The 12th Planet

Her occupation of Anu's temple in Uruk could not have taken place without his knowledge and consent; and the texts give us strong clues as to how such consent was obtained. Soon Inanna was known as "Anunitum," a nickname meaning "beloved of Anu." She was referred to in texts as "the holy mistress of Anu"; and it follows that Inanna shared not only Anu's temple but also his bed - whenever he came to Uruk, or on the reported occasions of her going up to his Heavenly Abode. Having thus maneuvered herself into the position of goddess of Uruk and mistress of the temple of Anu, Ishtar proceeded to use trickery for enhancing Uruk's standing and her own powers. Farther down the Euphrates stood the ancient city of Eridu - Enki's center. Knowing of his great knowledge of all the arts and sciences of civilization, Inanna resolved to beg, borrow, or steal these secrets. Obviously intending to use her "personal charms" on Enki (her great-uncle), Inanna arranged to call on him alone. That fact was not unnoticed by Enki, who instructed his housemaster to prepare dinner for two.

Come my housemaster Isimud, hear my instructions; a word I shall say to you, heed my words: The maiden, all alone, has directed her step to the Abzu . . .

Have the maiden enter the Abzu of Eridu, Give her to eat barley cakes with butter, Pour for her cold water that freshens the heart, Give her to drink beer. ...

Happy and drunk, Enki was ready to do anything for Inanna. She boldly asked for the divine formulas, which were the basis of a high civilization. Enki granted her some one hundred of them, including divine formulas pertaining to supreme lordship, Kingship, priestly functions, weapons, legal procedures, scribeship, woodworking, even the knowledge of musical instruments and of temple prostitution. By the time Enki awoke and realized what he had done, Inanna was already well on her way to Uruk. Enki ordered after her his "awesome weapons," but to no avail, for Inanna had sped to Uruk in her "Boat of Heaven." Quite frequently, Ishtar was depicted as a naked goddess; flaunting her beauty, she was sometimes even depicted raising her skirts to reveal the lower parts of her body.

Gilgamesh, a ruler of Uruk circa 2900 B.C. who was also partly divine (having been born to a human father and a goddess), reported how Inanna enticed him - even after she already had an official spouse. Having washed himself after a battle and put on "a fringe cloak, fastened with a sash,"

Glorious Ishtar raised an eye at his beauty.

"Come, Gilgamesh, be thou my lover!

Come, grant me your fruit.

Thou shall be my male mate, I will be thy female."

But Gilgamesh knew the score. "Which of thy lovers didst thou love forever?" he asked. "Which of thy shepherds pleased thee for all time?" Reciting a long list of her love affairs, he refused.

As time went on - as she assumed higher ranks in the pantheon, and with it the responsibility for affairs of state - Inanna/Ishtar began to display more martial qualities, and was often depicted as a Goddess of War, armed to the teeth. The inscriptions left by Assyrian kings describe how they went to war for her and upon her command, how she directly advised when to wait and when to attack, how she sometimes marched at the head of the armies, and how, on at least one occasion, she granted a theophany and appeared before all the troops. In return for their loyalty, she promised the Assyrian kings long life and success. "From a Golden Chamber in the skies I will watch over thee," she assured them.

Was she turned into a bitter warrior because she, too, came upon hard times with the rise of Marduk to supremacy? In one of his inscriptions Nabunaid said: "Inanna of Uruk, the exalted princess who dwelt in a gold cella, who rode upon a chariot to which were harnessed seven lions - the inhabitants of Uruk changed her cult during the rule of king Erba-Marduk, removed her cella and unharnessed her team." Inanna, reported Nabunaid, "had therefore left the E-Anna angrily, and stayed hence in an unseemly place" (which he does not name). (Fig 54)

Seeking, perhaps, to combine love with power, the much-courted Inanna chose as her husband DU.MU.ZI, a younger son of Enki. Many ancient texts deal with the loves and quarrels of the two. Some are love songs of great beauty and vivid sexuality. Others tell how Ishtar - back from one of her journeys - found Dumuzi celebrating her absence. She arranged for his capture and disappearance into the Lower World - a domain ruled by her sister E.RESH.KI.GAL and her consort NER.GAL. Some of the most celebrated Sumerian and Akkadian texts deal with the journey of Ishtar to the Lower World in search of her banished beloved.

Of the six known sons of Enki, three have been featured in Sumerian tales: the firstborn Marduk, who eventually usurped the supremacy; Nergal, who became ruler of the Lower World; and Dumuzi, who married Inanna/Ishtar.

Enlil, too, had three sons who played key roles in both divine and human affairs: Ninurta, who, having been born to Enlil by his sister Ninhursag, was the legal successor; Nanna/Sin, firstborn by Enlil's official spouse Ninlil; and a younger son by Ninlil named ISH.KUR ("mountainous," "far mountain land"), who was more frequently called Adad ("beloved"). As brother of Sin and uncle of Utu and Inanna, Adad appears to have felt more at home with them than at his own house. The Sumerian texts constantly grouped the four together. The ceremonies connected with the visit of Anu to Uruk also spoke of the four as a group. One text, describing the entrance to the court of Anu, states that the throne room was reached through "the gate of Sin, Shamash, Adad, and Ishtar." Another text, first published by V. K. Shileiko (Russian Academy of the History of Material Cultures) poetically described the four as retiring for the night together.

The greatest affinity seems to have existed between Adad and Ishtar, and the two were even depicted next to each other, as on this relief showing an Assyrian ruler being blessed by Adad (holding the ring and lightning) and by Ishtar, holding her bow. (The third deity is too nutilated to be identified.)

Was there more to this "affinity" than a platonic relationship, especially in view of Ishtar's "record"? It is noteworthy that in the

biblical Song of Songs, the playful girl calls her lover dod - a word that means both "lover" and "uncle." Now, was Ishkur called

Adad - a derivative from the Sumerian DA.DA - because he was the uncle who was the lover?

But Ishkur was not only a playboy; he was a mighty god, endowed by his father Enlil with the powers and

prerogatives of a storm god. As such he was revered as the Hurrian/Hittite Teshub and the Urartian Teshubu ("wind blower"),

the Amorite Ramanu ("thunderer"), the Canaanite Ragimu ("caster of hailstones"), the Indo-European Buriash ("light maker"),

the Semitic Meir ("he who lights up" the skies).

A god list kept at the British Museum, as shown by Hans Schlobies (Der Akkadwche Wettergott in Mesopotamen), clarifies that Ishkur was indeed the divine lord in lands far from Sumer and Akkad. As Sumerian texts reveal, this was no accident. Enlil, it seems, willfully dispatched his young son to become the "Resident Deity" in the mountain lands north and west of Mesopotamia. Why did Enlil dispatch his youngest and beloved son away from Nippur?

Several Sumerian epic tales have been found about the arguments and even bloody struggles among the younger gods. Many cylinder seals depict scenes of god battling god; it would seem that the original rivalry between Enki and Enlil was carried on and intensified between their sons, with brother sometimes turning against brother - a divine tale of Cain and Abel. Some of these battles were against a deity identified as Kur - in all probability, Ishkur/Adad. This may well explain why Enlil deemed it advisable to grant his younger son a far-off domain, to keep him out of the dangerous battles for the succession. The position of the sons of Anu, Enlil, and Enki, and of their offspring, in the dynastic lineage emerges clearly through a unique Sumerian device: the allocation of numerical rank to certain gods. The discovery of this system also brings out the membership in the Great Circle of Gods of Heaven and Earth when Sumerian civilization blossomed. We shall find that this Supreme Pantheon was made up of twelve deities.

The first hint that a cryptographic number system was applied to the Great Gods came with the discovery that the names of the gods Sin, Shamash, and Ishtar were sometimes substituted in the texts by the numbers 30, 20, and 15, respectively. The highest unit of the Sumerian sexagesimal system - 60 - was assigned to Anu; Enlil "was" 50; Enki, 40; and Adad, 10. The number 10 and its six multiples within the prime number 60 were thus assigned to male deities, and it would appear plausible that the numbers ending with 5 were assigned to the female deities. From this, the following cryptographic table emerges: Male 60 - Anu 50 - Enlil 40 - Ea/Enki 30 - Nanna/Sin

20 - Utu/Shamash

10 - Ishkur/Adad

6 male deities

Female

55 - Antu

4.5 - Ninlil

35 - Ninki

25 - Ningal

15 - Inanna/Ishtar

- Ninhursag

female deities

Ninurta, we should not be surprised to learn, was assigned the number 50, like his father. In other words, his dynastic rank was conveyed in a cryptographic message: If Enlil goes, you, Ninurta, step into his shoes; but until then, you are not one of the Twelve, for the rank of "50" is occupied.

Nor should we be surprised to learn that when Marduk usurped the Enlilship, he insisted that the gods bestow on him "the fifty names" to signify that the rank of "50" had become his.

There were many other gods in Sumer - children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews of the Great Gods; there were also several hundred rank-and-file gods, called Anunnaki, who were assigned (one may say) "general duties." But only twelve made the Great Circle.

THE NEFILIM: PEOPLE OF THE FIERY ROCKETS

SUMEHIAN AND AKKADIAN texts leave no doubt that the peoples of the ancient Near East were certain that the Gods of

Heaven and Earth were able to rise from Earth and ascend into the heavens, as well as roam Earth's skies at will.

In a text dealing with the rape of Inanna/Ishtar by an unidentified person, he justifies his deed thus:

One day my Queen,

After crossing heaven, crossing earth -

Inanna,

After crossing heaven, crossing earth - After crossing Elam and Shubur, After crossing . . .

The hierodule approached weary, fell asleep. I saw her from the edge of my garden; Kissed her, copulated with her.

Inanna, here described as roaming the heavens over many lands that lie far apart- - feats possible only by flying - herself spoke on another occasion of her flying. In a text which S.- Langdon (in Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale) named "A Classical Liturgy to Innini," the goddess laments her expulsion from her city. Acting on the instructions of Enlil, an emissary, who "brought to me the word of Heaven," entered her throne room, "his unwashed hands put on me," and, after other indignities, Me, from my temple, they caused to fly; A Queen am I whom, from my city, like a bird they caused to fly.

Such a capability, by Inanna as well as the other major gods, was often indicated by the ancient artists by depicting the gods - anthropomorphic in all other respects, as we have seen - with wings. The wings, as can be seen from numerous depictions, were not part of the body - not natural wings - but rather a decorative attachment to the god's clothing. Inanna/Ishtar, whose far-flung travels are mentioned in many ancient texts, commuted between her initial distant domain in Aratta and her coveted abode in Uruk. She called upon Enki in Eridu and Enlil in Nippur, and visited

her brother Utu at his headquarters in Sippar. But her most celebrated journey was to the Lower World, the domain of her sister Ereshkigal. The journey was the subject not only of epic tales but also of artistic depictions on cylinder seals - the latter showing the goddess with wings, to stress the fact that she flew over from Sumer to the Lower World.

The texts dealing with this hazardous journey describe how Inanna very meticulously put on herself seven objects prior to the start of the voyage, and how she had to give them up as she passed through the seven gates leading to her sister's abode. Seven such objects are also mentioned in other texts dealing with Inanna's skyborne travels:

The SHU.GAR.RA she put on her head.

"Measuring pendants," on her ears.

Chains of small blue stones, around her neck.

Twin "stones," on her shoulders.

A golden cylinder, in her hands.

Straps, clasping her breast.

The PALA garment, clothed around her body.

Though no one has as yet been able to explain the nature and significance of these seven objects, we feel that the answer has long been available. Excavating the Assyrian capital Assur from 1903 to 1914, Walter Andrae

and his colleagues found in the Temple of Ishtar a battered statue of the goddess showing her with various "contraptions" attached to her chest and back. In 1934 archaeologists excavating at Mari came upon a similar but intact statue buried in the ground. It was a life-size likeness of a beautiful woman. Her unusual headdress was adorned with a pair of horns, indicating that she was a goddess. Standing around the 4,000-year-old statue, the archaeologists were thrilled by her lifelike appearance (in a snapshot, one can hardly distinguish between the statue and the living men). They named her The Goddess with a Vase because she was holding a cylindrical object.

Unlike the flat carvings or bas-reliefs, this life-size, three-dimensional representation of the goddess reveals interesting features about her attire. On her head she wears not a milliner's chapeau but a special helmet; protruding from it on both sides and fitted over the ears are objects that remind one of a pilot's earphones. On her neck and upper chest the goddess wears a necklace of many small (and probably precious) stones; in her hands she holds a cylindrical object which appears too thick and heavy to be a vase for holding water.

Over a blouse of see-through material, two parallel straps run across her chest, leading back to and holding in place an unusual box of rectangular shape. The box is held tight against the back of the goddess's neck and is firmly attached to the helmet with a horizontal strap. Whatever the box held inside must have been heavy, for the contraption is further supported by two large shoulder pads. The weight of the box is increased by a hose that is connected to its base by a circular clasp. The complete package of instruments - for this is what they undoubtedly were - is held in place with the aid of the two sets of straps that crisscross the goddess's back and chest.

The parallel between the seven objects required by Inanna for her aerial journeys and the dress and objects worn by the statue from Mari (and probably also the mutilated one found at Ishtar's temple in Ashur) is easily proved. We see the "measuring pendants" - the earphones - on her ears; the rows or "chains" of small stones around her neck; the "twin stones" - the two shoulder pads - on her shoulders; the "golden cylinder" in her hands, and the clasping straps that crisscross her breast. She is indeed clothed in a "PALA garment" ("ruler's garment"), and on her head she wears the SHU.GAR.RA helmet - a term that literally means "that which makes go far into universe."

All this suggests to us that the attire of Inanna was that of an aeronaut or an astronaut.

The Old Testament called the "angels" of the Lord malachim - literally, "emissaries," who carried divine messages and carried out divine commands. As so many instances reveal, they were divine airmen: Jacob saw them going up a sky ladder, Hagar (Abraham's concubine) was addressed by them from the sky, and it was they who brought about the aerial destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The biblical account of the events preceding the destruction of the two sinful cities illustrates the fact that these emissaries were, on the one hand, anthropomorphic in all respects, and, on the other hand, they could be identified as "angels" as soon as they were observed. We learn that their appearance was sudden. Abraham "raised his eyes and, lo and behold, there were three men standing by him." Bowing and calling them "My Lords," he pleaded with them, "Do not pass over thy servant," and prevailed on them to wash their feet, rest, and eat.

Having done as Abraham had requested, two of the angels (the third "man" turned out to be the Lord himself) then proceeded to Sodom. Lot, the nephew of Abraham, "was sitting at the gate of Sodom; and when he saw them he rose up to meet them and bowed to the ground, and said: If it pleases my Lords, pray come to the house of thy servant and wash your feet and sleep over­night." Then "he made for them a feast, and they ate." When the news of the arrival of the two spread in the town, "all the town's people, young and old, surrounded the house, and called out to Lot and said: Where are the men who came this night unto thee?"

How were these men - who ate, drank, slept, and washed their tired feet - nevertheless so instantly recognizable as angels of the Lord? The only plausible explanation is that what they wore - their helmets or uniforms - or what they carried - their weapons - made them immediately recognizable. That they carried distinctive weapons is certainly a possibility: The two "men" at Sodom, about to be lynched by the crowd, "smote the people at the entrance of the house with blindness . . . and they were unable to find the doorway." And another angel, this time appearing to Gideon, as he was chosen to be a Judge in Israel, gave him a divine sign by touching a rock with his baton, whereupon a fire jumped out of the rock.

The team headed by Andrae found yet another unusual depiction of Ishtar at her temple in Ashur. More a wall sculpture than the usual relief, it showed the goddess with a tight-fitting decorated helmet with the "earphones" extended as though they had their own flat antennas, and wearing very distinct goggles that were part of the helmet.

Needless to say, any man seeing a person - male or female - so clad, would at once realize that he is encountering a divine aeronaut.

Clay figurines found at Sumerian sites and believed to be some 5,500 years old may well be crude representations of such malachim holding wandlike weapons. In one instance the face is seen through a helmet's visor. In the other instance, the "emissary" wears the distinct divine conical headdress and a uniform studded with circular objects of unknown function. The eye slots or "goggles" of the figurines are a most interesting feature because the Near East in the fourth millennium B.C. was literally swamped with wafer-like figurines that depicted in a stylized manner the upper part of the deities, exaggerating their most prominent feature: a conical helmet with elliptical visors or goggles. A hoard of such figurines was found at Tell Brak, a prehistoric site on the Khabur River, the river on whose banks Ezekiel saw the divine chariot millennia later. It is undoubtedly no mere coincidence that the Hittites, linked to Sumer and Akkad via the Khabur area, adopted as their written sign for "gods" the symbol clearly borrowed from the "eye" figurines. It is also no wonder that this symbol or hieroglyph for "divine being," expressed in artistic styles, came to dominate the art not only of Asia Minor but also of the early Greeks during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods.

The ancient texts indicate that the gods put on such special attire not only for their flights in Earth's skies but also when they

ascended to the distant heavens. Speaking of her occasional visits to Anu at his Celestial Abode, Inanna herself explained that

she could undertake such journeys because "Enlil himself fastened the divine ME-attire about my body." The text quoted Enlil as

saying to her:

You have lifted the ME,

You have tied the ME to your hands,

You have gathered the ME,

You have attached the ME to your breast. . . .

O Queen of all the ME, O radiant light

Who with her hand grasps the seven ME.

An early Sumerian ruler invited by the gods to ascend to the heavens was named EN.ME.DUR.AN.KI, which literally meant

"ruler whose me connect Heaven and Earth." An inscription by Nebuchadnezzar II, describing the reconstruction of a special pavilion for Marduk's "celestial chariot," states that it was part of the "fortified house of the seven me of Heaven and Earth." The scholars refer to the me as "divine power objects." Literally, the term stems from the concept of "swimming in celestial waters." Inanna described them as parts of the "celestial garment" that she put on for her journeys in the Boat of Heaven. The me were thus parts of the special gear worn for flying in Earth's skies as well as into outer space.

The Greek legend of Icarus had him attempt to fly by attaching feathered wings to his body with wax. The evidence from the ancient Near East shows that though the gods may have been depicted with wings to indicate their flying capabilities - or perhaps sometimes put on winged uniforms as a mark of their airmanship - they never attempted to use attached wings for flying. Instead, they used vehicles for such travels.

The Old Testament informs us that the patriarch Jacob, spending the night in a field outside of Haran, saw "a ladder

down. The Lord himself stood at the top of the ladder. And the astounded Jacob "was fearful, and he said":

Indeed, a God is present in this place,

and I knew it not. . . .

How awesome is this place!

Indeed, this is none but the Lord's Abode

and this is the Gateway to Heaven.

There are two interesting points in this tale. The first is that the divine beings going up and down at this "Gateway to Heaven" were using a mechanical facility - a "ladder." The second is that the sight took Jacob by complete surprise. The "Lord's Abode," the "ladder," and the "angels of the Lord" using it were not there when Jacob lay down to sleep in the field. Suddenly, there was the awesome "vision." And by morning the "Abode," the "ladder," and their occupants were gone.

We may conclude that the equipment used by the divine beings was some kind of craft that could appear over a place, hover for a while, and disappear from sight once again.

The Old Testament also reports that the prophet Elijah did not die on Earth, but "went up into Heaven by a Whirlwind." This was not a sudden and unexpected event: The ascent of Elijah to the heavens was prearranged. He was told to go to Beth-El ("the lord's house") on a specific day. Rumors had already spread among his disciples that he was about to be taken up to the heavens. When they queried his deputy whether the rumor was true, he confirmed that, indeed, "the Lord will take away the Master today." And then:

There appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire. ... And Elijah went up into Heaven by a Whirlwind.

Even more celebrated, and certainly better described, was the heavenly chariot seen by the prophet Ezekiel, who dwelt among

the Judaean deportees on the banks of the Khabur River in northern Mesopotamia.

The Heavens were opened,

and I saw the appearances of the Lord.

What Ezekiel saw was a Manlike being, surrounded by brilliance and brightness, sitting on a throne that rested on a metal "firmament" within the chariot. The vehicle itself, which could move whichever way upon wheels-within-wheels and rise off the ground vertically, was described by the prophet as a glowing whirlwind. And I saw

a Whirlwind coming from the north, as a great cloud with flashes of fire and brilliance all around it. And within it, from within the fire, there was a radiance like a glowing halo.

