes of the Lord Brahma, a thousand cycles were but a single day. This brings to mind the enigmatic statement in Psalms (90:4) regarding the Divine Day of the biblical Lord:

A thousand years, in thy eyes,
[are] as a day past, gone by.

"....The Hindu traditions were brought to the Indian subcontinent by "Aryan" migrants from the shores of the Caspian Sea, cousins of the Indo-Europeans who were the Hittites of Asia Minor (today’s Turkey) and the Hurrians of the upper Euphrates River, through whom Sumerian knowledge and beliefs were transmitted to the Indo-Europeans.... The Vedas were held to be "not of human origin," having been composed by the gods themselves in a previous age. In time the various components of the Vedas and the auxiliary literature that derived from them (the Mantras, Brahmanas, etc.) were augmented by the non-Vedic Puranas ("Ancient Writings") and the great epic tales of the Mahabarata and Ramayana. In them ages deriving from multiples of 3,600 also predominate, thus, according to the Vishnu Purana, "the day that Krishna shall depart from Earth will be the first day of the day of Kali; it will continue for 360,000 years of mortals." This is a reference to the concept that the Kaliyuga, the present age, is divided to a dawn or "morning twilight" of 100 divine years that equal 36,000 Earth or "mortal" years, the age itself (1,000 divine years equaling 360,000 Earth-years), and a dusk or "evening twilight" of a final 100 divine years (36,000 mortal-years) adding up to 1,200 divine or 432,000 Earth-years.

"The depth of such widespread beliefs in a Divine Cycle of 432,000 years, equaling 120 orbits of 3,600 Earth-years each of Nibiru, makes one wonder whether they represent merely arithmetical sleights of hand - or, in some unknown way, a basic natural or astronomical phenomenon recognized in antiquity by the Anunnaki. We have shown in The 12^th Planet, the first book of The Earth Chronicles series, that the Deluge was a global calamity anticipated by the Anunnaki, resulting by the gravitational pull of the nearing Nibiru on the unstable ice age to an abrupt end circa 13,000 years ago, and was thus recorded in Earth’s cycles as a major geological and climatic change.

"....The last geological epoch, called the Pleistocene, began about 2,500,000 years ago and ended at the time of the Deluge; it was the time span during which:

• hominids evolved

• the Anunnaki came to Earth

• Man, Homo sapiens, was brought into being

And it was during the Pleistocene that a cycle of approximately 430,000 years was identified in marine sediments....

Such a cyclic periodicity conforms with the Astronomical Theory of climatic modulations that takes into account changes due to obliquity (the Earth’s tilt), precession (the slight orbital retardation), and eccentricity (the shape of the elliptical orbit)....

Mr. Sitchin includes a few more cyclic details, then he continues:

"The "myth" of Divine Ages thus appears to be based on scientific facts.

"The element of Time features in the ancient records, both Sumerian and biblical, not only as a point of beginning - "When." The process of creation is at once linked to the measurement of time, measurements that in turn are linked to determine celestial motions.... In the biblical version, it took the Lord two divine "days" to complete the task (of creation); hopefully, even Fundamentalists, will by now agree that these were not day and night days as we now know them, for the two "days" occurred before Earth had yet come into existence (and besides, let them heed the Psalmist’s statement of the Lord’s Day being equal to a thousand years or so). The Mesopotamian version clearly measures Creation Time or Divine Time by the passages of Nibiru, in an orbit equaling 3,600 Earth-years....

"....Once the focus shifts to Earth and ultimately to Man upon it, the scale of Time also shifts - to an Earthly Time - to a scale appropriate not only to Man’s abode but also to one that Mankind could grasp and measure: Day, Month, Year.

"Even as we consider these familiar elements of Earthly Time, it should be born in mind that all three of them are also expressions of celestial motions - cyclical motions - involving a complex correlation between Earth, Moon, and Sun.

"....But such basic truths regarding the causes of the Earthly Time cycles of day, month, year are not self-evident and required advanced scientific knowledge to be realized. For the better part of two thousand years it was believed, for example, that the day-night cycle resulted from the circling of Earth by the Sun; for from the time of Ptolemy of Alexandria (second century A.D.) until the "Copernican Revolution" in 1543 A.D., the unquestionable belief was that the Sun, the Moon, and the visible planets were circling the Earth, which was the center of the universe.

