Sumerian texts like the "Epic of Gilgamesh" suggest that the manner of sexual intercourse did indeed account for a distinction between wild-Man and human-Man. When the people of Uruk wanted to civilize the wild Enkidu - "the barbarous fellow from the depths of the steppes" - I hey enlisted the services of a "pleasure girl" and sent her (o meet Enkidu at the water hole where he used to befriend various animals, and there to offer him her "ripeness."
It appears from the text that the turning point in the process of "civilizing" Enkidu was the rejection of him by I lie animals he had befriended. It was important, the people of Uruk told the girl, that she continue to treat him to "a woman's task" until "his wild beasts, that grew up on his steppe, will reject him." For Enkidu to be torn away from sodomy was a prerequisite to his becoming human.
The lass freed her beasts, bared her bosom, and he possessed her ripeness . . . She treated him, the savage, to a woman's task.
Apparently the ploy worked. After six days and seven nights, "after he had had his fill of her charms," he remembered his former playmates.
He set his face toward his wild beasts; but On seeing him the gazelles ran off. The wild beasts of the steppe drew away from his body.
The statement is explicit. The human intercourse brought about such a profound change in Enkidu that the animals he had befriended "drew away from his body." They did not simply run away; they shunned physical contact with him. Astounded, Enkidu stood motionless for a while, "for his wild animals had gone." But the change was not to be regretted, as the ancient text explains:
Now he had vision, broader understanding. . . . The harlot says to him, to Enkidu: "Thou art knowing, Enkidu; Thou art become like a god!"
The words in this Mesopotamian text are almost identical to those of the biblical tale of Adam and Eve. As the Serpent had predicted, by partaking of the Tree of Knowing, they had become - in sexual matters - "as the Deity - knowing good and evil." If this meant only that Man had come to recognize that having sex with animals was uncivilized or evil, why were Adam and Eve punished for giving up sodomy? The Old Testament is replete with admonitions against sodomy, and it is inconceivable that the learning of a virtue would cause divine wrath.
The "knowing" that Man obtained against the wishes of the Deity - or one of the deities - must have been of a more profound
nature. It was something good for Man, but something his creators did not wish him to have.
We have to read carefully between the lines of the curse against Eve to grasp the meaning of the event:
And to the woman He said:
"I will greatly multiply thy suffering by thy pregnancy.
In suffering shalt thou bear children, yet to thy mate shall be thy desire" . . . And the Adam named his wife "Eve," for she was the mother of all who lived.
This, indeed, is the momentous event transmitted to us in the biblical tale: As long as Adam and Eve lacked "knowing," they lived in the Garden of Eden without any offspring. Having obtained "knowing," Eve gained the ability (and pain) to become pregnant and bear children. Only after the couple had acquired this "knowing," "Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain."
Throughout the Old Testament, the term "to know" is used to denote sexual intercourse, mostly between a man and his spouse for the purpose of having children. The tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is the story of a crucial step in Man's development: the acquisition of the ability to procreate.
That the first representatives of Homo sapiens were incapable of reproduction should not be surprising. Whatever method the Nefilim had used to infuse some of their genetic material into the biological makeup of the hominids they selected for the purpose, the new being was a hybrid, a cross between two different, if related, species. Like a mule (a cross between a mare and a donkey), such mammal hybrids are sterile. Through artificial insemination and even more sophisticated methods of biological engineering, we can produce as many mules as we desire, even without actual intercourse between donkey and mare; but no mule can procreate and bring forth another mule. Were the Nefilim, at first, simply producing "human mules" to suit their requirements?
Our curiosity is aroused by a scene depicted on a rock carving found in the mountains of southern Elam. It depicts a seated deity holding a "laboratory" flask from which liquids are flowing - a familiar depiction of Enki. A Great Goddess is seated next to him, a pose that indicates that she was a co-worker rather than a spouse; she could be none other than Ninti, the Mother Goddess or Goddess of Birth. The two are flanked by lesser goddesses - reminiscent of the birth goddesses of the Creation tales. Facing these creators of Man are row upon row of human beings, whose outstanding feature is that they all look alike - like products from the same mold.
Our attention is also drawn again to the Sumerian tale of the imperfect males and females initially brought forth by Enki and the Mother Goddess, who were either sexless or sexually incomplete beings. Does this text recall the first phase of the existence of hybrid Man - a being in the likeness and image of the gods, but sexually incomplete: lacking in "knowing"? After Enki managed to produce a "perfect model" - Adapa/Adam, "mass-production" techniques are described in the Sumerian texts: the implanting of the genetically treated ova in a "production line" of birth goddesses, with the advance knowledge that half would produce males and half would produce females. Not only does this bespeak the technique by which hybrid Man was "manufactured"; it also implies that Man could not procreate on his own.
The inability of hybrids to procreate, it has been discovered recently, stems from a deficiency in the reproductive cells. While all cells contain only one set of hereditary chromosomes, Man and other mammals are able to reproduce because their sex cells (the male sperm, the female ovum) contain two sets each. But this unique feature is lacking in hybrids. Attempts are now being made through genetic engineering to provide hybrids with such a double set of chromosomes in their -reproductive cells, making them sexually "normal."
Was that what the god whose epithet was "The Serpent" accomplished for Mankind?
The biblical Serpent surely was not a lowly, literal snake - for he could converse with Eve, he knew the truth about the matter of "knowing," and he was of such high stature that he unhesitatingly exposed the deity as a liar. We recall that in all ancient traditions, the chief deity fought a Serpent adversary - a tale whose roots undoubtedly go back to the Sumerian gods. The biblical tale reveals many traces of its Sumerian origin, including the presence of other deities: "The Adam has become as one of us." The possibility that the biblical antagonists - the Deity and the Serpent - stood for Enlil and Enki seems to us entirely plausible.
Their antagonism, as we have discovered, originated in the transfer to Enlil of the command of Earth, although Enki had been the true pioneer. While Enlil stayed at the comfortable Mission Control Center at Nippur, Enki was sent to organize the mining operations in the Lower World. The mutiny of the Anunnaki was directed at Enlil and his son Ninurta; the god who spoke out for the mutineers was Enki. It was Enki who suggested, and undertook, the creation of Primitive Workers; Enlil had to use force to obtain some of these wonderful creatures. As the Sumerian texts recorded the course of human events, Enki as a rule emerges as Mankind's protagonist, Enlil as its strict discipliner if not outright antagonist. The role of a deity wishing to keep the new humans sexually suppressed, and of a deity willing and capable of bestowing on Mankind the fruit of "knowing," fit Enlil and Enki perfectly.
Once more, Sumerian and biblical plays on words come to our aid. The biblical term for "Serpent" is nahash, which does mean "snake." But the word comes from the root NHSH, which means "to decipher, to find out"; so that nahash could also mean "he who can decipher, he who finds things out," an epithet befitting Enki, the chief scientist, the God of Knowledge of the Nefilim. Drawing parallels between the Mesopotamian tale of Adapa (who obtained "knowing" but failed to obtain eternal life) and the fate of Adam, S. Langdon (Semitic Mythology) reproduced a depiction unearthed in Mesopotamia that strongly suggests the biblical tale: a serpent entwined on a tree, pointing at its fruit. The celestial symbols are significant: High above is the Planet of Crossing, which stood for Anu; near the serpent is the Moon's crescent, which stood for Enki.
Most pertinent to our findings is the fact that in the Mesopotamian texts, the god who eventually granted "knowledge" to Adapa was none other than Enki:
Wide understanding he perfected for him. . . . Wisdom [he had given him]. . . . To him he had given Knowledge; Eternal Life he had not given him.
A pictorial tale engraved on a cylinder seal found in Mari may well be an ancient illustration of the Mesopotamian version of the tale in Genesis. The engraving shows a great god seated on high ground rising from watery waves - an obvious depiction of
Enki. Water-spouting serpents protrude from each side of this "throne."
Flanking this central figure are two treelike gods. The one on the right, whose branches have penis-shaped ends, holds up a
bowl that presumably contains the Fruit of Life. The one on the left, whose branches have vagina-shaped ends, offers fruit-
bearing branches, representing the Tree of "Knowing" - the god-given gift of procreation.
Standing to the side is another Great God; we suggest that he was Enlil. His anger at Enki is obvious.
We shall never know what caused this "conflict in the Garden of Eden." But whatever Enki's motives were, he did succeed in
perfecting the Primitive Worker and in creating Homo sapiens, who could have his own offspring.
After Man's acquisition of "knowing," the Old Testament ceases to refer to him as "the Adam," and adopts as its subject Adam, a specific person, the first patriarch of the line of people with whom the Bible was concerned. But this coming of age of Mankind also marked a schism between God and Man.
The parting of the ways, with Man no longer a dumb serf of the gods but a person tending for himself, is ascribed in the Book of Genesis not to a decision by Man himself but to the imposition of a punishment by the Deity: lest the Earthling also acquire the ability to escape mortality, he shall be cast out of the Garden of Eden. According to these sources, Man's independent existence began not in southern Mesopotamia, where the Nefilim had established their cities and orchards, but to the east, in the Zagros Mountains: "And he drove out the Adam and made him reside east of the Garden of Eden."
Once more, then, biblical information conforms to scientific findings: Human culture began in the mountainous areas bordering the Mesopotamian plain. What a pity the biblical narrative is so brief, for it deals with what was Man's first civilized life on Earth. Cast out of the Abode of the Gods, doomed to a mortal's life, but able to procreate, Man proceeded to do just that. The first Adam with whose generations the Old Testament was concerned "knew" his wife Eve, and she bore him a son, Cain, who tilled the land. Then Eve bore Abel, who was a shepherd. Hinting at homosexuality as the cause, the Bible relates that "Cain rose up unto his brother Abel and killed him."
Fearing for his life, Cain was given a protective sign by the Deity and was ordered to move farther east. At first leading a nomad's life, he finally settled in "the Land of Migration, well east of Eden." There he had a son whom he named Enoch ("inauguration"), "and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son." Enoch, in turn, had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In the sixth generation after Cain, Lamech was born; his three sons are credited by the Bible as the bearers of civilization: Jabal "was the father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle"; Jubal "was the father of all that grasp lyre and harp"; Tubal-cain was the first smith.