Some recent students of the biblical description (such as Josef F. Blumrich of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) have concluded that the "chariot" seen by Ezekiel was a helicopter consisting of a cabin resting on four posts, each equipped with rotary wings - a "whirlwind" indeed.

About two millennia earlier, when the Sumerian ruler Gudea commemorated his building the temple for his god Ninurta, he wrote that there appeared to him "a man that shone like Heaven ... by the helmet on his head, he was a god." When Ninurta and two divine companions appeared to Gudea, they were standing beside Ninurta's "divine black wind bird." As it turned out, the main purpose of the temple's construction was to provide a secure zone, an inner special enclosure within the temple grounds, for this "divine bird."

The construction of this enclosure, Gudea reported, required huge beams and massive stones imported from afar. Only when the "divine bird" was placed within the enclosure was the construction of the temple deemed completed. And, once in place, the "divine bird" "could lay hold on -heaven" and was capable of "bringing together Heaven and Earth." The object was so important - "sacred" - that it was constantly protected by two "divine weapons," the "supreme hunter" and the "supreme killer" - weapons that emitted beams of light and death-dealing rays.

The similarity of the biblical and Sumerian descriptions, both of the vehicles and the beings within them, is obvious. The description of the vehicles as "bird," "wind bird," and "whirlwind" that could rise heavenward while emitting a brilliance, leaves no doubt that they were some kind of flying machine.

Enigmatic murals uncovered at Tell Ghassul, a site east of the Dead Sea whose ancient name is unknown, may shed light on our subject. Dating to circa 3500 B.C., the murals depict a large eight-pointed "compass," the head of a helmeted person within a bell-shaped chamber, and two designs of mechanical craft that could well have been the "whirlwinds" of antiquity. The ancient texts also describe some vehicle used to lift aeronauts into the skies. Gudea stated that, as the "divine bird" rose to circle the lands, it "flashed upon the raised bricks." The protected enclosure was described as MU.NA.DA.TUIiTUR ("strong stone resting place of the mU"). Urukagina, who ruled in Lagash, said in regard to the "divine black wind bird": "The MU that lights up as a fire I made high and strong." Similarly, Lu-Utu, who ruled in Umma in the third millennium B.C., constructed a place for a mu, "which in a fire comes forth," for the god Utu, "in the appointed place within his temple.' The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, recording his rebuilding of Marduk's sacred precinct, said that within fortified walls

made of burned brick and gleaming onyx marble:

I raised the head of the boat ID.GE.UL

the Chariot of Marduk's princeliness;

The boat ZAG.MU.KU, whose approach is observed,

the supreme traveler between Heaven and Earth,

in the midst of the pavilion I enclosed,

screening off its sides.

ID.GE.UL, the first epithet employed to describe this "supreme traveler," or "Chariot of Marduk," literally means "high to heaven, bright at night." ZAG.MU.KU, the second epithet describing the vehicle - clearly a "boat" nesting in a special pavilion - means "the bright MU which is for afar."

That a mu - an oval-topped, conical object - was indeed installed in the inner, sacred enclosure of the temples of the Great Gods of Heaven and Earth can, fortunately, be proved. An ancient coin found at Byblos (the biblical Gebal) on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Lebanon depicts the Great Temple of Ishtar. Though shown as it stood in the first millennium B.C., the requirement that temples be built and rebuilt upon the same site and in accordance with the original plan undoubtedly means that we see the basic elements of the original temple of Byblos, traced to millennia earlier.

The coin depicts a two-part temple. In front stands the main temple structure, imposing with its columned gateway. Behind it is an inner courtyard, or "sacred area," hidden and protected by a high, massive wall. It is clearly a raised area, for it can be reached only by ascending many stairs.

In the center of this sacred area stands a special platform, its crossbeam construction resembling that of the Eiffel Tower, as though built to withstand great weight. And on the platform stands the object of all this security and protection: an object that can only be a mu.

Like most Sumerian syllabic words, mu had a primary meaning; in the case of mu, it was "that which rises straight." Its thirty-odd nuances encompassed the meanings "heights," "fire," "command," "a counted period," as well as (in later times) "that by which one is remembered." If we trace the written sign for mu from its Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform stylizations to its original Sumerian pictographs, the following pictorial evidence emerges:

We clearly see a conical chamber, depicted by itself or with a narrow section attached to it. "From a golden chamber-in-the-sky I will watch over thee," Inanna promised to the Assyrian king. Was this mu the "heavenly chamber"?

A hymn to Inanna/Ishtar and her journeys in the Boat of Heaven clearly indicates that the mu was the vehicle in which the gods roamed the skies far and high: Lady of Heaven:

She puts on the Garment of Heaven; She valiantly ascends towards Heaven. Over all the peopled lands she flies in her Mu. Lady, who in her MU

to the heights of Heaven joyfully wings. . Over all the resting places she flies in her MU.

There is evidence to show that the people of the eastern Mediterranean had seen such a rocket-like object not only in a temple enclosure but actually in flight. Hittite glyphs, for example, showed - against a background of starry heavens - cruising missiles, rockets mounted on launch pads, and a god inside u radiating chamber.

Professor H. Frankfort (Cylinder Seals), demonstrating how both the art of making the Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the subjects depicted on them spread throughout the ancient world, reproduces the design on a seal found in Crete and dated to the thirteenth century B.C. The seal design clearly depicts a rocket ship moving in the skies and propelled by flames escaping from its rear.

The winged horses, the entwined animals, the winged celestial globe, and the deity with horns protruding from his headdress are all known Mesopotamian themes. It can certainly be assumed that the fiery rocket shown on the Cretan seal was also an object familiar throughout the ancient Near East.

Indeed, a rocket with "wings" or fins - reachable by a "ladder" - can be seen on a tablet excavated at Gezer, a town in ancient Canaan, west of Jerusalem. The double imprint of the same seal also shows a rocket resting on the ground next to a palm tree. The celestial nature or destination of the objects is attested by symbols of the Sun, Moon, and zodiacal constellations that adorn the seal.

The Mesopotamian texts that refer to the inner enclosures of temples, or to the heavenly journeys of the gods, or even to instances where mortals ascended to the heavens, employ the Sumerian term mu or its Semitic derivatives shu-mu ("that which is a mu"), sham, or shem. Because the term also connoted "that by which one is remembered," the word has come to be taken as meaning "name." But the universal application of "name" to early texts that spoke of an object used in flying has obscured the true meaning of the ancient records.

Thus G. A. Barton (The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad) established the unchallenged translation of Gudea's temple inscription - that "Its MU shall hug the lands from horizon to horizon" - as "Its name shall fill the lands." A hymn to Ishkur, extolling his "ray-emitting MU" that could attain the heights of Heaven, was likewise rendered: "Thy name is radiant, it reaches Heaven's zenith." Sensing, however, that mu or shem may mean an object and not "name," some scholars have treated the term as a suffix or grammatical phenomenon not requiring translation and have thereby avoided the issue altogether. It is not too difficult to trace the etymology of the term, and the route by which the "sky chamber" assumed the meaning of "name." Sculptures have been found that show a god inside a rocket-shaped chamber, as in this object of extreme antiquity (now in the possession of the University Museum, Philadelphia) where the celestial nature of the chamber is attested by the twelve globes decorating it.

Many seals similarly depict a god (and sometimes two) within such oval "divine chambers"; in most instances, these gods within their sacred ovals were depicted as objects of veneration.

Wishing to worship their gods throughout the lands, and not only at the official "house" of each deity, the ancient peoples developed the custom of setting up imitations of the god within his divine "sky chamber." Stone pillars shaped to simulate the oval vehicle were erected at selected sites, and the image of the god was carved into the stone to indicate that he was within the object.

It was only a matter of time before kings and rulers - associating these pillars (called stelae) with the ability to ascend to the Heavenly Abode - began to carve their own images upon the stelae as a way of associating themselves with the Eternal Abode. If they could not escape a physical oblivion, it was important that at least their "name" be forever commemorated. That the purpose of the commemorative stone pillars was to simulate a fiery skyship can further be gleaned from the term by which such stone stelae were known in antiquity. The Sumerians called them NA.RU ("stones that rise"). The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians called them naru ("objects that give off light"). The Amurru called them nuras ("fiery objects" - in Hebrew, ner still means a pillar that emits light, and thus today's "candle"). In the Indo-European tongues of the Hurrians and the Hittites, the stelae were called hu-u-ashi ("fire bird of stone").

Biblical references indicate familiarity with two types of commemorative monument, a yad and a shem. The prophet Isaiah

conveyed to the suffering people of Judaea the Lord's promise of a better and safer future:

And I will give them,

In my House and within my walls,

A yad and a shem.

Literally translated, this would amount to the Lord's promise to provide his people with a "hand" and a "name." Fortunately, however, from ancient monuments called yad's that still stand in the Holy Land, we learn that they

were distinguished by tops shaped like pyramidions. The shem, on the other hand, was a memorial with an oval top. Both, it seems evident, began as simulations of the "sky chamber," the gods' vehicle for ascending to the Eternal Abode. In ancient Egypt, in fact, the devout made pilgrimages to a special temple at Heliopolis to view and worship the ben-ben - a pyramidion- shaped object in which the gods had arrived on Earth in times immemorial. Egyptian pharaohs, on their deaths, were subjected to a ceremony of "opening of the mouth," in which they were supposed to be transported by a similar yad or a shem to the divine Abode of Eternal Life.

The persistence of biblical translators to employ "name" wherever they encounter shem has ignored a 'farsighted study published more than a century ago by G. M. Redslob (in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesell-schaft) in which he correctly pointed out that the term shem and the term shamaim ("heaven") stem from the root word shamah, meaning "that which is highward." When the Old Testament reports that King David "made a shem" to mark his victory over the Aramaeans, Redslob said, he did not "make a name" but set up a monument pointing skyward.

The realization that mu rr shem in many Mesopotamian texts should be read not as "name" but as "sky vehicle" opens the way to the understanding of the true meaning of many ancient tales, including the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The Book of Genesis, in its eleventh chapter, reports on the attempt by humans to raise up a shem. The biblical account is given in concise (and precise) language that bespeaks historical fact. Yet generations of scholars and translators have sought to impart to the tale only an allegorical meaning because - as they understood it - it was a tale concerning Mankind's desire to "make a name" for itself. Such an approach voided the tale of its factual meaning; our conclusion regarding the true meaning of shem makes the tale as meaningful as it must have been to the people of antiquity themselves.

The biblical tale of the Tower of Babel deals with events that followed the repopulation of Earth after the Deluge, when some of the people "journeyed from the east, and they found a plain in the land of Shin'ar, and they settled there." The Land of Shinar is, of course, the Land of Sumer, in the plain between the two rivers in southern Mesopotamia. And the people, already knowledgeable concerning the art of brickmaking and high-rise construction for an urban civilization, said: "Let us build us a city,

and a tower whose top shall reach the heavens; and let us make us a shem, lest we be scattered upon the face of the Earth." But this human scheme was not to God's liking.

And the Lord came down, to see the city and the tower which the Children of Adam had erected.

And he said: "Behold,

all are as one people with one language,

and this is just the beginning of their undertakings;

Now, anything which they shall scheme to do

shall no longer be impossible for them."

And the Lord said - to some colleagues whom the Old Testament does not name:

"Come, let us go down,

and there confound their language;

So that they may not understand each other's speech."

And the Lord scattered them from there

upon the face of the whole Earth,

and they ceased to build the city.

Therefore was its name called Babel,

for there did the Lord mingle the Earth's tongue.

The traditional translation of shem as "name" has kept the tale unintelligible for generations. Why did the ancient residents of Babel - Babylonia - exert themselves to "make a name," why was the "name" to be placed upon "a tower whose top shall reach the heavens," and how could the "making of a name" counteract the effects of Mankind's scattering upon Earth?

If all that those people wanted was to make (as scholars explain) a "reputation" for themselves, why did this attempt upset the Lord so much? Why was the raising of a "name" deemed by the Deity to be a feat after which "anything which they shall scheme to do shall no longer be impossible for them"? The traditional explanations certainly are insufficient to clarify why the Lord found it necessary to call upon other unnamed deities to go down and put an end to this human attempt.

We believe that the answers to all these questions become plausible - even obvious - once we read "skyborne vehicle" rather than "name" for the word shem, which is the term employed in the original Hebrew text of the Bible. The story would then deal with the concern of Mankind that, as the people spread upon Earth, they would lose contact with one another. So they decided to build a "skyborne vehicle" and to erect a launch tower for such a vehicle so that they, too, could - like the goddess Ishtar, for example - fly in a mu "over all the peopled lands."

A portion of the Babylonian text known as the "Epic of Creation" relates that the first "Gateway of the Gods" was constructed in

Babylon by the gods themselves. The Anunnaki, the rank-and-file gods, were ordered to

Construct the Gateway of the Gods. . . .

Let its brickwork be fashioned.

Its shem shall be in the designated place.

For two years, the Anunnaki toiled - "applied the implement . . . molded bricks" - until "they raised high the top of Eshagila" ("house of Great Gods") and "built the stage tower as high as High Heaven."

It was thus some cheek on the part of Mankind to establish its own launch tower on a site originally used for the purpose by the gods, for the name of the place - Babili - literally meant "Gateway of the Gods." Is there any other evidence to corroborate the biblical tale and our interpretation of it?

The Babylonian historian-priest Berossus, who in the third century B.C. compiled a history of Mankind, reported that the "first inhabitants of the land, glorying in their own strength . . . undertook to raise a tower whose 'top' should reach the sky." But the tower was overturned by the gods and heavy winds, "and the gods introduced a diversity of tongues among men, who till that time had all spoken the same language."

George Smith (The Chaldean Account of Genesis) found in the writings of the Greek historian Hestaeus a report that, in accordance with "olden traditions," the people who had escaped the Deluge came to Senaar in Babylonia but were driven away from there by a diversity of tongues. The historian Alexander Polyhistor (first century B.C.) wrote that all men formerly spoke the same language. Then some undertook to erect a large and lofty tower so that they might "climb up to heaven." But the chief god confounded their design by sending a whirlwind; each tribe was given a different language. "The city where it happened was Babylon."

There is little doubt by now that the biblical tales, as well as the reports of the Greek historians of 2,000 years ago and of their predecessor Berossus, all stem from earlier - Sumerian - origins. A. H. Sayce (The Religion of the Babylonians) reported reading on a fragmentary tablet in the British Museum "the Babylonian version of the building of the Tower of Babel." In all instances, the attempt to reach the heavens and the ensuing confusion of tongues are basic elements of the version. There are other Sumerian texts that record the deliberate confusion of Man's tongue by an irate god.

Mankind, presumably, did not possess at that time the technology required for such an aerospace project; the guidance and collaboration of a knowledgeable god was essential. Did such a god defy the others to help Mankind? A Sumerian seal depicts a confrontation between armed gods, apparently over the disputed construction by men of a stage tower.

A Sumerian stela now on view in Paris in the Louvre may well depict the incident reported in the Book of Genesis. It was put up

circa 2300 B.C. by Naram-Sin, king of Akkad, and scholars have assumed that it depicts the king victorious over his enemies.

But the large central figure is that of a deity and not of the human king, for the person is wearing a helmet adorned with horns -

the identifying mark exclusive to the gods. Furthermore, this central figure does not appear to be the leader of the smaller-sized

humans, but to be trampling upon them. These humans, in turn, do not seem to be engaged in any warlike activities, but to be

marching toward, and standing in adoration of, the same large conical object on which the deity's attention is also focused.

Armed with a bow and lance, the deity seems to view the object menacingly rather than with adoration.

The conical object is shown reaching toward three celestial bodies. If its size, shape, and purpose indicate that it was a shem,

then the scene depicted an angry and fully armed god trampling upon people celebrating the raising of a shem,

Both the Mesopotamia!! texts and the biblical account impart the same moral: The flying machines were meant for the gods and

not for Mankind.

Men - assert both Mesopotamian and biblical texts - could ascend to the Heavenly Abode only upon the express wish of the gods. And therein lie more tales of ascents to the heavens and even of space flights. The Old Testament records the ascent to the heavens of several mortal beings.

The first was Enoch, a pre-Diluvial patriarch whom God befriended and who "walked with the Lord." He was the seventh patriarch in the line of Adam and the greatgrandfather of Noah, hero of the Deluge. The fifth chapter of the Book of Genesis lists the genealogies of all these patriarchs and the ages at which they died - except for Enoch, "who was gone, for the Lord had taken him." By implication and tradition, it was heavenward, to escape mortality on Earth, that God took Enoch. The other mortal was the prophet Elijah, who was lifted off Earth and taken heavenward in a "whirlwind."

A little-known reference to a third mortal who visited the Divine Abode and was endowed there with great wisdom is provided in

the Old Testament, and it concerns the ruler of Tyre (a Phoenician center on the eastern Mediterranean coast). We read in

Chapter 28 of the Book of Ezekiel that the Lord commanded the prophet to remind the king how, perfect and wise, he was

enabled by the Deity to visit with the gods:

Thou art molded by a plan,

full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.

Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God;

every precious stone was thy thicket. ...

Thou art an anointed Cherub, protected;

and I have placed thee in the sacred mountain;

as a god werest thou, moving within the Fiery Stones.

Predicting that the ruler of Tyre should die a death "of the uncircumcised" by the hand of strangers even if he called out to them "I am a Deity," the Lord then told Ezekiel the reason: After the king was taken to the Divine Abode and given access to all wisdom and riches, his heart "grew haughty," he misused his wisdom, and he defiled the temples. Because thine heart is haughty, saying "A god am I;

in the Abode of the Deity I sat, in the midst of the Waters"; Though thou art a Man, not a god, thou set thy heart as that of a Deity.

The Sumerian texts also speak of several men who were privileged to ascend to the heavens. One was Adapa, the "model man" created by Ea. To him Ea "had given wisdom; eternal life he had not given him." As the years went by, Ea decided to avert Adapa's mortal end by providing him with a shem with which he was to reach the Heavenly Abode of Anu, there to partake of the Bread of Life and the Water of Life. When Adapa arrived at Anu's Celestial Abode, Anu demanded to know who had provided Adapa with a shem with which to reach the heavenly location.

There are several important clues to be found in both the biblical and the Mesopotamia!! tales of the rare ascents of mortals to the Abode of the Gods. Adapa, too, like the king of Tyre, was made of a perfect "mold." All had to reach and employ a shem - "fiery stone" - to reach the celestial "Eden." Some had gone up and returned to Earth; others, like the Mesopotamian hero of the Deluge, stayed there to enjoy the company of the gods. It was to find this Mesopotamian "Noah" and obtain from him the secret of the Tree of Life, that the Sumerian Gilgamesh set out.

The futile search by mortal Man for the Tree of Life is the subject of one of the longest, most powerful epic texts bequeathed to human culture by the Sumerian civilization. Named by modern scholars "The Epic of Gilgamesh," the moving tale concerns the ruler of Uruk who was born to a mortal father and a divine mother. As a result, Gilgamesh was considered to be "two-thirds of him god, one-third of him human," a circumstance that prompted him to seek escape from the death that was the fate of mortals. Tradition had informed him that one of his forefathers, Utnapishtirn - the hero of the Deluge - had escaped death, having been taken to the Heavenly Abode together with his spouse. Gilgamesh therefore decided to reach that place •and obtain from his ancestor the secret of eternal life.

What prompted him to go was what he took to be an invitation from Anu. The verses read like a description of the sighting of the falling back to Earth of a spent rocket. Gilgamesh described it thus to his mother, the goddess NIN.SUN: My mother,

During the night I felt joyful

and I walked about among my nobles.

The stars assembled in the Heavens.

The handiwork of Anu descended toward me.

I sought to lift it; it was too heavy.

I sought to move it; move it I could not!

The people of Uruk gathered about it,

While the nobles kissed its legs.

As I set my forehead, they gave me support.

I raised it. I brought it to thee.