"The suggestion by Nicolaus Copernicus that the Sun was at the center and the Earth was just another celestial body orbiting it, like any other planet, was so revolutionary scientifically and heretical religiously that he delayed writing his great astronomical work (De revolutionibus coelestium; English translation, On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres) and his friends delayed printing it until his very last day, May 24, 1543. This motions (as described in The Enuma Elish text) were attributed to the "destinies" (orbits) that the Celestial Lord (Nibiru) gave Earth and its moon as a result of the Celestial Battle:

The Moon he caused to shine,
to it the night entrusting;
In the night the days to signal
he appointed it, [saying:]
Monthly, without cease, form designs with a crown.
At the month’s very start, rising over the Earth,
thou shall have luminous horns to signify six days,
reaching a crescent the seventh day.
At mid month stand still opposite the Sun;
it shall overtake thee at the horizon.
Then diminish thy crown and regress in light,
at that time approaching the Sun;
And on the 30th day thou shalt stand against the Sun.
I have appointed thee a destiny; follow the path.

""Thus," the ancient text concluded, did the Celestial Lord "appoint the days and established the precincts of night and day."

"By listing the two luminaries (Sun and Moon) as responsible for the months and the days and the years, the complex lunar-solar nature of that calendar’s antiquity (Mesopotamian-Hebrew calendar) is also presented. Over the millennia of Mankind’s efforts to measure time by devising a calendar, some (as the Moslems continue to this day) have followed only the Moon’s cycles; others (as the ancient Egyptians and the Common Era calendars in use in the Western world) have adopted the solar year, conveniently dividing it into "months." But the calendar devised about fifty-eight hundred years ago in Nippur (Sumer’s religious center) and still adhered to by the Jews retained the biblically stated complexity of time-keeping based on the orbital relationship between the Earth and the two luminaries.

"....Scholars have been puzzled by the fact that the Zo’har (The Book of Splendor), an Aramaic-Hebrew composition which is a central work in the literature of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah, unmistakably explained - in the thirteenth century of the Christian era - that the cause of the day’s changing into night was the turning of the Earth around its own axis.... The Zo’har’s source was the third century Rabbi Hamnuna!

"....Such advanced knowledge, seemingly ahead of its time, can be explained only by the retention of the earlier sophisticated knowledge that permeates the Bible and its earlier Sumerian sources. Indeed, Kabbalah literally means "that which was received," earlier secret knowledge transmitted from generation to generation.... The Talmud, recording such data and commentaries from about 300 B.C. to about A.D. 500, is replete with astronomical snippets...." among them the Comet Halley is mentioned as "a star which appears once in seventy years and confounds the mariners."

Mr. Sitchin continues "Rabbi Gamliel of Jabneh possessed a tubular optical instrument with which he observed the stars and planets - fifteen centuries before the "official" invention of the telescope.

Old Jewish Talmud

"The need to know the heavenly secrets stemmed from the lunar-solar nature of the Jewish (i.e. Nippurian) calendar, which required a complex adjustment - "intercalation" - between the solar year and the lunar year, the latter falling short of the former by 10 days, 21 hours, 6 minutes and about 45.5 seconds. That shortfall equals 7/19 of a synodic month, and, therefore, a lunar year can be realigned with the solar year by adding seven lunar months to every nineteen solar years. Astronomy books credit the Athenian astronomer Meton (circa 430 B.C.) with the discovery of this nineteen-year cycle; but the knowledge in fact goes back millennia, to ancient Mesopotamia.

"....In the purely lunar calendars, as is still the case in the Moslem calendar, the holidays keep slipping back by about a month every three years. The Nippurian calendar, having been devised to maintain a cycle of holidays connected with the seasons, could not allow such an ongoing slippage: the New Year, for example had to begin on the first day of spring. This required, from the very beginning of Sumerian civilization, a precise knowledge of the motions of the Earth and the Moon, and their correlation with the Sun and thus the secrets of intercalation. It also required understanding how the seasons come about.