But Lamech, too, as his ancestor Cain, became involved in murder - this time of both a man and a child. It is safe to assume that the victims were not some humble strangers, for the Book of Genesis dwells on the incident and considers it a turning point in the lineage of Adam. The Bible reports that Lamech summoned his two wives, mothers of his three sons, and confessed to them the double murder, declaring, "If Cain be sevenfold avenged, Lamech shall seventy and seven fold." This little-understood statement must be assumed to deal with the succession; we see it as an admission by Lamech to his wives that the hope that the curse on Cain would be redeemed by the seventh generation (the generation of their sons) had come to naught. Now a new curse, lasting much longer, had been imposed on the house of Lamech.
Confirming that the event concerned the line of succession, the following verses advise us of the immediate establishment of a
new, pure, lineage:
And Adam knew his wife again
and she bore a son
and called his name Seth ["foundation"]
for the Deity hath founded for me
another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
The Old Testament at that point loses all interest in the defiled line of Cain and Lamech. Its ongoing tale of human events is henceforth anchored on the lineage of Adam through his son Seth, and Seth's firstborn, Enosh, whose name has acquired in Hebrew the generic connotation "human being." "It was then," Genesis informs us, "that it was begun to call upon the name of the Deity."
This enigmatic statement has baffled biblical scholars and theologians throughout the ages. It is followed by a chapter giving the genealogy of Adam through Seth and Enosh for ten generations ending with Noah, the hero of the Deluge.
The Sumerian texts, which describe the early stages when the gods were alone in Sumer, describe with equal precision the life of humans in Sumer at a later time, but before the Deluge. The Sumerian (and original) story of the Deluge has as its "Noah" a "Man of Shuruppak," the seventh city established by the Nefilim when they landed on Earth.
At some point, then, the human beings - banished from Eden - were allowed to return to Mesopotamia, to live alongside the gods, to serve them, and to worship them. As we interpret the biblical statement, this happened in the days of Enosh. It was then that the gods allowed Mankind back into Mesopotamia, to serve the gods "and to call upon the name of .the deity." Eager to get to the next epic event in the human saga, the Deluge, the Book of Genesis provides little information besides the names of the patriarchs who followed Enosh. But the meaning of each patriarch's name may suggest the events that took place during his lifetime.
The son of Enosh, through whom the pure lineage continued, was Cainan ("little Cain"); some scholars take the name to mean "metalsmith." Cainan's son was Mahalal-El ("praiser of god"). He was followed by Jared ("he who descended"); his son was Enoch ("consecrated one"), who at age 365 was carried aloft by the Deity. But three hundred years earlier, at age sixty-five, Enoch had begotten a son named Methuselah; many scholars, following Lettia D. Jeffreys (Ancient Hebrew Names: Their Significance and Historical Value) translate Methuselah as "man of the missile."
Methuselah's son was named Lamech, meaning "he who was humbled." And Lamech begot Noah ("respite"), saying: "Let this one comfort us concerning our work and the suffering of our hands by the earth which the deity hath accursed." Humanity, it appears, was undergoing great deprivations when Noah was born. The hard work and the toil were getting it nowhere, for Earth, which was to feed them, was accursed. The stage was set for the Deluge - the momentous event which was
to wipe off the face of Earth not only the human race but all life upon the land and in the skies.
And the Deity saw that the wickedness of Man
was great on the earth,
and that every desire of his heart's thoughts
was only evil, every day.
And the Deity repented that He had made Man
upon the earth, and His heart grieved.
And the Deity said:
"I will destroy the Earthling whom I have created off the face of the earth."
These are broad accusations, presented as justifications for drastic measures to "end all flesh." But they lack specificity, and scholars and theologians alike find no satisfactory answers regarding the sins or "violations" that could have upset the Deity so much.
The repeated use of the term flesh, both in the accusative verses and in the proclamations of judgment, suggest, of course, that the corruptions and violations had to do with the flesh. The Deity grieved over the evil "desire of Man's thoughts." Man, it would seem, having discovered sex, had become a sex maniac.
But one can hardly accept that the Deity would decide to wipe Mankind off the face of Earth simply because men made too much love to their wives. The Mesopotamian texts speak freely and eloquently of sex and lovemaking among the gods. There are texts describing tender love between gods and their consorts; illicit love between a maiden and her lover; violent love (as when Enlil raped Ninlil). There is a profusion of texts describing lovemaking and actual intercourse among the gods - with their official consorts or unofficial concubines, with their sisters and
daughters and even granddaughters (making love to the latter was a favorite pastime of Enki). Such gods could hardly turn against Mankind for behaving as they themselves did.
The Deity's motive, we find, was not merely concern for human morals. The mounting disgust was caused by a spreading defilement of the gods themselves. Seen in this light, the meaning of the baffling opening verses of Genesis 6 becomes clear: And it came to pass,
When the Earthlings began to increase in number
upon the face of the Earth,
and daughters were born unto them,
that the sons of the deities
saw the daughters of the Earthlings
that they were compatible,
and they took unto themselves
wives of whichever they chose.
As these verses should make clear, it was when the sons of the gods began to be sexually involved with Earthlings' offspring that the Deity cried, "Enough!" And the Deity said:
"My spirit shall not shield Man forever; having strayed, he is but flesh."
The statement has remained enigmatic for millennia. Read in the light of our conclusions regarding the genetic manipulation that was brought to play in Man's creation, the verses carry a message to our own scientists. The "spirit" of the gods - their genetic perfection of Mankind - was beginning to deteriorate. Mankind had "strayed," thereby reverting to being "but flesh" - closer to its animal, simian origins.
We can now understand the stress put by the Old Testament on the distinction between Noah, "a righteous man . . . pure in his genealogies" and "the whole earth that was corrupt." By intermarrying with the men and women of decreasing genetic purity, the gods were subjecting themselves, too, to deterioration. By pointing out that Noah alone continued to be genetically pure, the biblical tale justifies the Deity's contradiction: Having just decided to wipe all life off the face of Earth, he decided to save Noah and his descendants and "every clean animal," and other beasts and fowls, "so as to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth."
The Deity's plan to defeat his own initial purpose was to alert Noah to the coming catastrophe and guide him in the construction of a waterborne ark, which would carry the people and the creatures that were to be saved. The notice given to Noah was a mere seven days. Somehow, he managed to build the ark and waterproof it, collect all the creatures and put them and his family aboard, and provision the ark in the allotted time. "And it came to pass, after the seven days, that the waters of the Deluge were upon the earth." What came to pass is best described in the Bible's own words: On that day,
all the fountains of the great deep burst open,
and the sluices of the heavens were opened. ...
And the Deluge was forty days upon the Earth,
and the waters increased, and bore up the ark,
and it was lifted up above the earth.
And the waters became stronger
and greatly increased upon the earth,
and the ark floated upon the waters.
And the waters became exceedingly strong upon the
earth and all the high mountains were covered.
those that are under all the skies: fifteen cubits above them did the water prevail,
and the mountains were covered.
And all flesh perished. . . .
Both man and cattle and creeping things
and the birds of the skies
were wiped off from the Earth;
And Noah only was left,
and that which were with him in the ark.
The waters prevailed upon Earth 150 days, when the Deity
caused a wind to pass upon the Earth,
and the waters were calmed.
And the fountains of the deep were dammed,
as were the sluices of the heavens;
and the rain from the skies was arrested.
And the waters began to go back from upon the Earth,
coming and going back.
And after one hundred and fifty days,
the waters were less;
and the ark rested on the Mounts of Ararat.
According to the biblical version, Mankind's ordeal began "in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month." The ark rested on the Mounts of Ararat "in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month." The surge of the waters and their gradual "going back" - enough to lower the water level so that the ark rested on the peaks of Ararat - lasted, then, a full five months. Then "the waters continued to diminish, until the peaks of the mountains" - and not just the towering Ararats - "could be seen on the eleventh day of the tenth month," nearly three months later. Noah waited another forty days. Then he sent out a raven and a dove "to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground." On the third try, the dove came back holding an olive leaf in her mouth, indicating that the waters had receded enough to enable treetops to be seen. After a while, Noah sent out the dove once more, "but she returned not again." The Deluge was over.
And Noah removed the covering of the Ark and looked, and behold: the face of the ground was dry.
"In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, did the earth dry up." It was the six hundred and first year of Noah. The ordeal had lasted a year and ten days.
Then Noah and all that were with him in the ark came out. And he built an altar and offered burnt sacrifices to the Deity.
And the Deity smelled the enticing smell
and said in his heart:
"I shall no longer curse the dry land
on account of the Earthling;
for his heart's desire is evil from his youth."
The "happy ending" is as full of contradictions as the Deluge story itself. It begins with a long indictment of Mankind for various abominations, including defilement of the purity of the younger gods. A momentous decision to have all flesh perish is reached and appears fully justified. Then the very same Deity rushes in a mere seven days to make sure that the seed of Mankind and other creatures shall not perish. When the trauma is over, the Deity is enticed by the smell of roasting meat and, forgetting his original determination to put an end to Mankind, dismisses the whole thing with an excuse, blaming Man's evil desires on his youth.
These nagging doubts of the story's veracity disperse, however, when we realize that the biblical account is an edited version of the original Sumerian account. As in the other instances, the monotheistic Bible has compressed into one Deity the roles played by several gods who were not always in accord.
Until the archaeological discoveries of the Mesopotamian civilization and the decipherment of the Akkadian and Sumerian literature, the biblical story of the Deluge stood alone, supported only by scattered primitive mythologies around the world. The discovery of the Akkadian "Epic of Gilgamesh" placed the Genesis Deluge tale in older and venerable company, further enhanced by later discoveries of older texts and fragments of the Sumerian original.
The hero of the Mesopotamian Deluge account was Ziusudra in Sumerian (Utnapishtim in Akkadian), who was taken after the Deluge to the Celestial Abode of the Gods to live there happily ever after. When, in his search for immortality, Gilgamesh finally reached the place, he sought Utnapishtim's advice on the subject of life and death. Utnapishtim disclosed to Gilgamesh - and through him to all post-Diluvial Mankind - the secret of his survival, "a hidden matter, a secret of the gods" - the true story (one might say) of the Great Flood.