The interpretation of the incident by Gilgarnesh's mother is mutilated in the text, and is thus unclear. But obviously Gilgamesh

was encouraged by the sighting of the falling object - "the handiwork of Anu" - to embark on his adventure. In the introduction to

the epic, the ancient reporter called Gilgamesh "the wise one, he who has experienced everything":

Secret things he has seen, what is hidden to Man he knows; He even brought tidings of a time before the Deluge.

He also took the distant journey, wearisome and under difficulties; He returned, and engraved all his toil upon a stone pillar.

The "distant journey" Gilgamesh undertook was, of course, his journey to the Abode of the Gods; he was accompanied by his

comrade Enkidu. Their target was the Land of Tilmun, for there Gilgamesh could raise a shem for himself. The current

translations employ the expected "name" where the Sumerian mu or the Akkadian shumu appear in the ancient texts; we shall,

however, employ shem instead so that the term's true meaning - a "skyborne vehicle" - will come through:

The ruler Gilgamesh

toward the Land of Tilmun set his mind.

He says to his companion Enkidu:

"O Enkidu . . .

I would enter the Land, set up my shem. In the places where the shem's were raised up I would raise my shem."

Unable to dissuade him, both the elders of Uruk and the gods whom Gilgamesh consulted advised him to first obtain the

consent and assistance of Utu/Shamash. "If thou wouldst enter the Land - inform Utu," they cautioned him. "The Land, it is in

Utu's charge," they stressed and re-stressed to him. Thus forewarned and advised, Gilgamesh appealed to Utu for permission:

Let me enter the Land,

Let me set up my shem.

In the places where the shem's are raised up,

let me raise my shem. ...

Bring me to the landing place at. ...

Establish over me thy protection!

An unfortunate break in the tablet leaves us ignorant regarding the location of "the landing place." But, wherever it was, Gilgamesh and his companion finally reached its outskirts. It was a "restricted zone," protected by awesome guards. Weary and sleepy, the two friends decided to rest overnight before continuing.

No sooner had sleep overcome them than something shook them up and awoke them. "Didst thou arouse me?" Gilgamesh

asked his comrade. "Am I awake?" he wondered, for he was witnessing unusual sights, so awesome that he wondered whether

he was awake or dreaming. He told Enkidu:

In my dream, my friend, the high ground toppled.

It laid me low, trapped my feet. ...

The glare was overpowering!

A man appeared;

the fairest in the land was he.

His grace . . .

From under the toppled ground he pulled me out. He gave me water to drink; my heart quieted.

Who was this man, "the fairest in the land," who pulled Gilgamesh from under the landslide, gave him water, "quieted his heart"?

And what was the "overpowering glare" that accompanied the unexplained landslide?

Unsure, troubled, Gilgamesh fell asleep again - but not for long.

In the middle of the watch his sleep was ended.

He started up, saying to his friend:

"My friend, didst thou call me?

Why am I awake?

Didst thou not touch me?

Why am I startled?

Did not some god go by?

Why is my flesh numb?"

Thus mysteriously reawakened, Gilgamesh wondered who had touched him. If it was not his comrade, was it "some god" who went by? Once more, Gilgamesh dozed off, only to be awakened a third time. He described the awesome occurrence to his friend.

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

One needs little imagination to see in these few verses an ancient account of the witnessing of the launching of a rocket ship. First the tremendous thud as the rocket engines ignited ("the heavens shrieked"), accompanied by a marked shaking of the ground ("the earth boomed"). Clouds of smoke and dust enveloped the launching site ("daylight failed, darkness came"). Then the brilliance of the ignited engines showed through ("lightning flashed"); as the rocket ship began to climb skyward, "a flame shot up." The cloud of dust and debris "swelled" in all directions; then, as it began to fall down, "it rained death!" Now the rocket ship was high in the sky, streaking heavenward ("the glow vanished; the fire went out"). The rocket ship was gone from sight; and the debris "that had fallen had turned to ashes."

Awed by what he saw, yet as determined as ever to reach his destination, Gilgamesh once more appealed to Shamash for protection and support. Overcoming a "monstrous guard," he reached the mountain of Mashu, where one could see Shamash "rise up to the vault of Heaven."

He was now near his first objective - the "place where the shem's are raised up." But the entrance to the site, apparently cut into the mountain, was guarded by fierce guards:

Their terror is awesome, their glance is death. Their shimmering spotlight sweeps the mountains. They watch over Shamash, As he ascends and descends.

A seal depiction showing Gilgamesh (second from left) and his companion Enkidu (far right) may well depict the intercession of a god with one of the robot-like guards who could sweep the area with spotlights and emit

death rays. The description brings to mind the statement in the Book of Genesis that God placed "the revolving sword" at the entrance to the Garden of Eden, to block its access to humans.

When Gilgamesh explained his partly divine origins, the purpose of his trip ("About death and life I wish to ask Utnapishtim") and the fact that he was on his way with the consent of Utu/Shamash, the guards allowed him to go ahead. Proceeding "along the route of Shamash," Gilgamesh found himself in utter darkness; "seeing nothing ahead or behind," he cried out in fright. Traveling for many beru (a unit of time, distance, or the arc of the heavens), he was still engulfed by darkness. Finally, "it had grown bright when twelve beru he attained."

The damaged and blurred text then has Gilgamesh arriving at a magnificent garden where the fruits and trees were carved of semi-precious stones. It was there that Utnapishtim resided. Posing his problem to his ancestor, Gilgamesh encountered a disappointing answer: Man, Utnapishtim said, cannot escape his mortal fate. However, he offered Gilgamesh a way to postpone death, revealing to him the location of the Plant of Youth - "Man becomes young in old age," it was called. Triumphant, Gilgamesh obtained the plant. But, as fate would have it, he foolishly lost it on his way back, and returned to Uruk empty- handed.

Putting aside the literary and philosophic values of the epic tale, the story of Gilgamesh interests us here primarily for its "aerospace" aspects. The shem that Gilgamesh required in order to reach the Abode of the Gods was undoubtedly a rocket ship, the launching of one of which he had witnessed as he neared the "landing place." The rockets, it would seem, were located inside a mountain, and the area was a well-guarded, restricted zone.

No pictorial depiction of what Gilgamesh saw has so far come to light. But a drawing found in the tomb of an Egyptian governor of a far land shows a rockethead above-ground in a place where date trees grow. The shaft of the rocket is clearly stored underground, in a man-made silo constructed of tubular segments and decorated with leopard skins.

Very much in the manner of modern draftsmen, the ancient artists showed a cross-section of the underground silo. We can see that the rocket contained a number of compartments. The lower one shows two men surrounded by curving tubes. Above them there are three circular panels. Comparing the size of the rockethead - the ben-ben - to the size of the two men inside the rocket, and the people above the ground, it is evident that the rockethead - equivalent to the Sumerian mu, the "celestial chamber" - could easily hold one or two operators or passengers.

TIL.MUN was the name of the land to which Gilgamesh set his course. The name literally meant "land of the missiles." It was the land where the shem's were raised, a land under the authority of Utu/Shamash, a place where on e could see this god "rise up to the vault of heavens."

And though the celestial counterpart of this member of the Pantheon of Twelve was the Sun, we suggest that his name did not mean "Sun" but was an epithet describing his functions and responsibilities. His Sumerian name Utu meant "he who brilliantly goes in." His derivate Akkadian name - Shem-Esh - was more explicit: Esh means "fire," and we now know what shem originally meant.

Utu/Shamash was "he of the fiery rocket ships." He was, we suggest, the commander of the spaceport of the gods. The commanding role of Utu/Shamash in matters of travel to the Heavenly Abode of the Gods, and the functions performed by his subordinates in this connection, are brought out in even greater detail in yet another Sumerian tale of a heavenward journey by a mortal.

The Sumerian king lists inform us that the thirteenth ruler of Kish was Etana, "the one who to Heaven ascended." This brief statement needed no elaboration, for the tale of the mortal king who journeyed up to the highest heavens was well known throughout the ancient Near East, and was the subject of numerous seal depictions.

Etana, we are told, was designated by the gods to bring Mankind the security and prosperity that Kingship - an organized civilization - was intended to provide. But Etana, it seems, could not father a son who would continue the dynasty. The only known remedy was a certain Plant of Birth that Etana could obtain only by fetching it down from the heavens. Like Gilgamesh at a later time, Etana turned to Shamash for permission and assistance. As the epic unfolds, it becomes clear that Etana was asking Shamash for a shem!

O Lord, may it issue from thy mouth! Grant thou me the Plant of Birth! Show me the Plant of Birth! Remove my handicap! Produce for me a shem!

Flattered by prayer and fattened by sacrificial sheep, Shamash agreed to grant Etana's request to provide him with a shem. But instead of speaking of a shem. Shamash told Etana that an "eagle" would take him to the desired heavenly place. Directing Etana to the pit where the Eagle had been placed, Shamash also informed the Eagle ahead of time of the intended mission. Exchanging cryptic messages with "Shamash, his lord," the Eagle was told: "A man I will send to thee; he will take thy hand . . . lead him hither . . . do whatever he says ... do as I say."

Arriving at the mountain indicated to him by Shamash, "Etana saw the pit," and, inside it, "there the Eagle was." "At the

command of valiant Shamash," the Eagle entered into communication with Etana. Once more, Etana explained his purpose and

destination; whereupon the Eagle began to instruct Etana on the procedure for "raising the Eagle from its pit." The first two

attempts failed, but on the third one the Eagle was properly raised. At daybreak, the Eagle announced to Etana: "My friend ... up

to the Heaven of Anu I will bear thee!" Instructing him how to hold on, the Eagle took off - and they were aloft, rising fast.

As though reported by a modem astronaut watching Earth recede as his rocket ship rises, the ancient storyteller describes how

Earth appeared smaller and smaller to Etana:

When he had borne him aloft one beru,

the Eagle says to him, to Etana:

"See, my friend, how the land appears!

Peer at the sea at the sides of the Mountain House:

The land has indeed become a mere hill,

The wide sea is just like a tub."

Higher and higher the Eagle rose; smaller and smaller Earth appeared. When he had borne him aloft a second beru, the Eagle said:

"My friend,

Cast a glance at how the land appears! The land has turned into a furrow. . . . The wide sea is just like a bread-basket." . . .

When he had borne him aloft a third beru,

The Eagle says to him, to Etana:

"See, my friend, how the land appears!

The land has turned into a gardener's ditch!"

And then, as they continued to ascend, Earth was suddenly out of sight. As I glanced around, the land had disappeared, and upon the wide sea mine eyes could not feast.

According to one version of this tale, the Eagle and Etana did reach the Heaven of Anu. But another version states that Etana got cold feet when he could no longer see Earth, and ordered the Eagle to reverse course and "plunge down" to Earth.

Once again, we find a biblical parallel to such an unusual report of seeing Earth from a great distance above it. Exalting the Lord Yahweh, the prophet Isaiah said of him: "It is he who sitteth upon the circle of the Earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as insects."

The tale of Etana informs us that, seeking a shem, Etana had to communicate with an Eagle inside a pit. A seal depiction shows a winged, tall structure (a launch tower?) above which an eagle flies off. What or who was the Eagle who took Etana to the distant heavens?

We cannot help associating the ancient text with the message beamed to Earth in July 1969 by Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft: "Houston! Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!"

He was reporting the first landing by Man on the Moon. "Tranquility Base" was the site of the landing; Eagle was the name of the lunar module that separated from the spacecraft and took the two astronauts inside it to the Moon (and then back to their mother craft). When the lunar module first separated to start its own flight in Moon orbit, the astronauts told Mission Control in Houston: "The Eagle has wings."

But "Eagle" could also denote the astronauts who manned the spacecraft. On the Apollo 11 mission, "Eagle" was also the symbol of the astronauts themselves, worn as an emblem on their suits. Just as in the Etana tale, they, too, were "Eagles" who could fly, speak, and communicate.

How would an ancient artist have depicted the pilots of the skyships of the gods? Would he have depicted them, by some chance, as eagles?

That is exactly what we have found. An Assyrian seal engraving from circa 1500 B.C. shows two "eagle-men" saluting a shem! Numerous depictions of such "Eagles" - the scholars call them "bird-men" - have been found. Most depictions show them flanking the Tree of Life, as if to stress that they, in their shem's, provided the link with the Heavenly Abode where the Bread of Life and Water of Life were to be found. Indeed, the usual depiction of the Eagles showed them holding in one hand the Fruit of Life and in the other the Water of Life, in full conformity with the tales of Adapa, Etana, and Gilgamesh.

The many depictions of the Eagles clearly show that they were not monstrous "bird-men," but anthropomorphic beings wearing costumes or uniforms that gave them the appearance of eagles.

The Hittite tale concerning the god Telepinu, who had vanished, reported that "the great gods and the lesser gods began to search for Telepinu" and "Shamash sent out a swift Eagle" to find him.

In the Book of Exodus, God is reported to have reminded the Children of Israel, "I have carried you upon the wings of Eagles, and have brought you unto me," confirming, it seems, that the way to reach the Divine Abode was upon the wings of Eagles - just as the tale of Etana relates. Numerous biblical verses, as a matter of fact, describe the Deity as a winged being. Boaz welcomed Ruth into the Judaean community as "coming under the wings" of the God Yahweh. The Psalmist sought security "under the shadow of thy wings" and described the descent of the Lord from the heavens. "He mounted a Cherub and went flying; He soared upon windy wings." Analyzing the similarities between the biblical El (employed as a title or generic term for the Deity) and the Canaanite El, S. Langdon (Semitic Mythology) showed that both were depicted, in text and on coins, as winged gods.

The Mesopotamian texts invariably present Utu/Shamash as the god in charge of the landing place of the shem's and of the Eagles. And like his subordinates he was sometimes shown wearing the full regalia of an Eagle's costume. In such a capacity, he could grant to kings the privilege of "flying on the wings of birds" and of "rising from the lower heavens to the lofty ones." And when he was launched aloft in a fiery rocket, it was he "who stretched over unknown distances, for countless hours." Appro­priately, "his net was the Earth, his trap the distant skies."

The Sumerian terminology for objects connected with celestial travel was not limited to the me's that the gods put on or the mus that were their cone-shaped "chariots."

Sumerian texts describing Sippar relate that it had a central part, hidden and protected by mighty walls. Within those walls stood the Temple of Utu, "a house which is like a house of the Heavens." In an inner courtyard of the temple, also protected by high walls, stood "erected upwards, the mighty APIN" ("an object that plows through," according to the translators). A drawing found at the temple mound of Anu at Uruk depicts such an object. We would have been hard put a few decades ago to guess what this object was; but it is a multistage space rocket at the top of which rests the conical mu, or command cabin. The evidence that the gods of Sumer possessed not just "flying chambers" for roaming Earth's skies but space-going multistage rocket ships also emerges from the examination of texts describing the sacred objects at Utu's temple at Sippar. We are told that witnesses at Burner's supreme court were required to take the oath in an inner courtyard, standing by a gateway through which they could see and face three "divine objects." These were named "the golden sphere" (the crew's cabin?), the GIR, and the alikmahrati - a term that literally meant "advancer that makes vessel go," or what we would call a motor, an engine. What emerges here is a reference to a three-part rocket ship, with the cabin or command module at the top end, the engines at the bottom end, and the gir in the center. The latter is a term that has been used extensively in connection with space flight. The guards Gilgamesh encountered at the entrance to the landing place of Shamash were called gir-men. In the temple of Ninurta, the sacred or most guarded inner area was called the GlR.SU ("where the gir is sprung up").

Gir, it is generally acknowledged, was a term used to describe a sharp-edged object. A close look at the pictorial sign for gir provides a better understanding of the term's "divine" nature; for what we see is a long, arrow-shaped object, divided into several parts or compartments:

That the mu could hover in Earth's skies on its own, or fly over Earth's lands when attached to a gir, or become the command

module atop a multistage apin is testimony to the engineering ingenuity of the gods of Sumer, the Gods of Heaven and Earth.

A review of the Sumerian pictographs and ideograms leaves no doubt that whoever drew those signs was familiar with the

shapes and purposes of rockets with tails of billowing fire, missile-like vehicles, and celestial "cabins."

KA.GIR ("rocket's mouth") showed a fin-equipped gir, or rocket, inside a shaftlike underground enclosure.

ESH ("Divine Abode"), the chamber or command module of a space vehicle.

ZIK ("ascend"), a command module taking off?

Finally, let us look at the pictographic sign for "gods" in Sumerian. The term was a two-syllable word: DIN.GIR. We have already seen what the symbol for GIR was: a two-stage rocket with fins. DIN, the first syllable, meant "righteous," "pure," "bright." Put together, then, DIN.GIR as "gods" or "divine beings" conveyed the meaning "the righteous ones of the bright, pointed objects" or, more explicitly, "the pure ones of the blazing rockets."

The pictographic sign can easily bringing to mind a powerful jet engine spewing flames from the end part, and a front part that is puzzlingly open. But the puzzle turns to amazement if we "spell" dingir by combining the two pictographs. The tail of the finlike gir fits perfectly into the opening in the front of din!

The astounding result is a picture of a rocket-propelled spaceship, with a landing craft docked into it perfectly - just as the lunar module was docked with the Apollo 11 spaceship! It is indeed a three-stage vehicle, with each part fitting neatly into the other: the thrust portion containing the engines, the midsection containing supplies and equipment, and the cylindrical "sky chamber" housing the people named dingir - the gods of antiquity, the astronauts of millennia ago.

Can there be any doubt that the ancient peoples, in calling their deities "Gods of Heaven and Earth," meant literally that they were people from elsewhere who had come to Earth from the heavens?

The evidence thus far submitted regarding the ancient gods and their vehicles should leave no further doubt that they were once indeed living beings of flesh and blood, people who literally came down to Earth from the heavens.

Even the ancient compilers of the Old Testament - who dedicated the Bible to a single God - found it necessary to acknowledge the presence upon Earth in early times of such divine beings.

The enigmatic section - a horror of translators and theologians alike - forms the beginning of Chapter 6 of Genesis. It is interposed between the review of the spread of Mankind through the generations following Adam and the story of the divine disenchantment with Mankind that preceded the Deluge. It states - unequivocally - that, at that time, the sons of the gods

saw the daughters of man, that they were good; and they took them for wives, of all which they chose.

The implications of these verses, and the parallels to the Sumerian tales of gods and their sons and grandsons, and of semidivine offspring resulting from cohabitation between gods and mortals, mount further as we continue to read the biblical verses:

The Nefilim were upon the Earth, in those days and thereafter too, when the sons of the gods cohabited with the daughters of the Adam, and they bore children unto them. They were the mighty ones of Eternity - The People of the shem.

The above is not a traditional translation. For a long time, the expression "The Nefilim were upon the Earth" has been translated as "There were giants upon the earth"; but recent translators, recognizing the error, have simply resorted to leaving the Hebrew term Nefilim intact in the translation. The verse "The people of the shem," as one could expect, has been taken to mean "the people who have a name," and, thus, "the people of renown." But as we have already established, the term shem must be taken in its original meaning - a rocket, a rocket ship.

What, then, does the term Nefilim mean? Stemming from the Semitic root NFL ("to be cast down"), it means exactly what it says: It means those who were cast down upon Earth!

Contemporary theologians and biblical scholars have tended to avoid the troublesome verses, either by explaining them away allegorically or simply by ignoring them altogether. But Jewish writings of the time of the Second Temple did recognize in these verses the echoes of ancient traditions of "fallen angels." Some of the early scholarly works even mentioned the names of these divine beings "who fell from Heaven and were on Earth in those days": Sham-Hazzai ("shem's lookout"), Uzza ("mighty") and Uzi-El ("God's might").

Malbim, a noted Jewish biblical commentator of the nineteenth century, recognized these ancient roots and explained that "in ancient times the rulers of countries were the sons of the deities who arrived upon the Earth from the Heavens, and ruled the Earth, and married wives from among the daughters of Man; and their offspring included heroes and mighty ones, princes and sovereigns." These stories, Malbim said, were of the pagan gods, "sons of the deities, who in earliest times fell down from the Heavens upon the Earth . . . that is why they called themselves 'Nefilim,' i.e. Those Who Fell Down."

Irrespective of the theological implications, the literal and original meaning of the verses cannot be escaped: The sons of the gods who came to Earth from the heavens were the Nefilim.