"....The discovery of the solstices has also been attributed to Meton and his colleague, the Athenian Euctemon. But in fact such knowledge goes back to much earlier times. The rich astronomical vocabulary of the Talmud had already applied the term Neti’yah (from the verb Natoh, "to tilt, inclined turn sideways") to the modern equivalent term "obliquity" a millennium earlier the Bible recognized the notion of the Earth’s axis by attributing the day-night cycle to a "line" drawn through the Earth (Psalms 19:5); and the Book of Job, speaking of the formation of the Earth and its mysteries, attributed to the Celestial Lord the creation of an inclined line, a tilted axis, for the Earth (Job 38:5). Using the term Natoh, the book of Job refers to the Earth’s tilted axis and the North Pole when it states:

He tilted north over the void
and hangeth the Earth upon nothing at all.

"If a line is drawn between the sunrise and sunset points for each solstice, the result is such that the two lines cross above the viewer’s head, forming a giant x that divides the Earth, and the skies above it, into four parts. This division has been recognized in antiquity and is referred to in the Bible when it speaks of the "four corners of the Earth" and the "four corners of the skies." The resulting division of the circle of the Earth and the skies in four parts that look like triangles rounded at their bases created for the ancient peoples the image of "wings." The Bible thus spoke of the "four wings of the Earth" as well as of the "four wings of the skies."

"A Babylonian map of the Earth, for the first millennium B.C., illustrated this concept of four "corners of the Earth" by literally depicting four "wings" attached to the circular Earth.

"....The fourfold division of the solar year (two solstices, two equinoxes) was combined in antiquity with the lunar motions to create the first known formal calendar, the lunar-solar calendar of Nippur. It was used by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other nations after them, and remains in use to this very day as the Jewish calendar.

"For Mankind, Earthly Time began in 3760 B.C.; we know the exact date because in the year 1992 of the common Era, the Jewish calendar counts the year 5752.

"Between Earthly Time and Divine Time there is Celestial Time.

"From the moment Noah stepped out of the ark, needing reassurance that the watery end of all flesh would not soon recur, Mankind has lived with a lingering notion - or is it a recollection? - of cycles or eons or Ages of Earth’s destruction and resurrection, and has looked to the heavens for celestial signs, omens of good or bad to come.

"From its Mesopotamian roots the Hebrew language retains the term Mazal as meaning "luck, fortune" which would be either good or bad. Little is it realized that the term is a celestial one, meaning zodiac house, and harkens back to the time when astronomy and astrology were one and the same, and priests atop temple-towers followed the movements of the Celestial Gods to see in which house of the zodiac - in which Manzalu, in Akkadian - they stood that night.

"But it was not Man who had first grouped the myriads of stars into recognizable constellations, defined and named those that spanned the ecliptic, and divided them into twelve to create the twelve houses of the zodiac. It was the Anunnaki who had conceived of that for their own needs; Man adopted that as his link, his means to ascent, to the heavens from the mortality of life on Earth.

"....It is evident from the Sumerian King Lists and other texts dealing with the affairs of the Anunnaki that for a long time - certainly until the Deluge - they retained the sar, the 3,600 Earth-years of Nibiru, as the divine unit of time. But what could they do somehow to create a reasonable relationship, other than 1:3600, between that Divine Time and the Earthly Time.

"The solution was provided by the phenomenon called precession."

At this point Mr. Sitchin gives more details of measurements of Time, followed by a quote from the mythologist Joseph Campbell:

"By a miracle that I have found no one to interpret, the arithmetic that was developed in Sumer as early as c. 3200 B.C., whether by coincidence or by intuitive induction so matched the celestial order as to amount in itself to a revelation." The "miracle" as we have since shown, was provided by advance knowledge of the Anunnaki.

"Modern astronomy, as well as modern exact sciences owes much to the Sumerian "firsts."

After more interesting calculations quoted from various mathematicians, Mr. Sitchin reaches to the change of zodiacal house:

"....we have been in the "Age" (or zodiac) of Pisces since about 60 B.C., and slowly but surely we will soon enter the Age of Aquarius. It is such a shift - the change from a fading zodiacal age - to the start of another zodiacal age - that is the coming of a New Age.

"As Mankind on Earth awaits the change with anticipation, many are those who wonder what the change will bring with it - of what Mazal with it be a harbinger? Bliss or upheavals, an end - or a new beginning? The end of the Old Order or the start of a New Order on Earth, perhaps the prophesied return of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth?