The secret revealed by Utnapishtim was that before the onslaught of the Deluge the gods held a council and voted on the
destruction of Mankind. The vote and the decision were kept secret. But Enki searched out Utnapishtim, the ruler of Shuruppak,
to inform him of the approaching calamity. Adopting clandestine methods, Enki spoke to Utnapishtim from behind a reed screen.
At first his disclosures were cryptic. Then his warning and advice were clearly stated:
Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu:
Tear down the house, build a ship!
Give up possessions, seek thou life!
Forswear belongings, keep soul alive!
Aboard ship take thou the seed of all living things;
That ship thou shalt build -
her dimensions shall be to measure.
The parallels with the biblical story are obvious: A Deluge is about to come; one Man is forewarned; he is to save himself by preparing a specially constructed boat; he is to take with him and save "the seed of all living things." Yet the Babylonian version is more plausible. The decision to destroy and the effort to save are not contradictory acts of the same single Deity, but the acts of different deities. Moreover, the decision to forewarn and save the seed of Man is the defiant act of one god (Enki), acting in secret and contrary to the joint decision of the other Great Gods.
Why did Enki risk defying the other gods? Was he solely concerned with the preservation of his "wondrous works of art," or did he act against the background of a rising rivalry or enmity between him and his brother Enlil? The existence of such a conflict between the two brothers is highlighted in the Deluge story.
Utnapishtim asked Enki the obvious question: How could he, Utnapishtim, explain to the other citizens of Shuruppak the
construction of an oddly shaped vessel and the abandonment of all possessions? Enki advised him:
Thou shalt thus speak unto them:
"I have learnt that Enlil is hostile to me,
so that I cannot reside in your city,
nor set my foot in Enid's territory.
To the Apsu I will therefore go down,
to dwell with my Lord Ea."
The excuse was thus to be that, as Enki's follower, Utnapishtim could no longer dwell in Mesopotamia, and that he was building a boat in which he intended to sail to the Lower World (southern Africa, by our findings) to dwell there with his Lord, Ea/Enki. Verses that follow suggest that the area was suffering from a drought or a famine; Utnapishtim (on Enki's advice) was to assure the residents of the city that if Enlil saw him depart, "the land shall [again] have its fill of harvest riches." This excuse made sense to the other residents of the city.
Thus misled, the people of the city did not question, but actually lent a hand in, the construction of the ark. By killing and serving them bullocks and sheep "every day" and by lavishing upon them "must, red wine, oil and white wine," Utnapishtim encouraged them to work faster. Even children were pressed to carry bitumen for waterproofing. ;
"On the seventh day the ship was completed. The launching was very difficult, so they had to shift the floor '. planks above and below, until two-thirds of the structure had gone into the water" of the Euphrates. Then Utnapishtim put all his family and kin aboard the ship, taking along "whatever I had of all the living creatures" as well as "the animals of the field, the wild beasts of the field." The parallels with the biblical tale - even down to the seven days of construction - are clear. Going a step beyond Noah, however, Utnapishtim also sneaked aboard all the craftsmen who had helped him build the ship.
He himself was to go aboard only upon a certain signal, whose nature Enki had also revealed to him: a "stated time" to be set by Shamash, the deity in charge of the fiery rockets. This was Enki's order:
"When Shamash who orders a trembling at dusk will shower down a rain of eruptions - board thou the ship, batten up the entrance!"
We are left guessing at the connection between this apparent firing of a space rocket by Shamash and the arrival of the moment for Utnapishtim to board his ark and seal himself inside it. But the moment did arrive; the space rocket did cause a "trembling at dusk"; there was a shower of eruptions. And Utnapishtim "battened down the whole ship" and "handed over the structure together with its contents" to "Puzur-Amurri, the Boatman."
The storm came "with the first glow of dawn." There was awesome thunder. A black cloud rose up from the horizon. The storm
tore out the posts of buildings and piers; then the dikes gave. Darkness followed, "turning to blackness all that had been light;"
and "the wide land was shattered like a pot."
For six days and six nights the "south-storm" blew.
Gathering speed as it blew,
submerging the mountains,
overtaking the people like a battle. . . .
When the seventh day arrived,
the flood-carrying south-storm
subsided in the battle
which it had fought like an army.
The sea grew quiet,
the tempest was still,
the flood ceased.
I looked at the weather.
Stillness had set in.
And all of Mankind had returned to clay.
The will of Enlil and the Assembly of Gods was done.
But, unknown to them, the scheme of Enki had also worked: Floating in the stormy waters was a vessel carrying men, women, children, and other living creatures.
With the storm over, Utnapishtim "opened a hatch; light fell upon my face." He looked around; "the landscape was as level as a flat roof." Bowing low, he sat and wept, "tears running down on my face." He looked about for a coastline in the expanse of the sea; he saw none. Then:
There emerged a mountain region; On the Mount of Salvation the ship came to a halt; Mount Nisir ["salvation"] held the ship fast, allowing no motion.
For six days Utnapishtim watched from the motionless ark, caught in the peaks of the Mount of Salvation - the biblical peaks of Ararat. Then, like Noah, he sent out a dove to look for a resting place, but it came back. A swallow flew out and came back. Then a raven was set free - and flew off, finding a resting place. Utnapishtim then released all the birds and animals that were with him, and stepped out himself. He built an altar "and offered a sacrifice" - just as Noah had.
But here again the single Deity - multideity difference crops up. When Noah offered a burnt sacrifice, "Yahweh smelled the enticing smell"; but when Utnapishtim offered a sacrifice, "the gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor. The gods crowded like flies about a sacrificer."
In the Genesis version, it was Yahweh who vowed never again to destroy Mankind. In the Babylonian version it was the Great Goddess who vowed: "I shall not forget. . . . I shall be mindful of these days, forgetting them never."
That, however, was not the immediate problem. For when Enlil finally arrived on the scene, he had little mind for food. He was hopping mad to discover that some had survived. "Has some living soul escaped? No man was to survive the destruction!" Ninurta, his son and heir, immediately pointed a suspecting finger at Enki. "Who, other than Ea, can devise plans? It is Ea alone who knows every matter." Far from denying the charge, Enki launched one of the world's most eloquent defense summations. Praising Enlil for his own wisdom, and suggesting that Enlil could not possibly be "unreasoning" - a realist - Enki mixed denial with confession. "It was not I who disclosed the secret of the gods"; I merely let one Man, an "exceedingly wise" one, perceive by his own wisdom what the gods' secret was. And if indeed this Earthling is so wise, Enki suggested to Enlil, let's not ignore his abilities. "Now then, take counsel in regard to him!"
All this, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" relates, was the "secret of the gods" that Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh. He then told Gilgamesh of
the final event. Having been influenced by Enki's argument,
Enlil thereupon went aboard the ship.
Holding me by the hand, he took me aboard.
He took my wife aboard,
made her kneel by my side.
Standing between us,
he touched our foreheads to bless us:
"Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human;
henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife
shall be unto us like gods.
Utnapishtim shall reside in the Far Away,
at the Mouth of the Waters!"
And Utnapishtim concluded his story to Gilgamesh. After he was taken to reside in the Far Away, Anu and Enlil
Gave him life, like a god,
Elevated him to eternal life, like a god.
But what happened to Mankind in general? The biblical tale ends with an assertion that the Deity then permitted and blessed
Mankind to "be fruitful and multiply." Mesopotamian versions of the Deluge story also end with verses that deal with Mankind's
procreation. The partly mutilated texts speak of the establishment of human "categories":
. . . Let there be a third category among the Humans:
Let there be among the Humans
Women who bear, and women who do not bear.
There were, apparently, new guidelines for sexual intercourse:
Regulations for the human race:
Let the male ... to the young maiden. . . .
Let the young maiden. . . .
The young man to the young maiden . . .
When the bed is laid,
let the spouse and her husband lie together.
Enlil was outmaneuvered. Mankind was saved and allowed to procreate. The gods opened up Earth to Man. WHEN THE GODS FLED FROM EARTH
WHAT WAS THIS DKLUGE, whose raging waters swept over Earth?
Some explain the Flood in terms of the annual inundations of the Tigris-Euphrates plain. One such inundation, it is surmised, must have been particularly severe. Fields and cities, men and beasts were swept away by the rising waters; and primitive peoples, seeing the event as a punishment by the gods, began to propagate the legend of a Deluge.
In one of his books, Excavations at Ur, Sir Leonard Woolley relates how, in 1929, as the work on the Royal Cemetery at Ur was drawing to a close, the workmen sank a small shaft at a nearby mound, digging through a mass of broken pottery and crumbled brick. Three feet down, they reached a level of hard-packed mud - usually soil marking the point where civilization had started. But could the millennia of urban life have left only three feet of archaeological strata? Sir Leonard directed the workmen to dig farther. They went down another three feet, then another five. They still brought up "virgin soil" - mud with no traces of human habitation. But after digging through eleven feet of silted, dry mud, the workmen reached a stratum containing pieces of broken green pottery and flint instruments. An earlier civilization had been buried under eleven feet of mud! Sir Leonard jumped into the pit and examined the excavation. He called in his aides, seeking their opinions. No one had a plausible theory. Then Sir Leonard's wife remarked almost casually, "Well, of course, it's the Flood!" Other archaeological delegations to Mesopotamia, however, cast doubt on this marvelous intuition. The stratum of mud containing no traces of habitation did indicate flooding; but while the deposits of Ur and al-'Ubaid suggested flooding sometime between 3500 and 4000 B.C., a similar deposit uncovered later at Kish was estimated to have occurred circa 2800 B.C. The same date (2800 B.C.) was estimated for mud strata found at Erech and at Shuruppak, the city of the Sumerian Noah. At Nineveh, excavators found, at a depth of some sixty feet, no less than thirteen alternate strata of mud and riverine sand, dating from 4000 to 3000 B.C.
Most scholars, therefore, believe that what Woolley found were traces of diverse local floodings - frequent occurrences in Mesopotamia, where occasional torrential rains and the swelling of the two great rivers and their frequent course changes cause such havoc. All the varying mud strata, scholars have concluded, were not the comprehensive calamity, the monumental
prehistoric event that the Deluge must have been.