And the Nefilim were the People of the Shem - the People of the Rocket Ships. Henceforward, we shall call them by their biblical name.

THE SUGGESTION that Earth was visited by intelligent beings from elsewhere postulates the existence of another celestial body upon which intelligent beings established a civilization more advanced than ours.

"Speculation regarding the possibility of Earth visitation by intelligent beings from elsewhere has centered, in the past, on such planets as Mars or Venus as their place of origin. However, now that it is virtually certain that these two planetary neighbors of Earth have neither intelligent life nor an advanced civilization upon them, those who believe in such Earth visitations look to other galaxies and to distant stars as the home of such extraterrestrial astronauts.

The advantage of such suggestions is that while they cannot be proved, they cannot be disproved, either. The disadvantage is that these suggested "homes" are fantastically distant from Earth, requiring years upon years of travel at the speed of light. The authors of such suggestions therefore postulate one-way trips to Earth: a team of astronauts on a no-return mission, or perhaps on a spaceship lost and out of control, crash-landing upon Earth. This is definitely not the Sumerian notion of the Heavenly Abode of the Gods.

The Sumerians accepted the existence of such a "Heavenly Abode," a "pure place," a "primeval abode." While Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag went to Earth and made their home upon it, their father Anu remained in the Heavenly Abode as its ruler. Not only occasional references in various texts but also detailed "god lists" actually named twenty-one divine couples of the dynasty that preceded Anu on the throne of the "pure place."

Anu himself reigned over a court of great splendor and extent. As Gilgamesh reported (and the Book of Ezekiel confirmed), it was a place with an artificial garden sculpted wholly of semiprecious stones. There Anu resided with his official consort Antu and six concubines, eighty offspring (of which fourteen were by Antu), one Prime Minister, three Commanders in charge of the Mil's (rocket ships), two Commanders of the Weapons, two Great Masters of Written Knowledge, one Minister of the Purse, two Chief Justices, two "who with sound impress," and two Chief Scribes, with five Assistant Scribes.

Mesopotamian texts refer frequently to the magnificence of the abode of Anu and the gods and weapons that guarded its

gateway. The tale of Adapa reports that the god Enki, having provided Adapa with a shem,

Made him take the road to Heaven,

and to Heaven he went up.

When he had ascended to Heaven,

he approached the Gate of Anu.

Tammuz and Gizzida were standing guard

at the Gate of Anu.

Guarded by the divine weapons SHAR.UR ("royal hunter") and SHAR.GAZ ("royal killer"), the throne room of Anu was the place

of the Assembly of the Gods. On such occasions a strict protocol governed the order of entering and seating:

Enlil enters the throne room of Ami,

seats himself at the place of the right tiara,

on the right of Anu.

Ea enters [the throne room of Anu],

seats himself at the place of the sacred tiara,

on the left of Anu.

The Gods of Heaven and Earth of the ancient Near East not only originated in the heavens but could also return to the Heavenly Abode. Anu occasionally came down to Earth on state visits; Ishtar went up to Anu at least twice. Enlil's center in Nippur was equipped as a "bond heaven-earth." Shamash was in charge of the Eagles and the launching place of the rocket ships. Gilgamesh went up to the Place of Eternity and returned to Uruk; Adapa, too, made the trip and came back to tell about it; so did the biblical king of Tyre.

A number of Mesopotamian texts deal with the Apkallu, an Akkadian term stemming from the Sumerian AB.GAL ("great one who

leads," or "master who points the way"). A study by Gustav Guterbock (Die Historische Tradition und Ihre Literarische

Gestaltung bei Babylonier and Hethiten) ascertained that these were the "bird-men" depicted as the "Eagles" that we have

already shown. The texts that spoke of their feats said of one that he "brought down Inanna from Heaven, to the E-Anna temple

made her descend." This and other references indicate that these Apkallu were the pilots of the spaceships of the Nefilim.

Two-way travel was not only possible but actually contemplated to begin with, for we are told that, having decided to establish in

Sumer the Gateway of the Gods (Babili), the leader of the gods explained:

When to the Primeval Source

for assembly you shall ascend,

There shall be a restplace for the night

to receive you all.

When from the Heavens

for assembly you shall descend,

There shall be a restplace for the night

to receive you all.

Realizing that such two-way travel between Earth and the Heavenly Abode was both contemplated and practiced, the people of Sumer did not exile their gods to distant galaxies. The Abode of the Gods, their legacy discloses, was within our own solar system.

We have seen Shamash in his official uniform as Commander of the Eagles. On each of his wrists he wears a watchlike object held in place by metal clasps. Other depictions of the Eagles reveal that all the important ones wore such objects. Whether they were merely decorative or served a useful purpose, we do not know. But all scholars are agreed that the objects represented rosettes - a circular cluster of "petals" radiating from a central point.

The rosette was the most common decorative temple symbol throughout the ancient lands, prevalent in Mesopotamia, western Asia, Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete^A and Greece. It is the accepted view that the rosette as a temple symbol was an outgrowth or stylization of a celestial phenomenon - a sun encircled by its satellites. That the ancient astronauts wore this symbol on their wrists adds credence to this view.

An Assyrian depiction of the Gateway of Ami in the Heavenly Abode confirms ancient familiarity with a celestial system such as our Sun and its planets. The gateway is flanked by two Eagles - indicating that their services are needed to reach the Heavenly Abode. The Winged Globe - the supreme divine emblem - marks the gateway. It is flanked by the celestial symbols of the number seven and the crescent, representing (we believe) Ami flanked by Enlil and Enki.

Where are the celestial bodies represented by these symbols? Where is the Heavenly Abode? The ancient artist answers with yet another depiction, that of a large celestial deity extending its rays to eleven smaller celestial bodies encircling it. It is a representation of a Sun, orbited by eleven planets.

That this was not an isolated representation can be shown by reproducing other depictions on cylinder seals, like this one from the Berlin Museum of the Ancient Near East.

When the central god or celestial body in the Berlin seal is enlarged, we can see that it depicts a large, ray-emitting star surrounded by eleven heavenly bodies-planets. These, in turn, rest on a chain of twenty-four smaller globes. Is it only a coincidence that the number of all the "moons," or satellites, of the planets in our solar system (astronomers exclude those of ten miles 01 less in diameter) is also exactly twenty-four?

Now there is, of course, a catch to claiming that these depictions - of a Sun and eleven planets - represent our solar system, for

our scholars tell us that the planetary system of which Earth is a part comprises the Sun, Earth and Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. This adds up to the Sun and only ten planets (when the Moon is counted as one).

But that is not what the Sumerians said. They claimed that our system was made up of the Sun and eleven planets (counting the Moon), and held steadfastly to the opinion that, in addition to the planets known to us today, there has been a twelfth member of the solar system - the home planet of the Nefilim. We shall call it the Twelfth Planet.

Before we check the accuracy of the Sumerian information, let us review the history of our own knowledge of Earth and the heavens around it.

We know today that beyond the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn - at distances insignificant in terms of the universe, but immense in human terms - two more major planets (Uranus and Neptune) and a third, small one (Pluto) belong to our solar system. But such knowledge is quite recent. Uranus was discovered, through the use of improved telescopes, in 1781. After observing it for some fifty years, some astronomers reached the conclusion that its orbit revealed the influence of yet another planet. Guided by such mathematical calculations, the missing planet - named Neptune - was pinpointed by astronomers in 1846. Then, by the end of the nineteenth century, it became evident that Neptune itself was being subjected to unknown gravitational pull. Was there yet another planet in our solar system? The puzzle was solved in 1930 with the observation and location of Pluto.

Up to 1780, then, and for centuries before that, people believed there were seven members of our solar system: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Earth was not counted as a planet because it was believed that these other celestial bodies circled Earth - the most important celestial body created by God, with God's most important creation, Man, upon it. Our textbooks generally credit Nicolaus Copernicus with the discovery that Earth is only one of several planets in a heliocentric (Sun-centered) system. Fearing the wrath of the Christian church for challenging Earth's central position, Copernicus published his study (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) only when on his deathbed, in 1543.

Spurred to reexamine centuries-old astronomical concepts primarily by the navigational needs of the Age of Discovery, and by the findings by Columbus (1492), Magellan (1520), and others that Earth was not flat but spherical, Copernicus depended on mathematical calculations and searched for the answers in ancient writings. One of the few churchmen. who supported Copernicus, Cardinal Schonberg, wrote to him in 1536: "I have learned that you know not only the groundwork of the ancient mathematical doctrines, but that you have created a new theory . . . according to which the Earth is in motion and it is the Sun which occupies the fundamental and therefore the cardinal position."

The concepts then held were based on Greek and Roman traditions that Earth, which was flat, was "vaulted over" by the distant heavens, in which the stars were fixed. Against the star-studded heavens the planets (from the Greek word for "wanderer") moved around Earth. There were thus seven celestial bodies, from which the seven days of the week and their names originated: the Sun (Sunday), Moon (Monday), Mars (mardi), Mercury (mercredi), Jupiter (jeudi), Venus (vendredi), Saturn (Saturday).

These astronomical notions stemmed from the works and codifications of Ptolemy, an astronomer in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century A.D. His definite findings were that the Sun, Moon, and five planets moved in circles around Earth. Ptolemaic astronomy predominated for more than 1,300 years - until Copernicus put the Sun in the center. While some have called Copernicus the "Father of Modern Astronomy," others view him more as a researcher and reconstructor of earlier ideas. The fact is that he pored over the writings of Greek astronomers who preceded Ptolemy, such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus of Samos. The latter suggested in the third century B.C. that the motions of the heavenly bodies could better be explained if the Sun - and not Earth - were assumed to be in the center. In fact, 2,000 years before Copernicus, Greek astronomers listed the planets in their correct order from the Sun, acknowledging thereby that the Sun, not Earth, was the solar system's focal point.

The heliocentric concept was only rediscovered by Copernicus; and the interesting fact is that astronomers knew more in 500 B.C. than in A.D. 500 and 1500.

Indeed, scholars are now hard put to explain why first the later Greeks and then the Romans assumed that Earth was flat, rising above a layer of murky waters below which there lay Hades or "Hell," when some of the evidence left by Greek astronomers from earlier times indicates that they knew otherwise.

Hipparchus, who lived in Asia Minor in the second century B.C., discussed "the displacement of the sostitial and equinoctial sign," the phenomenon now called precession of the equinoxes. But the phenomenon can be explained only in terms of a "spherical astronomy," whereby Earth is surrounded by the other celestial bodies as a sphere within a spherical universe. Did Hipparchus, then, know that Earth was a globe, and did he make his calculations in terms of a spherical astronomy? Equally important is yet another question. The phenomenon of the precession could be observed by

relating the arrival of spring to the Sun's position (as seen from Earth) in a given zodiacal constellation. But the shift from one zodiacal house to another requires 2,160 years. Hipparchus certainly could not have lived long enough to make that astronomical observation. Where, then, did he obtain his information?

Eudoxus of Cnidus, another Greek mathematician and astronomer who lived in Asia Minor two centuries before Hipparchus, designed a celestial sphere, a copy of which was set up in Rome as a statue of Atlas supporting the world. The designs on the sphere represent the zodiacal constellations. But if Eudoxus conceived the heavens as a sphere, where in relation to the heavens was Earth? Did he think that the celestial globe rested on a flat Earth - a most awkward arrangement - or did he know of a spherical Earth, enveloped by a celestial sphere?

The works of Eudoxus, lost in their originals, have come down to us thanks to the poems of Aratus, who in the third century B.C. "translated" the facts put forth by the astronomer into poetic language. In this poem (which must have been familiar to St. Paul, who quoted from it) the constellations are described in great detail, "drawn all around"; and their grouping and naming is ascribed to a very remote prior age. "Some men of yore a nomenclature thought of and devised, and appropriate forms found." Who were the "men of yore" to whom Eudoxus attributed the designation of the constellations? Based on certain clues in the poem, modern astronomers believe that the Greek verses describe the heavens as they were observed in Mesopotamia circa 2200 B.C.

The fact that both Hipparchus and Eudoxus lived in Asia Minor raises the probability that they drew their knowledge from Hittite sources. Perhaps they even visited the Hittite capital and viewed the divine procession carved on the rocks there; for among the marching gods two bull-men hold up a globe - a sight that might well have inspired Eudoxus to sculpt Atlas and the celestial sphere.

Were the earlier Greek astronomers, living in Asia Minor, better informed than their successors because they could draw on Mesopotamian sources?

Hipparchus, in fact, confirmed in his writings that his studies were based on knowledge accumulated and verified over many millennia. He named as his mentors "Babylonian astronomers of Erech, Borsippa, and Babylon." Geminus of Rhodes named the "Chaldeans" (the ancient Babylonians) as the discoverers of the exact motions of the Moon. The historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C., confirmed the exactness of Mesopotamian " astronomy; he stated that "the Chaldeans named the planets ... in the center of their system was the Sun, the greatest light, of which the planets were 'offspring,' reflecting the Sun's position and shine."

The acknowledged source of Greek astronomical knowledge was, then, Chaldea; invariably, those earlier Chaldeans possessed greater and more accurate knowledge than the peoples that followed them. For generations, throughout the ancient world, the name "Chaldean" was synonymous with "stargazers," astronomers.

Abraham, who came out of "Ur of the Chaldeans," was told by God to gaze at the stars when the .future Hebrew generations were discussed. Indeed, the Old Testament was replete with astronomical information. Joseph compared himself and his brothers to twelve celestial bodies, and the patriarch Jacob blessed his twelve descendants by associating them with the twelve constellations of the zodiac. The Psalms and the Book of Job refer repeatedly to celestial phenomena, the zodiacal constellations, and other star groups (such as the Pleiades). Knowledge of the zodiac, the scientific division of the heavens, and other astronomical information was thus prevalent in the ancient Near East well before the days of ancient Greece. The scope of Mesopotamian astronomy on which the early Greek astronomers drew must have been vast, for even what archaeologists have found amounts to an avalanche of texts, inscriptions, seal impressions, reliefs, drawings, lists of celestial bodies, omens, calendars, tables of rising and setting times of the Sun and the planets, forecasts of eclipses. Many such later texts were, to be sure, more astrological than astronomical in nature. The heavens and the movements of the heavenly bodies appeared to be a prime preoccupation of mighty kings, temple priests, and the people of the land in general; the purpose of the stargazing seemed to be to find in the heavens an answer to the course of affairs on Earth: war, peace, abundance, famine.

Compiling and analyzing hundreds of texts from the first millennium B.C., R. C. Thompson (The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon) was able to show that these stargazers were concerned with the fortunes of the land, its people, and its ruler from a national point of view, and not with individual fortunes (as present-day "horoscopic" astrology is):

When the Moon in its calculated time is not seen, there will be an invasion of a mighty city. When a comet reaches the path of the Sun, field-flow will be diminished; an uproar will happen twice. When Jupiter goes with Venus, the prayers of the land will reach the heart of the gods. If the Sun stands in the station of the Moon, the king of the land will be secure on the throne.

Even this astrology required comprehensive and accurate astronomical knowledge, without which no omens were possible. The Mesopotamians, possessing such knowledge, distinguished between the "fixed" stars and the planets that "wandered about" and knew that the Sun and the Moon were neither fixed stars nor ordinary planets. They were familiar with comets, meteors, and other celestial phenomena, and could calculate the relationships between the movements of the Sun, Moon, and Earth, and predict eclipses. They followed the motions of the celestial bodies and related them to Earth's orbit and rotation through the heliacal system - the system still in use today, which measures the rising and setting of stars and planets in Earth's skies relative to the Sun.

To keep track of the movements of the celestial bodies and their positions in the heavens relative to Earth and to one another, the Babylonians and Assyrians kept accurate ephemerides. These were tables that listed and predicted the future positions of the celestial bodies. Professor George Sarton (Chaldean Astronomy of the Last Three Centuries B.C.) found that they were computed by two methods: a later one used in Babylon, and an older one from Uruk. His unexpected finding was that the older, Uruk method was more sophisticated and more accurate than the later system. He accounted for this surprising situation by concluding that the erroneous astronomical notions of the Greeks and Romans resulted from a shift to a philosophy that explained the world in geometric terms, while the astronomer-priests of Chaldea followed the prescribed formulas and traditions of Sumer.

The unearthing of the Mesopotamian civilizations in the past one hundred years leaves no doubt that in the field of astronomy, as in so many others, the roots of our knowledge lie deep in Mesopotamia. In this field, too, we draw upon and continue the heritage of Sumer.

Sarton's conclusions have been reinforced by very comprehensive studies by Professor O. Neugebauer (Astronomical Cuneiform Texts), who was astonished to find that the ephemerides, precise as they were, were not based on observations by the Babylonian astronomers who prepared them. Instead, they were calculated "from some fixed arithmetical schemes . . . which were given and were not to be interfered with" by the astronomers who used them.

Such automatic adherence to "arithmetical schemes" was achieved with the aid of "procedure texts" that accompanied the ephemerides, which "gave the rules for computing ephemerides step by step" according to some "strict mathematical theory." Neugebauer concluded that the Babylonian astronomers were ignorant of the theories on which the ephemerides and their mathematical calculations were based. He also admitted that "the empirical and theoretical foundation" of these accurate tables, to a large extent, escapes modern scholars as well. Yet he is convinced that ancient astronomical theories "must have existed, because it is impossible to devise computational schemes of high complication without a very elaborate plan."

Professor Alfred Jeremias (Handbuch der Altorienta-lischen Geistkultur) concluded that the Mesopotamian astronomers were acquainted with the phenomenon of retrograde, the apparent erratic and snakelike course of the planets as seen from Earth, caused by the fact that Earth orbits the Sun either faster or slower than the other planets. The significance of such knowledge lies not only in the fact that retrograde is a phenomenon related to orbits around the Sun, but also in the fact that very long periods of observation were required to grasp and track it.

Where were these complicated theories developed, and who made the observations without which they could not have been developed? Neugebauer pointed out that "in the procedure texts, we meet a great number of technical terms of wholly unknown reading, if not unknown meaning." Someone, much earlier than the Babylonians, possessed astronomical and mathematical knowledge far superior to that of later culture in Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

The Babylonians and Assyrians devoted a substantial part of their astronomical efforts to keeping an accurate calendar. Like the Jewish calendar to this very day, it was a solar-lunar calendar, correlating ("intercalating") the solar year of just over 365 days with a lunar month of just under 30 days. While a calendar was important for business and other mundane needs, its accuracy was required primarily to determine the precise day and moment of the New Year, and other festivals and worship of the gods. To measure and correlate the intricate movements of Sun, Earth, Moon, and planets, the Mesopotamian astronomer-priests relied on a complex spherical astronomy. Earth was taken to be a sphere with an equator and poles; the heavens, too, were divided by imaginary equatorial and polar lines. The passage of celestial bodies was related to the ecliptic, the projection of the plane of Earth's orbit around the Sun upon the celestial sphere; the equinoxes (the points and the times at which the Sun in its apparent annual movement north and south crosses the celestial equator); and the solstices (the time when the Sun during its apparent annual movement along the ecliptic is at its greatest declination north or south). All these are astronomical concepts used to this very day.

But the Babylonians and Assyrians did not invent the calendar or the ingenious methods for its calculation. Their calendars - as well as our own - originated in Sumer. There the scholars have found a calendar, in use from the very earliest times, that is the basis for all later calendars. The principal calendar and model was the calendar of Nippur, the seat and center of Enlil. Our present-day one is modeled on that Nippurian calendar.

The Sumerians considered the New Year to begin at the exact moment when the Sun crossed the spring equinox. Professor Stephen Langdon (Tablets from the Archives of Drehem) found that records left by Dungi, a ruler of Ur circa 2400 B.C., show that the Nippurian calendar selected a certain celestial body by whose setting against the sunset it was possible to determine the exact moment of the New Year's arrival. This, he concluded, was done "perhaps 2,000 years before the era of Dungi" - that is, circa 4400 B.C.!