"Does Time only flow forward or can it flow backward, philosophers have wondered. In fact, Time does shift backward, for that is the essence of the phenomenon of precession: the retardation of Earth’s orbit around the Sun that causes, once in about 2,160 years, the observance of sunrise on the spring equinox not in the next zodiacal house but in the preceding one ... Celestial Time, as we have designated it, does not progress in the direction of Earthly (and all Planetary) Time, counterclockwise; rather, it moves in the opposite direction, matching the orbital (clockwise) direction of Nibiru.

"Celestial Time does flow backward, as far as we on Earth are concerned; and therefore, in zodiacal terms, the Past is the Future.

"Let us examine the Past.

Return

Chapter Two
A COMPUTER MADE OF STONE

"....When Hernando Cortes was welcomed by the Aztec king Moctezuma as a returning god, he was presented with an immense golden disk on which were carved the symbols of the cyclical ages in which the Aztecs and their predecessors in Mexico believed. That precious artifact has been lost forever, having been quickly melted down by the Spaniards; but replicas thereof, in stone, have been found. The glyphs represented cycles of the "Suns" or ages of which the present is the fifth.

*   the first age was the Age of the White Haired Giants
*   the second, the Golden Age
*   the third was the Age of the Red Haired People (who, according to the legends, were the first to arrive by ships in the Americas)
*   the fourth was the Age of the Black Haired People, with whom the supreme Mexican god, Quetzalcoatl, had arrived

"All the way south in the pre-Columbian Peru, the Andean people also spoke of five "Suns" or ages.

*   the first one was the Age of the Viracochas, white and bearded gods
*   the second was the Age of the Giants
*   followed by the Age of Primitive Man
*   the fourth was the Age of Heroes
*   the fifth or contemporary age, the Age of Kings, of which the Inca kings were the last in line

"....The city of Cuzco itself, it appears, was (in the words of S. Hagar in a paper delivered at the 14^th Congress of Americanists) "a testimonial in stone" to the South American familiarity with the twelve-house zodiac. The unavoidable conclusion is that knowledge of the zodiacal division of the ecliptic was somehow in the New World millennia ago, and that the ages were measured in the 2,160-year units of Celestial Time.

"The idea that calendars could be made of stone might seem strange to us, but it was evidently quite logical in antiquity. One such calendar, posing many puzzles, is called Stonehenge.... in England, north of the city of Salisbury and about eighty miles southwest of London.... Time, we believe, is the key to its secrets.

"Stonehenge has been called "the most important prehistoric monument in the whole of Britain," and that alone justifies the attention it has been given over the centuries and especially in recent times.... Stonehenge is indeed the largest and most elaborate of more than nine hundred ancient stone, wood and earthern circles in the British Isles, as well as the largest and most complicated one in Europe.

"Yet, in our view, it is not only what makes Stonehenge unique that is its most important aspect. It is also what reveals its similarity to certain monuments elsewhere, and its purpose at the specific time of its construction, that make it part of the tale we have called The Earth Chronicles. It is within such a wider framework, we believe, that one can offer a plausible solution to its enigma.

"Even those who have not visited Stonehenge must have seen, in print or on the screen, the most striking features of this ancient complex: the pair of huge upright stone blocks, each about thirteen feet high, connected at the top by an equally massive lintel stone to form freestanding Trilithons; and these, erected in a semicircle, surrounded in turn by a massive circle of similar giant stones connected at the top by lintels that were carefully carved to form a continuous ring around the paired uprights.

Mr. Sitchin at this point gives more details of the stones of Stonehenge, the number of stones that were supposed to have existed on site and other. He continues further:

"As if to emphasize the importance of the circular shape already evident, the ring of stones are in turn centered within a large framing circle. It is a deep and wide ditch whose excavated soil was used to raise its banks; it forms a perfect encompassing ring around the whole Stonehenge complex, a ring with a diameter in excess of three hundred feet. Approximately half the circuit of the ditch was excavated earlier this century and then partly refilled; the other portions of the ditch and its raised banks bear marks of being weathered down by nature and man over the millennia
 

Night view through the megaliths of Stonehenge, toward the "Heel Stone," marking the position of the rising Sun on the summer solstice. This photo has been enhanced with artificial lights.