The Old Testament is a masterpiece of literary brevity and precision. The words are always well chosen to convey precise meanings; the verses are to the point; their order is purposeful; their length is no more than is absolutely needed. It is noteworthy that the whole story from Creation through the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is told in eighty verses. The complete record of Adam and his line, even when told separately for Cain and his line and Seth, Enosh, and their line, is managed in fifty-eight verses. But the story of the Great Flood merited no less than eighty-seven verses. It was, by any editorial standard, a "major story." No mere local event, it was a catastrophe affecting the whole of Earth, the whole of Mankind. The Mesopotamian texts clearly state that the "four corners of the Earth" were affected.
As such, it was a crucial point in the prehistory of Mesopotamia. There were the events and the cities and the people before the Deluge, and the events and cities and people after the Deluge. There were all the deeds of the gods and the Kingship that they lowered from Heaven before the Great Flood, and the course of godly and human events when Kingship was lowered again to Earth after the Great Flood. It was the great time divider.
Not only the comprehensive king lists but also texts relating to individual kings and their ancestries made mention of the Deluge. One, for example, pertaining to Ur-Ninurta, recalled the Deluge as an event remote in time:
On that day, on that remote day, On that night, on that remote night, In that year, in that remote year - When the Deluge had taken place.
The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, a patron of the sciences who amassed the huge library of clay tablets in Nineveh, professed in one of his commemorative inscriptions that he had found and was able to read "stone inscriptions from before the Deluge." An Akkadian text dealing with names and their origins explains that it lists names "of kings from after the Deluge." A king was exalted as "of seed preserved from before the Deluge." Various scientific texts quoted as their source "the olden sages, from before the Deluge."
No, the Deluge was no local occurrence or periodic inundation. It was by all counts an Earthshaking event of unparalleled magnitude, a catastrophe the likes of which neither Man nor gods experienced before or since.
The biblical and Mesopotamian texts that we have examined so far leave a few puzzles to be solved. What was the ordeal suffered by Mankind, in respect to which Noah was named "Respite" with the hope that his birth signaled an end to the hardships? What was the "secret" the gods swore to keep, and of whose disclosure Enki was accused? Why was the launching of a space vehicle from Sippar the signal to Utnapishtim to enter and seal the ark? Where were the gods while the waters covered even the highest mountains? And why did they so cherish the roasted meat sacrifice offered by Noah/Utnapishtim? As we proceed to find the answers to these and other questions, we shall find that the Deluge was not a premeditated punishment brought about by the gods at their exclusive will. We shall discover that though the Deluge
was a predictable event, it was an unavoidable one, a natural calamity in which the gods played not an active but a passive role. We will also show that the secret the gods swore to was a conspiracy against Mankind - to withhold from the Earthlings the information they had regarding the coming avalanche of water so that, while the Nefilim saved themselves, Mankind should perish.
Much of our greatly increased knowledge of the Deluge and the events preceding it comes from the text "When the gods as men." In it the hero of the Deluge is called Atra-Hasis. In the Deluge segment of the "Epic of Gilgamesh," Enki called Utnapishtim "the exceedingly wise" - which in Akkadian is atra-hasis.
Scholars theorized that the texts in which Atra-Hasis is the hero might be parts of an earlier, Sumerian Deluge story. In time, enough Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, and even original Sumerian tablets were discovered to enable a major reassembly of the Atra-Hasis epic, a masterful work credited primarily to W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard (Atra-Hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood).
After describing the hard work of the Anunnaki, their mutiny, and the ensuing creation of the Primitive Worker, the epic relates
how Man (as we also know from the biblical version) began to procreate and multiply. In time, Mankind began to upset Enlil.
The land extended, the people multiplied;
In the land like wild bulls they lay.
The god got disturbed by their conjugations;
The god Enlil heard their pronouncements,
and said the great gods:
"Oppressive have become the pronouncements of Mankind; Their conjugations deprive me of sleep."
Enlil - once again cast as the prosecutor of Mankind - then ordered a punishment. We would expect to read now of the coming Deluge. But not so. Surprisingly, Enlil did not even mention a Deluge or any similar watery ordeal. Instead, he called for the decimation of Mankind through pestilence and sicknesses.
The Akkadian and Assyrian versions of the epic speak of "aches, dizziness, chills, fever" as well as "disease, sickness, plague, and pestilence" afflicting Mankind and its livestock following Enlil's call for punishment. But Enlil's scheme did not work. The "one who was exceedingly wise" - Atra-Hasis - happened to be especially close to the god Enki. Telling his own story in some of the versions, he says, "I am Atra-Hasis; I lived in the temple of Ea my lord." With "his mind alert to his Lord Enki," Atra-Hasis appealed to him to undo his brother Enlil's plan:
"Ea, O Lord, Mankind groans; the anger of the gods consumes the land. Yet it is thou who hast created us! Let there cease the aches, the dizziness, the chills, the fever!"
Until more pieces of the broken-off tablets are found, we shall not know what Enki's advice was. He said of something, ". . . let there appear in the land." Whatever it was, it worked. Soon thereafter, Enlil complained bitterly to the gods that "the people have not diminished; they are more numerous than before!"
He then proceeded to outline the extermination of Mankind through starvation. "Let supplies be cut off from the people; in their bellies, let fruit and vegetables be wanting!" The famine was to be achieved through natural forces, by a lack of rain and failing irrigation.
Let the rains of the rain god be withheld from above; Below, let the waters not rise from their sources. Let the wind blow and parch the ground; Let the clouds thicken, but hold back the downpour.
Even the sources of seafood were to disappear: Enki was ordered to "draw the bolt, bar the sea," and "guard" its food away from the people.
Soon the drought began to spread devastation.
From above, the heat was not. . . .
Below, the waters did not rise from their sources.
The womb of the earth did not bear;
Vegetation did not sprout. . . .
The black fields turned white;
The broad plain was choked with salt.
The resulting famine caused havoc among the people. Conditions got worse as time went on. The Mesopotamian texts speak of
six increasingly devastating sha-at-tam's - a term that some translate as "years," but which literally means "passings," and, as
the Assyrian version makes clear, "a year of Anu":
For one sha-at-tam they ate the earth's grass.
For the second sha-at-tam they suffered the vengeance.
The third sha-at-tam came;
their features were altered by hunger,
their faces were encrusted . . .
they were living on the verge of death.
When the fourth sha-at-tam arrived,
their faces appeared green;
they walked hunched in the streets;
their broad [shoulders?] became narrow. •
By the fifth "passing," human life began to deteriorate. Mothers barred their doors to their own starving daughters. Daughters spied on their mothers to see whether they had hidden any food. By the sixth "passing," cannibalism was rampant.
When the sixth sha-at-tam arrived they prepared the daughter for a meal; the child they prepared for food. . . . One house devoured the other.
The texts report the persistent intercession by Atra-Hasis with his god Enki. "In the house of his god ... he set foot; . . . every day he wept, bringing oblations in the morning ... he called by the name of his god," seeking Enki's help to avert the famine. Enki, however, must have felt bound by the decision of the other deities, for at first he did not respond. Quite possibly, he even hid from his faithful worshiper by leaving the temple and sailing into his beloved marshlands. "When the people were living on the edge of death," Atra-Hasis "placed his bed facing the river." But there was no response.
The sight of a starving, disintegrating Mankind, of parents eating their own children, finally brought about the unavoidable: another confrontation between Enki and Enlil. In the seventh "passing," when the remaining men and women were "like ghosts of the dead," they received a message from Enki. "Make a loud noise in the land," he said. Send out heralds to command all the people: "Do not revere your gods, do not pray to your goddesses." There was to be total disobedience! Under the cover of such turmoil, Enki planned more concrete action. The texts, quite fragmented at this point, disclose that he convened a secret assembly of "elders" in his temple. "They entered . . . they took counsel in the House of Enki." First Enki exonerated himself, telling them how he had opposed the acts of the other gods. Then he outlined a plan of action; it somehow involved his command of the seas and the Lower World.
We can glean the clandestine details of the plan from the fragmentary verses: "In the night . . . after he . . ." someone had to be "by the bank of the river" at a certain time, perhaps to await the return of Enki from the Lower World. From there Enki "brought the water warriors" - perhaps also some of the Earthlings who were Primitive Workers in the mines. At the appointed time, commands were shouted: "Go! . . . the order . . ."
In spite of missing lines, we can gather what had happened from the reaction of Enlil. "He was filled with anger." He summoned
the Assembly of the Gods and sent his sergeant at arms to fetch Enki. Then he stood up and accused his brother of breaking
the surveillance-and-containment plans:
All of us, Great Anunnaki,
reached together a decision. ...
I commanded that in the Bird of Heaven
Adad should guard the upper regions;
that Sin and Nergal should guard
the Earth's middle regions;
that the bolt, the bar of the sea,
you [Enki] should guard with your rockets.
But you let loose provisions for the people!
Enlil accused his brother of breaking the "bolt to the sea." But Enki denied that it had happened with his consent:
The bolt, the bar of the sea,
I did guard with my rockets.
[But] when . . . escaped from me . . .
a myriad of fish ... it disappeared;
they broke off the bolt. . .
they had killed the guards of the sea.
He claimed that he had caught the culprits and punished them, but Enlil was not satisfied. He demanded that Enki "stop feeding
his people," that he no longer "supply corn rations on which the people thrive." The reaction of Enki was astounding: The god got fed up with the sitting; in the Assembly of the Gods, laughter overcame him.
We can imagine the pandemonium. Enlil was furious. There were heated exchanges with Enki and shouting. "There is slander in his hand!" When the Assembly was finally called to order, Enlil took the floor again. He reminded his colleagues and subordinates that it had been a unanimous decision. He reviewed the events that led to the fashioning of the Primitive Worker and recalled the many times that Enki "broke the rule."
But, he said, there was still a chance to doom Mankind. A "killing flood" was in the offing. The approaching catastrophe had to
be kept a secret from the people. He called on the Assembly to swear themselves to secrecy and, most important, to "bind
prince Enki by an oath."
Enlil opened his mouth to speak
and addressed the Assembly of all the gods:
"Come, all of us, and take an oath
regarding the Killing Flood!"
Anu swore first;
Enlil swore; his sons swore with him. WHEN THE GODS FLED FBOM EARTH
At first, Enki refused to take the oath. "Why will you bind me with an oath?" he asked. "Am I to raise my hands against my own humans?" But he was finally forced to take the oath. One of the texts specifically states: "Anu, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag, the gods of Heaven and Earth, had taken the oath." The die was cast.