Can it really be that the Sumerians, without actual instruments, nevertheless had the sophisticated astronomical and mathematical know-how required by a spherical astronomy and geometry? Indeed they had, as their language shows. They had a term - DUB - that meant (in astronomy) the 360-degree "circumference of the world," in relation to which they spoke of the curvature or arc of the heavens. For their astronomical and mathematical calculations they drew the AN.UR - an imagined "heavenly horizon" against which they could measure the rising and setting of celestial bodies. Perpendicular to this horizon they extended an imagined vertical line, the NU.BU.SAR.DA; with its aid they obtained the zenith point and called it the AN.PA. They traced the lines we call meridians, and called them "the graded yokes"; latitude lines were called "middle lines of heaven." The latitude line marking the summer solstice, for example, was called AN.BIL ("fiery point of the heavens"). The Akkadian, Hurrian, Hittite, and other literary masterpieces of the ancient Near East, being translations or versions of Sumerian originals, were replete with Sumerian loanwords pertaining to celestial bodies and phenomena. Babylonian and Assyrian scholars who drew up star lists or wrote down calculations of planetary movements often noted the Sumerian originals on the tablets that they were copying or translating. The 25,000 texts devoted to astronomy and astrology said to have been in­cluded in the Nineveh library of Ashurbanipal frequently bore acknowledgments of Sumerian origins.

A major astronomical series that the Babylonians called "The Day of the Lord" was declared by its scribes to have been copied from a Sumerian tablet written in the time of Sargon of Akkad - in the third millennium B.C. A tablet dated to the third dynasty of Ur, also in the third millennium B.C., describes and lists a series of celestial bodies so clearly that modern scholars had little difficulty in recognizing the text as a classification of constellations, among them Ursa Major, Draco, Lyra, Cygnus and Cepheus, and Triangulum in the northern skies; Orion, Canis Major, Hydra, Corvus, and Centaurus in the southern skies; and the familiar zodiacal constellations in the central celestial band.

In ancient Mesopotamia the secrets of celestial knowledge were guarded, studied, and transmitted by astronomer-priests. It was thus perhaps fitting that three scholars who are credited with giving back to us this lost "Chaldean" science were Jesuit priests: Joseph Epping, Johann Strassman, and Franz X. Kugler. Kugler, in a masterwork (Stem-kunde und Sterndienst in Babel), analyzed, deciphered, sorted out, and explained a vast number of texts and lists. In one instance, by mathematically "turning the skies backwards," he was able to show that a list of thirty-three celestial bodies in the Babylonian skies of 1800 B.C. was neatly arranged according to present-day groupings!

After much work deciding which are true groups and which are merely subgroups, the world's astronomical community agreed (in 1925) to divide the heavens as seen from Earth into three regions - northern, central, and southern - and group the stars therein into eighty-eight constellations. As it turned out, there was nothing new in this arrangement, for the Sumerians were the first to divide the heavens into three bands or "ways" - the northern "way" was named after Enlil, the southern after Ea, and the central band was the "Way of Ami" - and to assign to them various constellations. The present-day central band, the band of the twelve constellations of the zodiac, corresponds exactly to the Way of Anu, in which the Sumerians grouped the stars into twelve houses.

In antiquity, as today, the phenomenon was related to the concept of the zodiac. The great circle of Earth around the Sun was divided into twelve equal parts, of thirty degrees each. The stars seen in each of these segments, or "houses," were grouped together into a constellation, each of which was then named according to the shape the stars of the group seemed to form. Because the constellations and their subdivisions, and \ even individual stars within the constellations, have reached Western civilization with names and descriptions borrowed heavily from Greek mythology, the Western world tended for nearly two

millennia to credit the Greeks with this achievement. But it is now apparent that the early Greek astronomers merely adopted into their language and mythology a ready-made astronomy obtained from the Sumerians. We have already noted how Hipparchus, Eudoxus, and others obtained their knowledge. Even Thales, the earliest Greek astronomer of consequence, who is said to have predicted the total solar eclipse of May 28, 585 B.C., which stopped the war between the Lydians and the Medians, allowed that the sources of his knowledge were of pre-Semitic Mesopotamian origins, namely - Sumerian. We have acquired the name "zodiac" from the Greek zodiakos kyklos ("animal circle") because the layout of the star groups was likened to the shape of a lion, fishes, and so on. But those imaginary shapes and names were actually originated by the Sumerians, who called the twelve zodiacal constellations UL.HE ("shiny herd"):

GU.AN.NA ("heavenly bull"), Taurus.

MASH.TAB.BA ("twins"), our Gemini.

DUB ("pincers," "tongs"), the Crab or Cancer.

UR.GULA ("lion"), which we call Leo.

AB.SIN ("her father was Sin"), the Maiden, Virgo.

ZI.BA.AN.NA ("heavenly fate"), the scales of Libra.

GIR.TAB ("which claws and cuts"), Scorpio.

PA.BIL ("defender"), the Archer, Sagittarius.

SUHUR.MASH ("goat-fish"), Capricorn.

GU ('lord of the waters"), the Water Bearer, Aquarius.

SIM.MAH ("fishes"), Pisces.

KU.MAL ("field dweller"), the Ram, Aries.

The pictorial representations or signs of the zodiac, like their names, have remained virtually intact since their introduction in Sumer.

Until the introduction of the telescope, European astronomers accepted the Ptolemaic recognition of only nineteen constellations in the northern skies. By 1925, when the current classification was agreed upon, twenty-eight constellations had been recognized in what the Sumerians called the Way of Enlil. We should no longer be surprised to find out that, unlike Ptolemy, the earlier Sumerians recognized, identified, grouped, named, and listed all the constellations of the northern skies! Of the celestial bodies in the Way of Enlil, twelve were deemed to be of Enlil - paralleling the twelve zodiacal celestial bodies in the Way of Anu. Likewise, in the southern portion of the skies - the Way of Ea - twelve constellations were listed, not merely as present in the southern skies, but as of the god Ea. In addition to these twelve

principal constellations of Ea, several others were listed for the southern skies - though not so many as are recognized today. The Way of Ea posed serious problems to the Assyriologists who undertook the immense task of unraveling the ancient astronomical knowledge not only in terms of modern knowledge but also based on what the skies should have looked like centuries and millennia ago. Observing the southern skies from Ur or Babylon, the Mesopotamian astronomers could see only a little more than halfway into the southern skies; the rest was already below the horizon. Yet, if correctly identified, some of the constellations of the Way of Ea lay well beyond the horizon. But there was an even greater problem: If, as the scholars assumed, the Mesopotamians believed (as the Greeks did in later times) that Earth was a mass of dry land resting upon the chaotic darkness of a netherworld (the Greek Hades) - a flat disc over which the heavens arched in a semicircle - then there should have been no southern skies at all!

Restricted by the assumption that the Mesopotamians were beholden to a flat-Earth concept, modern scholars could not permit their conclusions to take them too much below the equatorial line dividing north and south. The evidence, however, shows that the three Sumerian "ways" encompassed the complete skies of a global, not flat, Earth.

In 1900 T. G. Pinches reported to the Royal Asiatic Society that he was able to reassemble and reconstruct a complete Mesopotamian astrolabe (literally, "taker of stars"). He showed it to be a circular disc, divided like a pie into twelve segments and three concentric rings, resulting in a field of thirty-six portions. The whole design had the appearance of a rosette of twelve "leaves," each of which had the name of a month written in it. Pinches marked them I to XII for convenience, starting with Nisannu, the first month of the Mesopotamian calendar.

Each of the thirty-six portions also contained a name with a small circle below it, signifying that it was the name of a celestial body. The names have since been found in many texts and "star lists" and are undoubtedly the names of constellations, stars, or planets.

Each of the thirty-six segments also had a number written below the name of the celestial body. In the innermost ring, the numbers ranged from 30 to 60; in the central ring, from 60 (written as "1") to 120 (this "2" in the sexagesimal system meant 2 X 60 = 120); and in the outermost ring, from 120 to 240. What did these numbers represent?

Writing nearly fifty years after the presentation by Pinches, the astronomer and Assyriologist O. Neugebauer (A History of Ancient Astronomy: Problems and Methods) could only say that "the whole text constitutes some kind of schematic celestial map ... in each of the thirty-six fields we find the name of a constellation and simple numbers whose significance is not yet clear." A leading expert on the subject, B. L. Van der Waerden (Babylonian Astronomy: The Thirty-Six Stars), reflecting on the apparent rise and fall of the numbers in some rhythm, could only suggest that "the numbers have something to do with the duration of daylight."

The puzzle can be solved, we believe, only if one discards the notion that the Mesopotamians believed in a fiat Earth, and recognizes that their astronomical knowledge was as good as ours - not because they had better instruments than we do, but because their source of information was the Nefilim.

We suggest that the enigmatic numbers represent degrees of the celestial arc, with the North Pole as the starting point, and that the astrolabe was a planisphere, the representation of a sphere upon a flat surface.

While the numbers increase and decrease, those in the opposite segments for the Way of Enlil (such as Nisannu - 50, Tashritu - 40) add up to" 90; all those for the Way of Anu add up to 180; and all those for the Way of Ea add up to 360 (such as Nisannu 200, Tashritu 160). These figures are too familiar to be misunderstood; they represent segments of a complete spherical

circumference: a quarter of the way (90 degrees), halfway (180 degrees), or full circle (360 degrees). The numbers given for the Way of Enlil are so paired as to show that this Sumerian segment of the northern skies stretched over 60 degrees from the North Pole, bordering on the Way of Anu at 30 degrees above the equator. The Way of Anu was equidistant on both sides of the equator, reaching to 30 degrees south below the equator. Then, farther south and farthest away from the North Pole, lay the Way of Ea - that part of Earth and of the celestial globe that lay between 30 degrees south and the South Pole.

The numbers in the Way of Ea segments add up to 180 degrees in Addaru (February - March) and Ululu (August-September). The only point that is 180 degrees away from the North Pole, whether you go south on the east or on the west, is the South Pole. And this can hold true only if one deals with a sphere.

The Way of Anu, the celestial band of the Sun, planets and the constellations of the Zodiac

The way of Enlil, the northern skies

The Way of Ea, the southern skies

Precession is the phenomenon caused by the wobble of Earth's north - south axis, causing the North Pole (the one pointing at the North Star) and the South Pole to trace a grand circle in the heavens. The apparent retardation of Earth against the starry constellations amounts to about fifty seconds of an arc in one year, or one degree in seventy-two years. The grand circle - the time it takes the Earth's North Pole to point again at the same North Star - therefore lasts 25,920 years (72 X 360), and that is what the astronomers call the Great Year or the Platonian Year (for apparently Plato, too, was aware of the phenomenon). The rising and setting of various stars deemed significant in antiquity, and the precise determination of the spring equinox (which ushered in the New Year), were related to the zodiacal house in which they occurred. Due to the precession, the spring equinox and the other celestial phenomena, being retarded from year to year, were finally retarded once in 2,160 years by a full zodiacal house. Our astronomers continue to employ a "zero point" ("the first point of Aries"), which marked the spring equinox circa 900 B.C., but this point has by now shifted well into the house of Pisces. Circa A.D. 2100 the spring equinox will begin to occur in the preceding house of Aquarius. This is what is meant by those who say that we are about to enter the Age of Aquarius. Because the shift from one zodiacal house to another takes more than two millennia, scholars wondered how and where Hipparchus could have learned of the precession in the second century B.C. It is now clear that his source was Sumerian. Professor Langdon's findings reveal that the Nippurian calendar, established circa 4400 B.C., in the Age of Taurus, reflects knowledge of the precession and the shift of zodiacal houses that took place 2,160 years earlier than that. Professor Jeremias, who correlated Mesopotamia!! astronomical texts with Hittite astronomical texts, was also of the opinion that older astronomical tablets recorded the change from Taurus to Aries; and he concluded that the Mesopotamian astronomers predicted and anticipated the shift from Aries to Pisces.

Subscribing to these conclusions, Professor Willy Hartner (The Earliest History of the Constellations in the Near East) suggested that the Sumerians left behind plentiful pictorial evidence to that effect. When the spring equinox was in the zodiac of Taurus, the summer solstice occurred in the zodiac of Leo. Hartner drew attention to the recurrent motif of a bull-lion "combat" appearing in Sumerian depictions from earliest times, and suggested that these motifs represented the key positions of the constellations of Taurus (Bull) and Leo (Lion) to an observer at 30 degrees north (such as at Ur) circa 4000 B.C.

Most scholars consider the Sumerian stress of Taurus as their first constellation as evidence not only of the antiquity of the zodiac - dating to circa 4000 B.C. - but also as testifying to the time when Sumerian civilization so suddenly began. Professor Jeremias (The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East) found evidence showing that the Sumerian zodiacal-chronological "point zero" stood precisely between the Bull and the Twins; from this and other data he concluded that the zodiac was devised in the Age of Gemini (the Twins) - that is, even before Sumerian civilization began. A Sumerian tablet in the Berlin Museum (VAT.7847) begins the list of zodiacal constellations with that of Leo - taking us back to circa 11,000 B.C., when Man had just begun to till the land.

Professor H. V. Hilprecht (The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania) went even farther. Studying thousands of tablets bearing mathematical tabulations, he concluded that "all the multiplication and division tables from the temple libraries of Nippur and Sippar, and from the library of Ashurbanipal [in Nineveh] are based upon [the number] 12960000." Analyzing this number and its significance, he concluded that it could be related only to the phenomenon of the precession, and that the Sumerians knew of the Great Year of 25,920 years. This is indeed fantastic astronomical sophistication at an impossible time.

Just as it is evident that the Sumerian astronomers possessed knowledge that they could not possibly have acquired on their own, so is there evidence to show that a good deal of their knowledge was of no practical use to them. This pertains not only to the very sophisticated astronomical methods that were used - who in ancient Sumer really needed to establish a celestial equator, for example? - but also to a variety of elaborate texts that dealt with the measurement of distances between stars.

One of these texts, known as AO.6478, lists the twenty-six major stars visible along the line we now call the Tropic of Cancer, and gives distances between them as measured in three different ways. The text first gives the distances between these stars by a unit called mana shukultu ("measured and weighed"). It is believed that this was an ingenious device that related the weight of escaping water to the passage of time. It made possible the determination of distances between two stars in terms of time. The second column of distances was in terms of degrees of the arc of the skies. The full day (daylight and nighttime) was divided into twelve double hours. The arc of the heavens comprised a full circle of 360 degrees. Hence, one beru or "double hour" represented 30 degrees of the arc of the heavens. By this method, passage of time on Earth provided a measure of the distances in degrees between the named celestial bodies.

The third method of measurement was beru ina shame ("length in the skies"). F. Thureau-Dangin (Distances entre Etoiles Fixes) pointed out that while the first two methods were relative to other phenomena, this third method provided absolute measurements. A "celestial bent," he and others believe, was equivalent to 10,692 of our present-day meters (11,693 yards). The "distance in the skies" between the twenty-six stars was calculated in the text as adding up to 655,200 "beru drawn in the skies."

The availability of three different methods of measuring distances between stars conveys the great importance attached to the matter. Yet, who among the men and women of Sumer needed such knowledge - and who among them could devise the methods and accurately use them? The only possible answer is: The Nefilim had the knowledge and the need for such accurate measurements.

Capable of space travel, arriving on Earth from another planet, roaming Earth's skies - they were the only ones who could, and did, possess at the dawn of Mankind's civilization the astronomical knowledge that required millennia to develop, the sophisticated methods and mathematics and concepts for an advanced astronomy, and the need to teach human scribes to copy and record meticulously table upon table of distances in the heavens, order of stars and groups of stars, heliacal risings and settings, a complex Sun-Moon-Earth calendar, and the rest of the remarkable knowledge of both Heaven and Earth. Against this background, can it still be assumed that the Mesopotamia!! astronomers, guided by the Nefilim, were not aware of the planets beyond Saturn - that they did not know of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto? Was their knowledge of Earth's own family, the solar system, less complete than that of distant stars, their order, and their distances?

Astronomical information from ancient times contained in hundreds of detailed texts lists celestial bodies, neatly arranged by their celestial order or by the gods or the months or the lands or the constellations with which they were associated. One such text, analyzed by Ernst F. Weidner (Handbuch der Babylonischen Astronomie), has come to be called "The Great Star List." It listed in five columns tens of celestial bodies as related to one another, to months, countries, and deities. Another text listed cor­rectly the main stars in the zodiacal constellations. A text indexed as B.M.86378 arranged (in its unbroken part) seventy-one celestial bodies by their location in the heavens; and so on and on and on.

In efforts to make sense of this legion of texts, and in particular to identify correctly the planets of our solar system, a succession of scholars came up with confusing results. As we now know, their efforts were doomed to failure because they incorrectly assumed that the Sumerians and their successors were unaware that the solar system was heliocentric, that Earth was but another planet, and that there were more planets beyond Saturn.

Ignoring the possibility that some names in the star lists may have applied to Earth itself, and seeking to apply the great number of other names and epithets only to the five planets they believed were known to the Sumerians, scholars reached conflicting conclusions. Some scholars even suggested that the confusion was not theirs, but a Chaldean mix-up - for some unknown reason, they said, the Chaldeans had switched around the names of the five "known" planets.

The Sumerians referred to all celestial bodies (planets, stars, or constellations) as MUL ("who shine in the heights"). The Akkadian term kakkab was likewise applied by the Babylonians and Assyrians as a general term for any celestial body. This practice further frustrated the scholars seeking to unravel the ancient astronomical texts. But some mul's that were termed LU.BAD clearly designated planets of our solar system.

Knowing that the Greek name for the planets was "wanderers," the scholars have read LU.BAD as "wandering sheep," deriving from LU ("those which are shepherded") and BAD ("high and afar"). But now that we have shown that the Sumerians were fully aware of the true nature of the solar system, the other meanings of the term bad ("the olden," "the foundation," "the one where death is") assume direct significance.

These are appropriate epithets for the Sun, and it follows that by lubad the Sumerians meant not mere "wandering sheep" but "sheep" shepherded by the Sun - the planets of our Sun.

The location and relation of the lubad to each other and to the Sun were described in many Mesopotamian astronomical texts. There were references to those planets that are "above" and those that are "below," and Kugler correctly guessed that the reference point was Earth itself.

But mostly the planets were spoken of in the framework of astronomical texts dealing with MUL.MUL - a term that kept the scholars guessing. In the absence of a better solution, most scholars have agreed that the term mulmul stood for the Pleiades, a cluster of stars in the zodiacal constellation of Taurus, and the one through which the axis of the spring equinox passed (as viewed from Babylon) circa 2200 B.C. Mesopotamian texts often indicated that the mulmul included seven LU.MASH (seven "wanderers that are familiar"), and the scholars assumed that these were the brightest members of the Pleiades, which can be seen with the naked eye. The fact that, depending on classification, the group has either six or nine such bright stars, and not seven, posed a problem; but it was brushed aside for lack of any better ideas as to the meaning of mulmul. Franz Kugler (Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel), reluctantly accepted the Pleiades as the solution, but expressed his astonishment when he found it stated unambiguously in Mesopotamian texts that mulmul included not only "wanderers" (planets) but also the Sun and the Moon - making it impossible to retain the Pleiades idea. He also came upon texts that clearly stated that "mulmul ul-shu 12" ("mulmul is a band of twelve"), of which ten formed a distinct group.

We suggest that the term mulmul referred to the solar system, using the repetitive (MUL.MUL) to indicate the group as a whole, as "the celestial body comprising all celestial bodies."

Charles Virolleaud (L'Astrologie Chaldeenne), transliterated a Mesopotamian text (K.3558) that describes the members of the

mulmul or kakkabu/kakkabu group. The text's last line is explicit:

Kakkabu/kakkabu.

The number of its celestial bodies is twelve. The stations of its celestial bodies twelve. The complete months of the Moon is twelve.

The texts leave no doubt: The mulmul: - our solar system - was made up of twelve members. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, for the Greek scholar Diodorus, explaining the three "ways" of the Chaldeans and the consequent listing of thirty-six celestial bodies, stated that "of those celestial gods, twelve hold chief authority; to each of these the Chaldeans assign a month and a sign of the zodiac."