"....The concentric circles of Stonehenge with the Avenue (Mr. Sitchin explains at length this feature in his book) leading to the northeast provide a major clue regarding the purpose for which Stonehenge was constructed. That the direction of the Avenue - its precise northeastern orientation - was not accidental becomes learned when it is realized that a line drawn through the center of the Avenue passes through the center of the circles of stones and wholes to form the structure’s axis. That the axis was deliberately oriented is suggested by a series of holes indicating that the marker stones had once been placed along this axis. One of them, called the Heel Stone, still stands as a mute witness to the builders’ intentions and the site’s purpose; it was undoubtedly astronomical.

"The idea that Stonehenge was a carefully planned astronomical observatory rather than a heathen cult or occult site (a notion expressed, for example, by calling a fallen stone "Slaughter Stone," implying human sacrifices), was not easily accepted. In fact, the difficulty grew rather than diminished the more the site was investigated and its date of construction kept shifting backward.

"A twelfth-century account (Historia regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth) related that the "Giants’ Ring" was "a stone cluster which no man of the period could ever erect and it was first built in Ireland from stones brought by the giants from Africa." It was then by the advice of the sorcerer Merlin (whom Arthurian legends also connected with the Holy Grail) that the King of Vortigen moved the stones and "re-erected them in a circle round a sepulchre, in exactly the same way as they had been arranged on Mount Killaraus, in Ireland. (That this medieval legend had a factual core was given confirmation by the modern discovery that the blue stones originated from the Prescelley Mountains in southwestern Wales and were somehow transported by land and water over a distance of two hundred fifty miles - first to a site some twelve miles northwest of Stonehenge, where they might have been erected in an earlier circle, and then on to Stonehenge proper).

The Arthurian legends were involved in Stonehenge...

"The stone temple was attributed to the Romans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or the Druids.... Of these various theories, the one concerning the Druids gained the most favour at the time (seventeenth, eighteenth centuries), not least of all because of the research and writings of William Stukely, especially his 1740 work Stonehenge, A Temple Restor’d To The British Druids. The Druids were the learned class or sect of teacher-priests among the ancient Celts. According to Julius Caesar, who is the prime source of information regarding the Druids, they assembled once a year at a secret place for secret rites; they offered human sacrifices; and among the subjects they taught the Celt noblemen were "the powers of the gods," the sciences of nature, and astronomy....

"While nothing that has been uncovered by archaeologists at the site reveals any connection with pre-Christian era Druids, the Celts had arrived in the area by that time and there is no proof the other way either, namely that the Druids did not gather at this "Sun Temple" even if they had nothing to do with its much earlier builders.

"Although Roman legions encamped near the site, no evidence was found to connect Stonehenge with the Romans. A Greek and Phoenician connection, however, shows more promise. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (first century B.C.) - a contemporary of Julius Caesar - who had traveled to Egypt wrote a multivolume history of the ancient world.

"....Drawing on the writings of earlier historians, he quotes from a (by now lost) book by Hecatacus of Abdea, in which the latter had stated, circa 300 B.C., that on an island inhabited by the Hyperborians "there is a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is spherical in shape." The name in Greek signified a people from the distant north, where the north wind ("Boreas") comes. They were worshippers of the Greek (later Roman) god Apollo, and the legends regarding the Hyperboreans were thus mingled with the myths concerning Apollo and his twin sister, the goddess Artemis. As the ancients told the twins were the sons of the great god Zeus and their mother Leto, a Titaness.... Leto wandered over the face of the Earth seeking a place where to give birth to her children in peace, away from the wrath of Hera, the official wife of Zeus.

"....Though not attributing any scientific value to such a legendary or mythological connection with Greece, archaeologists have nevertheless seemed to find such a connection through archaeological discoveries in the area of Stonehenge, which is replete with prehistoric earthworks, structures and graves. These man-made ancient remains include the great Avebury Circle which schematically drawn resembles the works of a modern watch, or even the meshing wheels of the ancient Mayan calendar.

"The ancient remains found also include the miles long trench called the Cursus; a kind of wooden-peg rather than stone-made circle called Woodhenge; and the outstanding Silbury Hill - an artificial conical hill which is precisely circular and 520 feet in diameter, the largest of its kind in Europe (some see significance in the fact that it is situated an exact six purported "megalithic miles" from Stonehenge).
 

Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, England

"....Many of those finds reinforced archaeological opinions that the manner in which stones at Stonehenge were smoothly dressed and carefully shaped indicated "influences" from Minoan Crete (the Mediterranean island) and Mycenaean (mainland) Greece.

"....A leading representative of this school has been Jacquetta Hawkes, who in her book, Dawn of the Gods, about the Minoan and Mycenaean origins of Greek civilization, could not help devoting a good portion of the chapter on "Graves and Kingdoms" to Stonehenge.... It flowered in the sixteenth century B.C. and the treasures uncovered in the tombs of its kings revealed foreign contacts that undoubtedly included Britain.
 

Grave Circles at Mycenae

"....Not all archaeological finds, however, showed such early Greek "influences." The finds in tombs around Stonehenge included, for example, decorated beads and amber disks bound with gold in a method developed in Egypt and not at all in Greece. Such finds raised the possibility that all those artifacts were somehow imported to southeast England, neither by Greeks nor Egyptians but perhaps by trading people from the eastern Mediterranean. The obvious candidates were the Phoenicians, the renowned sailors-cum-traders of antiquity.

"It is a recorded fact that the Phoenicians, sailing from their Mediterranean ports, reached Cornwall in the southwest corner of England, quite close to Stonehenge, in the search for tin, with which hardened bronze was made from soft copper. But were any of these peoples, whose trade links flourished in the millennium between 1500 B.C. and 500 B.C., responsible for the planning and construction of Stonehenge? Did they even visit it? A partial answer would depend of course, on when Stonehenge itself was conceived and built, or who else was there to build it.

"....Subjected to radiocarbon dating, remains found in the Ditch (Stonehenge) produced a date in between 2900 to 2600 B.C. - at least a thousand years and probably much more before the sailors from the Mediterranean might have arrived. A charcoal piece found in one of the Aubrey Holes provided a carbon date of 2200 B.C.; an anther pick found near one of the trilithons gave a reading of between 2280 and 2060 B.C.; radiocarbon datings of finds in the Avenue gave dates between 2245 and 2085 B.C.

"Who was there at such an early time to plan and execute the marvelous stone complex?

"....Were the Neolithic farmers and herders (about 3000 B.C.), the Beaker People (some time after 2500 B.C. and so called because of the shape of their drinking vessels), or even the Early Bronze Age Wessex People (2000 B.C.) capable of creating Stonehenge? or did they just provide the labor and the manpower to construct a complex mechanism in stone devised by advanced scientific knowledge of others?

"Even an outspoken proponent of the Mycenaean connection, Jacquetta Kawkes, had to admit that Stonehenge.... (among other facts).... "It has always seemed that some individual must have initiated it - through swollen ambition or religious obsession - but because the whole design and method of building is so far advanced of anything known in the island before, it has seemed likely that ideas drawn from a more civilized tradition might also have been involved."

"But what was that "more civilized tradition" that gave rise to this structure that was beyond compare to anything in prehistoric Europe? The answer must depend on an accurate dating of Stonehenge; and if, as scientific data suggests, it is a thousand to two thousand years older than the Mycenaeans and the Phoenicians, then an earlier source of the "civilized tradition" must be sought. If Stonehenge belongs to the third millennium B.C., then the only candidates are those of Sumer and Egypt. When Stonehenge was first conceived, the Sumerian civilization, with its cities, high-rise temples-cum-observatories, writings, and scientific knowledge, was already a thousand years old, and kingship had already flourished in Egypt for many centuries.

"For a better answer, we have to put together the knowledge accumulated by now regarding the several phases by which Stonehenge, according to the latest research, came to be.

Mr. Sitchin explains amply in his book, the "phases" in which Stonehenge was built, they were:

* Stonehenge I = The Ditch and its embankment,

- The 56 Aubrey Holes,
- Two "gateway stones," focusing aids to the Heel Stone,
- The Post Holes, may have been intended to hold wooden markers,
- The four rounded Station Stones.... to form a perfect rectangle.
- This phase scholars suggest it was constructed between 2900 and 2600 B.C.

"Whoever constructed Stonehenge I, and for whatever purpose, found it satisfactory for several centuries."