What was the oath he was bound by? As Enki chose to interpret it, he swore not to reveal the secret of the coming Deluge to the people; but could he not tell it to a wall? Calling Atra-Hasis to the temple, he made him stay behind a screen. Then Enki pretended to speak not to his devout Earthling but to the wall. "Reed screen," he said, Pay attention to my instructions. On all the habitations, over the cities, a storm will sweep.
The destruction of Mankind's seed it will be. . . .
This is the final ruling,
the word of the Assembly of the gods,
the word spoken by Anu, Enlil and Ninhursag.
(This subterfuge explains Enki's later contention, when the survival of Noah/Utnapishtim was discovered, that he had not broken his oath - that the "exceedingly wise" [atra-hasis] Earthling had found out the secret of the Deluge all by himself, by correctly interpreting the signs.) Pertinent seal depictions show an attendant holding the screen while Ea - as the Serpent God - reveals the secret to Atra-Hasis.
Enki's advice to his faithful servant was to build a water-borne vessel; but when the latter said, "I have never built a boat. . . draw for me a design on the ground that I may see," Enki provided him with precise instructions regarding the boat, its measurements, and its construction. Steeped in Bible stories, we imagine this "ark" as a very large boat, with decks and superstructures. But the biblical term - teba - stems from the root "sunken," and it must be concluded that Enki instructed his Noah to construct a submersible boat - a submarine.
The Akkadian text quotes Enki as calling for a boat "roofed over and below," hermetically sealed with "tough pitch." There were to be no decks, no openings, "so that the sun shall not see inside." It was to be a boat "like an Apsu boat," a sulili; it is the very term used nowadays in Hebrew (soleleth) to denote a submarine.
"Let the boat," Enki said, "be a MA.GUR.GUR" - "a boat that can turn and tumble." Indeed, only such a boat could have survived an overpowering avalanche of waters.
The Atra-Hasis version, like the others, reiterates that although the calamity was only seven days away, the people were unaware of its approach. Atra-Hasis used the excuse that the "Apsu vessel" was being built so that he could leave for Enki's abode and perhaps thereby avert Enlil's anger. This was readily accepted, for things were really bad. Noah's father had hoped that his birth signaled the end of a long time of suffering. The people's problem was a drought - the absence of rain, the shortage of water. Who in his right mind would have thought that they were about to perish in an avalanche of water? Yet if the humans could not read the signs, the Nefilim could. To them, the Deluge was not a sudden event; though it was unavoidable, they detected its coming. Their scheme to destroy Mankind rested not on an active but on a passive role by the gods. They did not cause the Deluge; they simply connived to withhold from the Earthlings the fact of its coming. Aware, however, of the impending calamity, and of its global impact, the Nefilim took steps to save their own skins. With Earth about to be engulfed by water, they could go in only one direction for protection: skyward. When the storm that preceded the Deluge began to blow, the Nefilim took to their shuttlecraft, and remained in Earth orbit until the waters began to subside. The day of the Deluge, we will show, was the day the gods fled from Earth.
The sign for which Utnapishtim had to .watch, upon which he was to join all other in the ark and seal it, was this:
When Shamash,
who orders a trembling at dusk,
will shower down a rain of eruptions -
board thou the ship,
batten up the entrance!
Shamash, as we know, was in charge of the spaceport at Sippar. There is no doubt in our mind that Enki instructed Utnapishtim to watch for the first sign of space launchings at Sippar. Shuruppak, where Utnapishtim lived, was only 18 beru (some 180 kilometers, or 112 miles) south of Sippar. Since the launchings were to take place at dusk, there would be no problem in seeing the "rain of eruptions" that the rising rocket ships would "shower down."
Though the Nefilim were prepared for the Deluge, its coming was a frightening experience: "The noise of the Deluge ... set the gods trembling." But when the moment to leave Earth arrived, the gods, "shrinking back, ascended to the heavens of Ami." The Assyrian version of Atra-Hasis speaks of the gods using rukub ilani ("chariot of the gods") to escape from Earth. "The Anunnaki lifted up," their rocketships, like torches, "setting the land ablaze with their glare."
Orbiting Earth, the Nefilim saw a scene of destruction that affected them deeply. The Gilgamesh texts tell us that, as the storm
grew in intensity, not only "could no one see his fellow," but "neither could the people be recognized from the heavens."
Crammed into their spacecraft, the gods strained to see what was happening on the planet from which they had just blasted off.
The gods cowered like dogs,
crouched against the outer wall.
Ishtar cried out like a woman in travail:
"The olden days are alas turned to clay." . . .
The Anunnaki gods weep with her.
The gods, all humbled, sit and weep;
their lips drawn tight. . . one and all.
The Atra-Hasis texts echo the same theme. The gods, fleeing, were watching the destruction at the same time. But the situation
within their own vessels was not very encouraging, either. Apparently, they were divided among several spaceships; Tablet III of
the Atra-Hasis epic describes the conditions on board one where some of the Anunnaki shared accommodations with the
Mother Goddess.
The Anunnaki, great gods,
were sitting in thirst, in hunger. . . .
Ninti wept and spent her emotion;
she wept and eased her feelings.
The gods wept with her for the land.
She was overcome with grief,
she thirsted for beer.
Where she sat, the gods sat weeping;
crouching like sheep at a trough.
Their lips were feverish of thirst,
they were suffering cramp from hunger.
The Mother Goddess herself, Ninhursag, was shocked by the utter devastation. She bewailed what she was seeing:
The Goddess saw and she wept . . .
her lips were covered with feverishness. . . .
"My creatures have become like flies -
they filled the rivers like dragonflies,
their fatherhood was taken by the rolling sea."
Could she, indeed, save her own life while Mankind, which she helped create, was dying? Could she really leave the Earth, she asked aloud -
"Shall I ascend up to Heaven, to reside in the House of Offerings, where Anu, the Lord, had ordered to go?"
The orders to the Nefilim became clear: Abandon Earth, "ascend up to Heaven." It was a time when the Twelfth Planet was nearest Earth, within the asteroid belt ("Heaven"), as evidenced by the fact that Anu was able to attend personally the crucial conferences shortly before the Deluge.
Enlil and Ninurta - accompanied perhaps by the elite of the Anunnaki, those who had manned Nippur - were in one spacecraft, planning, no doubt, to rejoin the main spaceship. But the other gods were not so determined. Forced to abandon Earth, they suddenly realized how attached they had become to it and its inhabitants. In one craft, Ninhursag and her group of Anunnaki debated the merits of the orders given by Anu. In another, Ishtar cried out: "The olden days, alas, are turned into clay"; the Anunnaki who were in her craft "wept with her."
Enki was obviously in yet another spacecraft, or else he would have disclosed to the others that he had managed to save the seed of Mankind. No doubt he had other reasons to feel less gloomy, for the evidence suggests that he had also planned the encounter at Ararat.
The ancient versions appear to imply that the ark was simply carried to the region of Ararat by the torrential waves; and a "south-storm" would indeed drive the boat northward. But the Mesopotamian texts reiterate that Atra-Hasis/Utnapishtim took along with him a "Boatman" named Puzur-Amurri ("westerner who knows the secrets"). To him the Mesopotamian Noah "handed over the structure, together with its contents," as soon as the storm started. Why was an experienced navigator needed, unless it was to bring the ark to a specific destination?
The Nefilim, as we have shown, used the peaks of Ararat as landmarks from the very beginning. As the highest peaks in that part of the world, they could be expected to reappear first from under the mantle of water. Since Enki, "The Wise One, the All- Knowing," certainly could figure that much out, we can surmise that he had instructed his servant to guide the ark toward Ararat, planning the encounter from the very beginning.
Berossus's version of the Flood, as reported by the Greek Abydenus, relates: "Kronos revealed to Sisithros that there would be a Deluge on the fifteenth day of Daisies [the second month], and ordered him to conceal in Sippar, the city of Shamash, every available writing. Sisithros accomplished all these things, sailed immediately to Armenia, and thereupon what the god had announced did happen."
Berossus repeats the details regarding the release of the birds. When Sisithros (which is atra-asis reversed) was taken by the gods to their abode, he explained to the other people in the ark that they were "in Armenia" and directed them back (on foot) to
Babylonia. We find in this version not only the tie-in with Sippar, the spaceport, but also confirmation that Sisithros was instructed to "sail immediately to Armenia" - to the land of Ararat.
As soon as Atra-Hasis had landed, he slaughtered some animals and roasted them on a fire. No wonder that the exhausted and hungry gods "gathered like flies over the offering." Suddenly they realized that Man and the food he grew and the cattle he raised were essential. "When at length Enlil arrived and saw the ark, he was wroth." But the logic of the situation and Enki's persuasion prevailed; Enlil made his peace with the remnants of Mankind and took Atra-Hasis/Utnapishtim in his craft up to the Eternal Abode of the Gods.
Another factor in the quick decision to make peace with Mankind may have been the progressive abatement of the Flood and the reemergence of dry land and the vegetation upon it. We have already concluded that the Nefilim became aware ahead of time of the approaching calamity; but it was so unique in their experience that they feared that Earth would become uninhabitable forever. As they landed on Ararat, they saw that this was not so. Earth was still habitable, and to live on it, they needed man.
What was this catastrophe - predictable yet unavoidable? An important key to unlocking the puzzle of the Deluge is the realization that it was not a single, sudden event, but the climax of a chain of events.
Unusual pestilences affecting man and beast and a severe drought preceded the ordeal by water - a process that lasted, according to the Mesopotamia!! sources, seven "passings," or sar's. These phenomena could be accounted for only by major climatic changes. Such changes have been associated in Earth's past with the recurring ice ages and interglacial stages that had dominated Earth's immediate past. Reduced precipitation, falling sea and lake levels, and the drying up of subterranean water sources have been the hallmarks of an approaching ice age. Since the Deluge that abruptly ended those conditions was followed by the Sumerian civilization and our own present, postglacial age, the glaciation in question could only have been the last one.