Ernst Weidner (Der Tierkreis und die Wege am Him-mel) reported that in addition to the Way of Anu and its twelve zodiac constellations, some texts also referred to the "way of the Sun," which was also made up of twelve celestial bodies: the Sun, the Moon, and ten others. Line 20 of the so-called TE-tablet stated: "naphar 12 shere-mesh ha.la sha kakkab.lu sha Sin u Shamash ina libbi ittiqu," which means, "all in all, 12 members where the Moon and Sun belong, where the planets orbit." We can now grasp the significance of the number twelve in the ancient world. The Great Circle of Sumerian gods, and of all

Olympian gods thereafter, comprised exactly twelve; younger gods could join this circle only if older gods retired. Likewise, a vacancy had to be filled to retain the divine number twelve. The principal celestial circle, the way of the Sun with its twelve members, set the pattern, according to which each other celestial band was divided into twelve segments or was allocated twelve principal celestial bodies. Accordingly, there were twelve months in a year, twelve double-hours in a day. Each division of Sumer was assigned twelve celestial bodies as a measure of good luck.

Many studies, such as the one by S. Langdon (Babylonian Menologies and the Semitic Calendar) show that the division of the year into twelve months was, from its very beginnings, related to the twelve Great Gods. Fritz Hommel (Die Astronomie der alien Chaldder) and others after him have shown that the twelve months were closely connected with the twelve zodiacs and that both derived from twelve principal celestial bodies. Charles F. Jean (Lexicologie Sumerienne) reproduced a Sumerian list of twenty- four celestial bodies that paired twelve zodiacal constellations with twelve members of our solar system. In a long text, identified by F. Thureau-Dangin (Ritueles Accadiens) as a temple program for the New Year Festival in Babylon, the evidence for the consecration of twelve as the central celestial phenomenon is persuasive. The great temple, the Esagila, had twelve gates. The powers of all the celestial gods were vested in Marduk by reciting twelve times the pronouncement "My Lord, is He not my Lord." The mercy of the god was then invoked twelve times, and that of his spouse twelve times. The total of twenty-four was then matched with the twelve zodiacal constellations and twelve members of the solar system. A boundary stone carved with the symbols of the celestial bodies by a king of Susa depicts those twenty-four signs: the familiar twelve signs of the zodiac, and symbols that stand for the twelve members of the solar system. These were the twelve astral gods of Mesopotamia, as well as of the Hurrian, Hittite, Greek, and all other ancient pantheons.

Although our natural counting base is the number ten, the number twelve permeated all matters celestial and divine long after the Sumerians were gone. There were twelve Greek Titans, twelve Tribes of Israel, twelve parts to the magical breastplate of the Israelite High Priest. The power of this celestial twelve carried over to the twelve Apostles of Jesus, and even in our decimal system we count from one to twelve, and only after twelve do we return to "ten and three" (thirteen), "ten and four," and so on. Where did this powerful, decisive number twelve stem from? From the heavens.

For the solar system - the mulmul - included, in addition to all the planets known to us, also the planet of Anu, the one whose symbol - a radiant celestial body - stood in the Sumerian writing for the god Anu and for "divine." "The kakkab of the Supreme Scepter is one of the sheep in mulmul" explained an astronomical text. And when Marduk usurped the supremacy and replaced Anu as the god associated with this planet, the Babylonians said: "The planet of Marduk within mulmul appears." Teaching humanity the true nature of Earth and the heavens, the Nefilim informed the ancient astronomer-priests not only of the planets beyond Saturn but also of the existence of the most important planet, the one from which they came: THE TWELFTH PLANET. THE EPIC OF CREATION

ON MOST OF THE ANCIENT cylinder seals that have been found, symbols that stand for certain celestial bodies, members of our solar system, appear above the figures of gods or humans.

An Akkadian seal from the third millennium B.C., now at the Vorderasiatische Abteilung of the State Museum in East Berlin (catalogued VA/243), departs from the usual manner of depicting the celestial bodies. It does not show them individually but rather as a group of eleven globes encircling a large, rayed star. It is clearly a depiction of the solar system as it was known to the Sumerians: a system consisting of twelve celestial bodies.

We usually show our solar system schematically as a line of planets stretching away from the Sun in ever-increasing distances. But if we depicted the planets, not in a line, but one after the other in a circle (the closest, Mercury, first, then Venus, then Earth, and so on).

If we now take a second look at an enlargement of the solar system depicted on cylinder seal VA/243, we shall see that the "dots" encircling the star are actually globes whose sizes and order conform to that of the solar system. The small Mercury is followed by a larger Venus. Earth, the same size as Venus, is accompanied by the small Moon. Continuing in a counterclock­wise direction, Mars is shown correctly as smaller than Earth but larger than the Moon or Mercury.

The ancient depiction then shows a planet unknown to us - considerably larger than Earth, yet smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, which clearly follow it. Farther on, another pair perfectly matches our Uranus and Neptune. Finally, the smallish Pluto is also there, but not where we now place it (after Neptune); instead, it appears between Saturn and Uranus.

Treating the Moon as a proper celestial body, the Sumerian depiction fully accounts for all of our known planets, places them in the correct order (with the exception of Pluto), and shows them by size.

The 4,500-year-old depiction, however, also insists that there was - or has been - another major planet between Mars and Jupiter. It is, as we shall show, the Twelfth Planet, the planet of the Nefilim.

If this Sumerian celestial map had been discovered and studied two centuries ago, astronomers would have deemed the Sumerians totally uninformed, foolishly imagining more planets beyond Saturn. Now, however, we know that Uranus and Neptune and Pluto are really there. Did the Sumerians imagine the other discrepancies, or were they properly informed by the Nefilim that the Moon was a member of the solar system in its own right, Pluto was located near Saturn, and there was a Twelfth Planet between Mars and Jupiter?

The long-held theory that the Moon was nothing more than "a frozen golf ball" was not discarded until the successful conclusion of several U.S. Apollo Moon missions. The best guesses were that the Moon was a chunk of matter that had separated from Earth when Earth was still molten and plastic. Were it not for the impact of millions of meteorites, which left craters on the face of the Moon, it would have been a faceless, lifeless, history-less piece of matter that solidified and forever follows Earth. Observations made by unmanned satellites, however, began to bring such long-held beliefs into question. It was determined that the chemical and mineral makeup of the Moon was sufficiently different from that of Earth to challenge the "breakaway" theory. The experiments conducted on the Moon by the American astronauts and the study and analysis of the soil and rock samples they brought back have established beyond doubt that the Moon, though presently barren, was once a "living planet." Like Earth it is layered, which means that it solidified from its own original molten stage. Like Earth it generated heat, but whereas Earth's heat comes from its radioactive materials, "cooked" inside Earth under tremendous pressure, the Moon's heat comes, apparently, from layers of radioactive materials lying very near the surface. These materials, however, are too heavy to have floated up. What, then, deposited them near the Moon's surface?

The Moon's gravity field appears to be erratic, as though huge chunks of heavy matter (such as iron) had not evenly sunk to its core but were scattered about. By what process or force, we might ask? There is evidence that the ancient rocks of the Moon were magnetized. There is also evidence I hat the magnetic fields were changed or reversed. Was it by some unknown internal process, or by an undetermined outside influence?

The Apollo 16 astronauts found on the Moon rocks (called breccias) that result from the shattering of solid rock and its rewelding together by extreme and sudden heat. When and how were these rocks shattered, then re-fused? Other surface materials on the Moon are rich in rare radioactive potassium and phosphorus, materials that on Earth are deep down inside. Putting such findings together, scientists are now certain that the Moon and Earth, formed of roughly the same elements at about the same time, evolved as separate celestial bodies. In the opinion of the scientists of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Moon evolved "normally" for its first 500 million years. Then, they said (as reported in The New York Times),

The most cataclysmic period came 4 billion years ago, when celestial bodies the size of large cities and small countries came crashing into the Moon and formed its huge basins and towering mountains.

The huge amounts of radioactive materials left by the collisions began heating the rock beneath the surface, melting massive amounts of it and forcing seas of lava through cracks in the surface.

Apollo 15 found a rockslide in the crater Tsiolovsky six times greater than any rockslide on Earth. Apollo16 discovered that the collision that created the Sea of Nectar deposited debris as much as 1,000 miles away. Apollo 17 landed near a scarp eight times higher than any on Earth, meaning it was formed by a moon-quake eight times more violent than any earthquake in history.

The convulsions following that cosmic event continued for some 800 million years, so that the Moon's makeup and surface finally took on their frozen shape some 3.2 billion years ago.

The Sumerians, then, were right to depict the Moon as a celestial body in its own right. And, as we shall soon see, they also left us a text that explains and describes the cosmic catastrophe to which the NASA experts refer.

The planet Pluto has been called "the enigma." While the orbits around the Sun of the other planets deviate only somewhat from a perfect circle, the deviation ("eccentricity") of Pluto is such that it has the most extended and elliptical orbit around the Sun. While the other planets orbit the Sun more or less within the same plane, Pluto is out of kilter by a whopping seventeen degrees. Because of these two unusual features of its orbit, Pluto is the only planet that cuts across the orbit of another planet, Neptune. In size, Pluto is indeed in the "satellite" class: Its diameter, 3,600 miles, is not much greater than that of Triton, a satellite of Neptune, or Titan, one of the ten satellites of Saturn. Because of its unusual characteristics, it has been suggested that this "misfit" might have started its celestial life as a satellite that somehow escaped its master and went into orbit around the Sun on its own.

This, as we shall soon see, is indeed what happened - according to the Sumerian texts.

And now we reach the climax of our search for answers to primeval celestial events: the existence of the Twelfth Planet. Astonishing as it may sound, our astronomers have been looking for evidence that indeed such a planet once existed between Mars and Jupiter.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, even before Neptune had been discovered, several astronomers demonstrated that "the planets were placed at certain distances from the Sun according to some definite law." The suggestion, which came to be known as Bode's Law, convinced astronomers that a planet ought to revolve in a place where hitherto no planet had been known to exist - that is, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Spurred by these mathematical calculations, astronomers began to scan the skies in the indicated zone for the "missing planet." On the first day of the nineteenth century, the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered at the exact indicated distance a very small planet (485 miles across), which he named Ceres. By 1804 the number of asteroids ("small planets") found there rose to four; to date, nearly 3,000 asteroid0 have been counted orbiting the Sun in what is now called the asteroid belt. Beyond any doubt, this is the debris of a planet that had shattered to pieces. Russian astronomers have named it Phayton ("chariot"). While astronomers are certain that such a planet existed, they are unable to explain its disappearance. Did the planet self- explode? But then its pieces would have flown off in all directions and not stayed in a single belt. If a collision shattered the missing planet, where is the celestial body responsible for the collision? Did it also shatter? But the debris circling the Sun, when added up, is insufficient to account for even one whole planet, to say nothing of two. Also, if the asteroids comprise the debris of two planets, they should have retained the axial revolution of two planets. But all the asteroids have a single axial rotation, indicating they come from a single celestial body. How then was the missing planet shattered, and what shattered it? The answers to these puzzles have been handed down to us from antiquity.

About a century ago the decipherment of the texts found in Mesopotamia unexpectedly grew into a realization that there - in Mesopotamia - texts existed that not only paralleled but also preceded portions of the Holy Scriptures. Die Kielschriften und das alte Testament by Eberhard Schrader in 1872 started an avalanche of books, articles, lectures, and debates that lasted half a century.

Was there a link, at some early time, between Babylon and the Bible? The headlines provocatively affirmed, or denounced: BABEL UND BIBEL.

Among the texts uncovered by Henry Layard in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, there was one that told a tale of Creation not unlike the one in the Book of Genesis. The broken tablets, first pieced together and published by George Smith in 1876 (The Chaldean Genesis), conclusively established that there indeed existed an Akkadian text, written in the Old Babylonian dialect, that related how a certain deity created Heaven and Earth and all upon Earth, including Man. A vast literature now exists that compares the Mesopotamian text with the biblical narrative. The Babylonian deity's work was done, if not in six "days," then over the span of six tablets. Parallel to the biblical God's seventh day of rest and enjoyment of his handiwork, the Mesopotamiaii epic devotes a seventh tablet to the exaltation of the Babylonian deity and his achievements.

Appropriately, L. W. King named his authoritative text on the subject The Seven Tablets of Creation.

Now called "The Creation Epic," the text was known in antiquity by its opening words, Enuma Elish ("When in the heights"). The

biblical tale of Creation begins with the creation of Heaven and Earth; the Mesopotamian tale is a true cosmogony, dealing with

prior events and taking us to the beginning of time:

Enuma elish la nabu shamamu

When in the heights Heaven had not been named

Shaplitu ammatitm shuma la zakrat

And below, firm ground [Earth] had not been called

It was then, the epic tells us, that two primeval celestial bodies gave birth to a series of celestial "gods." As the number of celestial beings increased, they made great noise and commotion, disturbing the Primeval Father. His faithful messenger urged him to take strong measures to discipline the young gods, but they ganged up on him and robbed him of his creative powers. The Primeval Mother sought to take revenge. The god who led the revolt against the Primeval Father had a new suggestion: Let his young son be invited to join the Assembly of the Gods and be given supremacy so that he might go to fight singlehanded the "monster" their mother turned out to be.

Granted supremacy, the young god - Marduk, according to the Babylonian version - proceeded to face the monster, and, after a fierce battle, vanquished her and split her in two. Of one part of her he made Heaven, and of the other, Earth. He then proclaimed a fixed order in the heavens, assigning to each celestial god a permanent position. On Earth he produced the mountains and seas and rivers, established the seasons and vegetation, and created Man. In duplication of the Heavenly Abode, Babylon and its towering temple were built on Earth. Gods and mortals were given assignments, commandments, and rituals to be followed. The gods then proclaimed Marduk the supreme deity, and bestowed on him the "fifty names" - the prerogatives and numerical rank of the Enlilship.

As more tablets and fragments were found and translated, it became evident that the text was not a simple literary work: It was the most hallowed historical-religious epic of Babylon, read as part of the New Year rituals. Intended to propagate the supremacy of Marduk, the Babylonian version made him the hero of the tale of Creation. This, however, was not always so. There is enough evidence to show that the Babylonian version of the epic was a masterful religious-political forgery of earlier Sumerian versions, in which Anu, Enlil, and Ninurta were the heroes.

No matter, however, what the actors in this celestial and divine drama were called, the tale is certainly as ancient as Sumerian civilization. Most scholars see it as a philosophic work - the earliest version of the eternal struggle between good and evil - or as an allegorical tale of nature's winter and summer, sunrise and sunset, death and resurrection.

But why not take the epic at face value, as nothing more nor less than the statement of cosmologic facts as known to the Sumerians, as told them by the Nefilim? Using such a bold and novel approach, we find that the "Epic of Creation" perfectly explains the events that probably took place in our solar system.

The stage on which the celestial drama of Enuma Elish unfolds is the primeval universe. The celestial actors are the ones who

create as well as the ones being created. Act I:

When in the heights Heaven had not been named,

And below, Earth had not been called;

Naught, but primordial APSU, their Begetter,

MUMMU, and TIAMAT - she who bore them all;

Their waters were mingled together.

No reed had yet formed, no marshland had appeared.

None of the gods had yet been brought into being,

None bore a name, their destinies were undetermined;

Then it was that gods were formed in their midst.

With a few strokes of the reed stylus upon the first clay tablet - in nine short lines - the ancient poet-chronicler manages to seat us in front row center, and boldly and dramatically raise the curtain on the most majestic show ever: the Creation of our solar system.

In the expanse of space, the "gods" - the planets - are yet to appear, to be named, to have their "destinies" - their orbits - fixed. Only three bodies exist: "primordial AP.SU" ("one who exists from the beginning"); MUM.MU ("one who was born"); and TIAMAT ("maiden of life"). The "waters" of Apsu and Tiamat were mingled, and the text makes it clear that it does not mean the waters in which reeds grow, but rather the primordial waters, the basic life-giving elements of the universe. Apsu, then, is the Sun, "one who exists from the beginning."

Nearest him is Mummu. The epic's narrative makes clear later on that Mummu was the trusted aide and emissary of Apsu: a good description of Mercury, the small planet rapidly running around his giant master. Indeed, this was the concept the ancient Greeks and Romans had of the god-planet Mercury: the fast messenger of the gods.

Farther away was Tiamat. She was the "monster" that Marduk later shattered - the "missing planet." But in primordial times she

was the very first Virgin Mother of the first Divine Trinity. The space between her and Apsu was not void; it was filled with the

primordial elements of Apsu and Tiamat. These "waters" "commingled," and a pair of celestial gods - planets - were formed in

the space between Apsu and Tiamat.

Their waters were mingled together. . . .

Gods were formed in their midst:

Gor LAHMU and god LAHAMU were brought forth;

By name they were called.

Etymologically, the names of these two planets stem from the root LHM ("to make war"). The ancients bequeathed to us the tradition that Mars was the God of War and Venus the Goddess of both .Love and War. LAHMU and LAHAMU are indeed male and female names, respectively; and the identity of the two gods of the epic and the planets Mars and Venus is thus affirmed both etymologically and mythologically. It is also affirmed astronomically: As the "missing planet," Tiamat was located beyond

Mars. Mars and Venus are indeed located in the space between the Sun (Apsu) and "Tiamat." We can illustrate this by following the Sumerian celestial map.

The process of the formation of the solar system then went on. Lahmu and Lahamu - Mars and Venus - were drought forth, but even

Before they had grown in age

And in stature to an appointed size -

God ANSHAR and god KISHAR were formed,

Surpassing them [in size].

As lengthened the days and multiplied the years,

God ANU became their son - of his ancestors a rival.

Then Anshar's first-born, Anu,

As his equal and in his image begot NUDIMMUD.

With a terseness matched only by the narrative's precision, Act I of the epic of Creation has been swiftly played out before our very eyes. We are informed that Mars and Venus were to grow only to a limited size; but even before their formation was complete, another pair of planets was formed. The two were majestic planets, as evidenced by their names - AN.SHAR ("prince, foremost of the heavens") and KI.SHAR ("foremost of the firm lands"). They overtook in size the first pair, "surpassing them" in stature. The description, epithets, and location of this second pair easily identify them as Saturn and Jupiter. Some time then passed ("multiplied the years"), and a third pair of planets was brought forth. First came ANU, smaller than Anshar and Kishar ("their son"), but larger than the first planets ("of his ancestors a rival" in size). Then Anu, in turn, begot a twin planet, "his equal and in his image." The Babylonian version names the planet NUDIMMUD, an epithet of Ea/Enki. Once again, the descriptions of the sizes and locations fit the next known pair of planets in our solar system, Uranus and Neptune. There was yet another planet to be accounted for among these outer planets, the one we call Pluto. The "Epic of Creation" has already referred to Anu as "Anshar's firstborn," implying that there was yet another planetary god "born" to Anshar/Saturn. The epic catches up with this celestial deity later on, when it relates how Anshar sent out his emissary GAGA on various missions to the other planets. Gaga appears in function and stature equal to Apsu's emissary Mummu; this brings to mind the many similarities between Mercury and Pluto. Gaga, then, was Pluto; but the Sumerians placed Pluto on their celestial map not beyond Neptune, but next to Saturn, whose "emissary," or satellite, it was.

As Act I of the "Epic of Creation" came to an end, there was a solar system made up of the Sun and nine planets:

SUN - Apsu, "one who existed from the beginning."

MERCURY - Mummu, counselor and emissary of Apsu.

VENUS - Lahamu, "lady of battles."

MARS - Lahmu, "deity of war."

?? - Tiamat, "maiden who gave life."

JUPITER - Kishar, "foremost of firm lands."

SATURN - Anshar, "foremost of the heavens."

PLUTO - Gaga, counselor and emissary of Anshar.

URANUS - Anu, "he of the heavens."

NEPTUNE - Nudimmud (Ea), "artful creator."

Where were Earth and the Moon? They were yet to be created, products of the forthcoming cosmic collision.

With the end of the majestic drama of the birth of the planets, the authors of the Creation epic now raise the curtain on Act II, on

a drama of celestial turmoil. The newly created family of planets was far from being stable. The planets were gravitating toward

each other; they were converging on Tiamat, disturbing and endangering the primordial bodies.

The divine brothers banded together;

They disturbed Tiamat as they surged back and forth.

They were troubling the "belly" of Tiamat

By their antics in the dwellings of heaven.