* Stonehenge II = At about 2100 B.C., the main event was:

- The introduction of the blue stones, making Stonehenge II a stone "henge" for the first time. What ever the precise route was to haul the bluestones, it is believed that in the end they were brought to the site’s proximity up the River Avon, which explains why the Avenue was extended by some two miles at this phase to connect Stonehenge with the river.
- The so called Altar Stone, was erected within the circles exactly on the Stonehenge axis, facing
- The Heel Stone to the northeast. "But as the researchers checked the alignment and the position of the outer stones, they discovered to their surprise that the Heel Stone was shifted in this Phase II somewhat eastward (to the right, as one looks from the enclosure’s center); simultaneously, two other stones were erected in a row in front ot the Heel Stone, so as to emphasize the new line of sight.

"Unexpectedly, the researchers realized that the main innovation of Stonehenge II was not the introduction of the blue stones, but

- The introduction of a new axis, an axis somewhat more to the east than the previous one.

* Stonehenge III = Followed Phase II within decades.

"Whoever was in charge decided to give the complex (Stonehenge) a monumental scope and permanence. It was then that Phase III was added:

* The huge sarsen stones.... were hauled to Stonehenge from Marlboro Downs, some twenty miles away.... even more daunting must have been the task of setting them up.... and then all those prepared (dressed to the desired shapes) stones had to be erected in a precise circle or in pairs, and the holding lintels hauled up to be placed on top. How the task, made more difficult by the site’s slope, was achieved, no one really knows.

- Two new Gateway Stones, replaced the old ones.
- The Sarcen Circle and the Trilithon Horseshoe, or oval....
- The inner Bluestone Horseshoe, and the Bluestone Circle (from the old bluestones).

"....In the usual course of scientific studies of ancient sites, archaeologists are the first to be on the scene.... and others experts - follow. In the case of Stonehenge, astronomers led the way. This was not only because the ruins were visible above the surface and required no excavation to reveal them, but also because from the very beginning it seemed almost self-evident that the axis line from the center toward the Heel Stone through the Avenue pointed "to the northeast, whereabouts the Sun rises when the days are longest" (to use the words of William Stukeley, 1740) - toward the point in the sky where the Sun rises at the summer solstice (about June 21). Stonehenge was an instrument to measure the passage of time!

"After two and an half centuries of scientific progress, this conclusion is still valid. All are agreed that Stonehenge was not a place of residence; nor was it a burial place. Neither palace nor tomb, it was in essence a temple-cum-observatory, as the ziggurats (step-pyramids) of Mesopotamia and ancient America were. And being oriented toward the Sun when it rises in midsummer, it could be called a Temple of the Sun.

"....Since this orientation is satisfied by the axis alone, subsequent researchers began in time to wonder whether the additional complexity of Stonehenge - the diverse circles, ovals, rectangle, markers - might signify that other celestial phenomena besides sunrise at summer solstice and other time cycles have been observed at Stonehenge.... It was only in 1963, when Cecil A. Newham discovered alignments that suggested that equinoxes too could have been observed and even predicted at Stonehenge, that these possibilities were given modern scientific credence.

"His most sensational suggestion, however.... was that Stonehenge must have also been a lunar observatory....

"....Prominent among the astronomers whose investigations confirmed the incredible capabilities of Stonehenge was Gerald S. Hawkins of Boston University. Writing in prestigious scientific journals in 1963, 1964, and 1965.... With the aid of the university’s computers he analyzed hundreds of sight lines at Stonehenge and related them to the positions of the Sun, Moon, and major stars as they were in ancient times, and decided that the resulting orientations could not have been just accidental.

These paragraphs (in the book) also include the calculations of Lunar cycles, bringing in the important cycle of "19 years," which makes the position of Stonehenge with all its features perfect for measuring celestial time.

"....The proposition that Stonehenge was not only a "Sun temple" but also a lunar observatory, was met at first with fierced resistance....

"Thom, an engineering professor at Oxford University, conducted the most accurate measurements at Stonehenge, and pointed out that the "horseshoe" arrangement of the sarcen stones in fact represented an oval, and elliptical shape that represents planetary orbits more accurate than a circle. He agreed with Newham that Stonehenge I was primarily a lunar, and not just a solar observatory, and confirmed that Stonehenge was erected where it is because it is only there that the eight lunar observations could be made precisely along the lines formed by the rectangle connecting the four Station Stones.