Our conclusion is that the events of the Deluge relate to Earth's last ice age and its catastrophic ending. Drilling into the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, scientists have been able to measure the oxygen trapped in the various layers, and to judge from that the climate that prevailed millennia ago. Core samples from the bottoms of the seas, such as the Gulf of Mexico, measuring the proliferation or dwindling of marine life, likewise enable them to estimate temperatures in ages past. Based on such findings, scientists are now certain that the last ice age began some 75,000 years ago and underwent a mini- warming some 40,000 years ago. Circa 38,000 years ago, a harsher, colder, and drier period ensued. And then, about 13,000 years ago, the ice age abruptly ended, and our present mild climate was ushered in.
Aligning the biblical and Sumerian information, we find that the harsh times, the "accursation of Earth," began in the time of Noah's father Lamech. His hopes that the birth of Noah ("respite") would mark the end of the hardships was fulfilled in an unexpected way, through the catastrophic Deluge.
Many scholars believe that the ten biblical pre-Diluvial patriarchs (Adam to Noah) somehow parallel the ten pre-Diluvial rulers of the Sumerian king lists. These lists do not apply to divine titles DIN.GIR or EN to the last two of the ten, and treat Ziusudra/Utnapishtim and his father Ubar-Tutu as men. The latter two parallel Noah and his father Lamech; and according to the Sumerian lists, the two reigned a combined total of 64,800 years until the Deluge occurred. The last ice age, from 75,000 to 13,000 years ago, lasted 62,000 years. Since the hardships began when Ubartutu/Lamech was already reigning, the 62,000 fit perfectly into the 64,800.
Moreover, the extremely harsh conditions lasted, according to the Atra-Hasis epic, seven shar's, or 25,200 years. The scientists discovered evidence of an extremely harsh period from circa 38,000 to 13,000 years ago - a span of 25,000 years. Once again, the Mesopotamian evidence and modern scientific findings corroborate each other.
Our endeavor to unravel the puzzle of the Deluge, then, focuses on Earth's climatic changes, and in particular the abrupt collapse of the ice age some 13,000 years ago.
What could have caused a sudden climatic change of such magnitude?
Of the many theories advanced by the scientists, we are intrigued by the one suggested by Dr. John T. Hollin of the University of Maine. He contended that the Antarctic ice sheet periodically breaks loose and slips into the sea, creating an abrupt and enormous tidal wave!
This hypothesis - accepted and elaborated upon by others - suggests that as the ice sheet grew thicker and thicker, it not only trapped more of Earth's heat beneath the ice sheet but also created (by pressure and friction) a slushy, slippery layer at its bottom. Acting as a lubricant between the thick ice sheet above and the solid earth below, this slushy layer sooner or later caused the ice sheet to slide into the surrounding ocean.
Hollin calculated that if only half the present ice sheet of Antarctica (which is, on the average, more than a mile in thickness) were to slip into the southern seas, the immense tidal wave that would follow would raise the level of all the seas around the globe by some sixty feet, inundating coastal cities and lowlands.
In 1964, A. T. Wilson of Victoria University in New Zealand offered the theory that ice ages ended abruptly in such slippages, not only in the Antarctic but also in the Arctic. We feel that the various texts and facts gathered by us justify a conclusion that the Deluge was the result of such a slippage into the Antarctic waters of billions of tons of ice, bringing an abrupt end to the last ice age.
The sudden event triggered an immense tidal wave. Starting in Antarctic waters, it spread northward toward the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. The abrupt change in temperature must have created violent storms accompanied by torrents of rain. Moving faster than the waters, the storms, clouds, and darkened skies heralded the avalanche of waters. Exactly such phenomena are described in the ancient texts.
As commanded by Enki, -Atra-Hasis sent everybody aboard the ark while he himself stayed outside to await the signal for boarding the vessel and sealing it off. Providing a "human-interest" detail, the ancient text tells us that Atra-Hasis, though ordered to stay outside the vessel, "was in and out; he could not sit, could not crouch ... his heart was broken; he was vomiting gall." But then:
. . . the Moon disappeared. . . .
The appearance of the weather changed;
The rains roared in the clouds. . . .
The winds became savage . . .
. . . the Deluge set out,
its might came upon the people like a battle;
One person did not see another,
they were not recognizable in the destruction.
The Deluge bellowed like a bull;
The winds whinnied like a wild ass.
The darkness was dense;
The Sun could not be seen.
The "Epic of Gilgamesh" is specific about the direction from which the storm came: It came from the south. Clouds, winds, rain,
and darkness indeed preceded the tidal wave which first tore down the "posts of Nergal" in the Lower World:
With the glow of dawn
a black cloud arose from the horizon;
inside it the god of storms thundered. . . .
Everything that had been bright
turned to blackness. ...
For one day the south storm blew,
gathering speed as it blew, submerging the mountains. . . .
Six days and six nights blows the wind
as the South Storm sweeps the land.
When the seventh day arrived,
the Deluge of the South Storm subsided.
The references to the "south storm," "south wind" clearly indicate the direction from which the Deluge arrived, its clouds and winds, the "heralds of the storm," moving "over hill and plain" to reach Mesopotamia. Indeed, a storm and an avalanche of water originating in the Antarctic would reach Mesopotamia via the Indian Ocean after first engulfing the hills of Arabia, then inundating the Tigris-Euphrates plain. The "Epic of Gilgamesh" also informs us that before the people and their land were submerged, the "dams of the dry land" and its dikes were "torn out": the continental coastlines were overwhelmed and swept over.
The biblical version of the Deluge story reports that the "bursting of the fountains of the Great Deep" preceded the "opening of the sluices of heaven." First, the waters of the "Great Deep" (what a descriptive name for the southernmost, frozen Antarctic seas) broke loose out of their icy confinement; only then did the rains begin to pour from the skies. This confirmation of our understanding of the Deluge is repeated, in reverse, when the Deluge subsided. First the "Fountains of the Deep [were] dammed"; then the rain "was arrested from the skies."
After the first immense tidal wave, its waters were still "coming and going back" in huge waves. Then the waters began "going back," and "they were less" after 150 days, when the ark came to rest between the peaks of Ararat. The avalanche of water, having come from the southern seas, went back to the southern seas. How could the Nefilim predict when the Deluge would burst out of Antarctica?
The Mesopotamian texts, we know, related the Deluge and the climatic changes preceding it to seven "passings" - undoubtedly meaning the periodic passage of the Twelfth Planet in Earth's vicinity. We know that even the Moon, Earth's small satellite, exerts sufficient gravitational pull to cause the tides. Both Mesopotamian and biblical texts described how the Earth shook when the Celestial Lord passed in Earth's vicinity. Could it be that the Nefilim, observing the climatic changes and the instability of the Antarctic ice sheet, realized that the next, seventh "passing" of the Twelfth Planet would trigger the impending catastrophe? Ancient texts show that it was so.
The most remarkable of these is a text of some thirty lines inscribed in miniature cuneiform writing on both sides of a clay tablet less than one inch long. It was unearthed at Ashur, but the profusion of Sumerian words in the Akkadian text leaves no doubt as to its Sumerian origin. Dr. Erich Ebeling determined that it was a hymn recited in the House of the Dead, and he therefore included the text in his masterwork (Tod und Leben) on death and resurrection in ancient Mesopotamia.
On close examination, however, we find that the composition "called on the names" of the Celestial Lord, the Twelfth Planet. It elaborates the meaning of the various epithets by relating them to the passage of the planet at the site of the battle with Tiamat - a passage that causes the Deluge!
The text begins by announcing that, for all its might and size, the planet ("the hero") nevertheless orbits the Sun. The Deluge
was the "weapon" of this planet.
His weapon is the Deluge;
God whose Weapon brings death to the wicked.
Supreme, Supreme, Anointed . . .
Who like the Sun, the lands crosses;
The Sun, his god, he frightens.
Calling out the "first name" of the planet - which, unfortunately, is illegible - the text describes the passage near Jupiter, toward the site of the battle with Tiamat: First Name: . . .
Who the circular band hammered together; Who the Occupier split in two, poured her out. Lord, who at Akiti time Within Tiamat's battle place reposes. . . .
Whose seed are the sons of Babylon;
Who by the planet Jupiter cannot be distracted;
Who by his glow shall create.
Coming closer, the Twelfth Planet is called SHILIG. LU.DIG ("powerful leader of the joyous planets"). It is now nearest to Mars:
"By the brilliance of the god [planet] Anu god [planet] Lahmu [Mars] is clothed." Then it loosed the Deluge upon the Earth:
This is the name of the Lord
Who from the second month to the month Addar
The waters had summoned forth.
The text's elaboration of the two names offers remarkable calendarial information. The Twelfth Planet passed Jupiter and neared Earth "at Akiti time," when the Mesopotamian New Year began. By the second month it was closest to Mars. Then, "from the second month to the month Addar" (the twelfth month), it loosed the Deluge upon Earth.
This is in perfect harmony with the biblical account, which states that "the fountains of the great deep burst open" on the seventeenth day of the second month. The ark came to rest on Ararat in the seventh month; other dry land was visible in the tenth month; and the Deluge was over in the twelfth month - for it was on "the first day of the first month" of the following years that Noah opened the ark's hatch.
Shifting to the second phase of the Deluge, when the waters began to subside, the text calls the planet SHUL. PA.KUN.E.
Hero, Supervising Lord,
Who collects together the waters;
Who by gushing waters
The righteous and the wicked cleanses;
Who in the twin-peaked mountain
Arrested the. ...
. . . fish, river, river; the flooding rested. In the mountainland, on a tree, a bird rested. Day which . . . said.
In spite of the illegibility of some damaged lines, the parallels with the biblical and other Mosopotamian Deluge tales is evident: The flooding had ceased, the ark was "arrested" on the twin-peaked mountain; the rivers began to flow again from the mountaintops and carry the waters back to the oceans; fish were seen; a bird was sent out from the ark. The ordeal was over. The Twelfth Planet had passed its "crossing." It had neared Earth, and it began to move away, accompanied by its satellites: When the savant shall call out: "Flooding!" - It is the god Nibiru ["Planet of Crossing"]; It is the Hero, the planet with four heads. The god whose weapon is the Flooding Storm, shall turn back;
To his resting place he shall lower himself.
(The receding planet, the text asserts, then recrossed the path of Saturn in the month of Ululu, the sixth month of the year.)