Apsu could not lessen their clamor;

Tiamat was speechless at their ways.

Their doings were loathsome. ...

Troublesome were their ways.

We have here obvious references to erratic orbits. The new planets "surged back and forth"; they got too close to each other ("banded together"); they interfered with Tiamat's orbit; they got too close to her "belly"; their "ways" were troublesome. Though it was Tiamat that was principally endangered, Apsu, too, found the planets' ways "loathsome." He announced his intention to "destroy, wreck their ways." He huddled with Mummu, conferred with him in secret. But "whatever they had plotted between them" was overheard by the gods, and the plot to destroy them left them speechless. The only one who did not lose his wits was Ea. He devised a ploy to "pour sleep upon Apsu." When the other celestial gods liked the plan, Ka "drew a faithful map of the universe" and cast a divine spell upon the primeval waters of the solar system.

What was this "spell" or force exerted by "Ea" (the planet Neptune) - then the outermost planet - as it orbited the Sun and circled all the other planets? Did its own orbit around the Sun affect the Sun's magnetism and thus its radioactive outpourings? Or did Neptune itself emit, upon its creation, some vast radiations of energy? Whatever the effects were, the epic likened them to a "pouring of sleep" - a calming effect - upon Apsu (the Sun). Even "Mummu, the Counsellor, was powerless to stir." As in the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah, the hero - overcome by sleep - could easily be robbed of his powers. Ea moved quickly to rob Apsu of his creative role. Quenching, it seems, the immense outpourings of primeval matter from the Sun, Ea/Neptune "pulled off Apsu's tiara, removed his cloak of aura." Apsu was "vanquished." Mummu could no longer roam about. He was "bound and left behind," a lifeless planet by his master's side.

By depriving the Sun of its creativity - stopping the process of emitting more energy and matter to form additional planets - the

gods brought temporary peace to the solar system. The victory was further signified by changing the meaning and location of the Apsu. This epithet was henceforth to be applied to the "Abode of Ea." Any additional planets could henceforth come only from the new Apsu - from "the Deep" - the far reaches of space that the outermost planet faced.

How long was it before the celestial peace was broken once more? The epic does not say. But it does continue, with little pause,

and raises the curtain on Act III:

In the Chamber of Fates, the place of Destinies,

A god was engendered, most able and wisest of gods;

In the heart of the Deep was MARDUK created.

A new celestial "god" - a new planet - now joins the cast. He was formed in the Deep, far out in space, in a zone where orbital motion - a planet's "destiny" - had been imparted to him. He was attracted to the solar system by the outermost planet: "He who begot him was Ea" (Neptune). The new planet was a sight to behold:

Alluring was his figure, sparkling the lift of his eyes; Lordly was his gait, commanding as of olden times. . . , Greatly exalted was he above the gods, exceeding throughout. ...

He was the loftiest of the gods, surpassing was his height; His members were enormous, he was exceedingly tall. Appearing from outer space, Marduk was still a newborn planet, belching fire and emitting radiation. "When he moved his lips, fire blazed forth."

As Marduk neared the other planets, "they heaped upon him their awesome flashes," and he shone brightly, "clothed with the halo of ten gods." His approach thus stirred up electrical and other emissions from the other members of the solar system. And a single word here confirms our decipherment of the Creation epic: Ten celestial bodies awaited him - the Sun and only nine other planets.

The epic's narrative now takes us along Marduk's speeding course. He first passes by the planet that "begot" him, that pulled him into the solar system, the planet Ea/ Neptune. As Marduk nears Neptune, the latter's gravitational pull on the newcomer grows in intensity. It rounds out Marduk's path, "making it good for its purpose."

Marduk must still have been in a very plastic stage at that time. As he passed by Ea/Neptune, the gravitational pull caused the side of Marduk to bulge, as though he had "a second head." No part of Marduk, however, was torn off at this passage; but as Marduk reached the vicinity of Anu/Uranus, chunks of matter began to tear away from him, resulting in the formation of four satellites of Marduk. "Anu brought forth and fashioned the four sides, consigned I heir power to the leader of the host." Called "winds," the four were thrust into a fast orbit around Marduk, "swirling as a whirlwind."

The order of passage - first by Neptune, then by Uranus - indicates that Marduk was coming into the solar system not in the system's orbital direction (counterclockwise) but from the opposite direction, moving clockwise. Moving on, the oncoming planet was soon seized by the immense gravitational and magnetic forces of the giant Anshar/ Saturn, then Kishar/Jupiter. His path was bent even more inward - into the center of the solar system, toward Tiamat.

The approach of Marduk soon began to disturb Tiamat and the inner planets (Mars, Venus, Mercury). "He produced streams, disturbed Tiamat; the gods were not at rest, carried as in a storm."

Though the lines of the ancient text were partially damaged here, we can still read that the nearing planet "diluted their vitals . . . pinched their eyes." Tiamat herself "paced about distraught" - her orbit, evidently, disturbed.

The gravitational pull of the large approaching planet soon began to tear away parts of Tiamat. From her midst there emerged eleven "monsters," a "growling, raging" throng of satellites who "separated themselves" from her body and "marched at the side of Tiamat." Preparing herself to face the onrushing Marduk, Tiamat "crowned them with halos," giving them the appearance of "gods" (planets).

Of particular importance to the epic and to Mesopotamian cosmogony was Tiamat's chief satellite, who was named KINGU, "the first-born among the gods who formed her assembly." She exalted Kingu,

In their midst she made him great. . . . The high command of the battle She entrusted into his hand.

Subjected to conflicting gravitational pulls, this large satellite of Tiamat began to shift toward Marduk. It was this granting to

Kingu of a Tablet of Destinies - a planetary path of his own - that especially upset the outer planets. Who had granted Tiamat

the right to bring forth new planets? Ea asked. He took the problem to Anshar, the giant Saturn.

All that Tiamat had plotted, to him he repeated:

".. . she has set up an Assembly and is furious with rage . . .

she has added matchless weapons, has borne

monster-gods . . .

withal eleven of this kind she has brought forth;

from among the gods who formed her Assembly,

she has elevated Kingu, her first-born, made him chief . . .

she has given him a Tablet of Destinies, fastened it on his breast."

Turning to Ea, Anshar asked him whether he could go lo slay Kingu. The reply is lost due to a break in the tablets; but apparently Ea did not satisfy Anshar, for the continuing narrative has Anshar turning to Anu (Uranus) lo find out whether he would "go and stand up to Tiamat." Hut Anu "was unable to face her and turned back."

In the agitated heavens, a confrontation builds; one god lifter another steps aside. Will no one do battle with the raging Tiamat? Marduk, having passed Neptune and Uranus, is now nearing Anshar (Saturn) and his extended rings. This gives Anshar an idea: "He who is potent shall be our Avenger; ho who is keen in battle: Marduk, the Hero!" Coming within reach of Saturn's rings ("he kissed the lips of Anshar"), Marduk answers: "If I, indeed, as your Avenger

Am to vanquish Tiamat, save your lives -

Convene an Assembly to proclaim my Destiny supreme!"

The condition was audacious but simple: Marduk and his "destiny" - his orbit around the Sun - were to be supreme among all the celestial gods. It was then that Gaga, Anshar/Saturn's satellite - and the future Pluto - was loosened from his course: Anshar opened his mouth,

To Gaga, his Counsellor, a word he addressed. . . .

"Be on thy way, Gaga,

take the stand before the gods,

and that which I shall tell thee

repeat thou unto them."

Passing by the other god/planets, Gaga urged them to ! "fix your decrees for Marduk." The decision was as anticipated: The gods were only too eager to have someone else go to settle the score for them. "Marduk is king!" they shouted, and urged him to lose no more time: "Go and cut off the life of Tiamat!" The curtain now rises on Act IV, the celestial battle.

The gods have decreed Marduk's "destiny"; their combined gravitational pull has now determined Marduk's orbital path so that he can go but one way - toward a "battle," a collision with Tiamat.

As befits a warrior, Marduk armed himself with a variety j of weapons. He filled his body with a "blazing flame"; "he constructed a bow . . . attached thereto an arrow ... in front of him he set the lightning"; and "he then made a net to enfold Tiamat therein." These are common names for what could only have been celestial phenomena - the discharge of electrical bolts as the two planets converged, the gravitational pull (a "net") of one upon the other.

But Marduk's chief weapons were his satellites, the four "winds" with which Uranus had provided him when Marduk passed by

that planet: South Wind, North Wind, East Wind, West Wind. Passing now by the giants, Saturn and Jupiter, and subjected to

their tremendous gravitational pull, Marduk "brought forth" three more satellites - Evil Wind, Whirlwind, and Matchless Wind.

Using his satellites as a "storm chariot," he "sent forth the winds that he had brought forth, the seven of them." The adversaries

were ready for battle.

The Lord went forth, followed his course;

Towards the raging Tiamat he set his face. . . .

The Lord approached to scan the innerside of Tiamat -

The scheme of Kingu, her consort, to perceive.

But as the planets drew nearer each other, Marduk's course became erratic:

As he looks on, his course becomes upset,

His direction is distracted, his doings are confused.

Even Marduk's satellites began to veer off course:

When the gods, his helpers,

Who were marching at his side,

Saw the valiant Kingu, blurred became their vision.

Were the combatants to miss each other after all?

But the die was cast, the courses irrevocably set on collision. "Tiamat emitted a roar" . . . "the Lord raised the flooding storm, his

mighty weapon." As Marduk came ever closer, Tiamat's "fury" grew; "the roots of her legs shook back and forth." She

commenced to cast "spells" against Marduk - the same kind of celestial waves Ea had earlier used against Apsu and Mummu.

But Marduk kept coming at her.

Tiamat and Marduk, the wisest of the gods,

Advanced against one another;

They pressed on to single combat,

They approached for battle.

The epic now turns to the description of the celestial battle, in the aftermath of which Heaven and Earth were created.

The Lord spread out his net to enfold her;

The Evil Wind, the rearmost, he unleashed at her face.

As she opened her mouth, Tiamat, to devour him -

He drove in the Evil Wind so that she close not her lips.

The fierce storm Winds then charged her belly;

Her body became distended; her mouth had opened wide.

He shot there through an arrow, it tore her belly;

It cut through her insides, tore into her womb.

Having thus subdued her, her life-breath he extinguished.

Here, then, is a most original theory explaining the celestial puzzles still confronting us. An unstable solar system, made up of the Sun and nine planets, was invaded by a large, comet-like planet from outer space. It first encountered Neptune; as it passed by Uranus, the giant Saturn, and Jupiter, its course was profoundly bent inward toward the solar system's center, and it brought forth seven satellites. It was unalterably set on a collision course with Tiamat, the next planet in line. A. Marduk's "winds" colliding with Tiamat and her "host" (led by Kingu).

But the two planets did not collide, a fact of cardinal astronomical importance: It was the satellites of Marduk I hat smashed into Tiamat, and not Marduk himself. They "distended" Tiamat's body, made in her a wide cleavage. Through these fissures in Tiamat, Marduk shot an "arrow," a "divine lightning," an immense bolt of electricity that lumped as a spark from the energy- charged Marduk, the planet that was "filled with brilliance." Finding its way into Tiamat's innards, it "extinguished her life-breath" - neutralized Tiamat's own electric and magnetic forces and Holds, and "extinguished" them.

The first encounter between Marduk and Tiamat left IKT fissured and lifeless; but her final fate was still to be determined by future encounters between' the two. Kingu, louder of Tiamat's satellites, was also to be dealt with separately. But the fate of the other ten, smaller satellites of Tiamat was determined at once.

After he had slain Tiamat, the leader, Her band was shattered, her host broken up. The gods, her helpers who marched at her side, Trembling with fear, Turned their backs about so as to save and preserve their lives.

Can we identify this "shattered . . . broken" host that trembled and "turned their backs about" - reversed their direction? By doing so we offer an explanation to yet another )ii7./le of our solar system - the phenomenon of the comets. Tiny globes of matter, they are often referred to as the solar system's "rebellious members," for they appear to obey none of the normal rules of the road. The orbits of the planets around the Sun are (with the exception of Pluto) almost circular; the orbits of the comets are elongated, and in most instances very much so - to the extent that some of them disappear from our view for hundreds or thousands of years. The planets (with the exception of Pluto) orbit the Sun in the same general plane; the comets' orbits lie in many diverse planes. Most significant, while all the planets known to us circle the Sun in the same counterclockwise direction, many comets move in the reverse direction.

Astronomers are unable to say what force, what event created the comets and threw them into their unusual orbits. Our answer: Marduk. Sweeping in the reverse direction, in an orbital plane of his own, he shattered, broke the host of Tiamat into smaller comets and affected them by his gravitational pull, his so-called net:

Thrown into the net, they found themselves ensnared. . . . The whole band of demons that had marched on her side He cast into fetters, their hands he bound. . . . Tightly encircled, they could not escape.

After the battle was over, Marduk took away from Kingu the Tablet of Destinies (Kingu's independent orbit) and attached it to his own (Marduk's) breast: his course was bent into permanent solar orbit. From that time on, Marduk was bound always to return to the scene of the celestial battle.

Having "vanquished" Tiamat, Marduk sailed on in the heavens, out into space, around the Sun, and back to retrace his passage by the outer planets: Ea/Neptune, "whose desire Marduk achieved," Anshar/Saturn, "whose triumph Marduk established." Then his new orbital path returned Marduk to the scene of his triumph, "to strengthen his hold on the vanquished gods," Tiamat and Kingu.

As the curtain is about to rise on Act V, it will be here - and only here, though this has not hitherto been realized - that the biblical tale of Genesis joins the Mesopotamian "Epic of Creation"; for it is only at this point that the tale of the Creation of Earth and Heaven really began.

Completing his first-ever orbit around the Sun, Marduk "then returned to Tiamat, whom he had subdued." The Lord paused to view her lifeless body. To divide the monster he then artfully planned. Then, as a mussel, he split her into two parts.

Marduk himself now hit the defeated planet, splitting Tiamat in two, severing her "skull," or upper part. Then another of Marduk's satellites, the one called North Wind, crashed into the separated half. The heavy blow carried this part - destined to become Earth - to an orbit where no planet had been orbiting before:

The Lord trod upon Tiamat's hinder part; With his weapon the connected skull he cut loose; He severed the channels of her blood; And caused the North Wind to bear it To places that have been unknown. Earth had been created!

The lower part had another fate: on the second orbit, Marduk himself hit it, smashing it to pieces:

The [other] half of her he set up as a screen for the skies: Locking them together, as watchmen he stationed them. . . . He bent Tiamat's tail to form the Great Band as a bracelet.

The pieces of this broken half were hammered to become a "bracelet" in the heavens, acting as a screen between the inner planets and the outer planets. They were stretched out into a "great band." The asteroid belt had been created. Astronomers and physicists recognize the existence of great differences between the inner, or "terrestrial," planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and its Moon, and Mars) and the outer planets (Jupiter and beyond), two groups separated by the asteroid belt. We now find, in the Sumerian epic, ancient recognition of these phenomena.

Moreover, we are offered - for the first time - a coherent cosmogonic-scientific explanation of the celestial events that led to the disappearance of the "missing planet" and the resultant creation of the asteroid belt (plus the comets) and of Earth. After several of his satellites and his electric bolts split Tiamat in two, another satellite of Marduk shunted her upper half to a new orbit as our planet Earth; then Marduk, on his second orbit, smashed the lower half to pieces and stretched them in a great celestial band. Every puzzle that we have mentioned is answered by the "Epic of Creation" as we have deciphered it. Moreover, we also have the answer to the question of why Earth's continents are concentrated on one side of it and a deep

cavity (the Pacific Ocean's bed) exists on the opposite side. The constant reference to the "waters" of Tiamat is also illuminating. She was called the Watery Monster, and it stands to reason that Earth, as part of Tiamat, was equally endowed with these waters. Indeed, some modern scholars describe Earth as "Planet Ocean" - for it is the only one of the solar system's known planets that is blessed with such life-giving waters.

New as these cosmologic theories may sound, they were accepted fact to the prophets and sages whose words fill the Old

Testament. The prophet Isaiah recalled "the primeval days" when the might of the Lord "carved the Haughty One, made spin the

watery monster, dried up the waters of Tehom-Raba." Calling the Lord Yahweh "my primeval king," the Psalmist rendered in a

few verses the cosmogony of the epic of Creation. "By thy might, the waters thou didst disperse; the leader of the watery

monsters thou didst break up." Job recalled how this celestial Lord also smote "the assistants of the Haughty One"; and with

impressive astronomical sophistication exalted the Lord who:

The hammered canopy stretched out in the place of Tehom,

The Earth suspended in the void. ...

His powers the waters did arrest,

His energy the Haughty One did cleave;

His Wind the Hammered Bracelet measured out; His hand the twisting dragon did extinguish.

Biblical scholars now recognize that the Hebrew Tehom ("watery deep") stems from Tiamat; that Tehom-Raba means "great Tiamat," and that the biblical understanding of primeval events is based upon the Sumerian cosmologic epics. It should also be clear that first and foremost among these parallels are the opening verses of the Book of Genesis, describing how the Wind of the Lord hovered over the waters of Tehom, and how the lightning of the Lord (Marduk in the Babylonian version) lit the darkness of space as it hit and split Tiamat, creating Earth and the Rakia (literally, "the hammered bracelet"). This celestial band (hitherto translated as "firmament") is called "the Heaven."

The Book of Genesis (1:8) explicitly states that it is this "hammered out bracelet" that the Lord had named "heaven" (shamaim). The Akkadian texts also called this celestial zone "the hammered bracelet" (rakkis), and describe how Marduk stretched out Tiamat's lower part until he brought it end to end, fastened into a permanent great circle. The Sumerian sources leave no doubt that the specific "heaven," as distinct from the general concept of heavens and space, was the asteroid belt. Our Earth and the asteroid belt are the "Heaven and Earth" of both Mesopotamian and biblical references, created when Tiamat was dismembered by the celestial Lord.

After Marduk's North Wind had pushed Earth to its new celestial location, Earth obtained its own orbit around the Sun (resulting in our seasons) and received its axial spin (giving us day and night). The Mesopotamian texts claim that one of Marduk's tasks after he created Earth was, indeed, to have "allotted [to Earth] the days of the Sun and established the precincts of day and night." The biblical concepts are identical: And God said:

"Let there be Lights in the hammered Heaven, to divide between the Day and the Night; and let them be celestial signs and for Seasons and for Days and for Years."

Modem scholars believe that after Earth became a planet it was a hot ball of belching volcanoes, filling the skies with mists and clouds. As temperatures began to cool, the vapors turned to water, separating the face of Earth into dry land and oceans. The fifth tablet of Enuma Elish, though badly mutilated, imparts exactly the same scientific information. Describing the gushing lava as Tiamat's "spittle," the Creation epic correctly places this phenomenon before the formation of the atmosphere, the oceans of Earth, and the continents. After the "cloud waters were gathered," the oceans began to form, and the "foundations" of Earth - its continents - were raised. As "the making of cold" - a cooling off - took place, rain and mist appeared. Meanwhile, the "spittle" continued to pour forth, "laying in layers," shaping Earth's topography. Once again, the biblical parallel is clear: And God said:

"Let the waters under the skies be gathered together, unto one place, and let dry land appear." And it was so.

Earth, with oceans, continents, and an atmosphere, was now ready for the formation of mountains, rivers, springs, valleys.

Attributing all Creation to the Lord Marduk, Enuma Elish continued the narration:

Putting Tiamat's head [Earth] into position,

He raised the mountains thereon.

He opened springs, the torrents to draw off.

Through her eyes he released the Tigris and Euphrates.

From her teats he formed the lofty mountains,

Drilled springs for wells, the water to carry off.

In perfect accord with modern findings, both the Book of Genesis and Enuma Elish and other related Mesopotamian texts place the beginning of life upon Earth in the waters, followed by the "living creatures that swarm" and "fowl that fly." Not until then did "living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts" appear upon Earth, culminating with the appearance of Man - the final act of Creation.

As part of the new celestial order upon Earth, Marduk "made the divine Moon appear . . . designated him to mark the night, define the days every month."