"....Newham summed up: "With the exception of the five Trilithons, practically all the remaining features appear to have lunar connections." He agreed that the "56 Aubrey Holes rotate to the eight main alignments of the Moon setting and rising." Thereafter, even Atkinson ( a previous dissenter) admitted that he "has become sufficiently persuaded that conventional archaeological thinking is in need of drastic revision" in regard to the purpose and functions of Stonehenge.

"....Notable participant.... of the 1960s and the decade of the 1970s, Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer and mathematician, held that the alignments listed by Hawkins to various stars and constellations were rather random than deliberate, but fully agreed with the lunar aspects of Stonehenge I - and especially the role of the fifty-six Aubrey Holes and the rectangular arrangement of the Station Stones ("Stonehenge - An Eclipse Predictor" in Nature and On Stonehenge).

"But concurring that the Aubrey Circle could act as a "calculator" for predicting eclipses (in his opinion it was done by moving four markers around), Hoyle stirred up another issue. Whoever had designed this calculator - Hawkins called it a "computer" - must have known in advance the precise length of the solar year, the Moon’s orbital period, and the cycle of 18.61 years; and Neolithic Man in Britain simply did not possess such knowledge.

"Struggling to explain how the advanced knowledge of astronomy and mathematics had appeared in Neolithic Britain, Hawkins resorted to ancient records of the Mediterranean peoples. In addition to the Diodorus/Hecatacus reference he also mentioned Plutarch’s quote (in Isis and Osiris) of Eudoxus of Cnidus the fourth century B.C. astronomer-mathematician from Asia Minor who had associated the "demon god of eclipses" with the number fifty-six.

"In the absence of answers from Man, a glance at the superhuman?

"Hoyle on his part, arrived at the conviction that Stonehenge was not a mere observatory, a place to see what goes on in the sky. He called it a Predictor, an instrument for foretelling celestial events and a facility for noting them on the predetermined dates.... he felt that the Station Stones rectangle and all it implied indicate "that the builders of Stonehenge I might have come to the British Isles from the outside, purposely looking for this rectangular alignment" (which is possible why Stonehenge is located, in the northern hemisphere)....

"...."A veritable Newton or Einstein must have been at work at Stonehenge," Hoyle mused; but even so where was the university where he had learned mathematics and astronomy, where were the writings without which accumulated knowledge could not be passed on and taught, and how could a sole genius plan, execute and supervise such a celestial predictor when for Phase II alone, a whole century was needed? "There have only been about 200 generations of history; there were upward of 10,000 generations of prehistory," Hoyle observed. Was it all part of the "eclipse of the gods," he wondered - the transition from a time when people worshiped an actual Sun god and a Moon god "to become the invisible God of Isaiah?"

"....The familiarity in such distant times not only with the nineteen-year cycle of the Moon but also with "prominences" (as mentioned in Diodorus from Hecatacus regarding the Hyperborians), like those of the Earth" - surface features such as mountains and plains - is unquestionably amazing.

"The attribution by Greek historians of the circular structure in Hyperborea to the lunar cycle first described in Greece by the Athenian Meton tosses the problem of Who Built Stonehenge to the ancient Near East; so do the soul-searching conclusions and musings of the above mentioned astronomers.

"But more than two centuries earlier, William Stukeley had already pointed for answers in the same direction, toward the ancient Near East. To his sketch of Stonehenge, as he understood it to have been, he appended the design he had seen on an eastern Mediterranean ancient coin, which depicts a temple on an elevated platform. This depiction, more explicit, also appears on another ancient coin from the city of Byblos in the same area.... It shows that the ancient temple had an enclosure in which there stood a rocket upon a launch pad. We have identified the place as The Landing Place of Sumerian lore, the place where the Sumerian king Gilgamesh witnessed a rocket ship rise. The place still exists; it is now the vast platform in the mountains of Lebanon, at Baalbeck, upon which there still stands the ruins of the greatest Roman temple ever built. Supporting the massive platform are three colossal stone blocks that have been known since antiquity as the Trilithon. (below image)

"The answers to the Stonehenge enigma should thus be sought in places far away from it, but in a time frame quite close to it. The When holds the key, we believe, not only to the Who of Stonehenge I, but also to the Why of Stonehenge II and III.

For, as we shall see, the hurried remaking of Stonehenge in 2100 - 2000 B.C. had to do with the coming of a New Age - Mankind’s first historically recorded New Age.
 

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