The Old Testament frequently refers to the time when the Lord caused Earth to be covered by the waters of the deep. The
twenty-ninth Psalm describes the "calling" as well as the "return" of the "great waters" by the Lord:
Unto the Lord, ye sons of the gods,
Give glory, acknowledge might. ...
The sound of the Lord is upon the waters;
The God of glory, the Lord,
Thundereth upon the great waters. . . .
The Lord's sound is powerful,
The Lord's sound is majestic;
The Lord's sound breaketh the cedars. . . .
He makes [Mount] Lebanon dance as a calf,
[Mount] Sirion leap like a young bull.
The Lord's sound strikes fiery flames;
The Lord's sound shaketh the desert. ...
The Lord to the Deluge [said]: "Return!"
The Lord, as king, is enthroned forever.
In the magnificent Psalm 77 - "Aloud to God I Cry" - the Psalmist recalls the Lord's appearance and disappearance in earlier times:
I have calculated the Olden Days,
The years of Olam. . . .
I shall recall the Lord's deeds,
Remember thy wonders in antiquity. . . .
Thine course, O Lord, is determined;
No god is as great as the Lord. . . .
The waters saw thee, O Lord, and shuddered;
Thine splitting sparks went forth.
The sound of thine thunder was rolling;
Lightnings lit up the world;
The Earth was agitated and it quaked.
[Then] in the waters was thy course,
Thine paths in the deep waters;
And thine footsteps were gone, unknown.
Psalm 104, exalting the deeds of the Celestial Lord, recalled the time when the oceans overran the continents and were made to go back:
Thou didst fix the Earth in constancy,
For ever and ever to be unmoved.
With the oceans, as with garment, thou coveredst it;
Above the mountains did the water stand.
At thy rebuke, the waters fled;
At the sound of thine thunder, they hastened away.
They went upon the mountains, then down to the valleys
Unto the place which thou hast founded for them.
A boundary thou hast set, not to be passed over;
That they turn not again to cover the Earth.
The words of the prophet Amos are even more explicit:
Woe unto you that desire the Day of the Lord;
To what end is it for you?
For the Day of the Lord is darkness and no light. . . .
Turneth morning unto death's shadow,
Maketh the day dark as night;
Calleth forth the waters of the sea
and poureth them upon the face of the Earth.
These, then, were the events that took place "in olden days." The "Day of the Lord" was the day of the Deluge.
We have already shown that, having landed on Earth, the Nefilim associated the first reigns in the first cities with the zodiacal
ages - giving the zodiacs the epithets of the various associated gods. We now find that the text uncovered by Ebeling provided
calendarial information not only for men but also for the Nefilim. The Deluge, it informs us, occurred in the "Age of the
constellation Lion":
Supreme, Supreme, Anointed;
Lord whose shining crown with terror is laden.
Supreme planet: a seat he has set up
Facing the confined orbit of the red planet [Mars].
Daily within the Lion he is afire;
His light his bright kingships on the lands pronounces.
We can now also understand an enigmatic verse in the New Year's rituals, stating that it was "the constellation Lion that
measured the waters of the deep." These statements place the time of the Deluge within a definite framework, for though
astronomers nowadays cannot precisely ascertain where the Sumerians set the beginning of a zodiacal house, the following
timetable for the ages is considered accurate.
60 B.C. to A.D. 2100 - Age of Pisces
2220 B.C. to 60 B.C. - Age of Aries
4380 B.C. to 2220 B.C. - Age of Taurus
6540 B.C. to 4380 B.C. - Age of Gemini
8700 B.C. to 6540 B.C. - Age of Cancer
10,860 B.C. to 8700 B.C. - Age of the Lion
If the Deluge occurred in the Age of the Lion, or sometime between 10,860 B.C. and 8700 B.C., then the date of the Deluge falls well within our timetable: According to modern science, the last ice age ended abruptly in the southern hemisphere some twelve to thirteen thousand years ago, and in the northern hemisphere one or two thousand years later.
The zodiacal phenomenon of precession offers even more comprehensive corroboration of our conclusions. We concluded earlier that the Nefilim landed on Earth 432,000 years (120 shar's) before the Deluge, in the Age of Pisces. In terms of the precessional cycle, 432,000 years comprise sixteen full cycles, or Great Years, and more than halfway through another Great Year, into the "age" of the constellation of the Lion.
We can now reconstruct the complete timetable for the events embraced by our findings. Years Ago EVENT
445,000 The Nefilim, led by Enki, arrive on Earth from the Twelfth Planet. Eridu - Earth Station is established in southern Mesopotamia.
430,000 The great ice sheets begin to recede. A hospitable climate in the Near East. 415,000 Enki moves inland, establishes Larsa.
400,000 The great interglacial period spreads globally. Enlil arrives on Earth, establishes Nippur as Mission Control Center. Enki establishes sea routes to southern Africa, organizes gold-mining operations.
360,000 The Nefilim establish Bad-Tibira as their metallurgical center for smelting and refining. Sippar, the spaceport, and other cities of the gods are built.
300,000 The Anunnaki mutiny. Man - the "Primitive Worker" - is fashioned by Enki and Ninhursag. 250,000 "Early Homo sapiens" multiply, spread to other continents. 200,000 Life on Earth regresses during new glacial period.
100,000 Climate warms again. The sons of the gods take the daughters of Man as wives.
77,000 Ubartutu/Lamech, a human of divine parentage, assumes the reign in Shuruppak under the patronage of Ninhursag. 75,000 The "accursation of Earth" - a new ice ago begins. Regressive types of Man roam Earth.
49,000 The reign of Ziusudra ("Noah"), a "faithful servant" of Enki, begins.
38,000 The harsh climatic period of the "seven passings" begins to decimate Mankind. Europe's Neanderthal Man disappears;
only Cro-Magnon Man (based in the Near East) survives. Enlil, disenchanted with Mankind, seeks its demise.
13,000 The Nefilim, aware of the impending tidal wave that will be triggered by the nearing Twelfth Planet, vow to let Mankind
perish.
The Deluge sweeps over Earth, abruptly ending the ice age.
THE DELUGE, a traumatic experience for Mankind, was no less so for the "gods" - the Nefilim.
In the words of the Sumerian king lists, "the Deluge had swept over," and an effort of 120 shar's was wiped away overnight. The south African mines, the cities in Mesopotamia, the control center at Nippur, the spaceport at Sippar - all lay buried under water and mud. Hovering in their shuttlecraft above devastated Earth, the Nefilim impatiently awaited the abatement of the waters so that they could set foot again on solid ground.
How were they going to survive henceforth on Earth when their cities and facilities were gone, and even their manpower - Mankind - was totally destroyed?
When the frightened, exhausted, and hungry groups of Nefilim finally landed on the peaks of the "Mount of Salvation," they were clearly relieved to discover that Man and beast alike had not perished completely. Even Enlil, at first enraged to discover that his aims had been partly frustrated, soon changed his mind.
The deity's decision was a practical one. Faced with their own dire conditions, the Nefilim cast aside their inhibitions about Man, rolled up their sleeves, and lost no time in imparting to Man the arts of growing crops and cattle. Since survival, no doubt, depended on the speed with which agriculture and animal domestication could be developed to sustain the Nefilim and a rapidly multiplying Mankind, the Nefilim applied their advanced scientific knowledge to the task.
Unaware of the information that could be culled from the biblical and Sumerian texts, many scientists who have studied the origins of agriculture have arrived at the conclusion that its "discovery" by Mankind some 13,000 years ago was related to the neothermal ("newly warm") elimalti that followed the end of the last ice ago. Long before modern scholars, however, the Bible also related the beginnings of agriculture to the aftermath of the Deluge.
"Sowing and Harvesting" were described in Genesis us divine gifts granted to Noah and his offspring as part of the post-Diluvial
covenant between the Deity and Mankind:
For as long as the Earth's days shall be,
There shall not cease
Sowing and Harvesting,
Cold and Warmth,
Summer and Winter,
Day and Night.
Having been granted the knowledge of agriculture, "Noah as a Husbandman was first, and he planted a vineyard": He became the first post-Diluvial farmer engaged in the deliberate, complicated task of planting.
The Sumerian texts, too, ascribed to the gods the granting to Mankind of both agriculture and the domestication of animals. Tracing the beginnings of agriculture, modem scholars have found that it appeared first in the Near East, but not in the fertile and easily cultivated plains and valleys. Rather, agriculture began in the mountains skirting the low-lying plains in a semicircle. Why would farmers avoid the plains and limit their sowing and reaping to the more difficult mountainous terrain? The only plausible answer is that the low-lying lands were, at the time when agriculture began, uninhabitable; 13,000 years ago the low-lying areas were not yet dry enough following the Deluge. Millennia passed before the plains and valleys had dried sufficiently to permit the people to come down from the mountains surrounding Mesopotamia and to settle the low-lying plains. This, indeed, is what the Book of Genesis tells us: Many generations after the Deluge, people arriving "from the East" - from the mountainous areas east of Mesopotamia - "found a plain in the land of Shin'ar [Sumer], and settled there." The Sumerian texts state that Enlil first spread cereals "in the hill country" - in the mountains, not in the plains - and that he made cultivation possible in the mountains by keeping the floodwaters away. "He barred the mountains as with a door." The name of this mountainous land east of Sumer, E.LAM, meant "house where vegetation germinated." Later, two of Enlil's helpers, the gods Ninazu and Ninmada, extended the cultivation of cereals to the low-lying plains so that, eventually, "Sumer, the land that knew not grain, came to know grain."
Scholars, who have now established that agriculture began with the domestication of wild emmer as a source of wheat and barley, are unable to explain how the earliest grains (like those found at the Shanidar cave) were already uniform and highly specialized. Thousands of generations of genetic selection are needed by nature to acquire even a modest degree of sophistication. Yet the period, time, or location in which such a gradual and very prolonged process might have taken place on Earth are nowhere to be found. There is no explanation for this botanogenetic miracle, unless the process was not one of natural selection but of artificial manipulation.
Spelt, a hard-grained type of wheat, poses an even greater mystery. It is the product of "an unusual mixture of botanic genes," neither a development from one genetic source nor a mutation of one source. It is definitely the result of mixing the genes of several plants. The whole notion that Man, in a few thousand years, changed animals through domestication, is also questionable.