Who was this celestial god? The text calls him SHESH.KI ("celestial god who protects Earth"). There is no mention earlier in the epic of a planet by this name; yet there he is, "within her heavenly pressure [gravitational field]." And who is meant by "her": Tiamat or Earth?

The roles of, and references to, Tiamat and Earth appear to be interchangeable. Earth is Tiamat reincarnated. The Moon is called Earth's "protector"; that is exactly what Tiamat called Kingu, her chief satellite.

The Creation epic specifically excludes Kingu from the "host" of Tiamat that were shattered and scattered and put into reverse motion around the Sun as comets. After Marduk completed his own first orbit and returned to the scene of the battle, he decreed Kingu's separate fate:

And Kingu, who had become chief among them, He made shrink;

As god DUG.GA.E he counted him. He took from him the Tablet of Destinies, Not rightfully his.

Marduk, then, did not destroy Kingu. He punished him by taking away his independent orbit, which Tiamat had granted him as he grew in size. Shrunk to a smaller size, Kingu remained a "god" - a planetary member of our solar system. Without an orbit he could only become a satellite again. As Tiamat's upper part was thrown into a new orbit (as the new planet Earth), we suggest, Kingu was pulled along. Our Moon, we suggest, is Kingu, Tiamat's former satellite.

Transformed into a celestial duggae, Kingu had been stripped of his "vital" elements - atmosphere, waters, radioactive matter; he shrank in size and became "a mass of lifeless clay." These Sumerian terms fittingly describe our lifeless Moon, its recently discovered history, and the fate that befell this satellite that started out as KIN.GU ("great emissary") and ended up as DUG.GA.E ("pot of lead").

L. W. King (The Seven Tablets of Creation) reported the existence of three fragments of an astronomical-mythological tablet that presented another version of Marduk's battle with Tiamat, which included verses that dealt with the manner in which Marduk dispatched Kingu. "Kingu, her spouse, with a weapon not of war he cut away . . . the Tablets of Destiny from Kingu he took in his hand." A further attempt, by B. Landesberger (in 1923, in the Archiv fur Keilschriftforschung), to edit and fully translate the text, demonstrated the interchangeability of the names Kingu/Ensu/Moon.

Such texts not only confirm our conclusion that Tiamat's main satellite became our Moon; they also explain NASA's findings regarding a huge collision "when celestial bodies the size of large cities came crashing into the Moon." Both the NASA findings and the text discovered by L. W. King describe the Moon as the "planet that was laid waste."

Cylinder seals have been found that depict the celestial battle, showing Marduk fighting a fierce female deity. One such depiction shows Marduk shooting his lightning at Tiamat, with Kingu, clearly identified as the Moon, trying to protect Tiamat, his creator.

This pictorial evidence that Earth's Moon and Kingu were the same satellite is further enhanced by the etymological fact that the name of the god SIN, in later times associated with the Moon, derived from SU.EN ("lord of wasteland"). Having disposed of Tiamat and Kingu, Marduk once again "crossed the heavens and surveyed the regions." This time his attention was focused on "the dwelling of Nudimmud" (Neptune), to fix a final "destiny" for Gaga, the erstwhile satellite of Anshar/Saturn who was made an "emissary" to the other planets.

The epic informs us that as one of his final acts in the heavens, Marduk assigned this celestial god" "to a hidden place," a hitherto unknown orbit facing "the deep" (outer space), and entrusted to him the "counsellorship of the Watery Deep." In line with his new position, the planet was renamed US.MI ("one who shows the way"), the outermost planet, our Pluto. According to the Creation epic, Marduk had at one point boasted, "The ways of the celestial gods I will artfully alter . . . into two groups shall they be divided."

Indeed he did. He eliminated from the heavens the Sun's first partner-in-Creation, Tiamat. He brought Earth into being, thrusting it into a new orbit nearer the Sun. He hammered a "bracelet" in the heavens - the asteroid belt that does separate the group of inner planets from the group of outer planets. He turned most of Tiamat's satellites into comets; her chief satellite, Kingu, he put into orbit around Earth to become the Moon. And he shifted a satellite of Saturn, Gaga, to become the planet Pluto, imparting to it some of Marduk's own orbital characteristics (such as a different orbital plane).

The puzzles of our solar system - the oceanic cavities upon Earth, the devastation upon the Moon, the reverse orbits of the comets, the enigmatic phenomena of Pluto - • all are perfectly answered by the Mesopotamia!! Creation epic, as deciphered by us.

Having thus "constructed the stations" for the planets, Marduk took for himself "Station Nibiru," and "crossed the heavens and surveyed" the new solar system. It was now made up of twelve celestial bodies, with twelve Great Gods as their counterparts. KINGSHIP OF HEAVEN

STUDIES OF THE "EPIC OF CREATION" and parallel texts (for example, S. Langdon's The Babylonian Epic of Creation) show that sometime after 2000 B.C., Marduk, son of Enki, was the successful winner of a contest with Ninurta, son of Enlil, for supremacy among the gods. The Babylonians then revised the original Sumerian "Epic of Creation," expunged from it all references to Ninurta and most references to Enlil, and renamed the invading planet Marduk.

The actual elevation of Marduk to the status of "King of the Gods" upon Earth was thus accompanied by assigning to him, as his celestial counterpart, the planet of the Nefilim, the Twelfth Planet. As "Lord of the Celestial Gods [the planets]" Marduk was thus also "King of the Heavens."

Some scholars at first believed that "Marduk" was either the North Star or some other bright star seen in the Mesopotamian skies at the time of the spring equinox because the celestial Marduk was described as a "bright heavenly body." But Albert Schott (Marduk und sein Stern) and others have shown conclusively that all the ancient astronomical texts spoke of Marduk as a member of the solar system.

Since other epithets described Marduk as the "Great Heavenly Body" and the "One Who Illumines," the theory was advanced that Marduk was a Babylonian Sun God, parallel to the Egyptian god Ra, whom the scholars also considered a Sun God. Texts describing Marduk as he "who scans the heights of the distant heavens . . . wearing a halo whose brilliance is awe-inspiring" appeared to support this theoiy. But the same text continued to say that "he

surveys the lands like Shamash [the Sun]." If Marduk was in some respects akin to the Sun, he could not, of course, be the Sun. If Marduk was not the Sun, which one of the planets was he? The ancient astronomical texts failed to fit any one planet. Basing their theories on certain epithets (such as Son of the Sun), some scholars pointed at Saturn. The description of Marduk as a reddish planet made Mars, too, a candidate. But the texts placed Marduk in markas shame ("in the center of Heaven"), and this convinced most scholars that the proper identification should be Jupiter, which is located in the center of the line of planets: Jupiter Mercury Venus Earth Mars Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto

This theory suffers from a contradiction. The same scholars who put it forward were the ones who held the view that the Chaldeans were unaware of the planets beyond Saturn. These scholars list Earth as a planet, while contending that the Chaldeans thought of Earth as a flat center of the planetary system. And they omit the Moon, which the Mesopotamians most definitely counted among the "celestial gods." The equating-of the Twelfth Planet with Jupiter simply does not work out. The "Epic of Creation" clearly states that Marduk was an invader from outside the solar system, passing by the outer planets (including Saturn and Jupiter) before colliding with Tiamat. The Sumerians called the planet NIBIRU, the "planet of crossing," and the Babylonian version of the epic retained the following astronomical information: Planet NIBIRU:

The Crossroads of Heaven and Earth he shall occupy.

Above and below, they shall not go across; They must await him. Planet NIBIRU:

Planet which is brilliant in the heavens. He holds the central position; To him they shall pay homage. Planet NIBIRU: It is he who without tiring The midst of Tiamat keeps crossing. Let "CROSSING" be his name - The one who occupies the midst.

These lines provide the additional and conclusive information that in dividing the other planets into two equal groups, the Twelfth Planet in "the midst of Tiamat keeps crossing": Its orbit takes it again and again to the site of the celestial battle, where Tiamat used to be.

We find that astronomical texts that dealt in a highly sophisticated manner with the planetary periods, as well as lists of planets in their celestial order, also suggested that Marduk appeared somewhere between Jupiter and Mars. Since the Sumerians did know of all the planets, the appearance of the Twelfth Planet in "the central position" confirms our conclusions: Marduk

Mercury Venus Moon Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto

If Marduk's orbit takes it to where Tiamat once was, relatively near us (between Mars and Jupiter), why have we not yet seen this planet, which is supposedly large and bright?

The Mesopotamian texts spoke of Marduk as reaching unknown regions of the skies and the far reaches of the universe. "He

scans the hidden knowledge ... he sees all the quarters of the universe." He was described as the "monitor" of all the planets,

one whose orbit enables him to encircle all the others. "He keeps hold on their bands [orbits]," makes a "hoop" around them. His

orbit was "loftier" and "grander" than that of any other planet. It thus occurred to Franz Kugler (Sternkunde und Sterndienst in

Babylon) that Marduk was a fast-moving celestial body, orbiting in a great elliptical path just like a comet.

Such an elliptical path, focused on the Sun as a center of gravity, has an apogee - the point farthest from the Sun, where the

return flight begins - and a perigee - the point nearest the Sun, where the return to outer space begins. We find that two such

"bases" are indeed associated with Marduk in the Mesopotamian texts. The Sumerian texts described the planet as going from

AN.UR ("Heaven's base") to E.NUN ("lordly abode"). The Creation epic said of Marduk:

He crossed the Heaven and surveyed the regions. . . .

The structure of the Deep the Lord then measured.

E-Shara he established as his outstanding abode;

E-Shara as a great abode in the Heaven he established.

One "abode" was thus "outstanding" - far in the deep regions of space. The other was established in the "Heaven," within the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter.

Following the teachings of their Sumerian forefather, Abraham of Ur, the ancient Hebrews also associated their supreme deity with the supreme planet. Like the Mesopotamian texts, many books of the Old Testament describe the "Lord" as having his abode in the "heights of Heaven," where he "beheld the foremost planets as they were arisen"; a celestial Lord who, unseen, "in the heavens moves about in a circle." The Book of Job, having described the celestial collision, contains these significant verses telling us where the lordly planet had gone:

Upon the Deep he marked out an orbit; Where light and darkness [merge] Is his farthest limit.

No less explicitly, the Psalms outlined the planet's majestic course:

The Heavens bespeak the glory of the Lord;

The Hammered Bracelet proclaims his handiwork. . . .

He comes forth as a groom from the canopy;

Like an athlete he rejoices to run the course.

From the end of heavens he emanates,

And his circuit is to their end.

Recognized as a great traveler in the heavens, soaring to immense heights at its apogee and then "coming down, bowing unto the Heaven" at its perigee, the planet was depicted as a Winged Globe.

Wherever archaeologists uncovered the remains of Near Eastern peoples, the symbol of the Winged Globe was conspicuous, dominating temples and palaces, carved on rocks, etched on cylinder seals, painted on walls. It accompanied kings and priests, stood above their thrones, "hovered" above them in battle scenes, was etched into their chariots. Clay, metal, stone, and wood objects were adorned with the symbol. The rulers of Sumer and Akkad, Babylon and Assyria, Elam and Urartu, Mari and Nuzi, Mitanni and Canaan - all revered the symbol. Hittite kings, Egyptian pharaohs, Persian shar's - all proclaimed the symbol (and what it stood for) supreme. It remained so for millennia.

Central to the religious beliefs and astronomy of the ancient world was the conviction that the Twelfth Planet, the "Planet of the Gods," remained within the solar system and that its grand orbit returned it periodically to Earth's vicinity. The pictographic sign for the Twelfth Planet, the "Planet of Crossing," was a cross. This

cuneiform sign, also meant "Ami" and "divine," evolved in the Semitic languages to the letter tav, which meant "the sign." Indeed, all the peoples of the ancient world considered the periodic nearing of the Twelfth Planet as a sign of upheavals, great changes, and new eras. The Mesopotamian texts spoke of the planet's periodic appearance as an anticipated, predictable, and observable event:

The great planet: ;

At his appearance, dark red. :

The Heaven he divides in half and stands as Nibiru.

Many of the texts dealing with the planet's arrival were omen texts prophesying the effect the event would have upon Earth and

Mankind. R. Campbell Thompson (Reports of the Magicians and Astronomers of Nineveh and Babylon) reproduced several

such texts, which trace the progress of the planet as it "ringed the station of Jupiter" and arrived at the point of crossing, Nibiru:

When from the station of Jupiter

the Planet passes towards the west,

there will be a time of dwelling in security.

Kindly peace will descend on the land.

When from the station of Jupiter

the Planet increases in brilliance c

and in the Zodiac of Cancer will become Nibiru, ;

Akkad will overflow with plenty,

the king of Akkad will grow powerful.

When Nibiru culminates. . . .

The lands will dwell securely,

Hostile kings will be at peace,

The gods will receive prayers and hear supplications.

The nearing planet, however, was expected to cause rains and flooding, as its strong gravitational effects have been known to do:

When the Planet of the Throne of Heaven

will grow brighter,

there will be floods and rains.

When Nibiru attains its perigee,

the gods will give peace;

troubles will be cleared up, complications will be unravelled. Rains and floods will come.

Like the Mesopotamian savants, the Hebrew prophets considered the time of the planet's approaching Earth and becoming visible to Mankind as ushering in a new era. The similarities between the Mesopotamian omens of peace and prosperity that would accompany the Planet of the Throne of Heaven, and the biblical prophesies of the peace and justice that would settle upon Earth after the Day of the Lord, can best be expressed in the words of Isaiah:

And it shall come to pass at the End of Days: . . . the Lord shall judge among the nations and shall rebuke many peoples. They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation. In contrast with the blessings of the new era following the Day of the Lord, the day itself was described by the Old Testament as a time of rains, inundations, and earthquakes. If we think of the biblical passages as referring, like their Mesopotamian counterparts, to the passage in Earth's vicinity of a large planet with a strong gravitational pull, the words of Isaiah can be plainly understood:

Like the noise of a multitude in the mountains,

a tumultuous noise like of a great many people,

of kingdoms of nations gathered together;

it is the Lord of Hosts,

commanding a Host to battle.

From a far away land they come,

from the end-point of the Heaven

do the Lord and his Weapons of wrath

come to destroy the whole Earth. . . .

Therefore will I agitate the Heaven

and Earth shall be shaken out of its place

when the Lord of Hosts shall be crossing,

the day of his burning wrath.

While on Earth "mountains shall melt . . . valleys shall be cleft," Earth's axial spin would also be affected. The prophet Amos

explicitly predicted:

It shall come to pass on that Day,

sayeth the Lord God,

that I will cause the Sun to go down at noon and I will darken the Earth in the midst of daytime.

Announcing, "Behold, the Day of the Lord is come!" the prophet Zechariah informed the people that this phenomenon of an

arrest in Earth's spin around its own axis would last only one day:

And it shall come to pass on that Day

there shall be no light - uncommonly shall it freeze.

And there shall be one day, known to the Lord,

which shall be neither day nor night,

when at eve-time there shall be light.

On the Day of the Lord, the prophet Joel said, "the Sun and Moon shall be darkened, the stars shall withdraw their radiance"; "the Sun shall be turned into darkness, and the Moon shall be as red blood."

Mesopotamian texts exalted the planet's radiance and suggested that it could be seen even at daytime: "visible at sunrise, disappearing from view at sunset." A cylinder seal, found at Nippur, depicts a group of plowmen looking up with awe as the

Twelfth Planet (depicted with its cross symbol) is visible in the skies. The ancient peoples not only expected the periodic arrival of the Twelfth Planet but also charted its advancing course.

Various biblical passages - especially in Isaiah, Amos, and Job - relate the movement of the celestial Lord to various

constellations. "Alone he stretches out the heavens and treads upon the highest Deep; he arrives at the Great Hoar, Orion and

Sirius, and the constellations of the south." Or, "He smiles his face upon Taurus and Aries; from Taurus to Sagittarius he shall

go." These verses describe a planet that not only spans the highest heavens but also comes in from the south and moves in a

clockwise direction - just as we have deduced from the Mesopotamian data. Quite explicitly, the prophet Habakkuk stated: "The

Lord from the south shall come . . . his glory shall fill the Earth . . . and Venus shall be as light, its rays of the Lord given."

Among the many Mesopotamian texts that dealt with the subject, one is quite clear:

Planet of the god Marduk:

Upon its appearance: Mercury.

Rising thirty degrees of the celestial arc: Jupiter.

When standing in the place of the celestial battle:

Nibiru.

As the accompanying schematic chart illustrates, the above texts do not simply call the Twelfth Planet by different names (as scholars have assumed). They deal ml her with the movements of the planet and the three crucial points at which its appearance can be observed and charted from Earth.

The first opportunity to observe the Twelfth Planet as its orbit brings it back to Earth's vicinity, then, was when il aligned with Mercury (point A) - by our calculations, at an angle of 30 degrees to the imaginary celestial axis of Sun - Earth - perigee. Coming closer to Earth and thus appearing to "rise" farther in Earth's skies (another 30 degrees, to be exact), the planet crossed the orbit of Jupiter ul point B. Finally, arriving at the place where the celestial I tattle had taken place, the perigee, or the Place of the Crossing, the planet is Nibiru, point C. Drawing an imaginary axis between Sun, Earth and the perigee of Marduk's orbit, observers on Earth first saw Marduk aligned with Mercury, at a 30° angle (point A). Progressing another 30°, Marduk crossed the orbital path of Jupiter at point B.

Then, at its perigee (point C) Marduk reached The Crossing: back at the site of the Celestial Battle, it was closest to Earth, and began its orbit back to distant space.

The anticipation of the Day of the Lord in the ancient Mesopotamian and Hebrew wrings (which were echoed in the New Testament's expectations of the coming of the Kingship of Heaven) was thus based on the actual experiences of Earth's people: their witnessing the periodic return of the Planet of Kingship to Earth's vicinity.

The planet's periodic appearance and disappearance from Earth's view confirms the assumption of its permanence in solar orbit. In this it acts like many comets. Some of the known comets - like Halley's comet, which nears Earth every seventy-five years - disappeared from view for such long times that astronomers were hard-pressed to realize that they were seeing the same comet. Other comets have been seen only once in human memory, and are assumed to have orbital periods running into thousands of years. The comet Kohoutek, for example, first discovered in March 1973, came within 75,000,000 miles of Earth in January 1974, and disappeared behind the Sun soon thereafter. Astronomers calculate it will reappear anywhere from 7,500 to 75,000 years in the future.

Human familiarity with the Twelfth Planet's periodic appearances and disappearances from view suggests that its orbital period is shorter than that calculated for Kohoutek. If so, why are our astronomers not aware of the existence of this planet? The fact is that even an orbit half as long as the lower figure for Kohoutek would take the Twelfth Planet about six times farther away from us than Pluto - a distance at which such a planet would not be visible from Earth, since it would barely (if at all) reflect the Sun's light toward Earth. In fact, the known planets beyond Saturn were first discovered not visually but mathematically. The orbits of known planets, astronomers found, were apparently being affected by other celestial bodies.

This may also be the way in which astronomers will "discover" the Twelfth Planet. There has already been speculation that a "Planet X" exists, which, though unseen, may be "sensed" through its effects on the orbits of certain comets. In 1972, Joseph L. Brady of the Lawrence Liver-more Laboratory of the University of California discovered that discrepancies in the orbit of Halley's comet could be caused by a planet the size of Jupiter orbiting the Sun every 1,800 years. At its estimated distance of 6,000,000,-000 miles, its presence could be detected only mathematically.

While such an orbital period cannot be ruled out, the Mesopotamian and biblical sources present strong evidence that the orbital period of the Twelfth Planet is 3,600 years. The number 3,600 was written in Sumerian as a large circle. The epithet for the planet - shar ("supreme ruler") also meant "a perfect circle," a "completed cycle." It also meant the number 3,600. And the identity of the three terms - planet/orbit/3,600 - could not be a mere coincidence.

Berossus, the Babylonian priest-astronomer-scholar, spoke of ten rulers who reigned upon Earth before the Deluge. Summarizing the writings of Berossus, Alexander Polyhistor wrote: "In the second book was the history of the ten kings of the Chaldeans, and the periods of each reign, which consisted collectively of an hundred and twenty shar's, or four hundred and thirty-two thousand years; reaching to the time of the Deluge."