Modem scholars have no answers to these puzzles, nor to the general question of why the mountainous semicircle in the ancient Near East became a continuous source of new varieties of cereals, plants, trees, fruits, vegetables, and domesticated animals.
The Sumerians knew the answer. The seeds, they said, were a gift sent to Earth by Anu from his Celestial Abode. Wheat, barley, and hemp were lowered to Earth from the Twelfth Planet. Agriculture and the domestication of animals were gifts given to Mankind by Enlil and Enki, respectively.
Not only the presence of the Nefilim but also the periodic arrivals of the Twelfth Planet in Earth's vicinity seem to lie behind the three crucial phases of Man's post-Diluvial civilization: agriculture, circa 11,000 B.C., the Neolithic culture, circa 7500 B.C., and
the sudden civilization of 3800 B.C. took place at intervals of 3,600 years.
It appears that the Nefilim, passing knowledge to Man in measured doses, did so in intervals matching the periodic returns of the Twelfth Planet to Earth's vicinity. It was as though some on-site inspection, some face-to-face consultation possible only during the "window" period that allowed landings and takeoffs between Earth and the Twelfth Planet, had to take place among the "gods" before another "go ahead" could be given.
The "Epic of Etana" provides a glimpse of the deliberations that took place. In the days that followed the Deluge, it says:
The great Anunnaki who decree the fate
sat exchanging their counsels regarding the land.
They who created the four regions,
who set up the settlements, who oversaw the land,
were too lofty for Mankind.
The Nefilim, we are told, reached the conclusion that they needed an intermediary between themselves and the masses of humans. They were, they decided, to be gods - elu in Akkadian, meaning "lofty ones." As a bridge between themselves as lords and Mankind, they introduced "Kingship" on Earth: appointing a human ruler who would assure Mankind's service to the gods and channel the teachings and laws of the gods to the people. A text dealing with the subject describes the situation ' before either tiara or crown had been placed on a human head, or scepter handed down; all these symbols of Kingship - plus the shepherd's crook, the symbol of righteousness and justice - "lay deposited before Anu in Heaven." After the gods had reached their decision, however, "Kingship descended from Heaven" to Earth.
Both Sumerian and Akkadian texts state that the Nefilim retained the "lordship" over the lands, and had Mankind first rebuild the pre-diluvial cities exactly where they had originally been and as they had been planned: "Let the bricks of all the cities be laid on the dedicated places, let all the [bricks] rest on holy places." Eridu, then, was first to be rebuilt.
The Nefilim then helped the people plan and build the first royal city, and they blessed it. "May the city be the nest, the place where Mankind shall repose. May the King be a Shepherd."
The first royal city of Man, the Sumerian texts tell us, was Kish. "When Kingship was lowered again from Heaven, the Kingship was in Kish." The Sumerian king lists, unfortunately, are mutilated just where the name of the very first human king was inscribed. We do know, however, that he started a long line of dynasties whose royal abode changed from Kish to Uruk, Ur, Awan, Hamazi, Aksak, Akkad, and then to Ashur and Babylon and more recent capitals.
The biblical "Table of Nations" likewise listed Nimrud - the patriarch of the kingdoms at Uruk, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria - as descended from Kish. It records the spread of Mankind, its lands and Kingships, as an outgrowth of the division of Mankind into three branches following the Deluge. Descended from and named after the three sons of Noah, these were the peoples and lands of Shem, who inhabited Mesopotamia and the Near Eastern lands; Ham, who inhabited Africa and parts of Arabia; and Japheth, the Indo-Europeans in Asia Minor, Iran, India, and Europe.
These three broad groupings were undoubtedly three of the "regions" whose settlement was discussed by the great Anunnaki. Each of the three was assigned to one of the leading deities. One of these was, of course, Sumer itself, the region of the Semitic peoples, the place where Man's first great civilization arose.
The other two also became sites of flourishing civilizations. Circa 3200 B.C. - about half a millennium after the blooming of the Sumerian civilization - statehood, Kingship, and civilization made their first appearance in the Nile valley, leading in time to the great civilization of Egypt.
Nothing was known until some fifty years ago about the first major Indo-European civilization. But by now it is well established
that an advanced civilization, encompassing large cities, a developed agriculture, a flourishing trade, existed in the Indus valley
in ancient times. It came into being, scholars believe, some 1,000 years after the Sumerian civilization began.
Ancient texts as well as archaeological evidence attest to the close cultural and economic links between these two river-valley
civilizations and the older Sumerian one. Moreover, both direct and circumstantial evidence has convinced most scholars that
the civilizations of the Nile and Indus not only were linked to, but were actually offspring of, the earlier civilization of
Mesopotamia.
The most imposing monuments of Egypt, the pyramids, have been found to be, under a stone "skin," simulations of the Mesopotamian ziggurats; and there is reason to believe that the ingenious architect who designed the plans for the great pyramids and supervised their construction was a Sumerian venerated as a god.
The ancient Egyptian name for their land was the "Raised Land," and their prehistoric memory was that "a very great god who came forth in the earliest times" found their land lying under water and mud. He undertook great works of reclamation, literally raising Egypt from under the waters. The 'legend" neatly describes the low-lying valley of the Nile River in the aftermath of the Deluge; this olden god, it can be shown, was none other than Enki, the chief engineer of the Nefilim.
Though relatively little is known as yet regarding the Indus valley civilization, we do know that they, too, venerated the number twelve as the supreme divine number; that they depicted their gods as human-looking beings wearing horned headdresses; and that they revered the symbol of the cross - the sign of the Twelfth Planet.
If these two civilizations were of Sumerian origin, why are their written languages different? The scientific answer is that the languages are not different. This was recognized as early as 1852, when the Reverend Charles Foster (The One Primeval Language) ably demonstrated that all the ancient languages then deciphered, including early Chinese and other Far Eastern languages, stemmed from one primeval source - thereafter shown to be Sumerian.
Similar pictographs had not only similar meanings, which could be a logical coincidence, but also the same multiple meanings and even the same phonetic sounds - which suggests a common origin. More recently, scholars have shown that the very first Egyptian inscriptions employed a language that was indicative of a prior written development; the only place where a written language had a prior development was Sumer.
So we have a single written language that for some reason was differentiated into three tongues: Mesopotamian, Egyptian/Hamitic, and Indo-European. Such a differentiation could have occurred by itself over time, distance, and geographical separation. Yet the Sumerian texts claim that it occurred as the result of a deliberate decision of the gods, once again initiated by Enlil. Sumerian stories on the subject are paralleled by the well-known biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which we are told "that the whole Earth was of one language and of the same words." But after the people settled in Sumer, learned the art of brickmaking, built cities, and raised high towers (ziggurats), they planned to make for themselves a shem and a tower to launch it. Therefore "did the Lord mingle the Earth's tongue."
The deliberate raising of Egypt from under the muddy waters, the linguistic evidence, and the Sumerian and biblical texts support our conclusion that the two satellite civilizations did not develop by chance. On the contrary, they were planned and brought about by the deliberate decision of the Nefilim.
Fearing, evidently, a human race unified in culture and purpose, the Nefilim adopted the imperial policy: "Divide and rule." For while Mankind reached cultural levels that included even airborne efforts - after which "anything they shall scheme to do shall no longer be impossible for them" - the Nefilim themselves were a declining lot. By the third millennium B.C., children and grandchildren, to say nothing of humans of divine parentage, were crowding the great olden gods.
The bitter rivalry between Enlil and Enki was inherited by their principal sons, and fierce struggles for supremacy ensued. Even the sons of Enlil - as we have seen in earlier chapters - fought among themselves, as did the sons of Enki. As has happened in recorded human history, overlords tried to keep the peace among their children by dividing the land among the heirs. In at least one known instance, one son (Ishkur/Adad) was deliberately sent away by Enlil to be the leading local deity in the Mountain Land.
As time went on, the gods became overlords, each jealously guarding the territory, industry, or profession over which he had been given dominion. Human kings were the intermediaries between the gods and the: growing and spreading humanity. The claims of ancient kings that they went to war, conquered new lands, or subjugated distant peoples "on the command of my god" should not be taken lightly. Text after text makes it clear that this was literally so. The gods retained the powers of conducting foreign affairs, for these affairs involved other gods in other territories. Accordingly, they had the final say in matters of war or peace.
With the proliferation of people, states, cities, and villages, it became necessary to find ways to remind the people who their particular overlord, or "lofty one," was. The Old Testament echoes the problem of having people adhere to their god and not "prostitute after other gods." The solution was to establish many places of worship, and to put up in each of them the symbols and likenesses of the "correct" gods. The age of paganism began.
Following the Deluge, the Sumerian texts inform us, the Nefilim held lengthy counsels regarding the future of gods and Man on Earth. As a result of these deliberations, they "created the four regions." Three of them - Mesopotamia, the Nile valley, and the Indus valley - were settled by Man.
The fourth region was "holy" - a term whose original literal meaning was "dedicated, restricted." Dedicated to the gods alone, it was a "pure land," an area that could be approached only with authorization; trespassing could lead to quick death by "awesome weapons" wielded by fierce guards. This land or region was named TIL.MUN (literally, "the place of the missiles"). It was the restricted area where the Nefilim had reestablished their space base after the one at Sippar had been wiped out by the Deluge. Once again the area was put under the command of Utu/Shamash, the god in charge of the fiery rockets. Ancient heroes like Gilgamesh strove to reach this Land of Living, to be carried by a shem or an Eagle to the Heavenly Abode of the Gods. We recall the plea of Gilgamesh to Shamash:
Let me enter the Land, let me raise my Shem. . . . By the life of my goddess mother who bore me, of the pure faithful king, my father - my step direct to the Land!
Ancient tales - even recorded history - recall the cease-} less efforts of men to "reach the land," find the "Plant of Life," gain eternal bliss among the Gods of Heaven and Earth. This yearning is central to all the religions whose roots lie deep in Sumer: the hope that justice and righteousness pursued on Earth will be followed by an "afterlife" in some Heavenly Divine Abode. But where was this elusive land of the divine connection?
The question can be answered. The clues are there. But beyond it loom other questions. Have the Nefilim been encountered since? What will happen when they are encountered again?
And if the Nefilim were the "gods" who "created" Man on Earth, did evolution alone, on the Twelfth Planet, create , the Nefilim?
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